Tara Mendola, Jacques Lezra (Eds) Allegory and Political Representation

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The Yearbook Comparative Literature Allegory and Political Representation Volume 61 2015

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The Yearbook Comparative Literature Produced under the auspices of The Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University - Bloomington and published by University of Toronto Press.

ISSN US 0084-3695 E-ISSN 1947-2978 Copyright © 2017

General Editor Eyal Peretz

Managing Editor Sally Morrell

Book Review Editor Akin Adesokan

Editorial Board Ulrich Baer Peter Bondanella Cathy Caruth Michel Chaouli Joan Copjec Eugene Eoyang Shoshana Felman David M. Hertz

Ingeborg Hoesterey Bill Johnston Sumie Jones Eileen Julien Oscar Kenshur Kenneth Gros Louis Herb Marks Karla Oeler

François Raffoul Alessia Ricciardi Emily Sun Joseph Vogl Ulrich Weisstein Alex Woloch

Founded by Werner P. Friederich The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 923 Ballantine Hall Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 yearbook@indiana.edu www.indiana.edu/~ycgl/index.html Cover Image: “AUX” (2013) by Robert Yarber. All images by Robert Yarber in “The Ugly Baby and the Beautiful Corpse” are used by permission of the artist.

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The Yearbook Comparative Literature Allegory and Political Representation Volume 61

Edited by Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra

1 Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra

ARTICLES 11 Literary Arendt:The Right to Political Allegory Munia Bhaumik 35 Ruin Lust and Totalitarian Remnants Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss 68 Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon Alberto Moreiras 86 The Object of Allegory (A Polemic) Jacques Lezra 102 Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx and Engels Deborah Elise White 130 Bakhtin and Gogol, or,The Question of Allegory and the Politics of Carnival Matthew Walker 156 Beyond Jameson:The Metapolitics of Allegory Erin Graff Zivin 174 The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno Patrick Dove

INTERPRETATIONS 203 “God is God”: Essay on theViolence of Tautological Propositions / « Dieu est Dieu » Essai sur la violence des propositions tautologiques Stanislas Breton (translated by Jacques Lezra)

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218 Fictions of the Return Daniel Heller-Roazen 235 Radical Empiricism Revisited Joshua Kates

POLITICAL FICTION: A SYMPOSIUM 287 Political Fiction, Ancient and Modern: From David’s Court to Fabrice’s Charterhouse Robert Alter 303 Political Fiction, Anonymous and Pseudonymous (A Response to Robert Alter) Herbert Marks 315 Response to Robert Alter,“Political Fiction” Michael Wood

HORST FRENZ PRIZE ESSAYS 320 “Dialogue in Monologue”: Addressing Darwish in Hebrew Yael Kenan 328 Chamoiseau’s Literary Creolization:The Stylistic Potential of aVernacular Mandy Mazur

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Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra Allegory is always topical, but the mode seems closer to our experience of representative politics today than it has in many years. Thirty-five years after the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s important collection of 1981, Allegory and Representation, we write in the shadow of elections (in the United States, in Europe) and referenda (in Greece, in Britain) that have worked with figures and slogans meant to stand for existing collectivities or to establish them. Aliquid, the Scholastic maxim reads, stat pro aliquo: this stands in the place of that. This, a minority of the electorate in the United States, stands for that, a spectral, archaic figure of a great America to whose mythological features—Caucasian, orderly, safe—the unruly and disparate present and an equally unruly and disaggregated electoral majority must be made to conform.

“Who will speak for England?” asked a headline in the Daily Mail in February of 2016, before the Brexit vote, borrowing, the tabloid said, a phrase used once before, in Parliament, to force Neville Chamberlain to “bow[] to the mood of the House” and declare war on Germany. Imagine: the native citizens of a sceptered isle, assaulted by what the Daily Mail’s editors call “mass migration,” prey to “a statist, unelected bureaucracy,” “unaccountable judges,” “a sclerotic Europe.” In the United States, the heartland is assailed by the twin specters of the illegal alien and the Islamic terrorist, each frequently a figure for the other, their hazy propinquity painting economic anxiety with the colors of post-9/11 national and religious terrors, and vice versa. And then there is a newly elected administration ciphering the bodies of those displaced, deported, dead as a figure for the shambling chimera of “America First,” in a farcical echo of Lindbergh’s 1941 rallying cry to isolationism, anti-Semitism, blood libel. Political allegory, then, operates The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 1–9 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.1

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now more than ever in a mode of closure—the closed loop of interpretation echoing closed borders, great and magnificent walls between us and the other, between us and horizontal, polysemous modes of interpretation.

Such a mode does not represent a mythical return to older, even medieval, systems of signification; the recursive loop we find ourselves in rests on the self-conception of the modern subject. That subject’s imagined, medieval past functions as the ground for both the terrorist-as-invader and the white supremacist-as-Crusader (the latter substitution, implicit until recently, has become an acceptable explicit political position: Deus vult!). That is to say that allegory today is the mode of the alternative we are meant to desire. It offers us what we should want, standing in place of what is the case. Take, for instance, the numerology that captured the imagination of voters in the United States and Britain: polling results, offered as uncompromising and unimpeachable fact, coded for science-writ-large; they took the place of proper analysis; they tranquilized; they veiled; they displaced.

Allegory is the mode of alt-news.

In dire times, the critic assumes the function of de-allegorization: “See?” he or she explains; “behind the fetching clothes of nationalist nostalgia, under the cloak of that ‘America’ that Donald Trump would make ‘great’ again, in the breast of that same ‘England’ for which the Daily Mail claims to speak, beats the clumsy heart of oligarchy and racism on which ‘America’ and ‘Britain’ were literally built.” Other action—what we more conventionally call political action—may then follow: forms of resistance that range from Antifa-direct action, through the classic instruments of liberal-democratic opposition, to economic pressure (boycotts, shareholder democracy, divestments), to mobilization in the name of religious and spiritual claims, institutional or not.

The limits to this form of critical heroism are palpable.

The articles collected in this volume of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature flow from an American Comparative Literature Association convention seminar imagined well before Brexit and the US election.The organizers—now the coeditors—had in mind to mark an academic event, or rather, two events: the publication, thirty-five and thirty years ago, of two works that proved decisive to academic thought regarding the relation between allegory and representation.The first of these, as above, is Greenblatt’s edited collection Allegory and Representation; the second is Fredric Jameson’s still controversial The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” of 1986.We take the eclipse of studies of allegory since the late 1980s to follow logics that these works and their reception helped to articulate.

On one hand, the turn away from studies of allegory accompanies a general disciplinary turn away from linguistically driven criticism, and toward ways of writing about culture broadly understood as political in the academy today, whether based in identitarian paradigms, versions of hegemony theory, or critical philosophy. On the other, we take allegory to have replaced realism as an explicitly, even vulgarly, political mode—often to be rejected for just this reason. In the period since the mid-1980s, allegory has become, for the first-world critic, the mode in which the subaltern is permitted, or made, to represent; it is the mode that makes available, to the attentive eye, otherwise obscured social totalities; to the critical ear, it is the voice of the cosmopolis that hums below any local expression, or vice versa.The subaltern represents allegorically, whether he or she knows it or not. When the critic reads for what is thus represented allegorically, she confirms the legitimacy and the value of her professional, disciplinary identity: the de-allegorizing function we claim in such times is never, in this way, innocent.The writerly resistance to allegorical representation should be understood as a critique of the selfconfirming practices of metropolitan academic criticism.

The fault line between these two logics—and the two disavowals of the allegorical mode and its study to which they give rise—runs deep and offers, among other things, new ways of understanding each of the terms in play—“allegory,” “politics,” “representation,” and even the conjunction “and.”

This contradiction is the (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) subject of the essays collected in Allegory and Political Representation.

The articles span less a representative survey of time periods than a set of approaches to the topic. We begin with twin essays, both concerned with Marx, but also, and more importantly, concerned with the ephemeral political concepts gained from reading him. Deborah Elise White’s “Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx and Engels” threads revolutionary Marxism through the “aporia that allegory both unfolds and obscures” in revolution and history. Jacques Lezra, first historically, then undoing that historicity, theoretically, reads Freud with Marx to tack this aporia through what he terms “melancholic allegory” and identifies the tension between such allegorical pathology and the grief of object The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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loss as what allows humans to enter into coalitions and create institutions (likenesses); it is what permits us to found “weak republican institutions.”

From here, a trio of essays excavate what Munia Bhaumik calls “the status of the literary,” and hence, inevitably, the allegorical, “in the text of political philosophy,” and vice versa: the trace of philosophy in the literary. In “Literary Arendt:The ‘Right to Have Rights’ as Political Allegory,” Bhaumik traces Hannah Arendt’s use of literary allusion and analysis throughout her oeuvre. She concludes that only through the literary—specifically, Billy Budd—in Arendt’s work may we fully understand her account of political exclusion. Next, with “Bakhtin and Gogol, or,The Question of Allegory and the Politics of Carnival,” Matthew Walker takes on a key figure for literary studies—Mikhail Bhaktin—and recovers the relationship between Gogol and Bakhtin, long ignored in the Western academy. Reimagining allegory out from under the shadow of de Man, Bhaktin’s writing gives us a “sober alternative” to de Manian visions of allegory. Allegory here is a “weapon in a struggle,” the figure “of (or as) a machine.” Last of this trio, Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss takes us from the carnival to the ruin, Bhaktin to Nabokov.

“Ruin Lust and Totalitarian Remnants” invites an uncommon understanding of the temporality of totalitarianism: of the Nabokovian ruin as a figure that “resist[s] the pseudo-event.”

The allegorical machine comes back, melancholic, in the last group of essays. Both Erin Graff Zivin, in “Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory,” and Patrick Dove, in “The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno,” work at the nexus of Jameson and de Man, tracing a new path through Latin American studies. Graff Zivin recoups Jameson to read allegory as a political mode, opening up the possibility of reading Latin American literature through a “politics […] of allegory based in the impossibility of reading.” Dove, for his part, tracks the “technological artifact” at the heart of the subject through allegory in Castellanos Moya’s novel; ultimately, this artifact, which we might call an allegorical construction, stands not “as the purity of a proper space but as an opening to what will later become its outside—an opening to others prior to any possibility of distinguishing between self and other.”

Bookending the Marxian duo with which the collection began, Alberto Moreiras’s “Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon” turns to Hegel and Heidegger, attempting to square the need for narrative deconstruction—which, in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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his description, entails the destruction of allegorical thinking—first into a “horizonless nihilism.” At the last, though, he turns—mythically—to suggest that we may understand literature as a sustained engagement with “unused grace, unreceived grace.”

From that too-brief overview, let us return to the two critical events that lie behind our collection. The central, symptomatic knot in Stephen Greenblatt’s volume is signaled in Greenblatt’s response to the famous question with which Paul de Man opens his striking contribution to Allegory and Representation, the essay “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” “Why is it,” de Man asks about allegory, “that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode?” (2). Greenblatt’s preface “restates” in this way, de Man’s question: Paul de Man’s question with which we began […] is thus restated as a question about the politics of representation, and an answer is sought not in the logic of the sign or in the universal psychogenesis of the subject, but in the particular social circumstances that both shape and inhibit representation in a given culture. For, if I may add my own terms here, all discourse is improvisation, both an entry into and a deflection of existing strategies of representation. The improviser never encounters the theoretical origins of signification, whether they lie in pure presence or absence. All artists enter into representations that are already under way and make a place for themselves in relation to these representations which are, we might add, never fully coordinated. Even in the most oppressive or, alternatively, the most happily unified of cultures, there are always conflicts of interest, strategy, and desire, so that the artist’s task includes a substantial element of choice or tact or struggle.This task is shaped by the fact that the improviser is himself in part the product of these prior representations. But only in part, for were there a perfect fit, there would no longer be that craving for reality that forever generates ironic submission and disguised revolt. (xii–xiii)

Greenblatt proceeds in two steps: a first one that translates de Man’s phrase into “a question about the politics of representation,” and then a second that places “the politics of representation” in the irreducible struggle occasioned by the improvising artist’s simultaneous freedom and debt to “existing strategies of representation” and the “particular social circumstances that both shape and inhibit representation in a given culture.” The artist is The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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partly, but never entirely, the product of these strategies; she is agent as well as patient with regard to the constraints of existing regimes of representation, which are her medium, as well as the incoherent object her work will displace, sometimes directly, sometimes through “ironic submission and disguised revolt.”

The circumstances shaping strategies of representation vary wildly over time and across cultures and languages. It’s not only that “what,” which can or does stand for (aliquid) something else, is forged in the struggle that Greenblatt describes, or that what can be stood-for, aliquo, must be forged there too, but that standing-for is a way of exercising the sorts of power involved in correlating terms and objects, or in producing relations more broadly, in specific cultures and under particular circumstances. Just how this threeway struggle is conformed, represented, and thought at a moment—say the moment when Allegory and Representation is published, or Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” or this volume on Allegory and Political Representation—is itself overdetermined by “prior representations,” “cultures,” and histories.

For Jameson, an explicitly dialectical thinker, the postcolonial condition is definitive of this three-way struggle and its higher-order representation in the era of late capitalism, though in markedly different ways in cultures and societies existing and operating at different and discontinuous levels of development. The conceptual devices that Jameson turns to so as to bring order to these struggles are taken, he tells his readers, from Hegel and from Lukács’s “epistemology in History and Class Consciousness according to which ‘mapping’ or the grasping of social totality is structurally available to the dominated rather than the dominating classes” (87–88). The dominated “improviser,” to return to Greenblatt’s lexicon, working with the master’s tools and given culture, provides maps of social totality, in the form (in “Third World Literature”) of national allegories.

The essays collected in Greenblatt’s Allegory and Representation take rather different approaches—from each other and from the approach that Jameson would advocate some five years later—to understanding this threeway struggle at the core of allegory’s structure, as well as the historical shape in which it came before their authors. What proved decisive about the collection was Greenblatt’s elegant conforming of these disparate tacks into a strong, critical narrative—a narrative that gave allegorical shape The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to his contributors’ disparate, often radically antagonistic, approaches to the matter of allegory’s relation to representation. Take his restating of de Man’s opening question. Here, Greenblatt retells the history of the volume’s publication—the “particular […] circumstances” (vii) shaping its presentation and its reception.

De Man’s essay was read in 1979 at the annual conference of the English Institute; the conference in 1980 included a panel on “Mimesis and Representation,” “conceived,” Greenblatt writes, “in part as a response” to the 1979 panel (vii); and finally, the 1981 volume brought the seven essays together. Allegory and Representation, now furnished with the framing preface from which we’ve been citing, translates or restates the relation between the 1979 and 1980 panels to reflect a movement away from “the logic of the sign [and] the universal psychogenesis of the subject” and toward the sorts of political interventions in “social circumstances” that an “improviser” might, with due struggle, be able to carry out, always moved, Greenblatt says, by “that craving for reality that forever generates ironic submission and disguised revolt” (xii–xiii). Precisely this movement toward a political sphere imagined to fall on the side of mimesis and representation, rather than “the logic of the sign or […] the universal psychogenesis of the subject,” is the subject of de Man’s essay: a movement settling language’s referential and cognitive functions in line with its persuasive, performative ones— one settling the question of how this, aliquid, can bear a name in the same way as that, aliquo, will do. Greenblatt’s own phrasing struggles just here: doesn’t the assertion that there is, indeed, a “craving for reality that forever generates ironic submission and disguised revolt” remit us to “the universal psychogenesis of the subject”?

The “reality” craved incessantly, the source of a subject’s “ironic submission and disguised revolt,” forever stands outside of what we represent at one or another moment. Submission, irony, disguise, and revolt will take different shapes at different times and in different cultures, but the “craving for reality” works “forever.”The terms “submission,” “irony,” “disguise,” and “revolt” form an arc in Greenblatt’s collection: they are first used in Bersani’s essay, from the original panel on “Allegory,” and then are restated “in a strikingly different way” in the volume’s concluding essay, by Michael Holquist—“as a strategy,” Greenblatt writes, “a way to survive, to insinuate oneself into a system of monolithic power, to create dialogue where the was only monologue, to The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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generate a more capacious and decent social meaning.” (xii) Allegory is political representation inasmuch as the mode stands open to, and by defect conveys, “forever,” a “reality” no subject can represent. A reality that includes, of course, whatever one means by “the particular social circumstances that both shape and inhibit representation in a given culture.” No “culture” is given, though, unless it has been given a name and a minimal coherence; a “given culture” is an allegorical figure.

It is hard to fault Greenblatt for this telling relapse. He moves, at the conclusion of his allegorical foreword, back from an achieved position that holds allegory to spring from—and to be capable of representing—particular social circumstances, into lexicons apparently abandoned, traveling back along the arc he draws from Bersani’s essay to Holquist’s, or from de Man’s opening question to his own concluding, prefatory restating of it; back from “strategy,” from “way[s] to survive, to […] generate a more capacious and decent social meaning,” to “the universal psychogenesis of the subject,” perhaps in reference to Fineman’s essay. The end of the Carter years and the beginning of the Reagan administration threatened “decent social meaning,” and promised political conflicts it would seem hard to face without improvisation, dialogue, irony, disguise, revolt. Aliquid stat pro aliquo: the allegorical sign gives access, if not mediately or immediately, to the “totality of social relations”—at any rate, to an animal invariant on which to build political action (resistance, survival, the creation of “social meaning”): a “craving for reality.”

We recognize today, vividly, perhaps even more vividly than in 1981, the appeal of this position. When the critic claims de-allegorization, she does so out of this craving—out of indignation at the obfuscation of the real under the allegorical cloak in which the political media machine clothes it.

In this sense, allegory and de-allegorization remain topical, urgent, palpably political. It is likewise true that this politics is built on the back of a restating, a translation, a disavowal, a retelling—which is to say that it is built on a compensatory allegory, what de Man calls “[t]he (ironic) pseudo-knowledge of this impossibility” (the impossibility of deciding whether politics stands on “the language of truth and of persuasion by proof ” or “the language of pleasure [volupté] and of persuasion by usurpation or seduction”), which pretends to order sequentially, in a narrative, what is actually the destruction of all sequence” (23). A subject’s improvisations, resistances, ironies, and de-allegorizations make truth claims, and they seek to persuade—constantly, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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undecidably, destructively both. Allegory then destroys what we couple to it at one or another moment, topically: “representation” in 1981, “political representation” in 2016 and 2017—the politics and the disciplines we build on identities or understand as a field of battles over hegemony.

With what result? In 1930, Freud found “the fateful question for the human species […] to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (92). In the allegorical battle that Civilization and Its Discontents imagines, “it is now to be expected,” he continues, “that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary”: the death drive (92). Allegory understood in this way may—or, it can—help cultures struggle with the egregiously aggressive and self-destructive forms of politics the last years have brought to the fore. (Such politics were always at work, of course.)

Not a year later, Freud added, to his perhaps consoling ending, this question: “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”

(92). He saw in Europe’s immediate future that no number of “Heavenly” allegories could entirely keep the worst politics from their work: they might hope to slow them down, divert or appropriate the politics of the worst, or do other work, but never in the expectation of an outcome ruled by “eternal Eros.” Furnished with a different sense of the terms, we ask Freud’s question again today: who can foresee with what success and with what result destructive allegory may offer alternative forms of political representation?

Works Cited Daily Mail Comment. “Who WILL Speak for England?” Daily Mail, 4 February 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3430870/DAILY-MAILCOMMENT-speak-England.html. de Man, Paul. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” Greenblatt, 1–25.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey, Norton, 1961.

Greenblatt, Stephen, editor. Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80. Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

Social Text, no. 15, 1986, pp. 65–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/466493.

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ARTICLES Allegory and Political Representation

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Literary Arendt: The Right to Political Allegory Munia Bhaumik Abstract: This article puts forth a theory of an Arendtian mode of political allegory: a technique of reading to illuminate an effaced and excluded figure in philosophical accounts of the polis. I retrieve how a speechless hero recurs throughout Arendt’s writing as a critique of a “tradition” of political philosophy. Arendt’s readings of figures silent before the law, such as Socrates’s “speechless wonder” in representations of his trial and Melville’s casting of a figure with a “vocal defect” in Billy Budd, are political allegories about rightlessness. I assemble a range of such literary citations and examples to demonstrate how her understudied but remarkable attentiveness to the literary works to expose the limits of an established rationality in political philosophy about law. In addition, I demonstrate how literary concepts— allegory, doxai (irony), and verse—inform Arendt’s influential thesis on the “right to have rights.” Literature is a recurring “trace,” not only in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem but throughout Arendt’s writings: the essays on Socrates’s trial, the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, the references to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and her readings of Plato. Literary concepts such as allegory, irony, and verse then function to contest an entrenched juridical rationality in the legal setting and in philosophical prose that effectively erases the predicament of the stateless from a history of political philosophy.

Keywords: Hannah Arendt, statelessness, political philosophy, speechless hero, noncitizen

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 11–34 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.11

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The problem thus arose of how man, if he is to live in a polis, can live outside of politics; this problem, in what sometimes seems a strange resemblance to our own times, very quickly became the question of how is it possible to live without belonging to a polity—that is, in the condition of apolity, or what we today would call statelessness.

Hannah Arendt (1953)1 “How is it possible to live without belonging to any polity?—that is, the condition of apolity, or what we today would call statelessness,” asks Hannah Arendt in a reading of the trial of Socrates (Promise 6). Arendt’s question presents the predicament of statelessness as an inquiry into a tradition of political philosophy.2 Immediately following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she turns from historicizing statelessness in relation to the development of the European nation-state to situating the predicament within a reading of a philosophical tradition from Plato, to Montesquieu, to Marx. When she states that the problem of exclusion arising in the trial of Socrates prophetically bears a “strange resemblance to our own times,” she invokes a comparative reading between the philosophical scene and political future (6). In this passage, Arendt moves beyond history alone to identify a rift between thinking (philosophy) and action that forever marks public affairs.The banishment of philosophy from the life of the city touches upon conditions of political exclusion, particularly the condition when one is denied the right to political membership. Apolity results not just from restrictive laws but also from “indifference and contempt for the world of the city” (26). Although some readers would dispute Arendt’s translation of the term “apolity” as “statelessness,” the passage proposes this analogy between the two terms to ask a question: how is political exclusion also bound to the reading of philosophy? The rhetorical question—how can one live?—is a figure of speech itself that exposes statelessness as a condition of life and death.The essay also provocatively suggests political exclusion is a collective failure to recognize the stateless question also as a philosophical quandary.

In my own essay, I demonstrate how the relevance of Arendt’s less literal and more figurative tracing of statelessness identifies a recurring aporia in a long tradition of political philosophy that effaces the noncitizen.

In fact, Arendt returns to a foundational scene of law—Socrates’s trial—to illuminate how a constitutive exclusion recurs in the general theory of the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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city-state and, consequently, how it is a “defeat for philosophy” (Promise 26).

I argue here that Arendt reads Socrates as a philosophical prefiguration of the noncitizen before the law. Unlike Michel Foucault’s focus on parrhe-sia in the trial,3 Arendt’s reading focuses on the silence in the philosophical scene. While Socrates is punished for the good of the republic, he also paradoxically desires to remain in the city and requires legal protection.The trial is then a primal scene in philosophy about the paradox of citizenship: a thaumadzein within an entire “occidental philosophical tradition,” as Arendt writes (5).4 While thaumadzein is a term frequently translated as “wonder,” Arendt writes of it as a brutal shock and recurring traumatic recollection of a figure denied the right to belong to a polis. For Socrates, the denial of the right to remain in the city is tantamount to death.

Arendt’s writings on the trial and a tradition of thought that follows represent a rigorous study of figures and traces often effaced by philosophy through its readings of Plato’s Republic, Apology, and Phaedo; Aristotle’s Politics; Montesquieu’s L’Espirt de lois; Cicero’s De res publica; and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract.5 The Greek, and particularly Athenian, scene is relevant precisely because it is the “source of the Greek political vocabulary that still survives in all European languages” (Promise 45). Her use of the word “occidental” critiques a reconstructed genealogy of philosophy that begins with Hegel to frequently cast Aristotle and Plato as the origins of classical philosophy.6 Her own language reveals also the interwoven effects of imperialism on modes of thinking and acting that she meticulously connects to the stateless question in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

I begin with Arendt’s reading of Socrates as a philosophical figure and speechless noncitizen not to reinscribe a foundational scene as the beginning of philosophy but to excavate and attend to an Arendtian mode of reading.

She reads the trial as a traumatic inscription in a tradition of writing about politics. While readings of the trial come to define, and dominate, philosophical understandings of Greek political life, they simultaneously have effaced the lexical complexity of political concepts and terms in pre-polis Athens. Moreover, a tradition of writings about politics stakes a claim to the Athenian polis as its origin while translating Greek political terms as if absolute categories. For Arendt, Roman and modern translations of Greek terms are “only rudimentary traces” that become subject to new sets of categorizations and formulations (Promise 45).What is tragically lost for her The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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in this “dangerous identification with the past,” ritualizing a scene of sacrifice and punishment as a philosophical foundation (43), is the heterogeneity of political concepts embodied in Greek words.

In her provocative mistranslation of apolity as statelessness, she critiques future translations and the misuse of the terms and ideals of pre-polis Athens. The language of politics increasingly becomes subject to calculated classifications and categories under authoritarian regimes. The co-optation of Greek terms for the management of public affairs causes them to be severed from the ideal of politics as “an absolute necessity for human life” (Promise 115). For example, the Roman assertion of the word “civitas” as citizenship and the reduction of philosophical concepts to common sense effaces the complexity of Greek considerations on the relation between speech, action, and thought, as well the understanding of politics as the desire for “no ‘end,’ no ultimate telos” (46). As a “categorical system of means and ends, of ruling and being ruled, of interests and moral standards” takes hold, the very pre-polis teachings and ideas about thought as an act of considering “many different logoi” gets lost (19).This philosophical reflection in Arendt’s writing implicitly invokes political allegory, a literary concept accounting for classification. I am arguing the question of philosophy and reading then become central to both her thesis on rightlessness and a broader critique of political exclusion.

The point of returning to Arendt’s reading of the trial is its refusal of a philosophical common sense that reduces remembrance to a set of general rules and standards. In contrast, for Arendt, the act of reading Homer brings forth noncitizen figures in Greek life who were central to the life of the city but were “without place, homeless as it were, in traditional political thought” (Promise 44). The figure conjured in the question “how can one live?” is the noncitizen: a figure denied the rights conferred by organized polities. In the trial, the figure of the philosopher condemned to death also resembles the noncitizen before the law. Socrates’s condemnation by a jury of his friends is not only the destruction of pre-Platonic political ideals of friendship and the ideal of making “philosophy relevant to the polis” but also foreshadows the noncitizen’s juridical predicament in the twentieth century (26). This is to say that the banishment of philosophy or thinking from the realm of public affairs mirrors the brutal exile and regulation of noncitizens’ juridical predicament (26).

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The noncitizen is characterized by exclusion from the community of rights-bearing subjects (the polity), including the juridical category of the human, and lacks what Arendt would powerfully describe as “the right to have rights.”7 Arendt’s question of how one can live without belonging to a polity and her notions of rights as simultaneously a question of life or death, urgently pointing to a legal ontology of restrictive citizenship: without the right to have rights, for example, how can the noncitizen seek redress for the grievance of grave deprivation and social death?8 If the denial of citizenship is also the denial of the human, then noncitizenship legislates violence and denies forms of social life, effectively negating the possibility of living together. Arendt’s essay “Socrates” stages an argument with Plato and claims that his adherence to a speech of the common good destroys the pre-Platonic ideal of citizenship as coexistence and friendship. Friendship or philia is an explicitly political concept in her writings because it constitutes deliberations on inhabiting a common word without a predetermined calculated end. The shock in the trial is that the very figure—Socrates, who “tried to make friends out of Athens’ citizenry”—is forcibly condemned to death by the polis (Promise 16).

In this article, I show how philosophical and literary figures are a recurring trace from Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem to her essay on Socrates’s tragic trial in The Promise of Politics, to her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s essays, as well as to her reading of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1924) on the noncitizen. Arendt’s own use of the term “trace” prior to Jacques Derrida’s more intricate elaboration leaves a curious mark in her own writings. As I have already stated, the noncitizen recurs in her own writings as a figure and trace that contests an entrenched political rationality privileging the citizen in a “tradition of political thought.”9 The citations and readings assembled here demand a reading that faces the limits of established narratives of rights and political membership. The figure of the exiled philosopher and speechless noncitizen disrupts a prose of political philosophy that effaces its conceptual complicity with conditions of exclusion.

Arendt reads for figures silent before the law, including Socrates’s “speechless wonder” and Herman Melville’s casting of a Billy Budd as a figure silenced before the law to collapse the distinction between politicalbeing and speaking-being. “Speechless wonder” is a term invoked multiple times throughout the essays in The Promise of Politics, including in Arendt’s reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the essay on “Socrates”: “The The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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wonder which man endures or which befalls him cannot be related in words because it is too general for words. Plato must have encountered it in those frequently reported traumatic states in which Socrates would suddenly, as though seized by rapture, fall into complete motionlessness, just staring without seeing or hearing anything” (33). Like her writings on Socrates, Billy Budd is a story that also represents the violent effects of statelessness before the law through the staging of silence; hence, it is not just statelessness directly that is being critiqued but the monophonology of law and a tradition of philosophy that unquestioningly sanctions state forms of political exclusion.

Statelessness then is not only a historical and a juridical dilemma but also a philosophical one. The question “how can one live?” registers the brutal effects of semantic classifications in law that impact the very conditions for living. In law, for instance, the denial of citizenship based on the division of “citizen” from “noncitizen” results in an ontology of exclusion or language of nullity. However, Arendt’s recuperation of a speechless figure and trace demonstrates how a tradition of political thought about the republic and its definitions of rights results, precisely and ironically, in this dehumanization.

For instance, an established discourse on belonging to the polis and rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) rationalizes a legal deprivation of a person’s humanity, so that the law can also deprive that person of the “right to have rights,” as Arendt famously claims in Origins of Totalitarianism.While this phrase has been explicated and cited on numerous occasions, the work of my essay is to bring to light the significance of literary concepts and examples to her influential thesis.

In what way does the law’s presumption of the a priori nullity of the noncitizen naturalize exclusion as central to an accepted version of justice?

In fact, the phrase “right to have rights” exposes how the law disavows its own power to deprive a human creature of ontological standing, acting as if that deprivation is an ontological fact, prior to the intervention of any law. Once that deprivation is presumed as ontological, then the law can say that it is under no obligation to extend rights to a nullity.

Readings not just of the literal but the figurative trial scene inform Arendt’s influential understanding of statelessness as an ontological crisis. The literary ontology of the speechless hero registers the force of restrictive citizenship laws.

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The role of literary terms and concepts play a decisive role also in Arendt’s critique of the noncitizen’s forced ontological deprivation. As stated, statelessness is not considered only through the meticulous historical contextualization found in The Origins of Totalitarianism but rather through the reading of a notably allegorical scene in philosophy: the “process of reasoning out the implications of Socrates’s trial,” as Arendt describes in the essay on the philosopher before the law (Promise 10). The problem for Arendt is Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical revisionism of the trial as a narrative that sees “friendship from the viewpoint of the single citizen, not from that of the polis,” (17). Although Socrates is not explicitly stateless, her reading does defamiliarize the trial merely as an account of the figure of the philosopher-citizen in a foundational scene. Instead, the trial represents for Arendt not a beginning or origin but the loss of a notion of philosophy as the idea that “friends can understand the truth inherent in the other’s opinion” (18). I recuperate Arendt’s readings of the trial and of trial scenes in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd to elaborate an Arendtian mode of political allegory as a kind of specialized reading to which we have access through her use of the literary. But what, precisely, do we speak of when we speak of the status of the literary and the allegorical in the text of political philosophy?

As in her interpretation of the trial, Arendt would also turn to a figure condemned to death in a trial scene Melville’s Billy Budd in On Revolution (1963) and in On Violence (1970). A figurative scene of law registers the phenomenological effects of statelessness through the staging of speechless hero. Literary language stands as a counterpoint to a legal rationality, questioning how a corruption of political concepts and terms takes place in the scene of punishment before the law. Language becomes an instrument of absolute rule, introducing the use of catch phrases and stock phrases in the political realm. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, for example, Arendt warns of how the state’s violence is reflected in the regulation of speech: “language rules [. . .] proved of enormous significance in the maintenance of order” and the state converted “ordinary language” into “a lie” (84). This “lie” institutes itself in politics through the repetition of moralizing terms such as “vice, virtue, good and evil,” as her reading of Billy Budd suggests (On Revolution 206–13). These absolutist and moralizing terms register as the emergence of an authoritarian dimension in a tradition of political thought that, for Arendt, begins with Plato’s writing on the trial.The conversion particularly The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of philosophical concepts to “stock phrases” is one she deplores, as the banalization of language in politics becomes instrumental in rationalizing brutal acts of cruelty under the aegis of a social democracy and law in Arendt’s own time.

Literature and particularly poetry prove crucial to her critiques of statelessness and state violence. Thus, I retrieve her protocols of reading the noncitizen as a speechless but philosophical figure and, thus, reading its trace. The turn to allegory in the essay “Socrates” reckons with the effects of preestablished semantic divisions—such as the terms “citizen” versus “noncitizen.” The literary and allegorical aspects in Arendt’s own political philosophy bring forth the role of semantics, classifications, and categories in the production of statelessness as the calculated end of state policy.

Considering Arendt as a reader of literature, I foreground her consistent turning to literary terms and concepts but also verse to unravel an established discourse of rights. Her phrase “right to have rights” is a poignant reminder of how declarations of rights can simultaneously work to restrict rather than enfranchise citizenship. Reading for the literary in a text of political philosophy opens the prose of political philosophy to the concealed, subjugated figure of the noncitizen.

Arendt’s turn to Melville’s Billy Budd offers a reading of the noncitizen’s juridical predicament and of the centrality of literary concepts to a critique of political exclusion. As readers of this story will recall, Billy Budd disembarks from a ship named the Rights-of-Man (a name the sailors mockingly abbreviate as the Rights) to board the Bellipotent. As though political allegories for a liberal social contract, ships bearing the name of Enlightenment philosophers—“Voltaire” and “Diderot”—also meaninglessly cross the Atlantic in the tale.The story is set in a moment when a contractual notion of citizenship becomes the norm and adopts the universal language of the Rights of Man. However, within the trial scene set aboard a warship, the law also presumes the right to strip a life of dignity with the death penalty.

Billy is ultimately sentenced to death by Captain Fairfax Vere, who acts as both judge and prosecutor, while a jury comprising his crew members and friends gaze upon the spectacle of his execution in silence.

The following sections draw upon two of Arendt’s readings of silence in figurative scenes of law: the trials of Socrates and Billy Budd. Her tracing of speechless figures before the law register as a profound loss of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the ideal of citizenship: the loss of the art of friendship and living together.

Silence figures in her reading as the absence of reflective judgment and of the faculty of the imagination in public life. Arendt writes that “political philosophy, like all its other branches, will never be able to deny its origins in thaumadzein” (35).The word “thaumadzein” suggests that statelessness was always and already inscribed in the primal scene of philosophical tradition.

Socrates’s trial is not the trace of a wondrous origin of philosophy but of conditions of exclusion superficially effaced by a prose of rights. Reading not for Socrates’s speech (parrhe-sia) but rather the silence in the trial, Arendt’s retrieval of a speechless figure before the law bears witness to the at times imperceptible noncitizen moving through and in the margins of a range of writings in philosophy and literature.10 A Primal Scene of Politics The gulf between philosophy and politics opened historically with the trial and condemnation of Socrates, which in the history of political thought plays the same role of a turning point that the trail and condemnation of Jesus plays in the history of religion.

Hannah Arendt (1963)11

Arendt’s reading of Socrates’s trial as a “philosophical shock” and his silence as the trace of the banishment of philosophy as a practice of wondering and not simply speaking points to the effects of statelessness on modes of thinking (Promise 35). Arendt’s critique of Plato in the essay now introduces the literary concept of irony as an example of “refusal” in the legal setting: “The refusal is expressed in doxadzein, in forming opinions on matters about which man cannot hold opinions because of the common and commonly accepted standards do not apply here” (35). Arendt is again turning to the literary to critique a logic whereby punishment becomes a ritual of the city-state and its laws: a cruel way of deratifying citizenship and philosophy at once. Moreover, she reads the trial also as an allegory for the increasing gulf and abyss between philosophy and politics. The reading draws upon a recurring obsession with scenes of sacrifice: the painted figure of Socrates dying before the citizenry of Athens and the pained figure of Jesus.The political and theological scene intersect in her reading, not as consolidating a sacred foundation of thought but as a “turning point,” to question the conversion The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of political ideals and religious writings into dogma. Both the sacrificial scenes of Socrates and Jesus come under scrutiny in Arendt’s reading as a way of indicting also the influence of the theological in a tradition of law, including the writings of Plato and Rousseau, that remain silent on the issue of statelessness.

Socrates is a singular figure before the law “neither in his equality with all others nor in his absolute distinctness from them,” Arendt writes (Promise 16).While Socrates is not a noncitizen in the same sense as the stateless in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the singularity of Socrates’s dual status as suddenly both friend and enemy of the republic introduces a paradox of citizenship at the very presumed origins in a reconstructed history of philosophy. Of course, the paradox in the trial is not a literal one but a figurative instance of sudden dispossession from the right to political membership and to philosophy.

Furthermore, when this scene of a bodily sacrifice compulsively returns in philosophical narratives from Plato’s Apology to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, each iteration bears the trace of a traumatic inscription in Arendt’s own prose.

Similarly, the isolation of the noncitizen from concepts of the political and from other social spheres—the private, the religious, the economic—and, particularly, the critical practice of philosophy reproduces a false opposition between the friend and enemy of the polis.

Arendt’s use of literary concepts—irony and allegory—in the essay “Socrates” is an example of a mode of allegorical reading.12 She even explicitly refers to allegory in this essay when reading the “images on the screen at which the cave dwellers stare” as ironic images (doxai) about the role of the philosopher in the polis (Promise 30). In her reading and critique of Plato, for instance, she writes of the images reflected on the wall of the cave as doxai (irony) and excavates the “metaphors” taken exclusively from “sight and visual perception” in the “allegory of the cave” (30).The entire allegory of the cave in Plato’s writings is a contemplation on the responsibility of the philosopher to the polis and on the metaphor of vision or sight.13 Arendt writes that [t]he allegory of the cave is designed to depict not so much how philosophy looks from the viewpoint of politics, but how politics, the realm of human affairs, looks from philosophy [. . .]What Plato does not tell us in the story, is what distinguished the philosopher from those who also love seeing for its own sake (37).

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Here, Arendt explicates as she frequently does in other writings how merely to look without seeing registers as a philosophical passivity and complicity with political exclusion. As philosophy leaves the life of the city and foments into a tradition, the implementation of absolute standards and dogma in public affairs destroy the principal of viewing politics from the eyes of others. The metaphor of sight in the allegory of the cave returns as a critique of forms of thinking that seek only to standardize categories and classifications as finite determinants for accounting for political life.14 Arendt argues with Plato’s imposition of an autocratic standard in philosophy; the “forcing” upon the “multiple opinions” of the polis “one’s own opinion” (13). In this account, statelessness and political violence more generally results from a gulf that develops between a politics that values the singularity of each life and a philosophy intended for governance; the “condition of apolity” results again in a “defeat for philosophy,” as she writes in the passage cited at the start of the essay (26).

These examples in Arendt’s reading of the trial and Plato’s other writings again bring forth the literary as registering the violence also of a logic of divisive classifications in law. Arendt returns to the spectacle of Socrates submitting his own doxa (irony) to a jury comprised of his friends, who passively consent to Plato’s decision to condemn Socrates—their friend—to death. For Arendt, this consent is a brutal “defeat for philosophy” in the life of the polis. In this scene of betrayal and loss, citizenship emerges simply as the rhetoric of legal common sense: a problem that returns in the scene of Billy Budd’s execution when a jury of his crew members gazes upon his execution in silence. A normalized common sense destroys and banishes philosophy (an allusion to reflective judgment and the act of seeing from another’s perspective) from political life. Melville’s dramatization of law, for Arendt, registers this loss of a democratic mode of inhabiting the polis.

The phrase “defeat for philosophy” distinguishes Arendt’s reading of the trial from accounts of it as the beginning of philosophy, as frequently assumed in the translation of the term thaumadzein as the “wonder with which philosophy begins”(36)15 Instead, Arendt suggests the trial initiates not the birth of philosophy but its death, since reflective judgment or thinking become divorced from the polis: “In this attempt the philosopher establishes himself, bases his whole existence on that singularity which he endured the pathos of thaumadzein. And by this he destroys the plurality of the human The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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condition within himself ” (Promise 37). Again, Arendt’s use of the word “thaumadzein” registers her discomfort with Plato’s conversion of philosophy to a set of absolute standards and terms (such as the notion of the good), which increasingly play a role in law and politics. For Arendt, this is the collusion of philosophy with authority, as well as the denigration of opinion and persuasion (peithein) to sets of rules and standards within the polis. Alluding to philosophical dogmatism, she reads Plato’s dialogues as stories devoid of a double perspective and instilling a language “which can frighten” (13). Again, in this critique of Plato, Arendt reads the rhetorical forms employed during the trial as the initiation of “an attempt to use violence by words only” (13).

Thus, Arendt’s essay “Socrates” proves crucial for unraveling a moral justification for extreme forms of political exclusion such as statelessness frequently found in the conversion of philosophy into an instrument of rule.

I have argued that Arendt’s tracing of speechlessness in the philosophical scene alludes to a constitutive exclusion from rights. This condition of exclusion reveals an aporia within a tradition of political thought that invokes the Rights of Man while implementing violence based on a person’s legal status.

Arendt’s reading of statelessness as the silent specter in the trial implicates a tradition of political thought and its concepts of the political. In so doing, she challenges philosophical and influential assumptions about who figures as the central subject of political philosophy. In “The Tradition of Political Thought,” she writes that Goethe in fact anticipates the “catastrophe” of a tradition with the “mere tendency to exclude everything that was not consistent developed into a great power of exclusion, which kept the tradition against all new, contradictory, and conflicting experiences” (Promise 47).This tradition of philosophy and law becomes complicit with statelessness and atrocity, becoming complicit also with a repressive rule of the city and its use of political violence.Yet, the literary captures for her the ironic dualities and brutal contradictions in the legal setting.

In the political discourse of rights, and in the language of the social contract accompanying the French Revolution, for example, to be recognizable as human or a life, in a legal sense, one requires legal and political recognition as a citizen.The legal definition of the human contractually binds citizenship to inclusion within the nation-state. Only the rights-bearing subject or citizen then figures as the central character in this narrative of political freedom and equality. To be recognizable as human in a legal sense, one had to have The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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legal and political recognition as a citizen. Although Arendt’s writing on statelessness in The Origins of Totalitarianism implicate a European discourse of rights and a tradition of law that coincides with Rousseau’s Social Contract, her readings of literary and philosophical scenes are just as key to her critique of the complicity and consent to political violence that makes statelessness possible. Specifically, Melville’s Billy Budd and its poetic inflections call into question the reading of foundational scenes in a tradition of political and religious thought.

“We Had Better Turn to the Poets” Without the French Revolution neither Melville nor Dostoevski would have dared to undo the haloed transformation of Jesus of Nazareth into Christ, to make him return to the world of men […] to show openly and concretely, though of course poetically and metaphorically, upon what tragic and self-defeating enterprise the men of the French Revolution have embarked almost without knowing it. If we want to know what absolute goodness would signify for the course of human affairs […] we had better turn to the poets, and we can do it safely enough if we remember that “the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson’s, the opportunity being given, vitalizes into acts” (Melville).

Hannah Arendt (1963)16

In the above passage, Arendt’s imperative—“we had better turn to the poets”—is a call to rethink how the literary animates and reveals problems in a tradition of political philosophy.17 The scene is no longer the Athenian polis but a trial aboard a warship perpetually adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1793. The last lines of the passage cite directly from the text of Billy Budd.

The citation above is part of a larger reflection on the implications of the French and American Revolutions, as well as on distinguishing the social from the political. Arendt argues through a reading of literature again— Melville and Dostoevsky—for a poetic intervention into the legal scene.

Implied in the citation of Melville as a counterpoint to Rousseau’s prose is the suggestion that poetic language stands apart from the commonsense prose of contracts. The phrase “turn to the poets” seeks to go against the grain of reading philosophical scenes or scripture as doctrine, dogma, or absolute standards. Instead, as I interpret it, Arendt implies that Billy Budd demands not simply to be read through the lens of Christian eschatology The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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(an opinion shared by the story’s author, Melville); the “turn to the poets” unravels instead the stark moralism of terms, such as “vice,” “virtue,” “good,” and “evil” in the legal setting. Her turn demands to “poetically and metaphorically” show the “tragic” and “self-defeating” fissures in the concept of citizenship that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen generates.

The notion that Melville is “in a better position to know what [the French Revolution] had all been about” than Rousseau and Robespierre critiques the institution of the social contract and a “terror of virtue” that follows the French Revolution (On Revolution 206). A vocabulary of moral absolutes instrumental during the French Revolution is also a “defeat for philosophy,” as Arendt would state in “Socrates.” Critiquing the rise of what she perceives as a Platonic absolutism in political speech, I interpret her call to “talk back to the Men of the French Revolution” as the contrasting of various rhetorical forms (208). The figure of the poet, or poetry more generally, stands in contrast to the language of the Social Contract that Arendt critiques. For instance, she writes in the “The Social Question” that [n]either Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would “partake nothing of the sordid or the sensual” (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice. (209)

Again, the commonsense language of moral accusation—vice, virtue, good, and evil—is bound with the exclusion of the noncitizen.18 Since Melville’s story negates the fixity of moral terms or the idea of static virtue or evil, the story captures for Arendt the ambiguity of political and legal decrees enacted in the name of the moral good. Unlike the commonsense prose of Rousseau’s Social Contract, for instance, Melville’s stages the moralism of the law as theatrical. Billy Budd depicts a figure first introduced as a “peacemaker” as both criminal and compassionate (Melville 433). A trial ensues when Billy, universally loved by the fellow crew, suddenly strikes dead his shipmate Claggart, a figure introduced at the story’s start as an allegory for envy.

In the “turn to the poets,” literary exegesis proves crucial to Arendtian political theory and her critique of the abstract universality in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. A line in Billy Budd also asserts the novella as the story of a “figure” from a “less prosaic time” to law to counter the commonsense prose of political treatises crossing the Atlantic (Melville The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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430). In the story of Billy’s trial, for instance, Captain Vere’s condemning Billy to the death penalty is the result of a calculated logic of means and ends in the legal proceedings. Disparate and complicated actions are classified according to rigid moral terms in Vere’s judgment that Billy should hang to death. Implicit in Arendt’s call to “turn to the poets” is the recognition of how the figural scene of law exposes the brutal contradictions and even bellicosity of this juridical rationality.

Her turn to the poets and the literary more generally is an unraveling of the contractual promise of universal citizenship and rights that define the European Enlightenment. In Billy Budd, however, this promise of inclusion and protection before the law is effectively staged as a lie. In exchange for the citizen’s consent to violence, an absolute rhetoric of morality—vice, virtue, good, and evil—sanctions the state with the authority to decide who lives and who dies. Arendt privileges again a literary staging of law when she asserts that Melville is “in a better position to know what it [the French Revolution] had all been about” than Rousseau and Robespierre (On Revolution 209). The statement “we had better turn to the poets” seeks to counter the commonsense prose of the Social Contract, interrogating again an absolutist logic entering the public realm. Arendt’s insistence on how “the poet […] embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment” (209) foregrounds the role of gesture, emotion, sensation, and language in the legal setting. However, the excess of sensation and passion in Billy Budd cannot be subsumed under absolutist standards of classification.

For Arendt, Melville’s narratives are lyrical, wandering, passionate, and dramatically embodied appeals to law, rendering Rousseau’s moralizing prose empty: “Compassion plays a role, even an important one in Billy Budd, but its topic is goodness beyond virtue and evil beyond vice, and the plot of the story consists in confronting these two” (On Revolution 73).While Billy does not speak, his last words upon the “spar” where he is executed are “‘God bless Captain Vere!’” (Melville 442). Arendt implies, as I am reading her, that this utterance is a sign of Billy’s compassion and of a “goodness beyond virtue” (On Revolution 209).Whereas goodness and evil are moral absolutes for Rousseau, Billy Budd renders the thesis that “innocence and guilt […] in effect changed places” (Melville 480). Melville stages Billy not as the enemy of the state, but as both the criminal and compassionate figure. For instance, Billy faces and forgives his executioner, “uttering syllables […] delivered in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the clear melody of a singing-bird” (445).The narrator describes the speech in the trial scene as having a “phenomenal effect” that in turn exposes the cruelty of law (497).Thus, a distinctly literary scene of law unravels a set of moral terms and lays bare the violent consequences of adhering to a logic of law as a calculated logic of means and ends. Indeed, Melville’s staging of the trial as a dramatic play effectively disrupts the notion of fixed good and bad absolutes, revealing the fissures in such moral declaratives of the good in the Social Contract.

I draw upon Arendt’s reading of Billy as a “foundling” who is “socially speaking, from nowhere” and “a man whose origin is unknown” to argue that it retrieves a figuration of the noncitizen (On Revolution 209–10). If we read Billy Budd as the figure of the noncitizen, the novella’s importance and Arendt’s readings of it are an important account of the effects of statelessness on the voice (phone) or speech, political language, and scenes of legal exclusion in philosophical prose. To counter the logic of means and ends in the legal setting, she calls upon the nonteleological sensibilities of poetic language.

Unlike a lawyer’s speech or judge’s edict, the poets withdraw from the logic of means and ends to offer a different image of sociality.

A tragic silence within the courtroom scene of Billy Budd’s conviction recuperates the figure of the speechless hero before the law.The noncitizen’s exclusion or lack of rights results from the devaluation of both poetry and other marginal forms of philosophy in the polis. Both the trials of Socrates and Billy Budd elucidate the noncitizen’s juridical predicament. In both cases, the dynamics of speech and silence decisively tell us about the bellicosity of law or, as Arendt writes, the “right to have rights.” Her metonymic play with the word “rights” is one that suggests the denial of legal protection and recognition effectively becomes inscribed into a modern discourse of law.

Billy Budd dramatizes this irony of law through a fictional figure.When asked to name his father, for instance, Billy reveals that he has no known patrimony or relation. The further figuration of Billy’s vocal impediment—he could sing but not speak—suggests that he is in fact a noncitizen, denied the rights conferred by organized polities.

Billy’s preestablished classification as a noncitizen (a figure who Arendt notes has “no knowledge of birthplace or kin” in the novel), then his legal status and classification foreordains his condemnation (On Revolution 209).

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of utterance. Billy’s speechlessness is not as the mark of an individual will that is withheld but instead bears the trace of the psychological and corporeal effects of legal exclusion. Leaving an imprint in its absence, Billy’s vulnerability appears as a “vocal embarrassment” and a sign of a figure in “agony” (Melville 440). Vere addresses Billy as a “fated boy” and commands him to “Speak Man!” but Billy remains silent (476). Billy’s stammer attests to the effects of punishment acting on the voice and, conversely, to modes of resistance that emerge from that subjection. The silence in the scene is also indicative of the noncitizen’s preordained accusation of guilt. Billy Budd highlights the monophonology of the figure Vere, acting as judge, lawyer, and jury: the voice of the state’s univocal claim to violence.

Thus, Billy Budd appears as a parable of political violence and of its failure to include the entire populace as equal, rights-bearing citizens. In the novella, Billy’s execution by hanging is set amidst “revolutionary chaos” and cast as a scene resembling Christ’s crucifixion, or a “martyr” sacrificed to “martial discipline” (Melville 445). Arendt returns to this scene to insist upon the spectator’s obligations to the silenced figure and to again pose questions of both legal and religious judgment. Arendt’s hermeneutical reading turns a Christian allegory about the human condition at odds with itself. As she writes, literature can “undo the haloed transformation of Jesus of Nazareth into Christ, to make him return to the world of men” (On Revolution 208). This line in fact suggests that the trial of Billy Budd is not a Christian allegory of sacrifice, crucifixion, and resurrection, as is frequently suggested, but it is rather one about a mortal and Jewish notion of being in the world. Her exegesis challenges the Christian association between suffering as the “terrifying question of good and evil […] in the framework of Western traditions,” suggesting such dogmatic figurations of good and evil in the public realm and within a Euro-American legal tradition coincide with the advent of state violence.

As I aim to point out in this article, reading against the grain, Arendt also uses the intrinsically Christian form of allegorical reading against itself, making it undo itself back into the literal word of men. Arendt reads Billy’s execution as the death of an “angel” who the law deems “must hang”; figuring as the angel, the scene foreshadows the institutional exclusion from rights (On Revolution 210). Arendt is again drawing of the irony of law and, particularly, capital punishment. Going against the grain of readings of Billy’s execution The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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as a reenactment of a Christian scene of sacrifice alone, she interrogates the role of sacrifice and punishment in a tradition of political thought as evidence of a rampant infringement on rights.

The implications of retrieving the status of the literary in Arendt’s writings is ultimately to argue that aesthetic judgment or reading is crucial to a critique of restrictive citizenship. For instance, Arendt cites Billy Budd immediately after writing her commentaries on the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1962–1963) and in OnViolence (1970), and she reflects on how legal proceedings convert the social question into moral absolutes and hence convert the adjective “social” into a trite term. Although she is a political theorist, Arendt’s recuperation of the value of the literary and the faculty of the imagination privilege poetic over scientific inquiries into political phenomenon.

Linguistic forms such as poetry escape the rhetoric of evidence and proof in the courtroom scene, though they remain marginal to the prose of contract in Billy Budd. As a counterpoint to law, literature then offers a reservoir of knowledge about linguistic forms and embodied techniques that might more adequately express and counter the effects of political violence and restrictive citizenship. Despite the judge barring Billy from the recognized rights of participation, speech, and legal representation, Arendt’s reading bears witness to the trial’s monophonology and the state’s monopoly on violence against citizens and noncitizens. As in Arendt’s reading of the betrayal of friendship in the trial, she implies that Melville pursues a critique of the spectator’s complicity in producing statelessness in Billy Budd. She returns, time and again, to asserting the figure of an ethical witness who questions rather than consents to violence.

Arendt clearly listens to the dynamics of speech and silence while interpreting the scene of law in terms that exceed the rhetoric of proof.

The deliberations on the effects of statelessness on law from the essays on the Eichmann Trial published in The NewYorker to the more abstract text of “The Social Question” are not incidental but reflect more broadly on the weight that Arendt assigns to gesture, emotion, vision, and sensation, or, more generally, passion in the public realm. Her own writing invokes an implicit figure: the position of the spectator. The spectator’s role recurs in her writing as an allegory for the importance of perception and listening in public life.The Arendtian mode of political allegory bears witness also to the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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imperceptible, the nonvisible in the trial scene. She reads Billy’s silence, for instance, as reflecting a kind of compassion that exceeds the law: “Passion and compassion are not speechless, but their language consists in gestures and expressions of countenance rather than in words” (On Revolution 211).

For Arendt, compassion embodied in an utterance or a gesture (like Billy’s final words “God Bless Captain Vere!”) is integral to a political ideal of vita contemplativa, as noted in The Human Condition. Compassion, then, is not a narrative of empty words in Arendt’s reflections, but “vitalizes into acts” through gestures and signs exchanged between actors despite the censorship of certain forms of speech, as suggested in her references to Melville’s story (Melville 445).19 The pivot to the literary in Arendt’s writings on law asserts the role of cognition, reflective judgment, and reading, but most importantly, the role of the imagination as crucial for political theory. Although she is a political theorist by training, Arendt’s reflections on literary techniques, poetic language, aesthetics, and speech critique the erasure of the noncitizen within the Social Contract through literary concepts.20 After the publication of “The Social Question,” Arendt once again cited Billy Budd in OnViolence in a parenthesis. She recalls the moral dilemma posed when Billy strikes dead the man (Billy’s fellow crew member) who bears false witness against him; this is a sustained reflection on political violence, a subject also covered in The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. As is clear in the story of Billy Budd, the presemantic classifications between “citizen” and “noncitizen” or “barbarian” and “captain” are within forms of law. In the trial scene, for instance, violence becomes a common denominator in law and aboard the “more knowing world of a great warship” (Melville 436).

As argued here, these semantic classifications often become a justification for violence against the most vulnerable in a polity. Arendt’s reading of Billy Budd posits language not as an ancillary afterthought to political phenomenon but as part and parcel of the event.

Arendt’s advocacy for considering silence invokes an imperceptible but active figure and trace in the legal setting. Her frequent recuperation of the speechless hero posits an ethics of reading for the imperceptible as an obligation of democratic life. She was herself a poet and occasionally published on aesthetics, poetics, and what we would now call semiotics.21 The act of reading the figurative scene offers a way to retrace the condition of statelessness from The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the scene of Socrates’s condemnation to the present as a philosophical dilemma.

Literary representations by Brecht, Dostoevsky, Melville, Rilke, and Kafka also recur as crucial to her larger explications of established concepts and maxims.

She stands apart from political scientists as she considers the effects of political violence on the senses, on speech, on philosophical writing, and on language, but also on concepts of the hero, tragedy, allegory, and irony. Her recurring citations of literary texts and scenes are thus political allegories about the crucial importance of literary concepts to political theory.

Another crucial concept figure appears in Arendt’s own thought: the spectator turning away from suffering, consenting instead with populist political oratory and moralism. The figure silent before the law exposes the juridical quandary of the noncitizen as a shared ethical crisis.Thus, I have attempted here to argue that her readings ultimately serve as political allegories about the spectator’s responsibility, a recurring consideration in Eichmann in Jerusalem as well. Questions about the responsibility of the implied spectator are cast as central to democratic life. Moreover, Arendt insists on the faculty of the imagination as crucial for a democratic ethos.The citations of Billy Budd and literature more generally tacitly argue for the value of literary exegesis to political theory. What I have aimed to show in this essay is that her writings on literature are not superfluous but rather integral to her critique of statelessness in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The citations and readings of law that I have traced account for the centrality of literary exegesis to political theory. In the two readings of literary trial scenes, for instance, Arendt looks outside the prose of a tradition of political philosophy to the poets to question an expressed political morality in the public realm.22 After publishing on the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, for instance, Arendt reflects on how the trial scene ironically effaces the very innocent figure the law seeks to protect—the figure who can’t bear testimony. Importantly, Arendt’s post–World War II reading of Billy Budd takes place when a narrative of democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) proclaims itself as a moral and universal norm that promises international and human rights law as well as the restoration of governmental order in the wake of totalitarian devastation. Although not explicitly stated in her passages, she draws on Melville’s figuration of Billy as a “foundling” with “no birthplace or kin” to consider how the literary figure of the noncitizen calls into question an established discourse of politics and of rights (On Revolution 209–10).

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My account of a literary Arendt retrieves both the political and theological allusions in her writing as also a theory of literature and an index of genres.

Arendt writes of the literary—particularly irony, parable, and poetry—as the aesthetic forms closest to “thought” (a word that alludes to critique and reflective judgment). While the remote possibility exists that Billy “could have spoken,” she writes that he “would not have been able to refute the accusation” (On Revolution 210).This reading implies that a predetermined or a priori judgment prohibits Billy not just from speaking but from being heard in the trial scene. Drawing upon the figuration of Billy as a speechless hero, the text of Billy Budd dramatizes the similar paradox of citizenship in Arendt’s “right to have rights” phrase. Billy’s accusation is a foregone conclusion, his guilt already established, and Arendt’s essay demonstrates the weight of how the trial scene operates through a preestablished verdict about the stateless figure. The assertion that even if Billy “could have spoken” he “would not have been able” to defend his action brings to light the role of prejudgment or prejudice in the trial scene. Legal exclusion must be understood as the forcible working of law, normalizing social death, and destroying social life.

Munia Bhaumik is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University.

Notes 1 Arendt, “Socrates,” The Promise of Politics, p. 6.

It is important to note that Arendt never published the essays in this collection as a cohesive book; rather, they reflect fragments of her thinking and reading of political philosophy. Although I do not agree with all aspects of Kohn’s introduction to the volume, his discovery of Arendt writing of a “serious gap” in Origins of Totalitarianism in her application to the Guggenheim Foundation is very revealing (xi). I interpret this refection on the “gap” by Arendt as a move from historical context to the reading of literature and philosophy to account for the stateless condition.

2 “Tradition” is a critical term in Arendt’s writing, as two essays in The Promise of Politics, assembled by Jerome Kohn, make clear. Arendt’s essay “Socrates” is part of this volume. Although she wrote the various pieces as disparate fragments, Kohn suggests that Arendt envisioned the project Einführung in die Politik (“Introduction to Politics”) in 1960, immediately after writing The Origins of Totalitarianism. Notably, “tradition” is not synonymous with history for Arendt: “History and tradition are not the same […] We can, moreover, date The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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our tradition with certainty, but we can no longer date our history” (Promise 43). Thus, the tracing of scenes and figures in the range of texts she cites is not just an intellectual history. Rather, I would suggest the term “tradition” in her writing is more akin to “discourse” in contemporary theory.

3 See Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech.

4 The essay “Socrates” is the only place in the corpus of Arendt’s writings that she uses the word thaumadzein or “trauma” (2).

5 Of course, the actual reading of these philosophical texts is more complex and beyond the scope of this article’s focus. The aim of this essay is recuperating an Arendtian mode of allegory.

6 As Arendt writes, “Today we know that Plato and Aristotle were the culmination rather than the beginning of Greek philosophic thought, which had begun its flight when Greece had reached or nearly reached its climax […] (and) occurred when Greek political life was reaching its end,” (Promise 6).

7 For the passage where the right to rights quote appears, see Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (295–96): “We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights […] and a right to belong to [… an] organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights.” In this passage, as I state in my readings, rights are understood as ontological or bound to existence.

8 See Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. The term “social death” specifically refers to the brutal classification of the slave in US law as being also outside of recognition as human, as is the status of stateless peoples in Arendt’s writings about the right to have rights.

9 “Tradition” is a key term in Arendtian philosophy—one that has prompted a return to her writings by feminist philosophers such as Adrianna Cavarero. See Cavarero’s Toward a Philosophy ofVocal Expression.

10 Some political theorists have sought to show that exclusion is a necessary feature of liberal democracies. See Chantal Mouffe’s exclusion as a “constitutive paradox” in The Democratic Paradox (42–45). Mouffe, however, does not account for either the violence of restricting citizenship or the political consent authorizing brutal modes of regulating the stateless figure. It is precisely these features that are dramatically brought to the fore in Arendt’s figure of the spectator.

11 Arendt, “Socrates,” The Promise of Politics, p. 6.

12 Arendt’s invocation of allegory precedes the writings of Paul de Man as well as the debate between Aijaz Ahmad and Frederic Jameson. Thus, her concept of allegory must be understood in her own terms.

13 For Arendt on allegory, see towards the end of the essay on “Socrates” in her reading of Plato in The Promise of Politics (37).

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14 The paradigmatic embodiment of nonthinking or banality is Adolf Eichmann in Arendt’s writing on the trial scene. She writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else” (49; emphasis in original).The verb “to think,” particularly from a vantage point outside the self, offers a critique again of determinative judgment and merely description without reflection.

15 This phrase is a presupposition in philosophy associated with interpretations of the word thaumadzein as wonder (thaumazô) and Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that this is the beginning of philosophy.

16 Arendt, “The Social Question (On Melville and Dostoevski),” On Revolution, p. 208.

17 Billy Budd is not a poem, as Arendt reads. However, Melville incorporates dramatic technique and ends the novella with a ballad. For more on Melville as a poet, see Hershel Parker’s Melville:The Making of a Poet and Lawrence Buell’s “Melville the Poet” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville.

18 See Arendt’s comments on the influence of common sense on the rise of the Roman Empire in “The Tradition of Political Thought” (Promise 43).

19 In Billy Budd, Melville writes: “[I]f thus to have adorned himself for the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian is each more heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given, vitalizes into acts” (443). Arendt cites the last lines of this Melville sentence in “The Social Question” (On Revolution 208).

20 See Arendt’s Reflections on Literature and Culture, a wonderful compilation of her writings on literature, including essays on Rilke, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann.

21 Arendt never published her poems to my knowledge; but she did speak of learning, reciting, and writing poems for pleasure in broadcast interviews. See the interview with German journalist Günther Gaus in September 1964 for the series “Zur Person.”

22 See Hannah Arendt, “The Social Question” (On Revolution 59–144).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem:A Report on the Banality of Evil.Viking, 1963.

———. The Human Condition. U of Chicago P, 1958.

———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. U of Chicago P, 1992.

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———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace, 1973.

———. On Revolution. Penguin, 1965.

———. OnViolence. Harcourt Brace, 1969.

———. The Promise of Politics. Edited by Jerome Kohn, Schocken, 2005.

———. Reflections on Literature and Culture. Edited by SusannahYoung-ah Gottlieb, Standford UP, 2007.

Buell, Lawrence. “Melville the Poet.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville.

Edited by Robert S. Levine, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 35–56.

Cavarero, Adrianna. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford UP, 2005.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. American Bar Association, National Assembly of France, 1789, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba /migrated/2011_build/human_rights/french_dec_rightsofman.authcheckdam. pdf.

Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Semiotexte, 2001.

Gaus, Günter. “Zur Person.” YouTube, uploaded byStack Altoids, 8 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsoImQfVsO4.

Melville, Herman. “Billy Budd.” Great ShortWorks, Harper Collins, 1962, pp. 419–505.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, 2000.

Parker, Hershell. Melville:The Making of a Poet. Northwestern UP, 2008 Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death:A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1982.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. On the Social Contract. Translated and edited by Donald E. Cress, Hackett, 1987.

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Ruin Lust and Totalitarian Remnants Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss Abstract: This article posits Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading as an allegorical novel that resists classical markers of allegory. Its narrative action unfolds without a history, setting, or temporality, and it becomes, in its selfcontainment, a system outside specific reference. Attributing this text to a critique of a particular totalitarian regime is difficult, as there are no Soviet or Nazi markers in place. The text denies orientation with reality outside the novel; it draws into itself, denying history, nationhood, and language; yet the political system in which Cincinnatus is stuck and to whose laws he is subject follows classic game-plays of totalitarianism. Nabokov uses the literary to enhance the absurdity of such political and social games. Nabokov’s counter-allegorical allegory functions according to a logic of ruins, which gives readable form to the text, the suggestion of a real-life politic, but at the same time exposes its instability and turns its reader-voyeur to its inner workings. The power system is an absurdly intricate theater with no playwright, no director, and no sovereign. It is self-perpetuating; it relies on absolute loyalty to what remains of central dynamism, but the edges of the stage illusion lie exposed. The system reveals nothing about its political inception, and this seems to be the point. In the novel’s prison ruins, we only have the remnants of a past political system, continuing to sustain itself from a previous momentum but unable to draw power from a specific historical past and unable to guarantee a sustainable future.

Keywords: Nabokov, totalitarianism, allegory, sovereignty, architecture

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Faced with the difficulty of allegorizing a political system such as totalitarianism, which is built of devious fiction that constantly morphs, plays, and evades definition, Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading instead allegorizes a particular temporality and architecture of totalitarianism.The novel addresses the strangeness of a ruin temporality and the inadequacy of Hitler’s and Speer’s architectural plans in their Ruinenwerttheorie. Using Nabokov’s novel, this article will make parallels between several terms: the “human body,” “architectural structure as body,” and “body politic.” If the human body is the classical model for architectural design insofar as architecture is designed to shelter the body, then Speer’s perversion of architectural functionality disturbs the body-architecture parallel in a radical way. Designed so that Hitler could circumvent the powers of time and space, Speer’s architecture makes a very motivated attempt to control the body politic through his ruin temporality. We will see, through Nabokov’s anticipation of Speer’s failure, that such thinking is faulty; we will also see that the Vitruvian bodyarchitecture parallel is a design that protects the political body, just as it protects the physical body.

Written in Berlin during the time of Speer and Hitler’s work together, Nabokov’s Priglashenie na kazn´ (later to become Invitation to a Beheading) is an allegorical novel that deals with the rising air of monumentality in Germany. Nabokov interrupted his work on Dar (The Gift) in spring 1934, when his preparatory Chernyshevsky research gave him a burst of inspiration for a new novel. He claimed to have written Priglashenie in “one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration” (Nabokov, Strong 68). In defense of the novel after its publication, Nabokov gave differing accounts of its political content. First, in March 1935, he corrected his mother’s approach to the novel as an allegory: [Y]our explanation of “Invitation” is completely wrong.You don’t have to look for symbols or allegory. It’s strictly logical and real; it’s the simplest everyday reality, it doesn’t require any special explanation. (Boyd 147)

Several years later, in May 1938, however, he defended the historicity of his novel to his literary agent, Altagracia de Jannelli: I am afraid I shall always remain “objective” and that I shall never, never, never write novels solving “modern problems” or picturing “the world The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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unrest.” I am neither Upton Sinclair nor Sinclair Lewis. Literature will always remain a game for me, the secret rules of which preclude my following any aim foreign to its curiously divine nature. Incidentally I don’t see much difference between Sov. Russia and Germany: it is the same kind of boot with the nails somewhat bloodier in the former one. On the other hand in my novels “Invit.” and my last one the “Gift” I have in my own way reflected things and moods which are in direct connection with the times we live in. (Boyd 149)

Several years later, Nabokov described Priglashenie as dealing “with the incarceration of a rebel in a picture-postcard fortress by the buffoons and bullies of a Communazist state” (Conclusive 216–17), giving the novel a clear historical and geographic grounding.

Though the novel’s reception is originally rooted in the German environment of its birth, its translations seem to push the interpretations of the text away from its roots. By the time Nabokov had recognized the translating talents of his son and hired him as the translator of Priglashenie in 1950, he had developed a translating strategy that forbade him “to abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered, for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation” (Nabokov, Invitation 7).

So, despite having seen the Nazi regime unfold into what he termed “its full volume of welcome” (5), Nabokov resisted hinting at its historical finitude beyond what his 1934 novel anticipated. The English translation, Invitation to a Beheading, was published in 1959, and since its release, it has often been misread as a critique of Stalinism.

The novel concerns the incarceration of Cincinnatus, the sole prisoner of a dilapidated fortress, and his eventual beheading. For much of the novel, Cincinnatus waits restlessly, desiring to write his memoirs, but unwilling to leave them unfinished—he is unsure of how much time he has left before his execution. In charge of his incarceration are theatrical legal figures Roman, Rodrig, and Rodion—characters whom Nabokov has called “facets of the same many-faced monster,” that monster presumably being related to Dostoevsky’s Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. In Nabokov’s reversal, the famous criminal becomes the parodic system of legal rigor, which terrorizes Cincinnatus with theatrics and cruel games. Between the first page, which gives us a glimpse of Cincinnatus’s sentencing, and the last scene, his execution, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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we are swimming in an ocean of largely indistinct time, accentuated by three markers: a clock striking somewhere, which interjects the text with its chime or the arithmetic sequence of its ticks;1 the turning of each page, of which the reader is called upon to be aware in an early apostrophe; and the accelerating decay of the prison walls.

In its focus on the temporality of building decay, Invitation allegorizes the conflicts of monumentality posed by Speer’s architecture—between temporality and space, function and maintenance, body and building—in order to point out their absurdity. Of particular interest in this article will be Nabokov’s unique treatment of place: he creates a Panopticon-in-ruin, a decaying building, just on the brink of ruination, repurposed as an inescapable prison. Living at this threshold is its sole prisoner, Cincinnatus, who is at the mercy of the building and its political impositions. Here, the body will take many forms: Cincinnatus’s biological human body, the building’s decaying shell, the body of the text itself, and the political body, dispersed and uncannily intangible. Form and disintegration of form will have double valence here: both the loss of form in architecture and literature and the possibility of political change through this distortion and dysfunction.

Ruin Aesthetics

Ruin lust of the eighteenth century grew out of a neoclassical impulse and into a Romantic fascination with Greek and Roman ruins.The mock decaying temples—the follies—of English estates are decorative, but they are also attempts to vicariously command history. As we will see in both Speer and Nabokov, this impulse to control the effects of time can quickly turn absurdist and theatrical.To create an artificial future is a poor substitute for the sublimity of an authentic ruin: “how trite was this parody of the work of time” (Nabokov, Invitation 170).

In modern ruin lust, the return to representations of ancient monuments serves as a pleasure of the imaginary. The twentieth century brought on a new kind of ruin with an entirely different sublime character—war rubble.

Instead of standing as indicators of time’s power and wear, twentieth-century ruins became a common visual metaphor for the instantaneous effects of war—for the power of the human will. As Sartre famously wrote, “My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body in so far as the house was already an indication of my body” (428).This The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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connection between building and body is nothing new, and we will see how the ruin lust of the twentieth century borrows from an ancient paradigm.

Since Vitruvius (c. 30–20 BC), the correlation between buildings and human bodies has turned architecture into a surrogate body.

Ruins mark a transition period between eras, and political reorientation is marked by a physical reshaping of landscape. In twentieth-century warfare, the readability of landscape is essential: contemporary wars are won on the basis of the visibility and readability of sequential air photography, a surveillance of symbolic existence on the map. And even if a city were not entirely eradicated by bombings, its ruin landscape was an ugly, irretrievable mass of exposed metal girdles. Reinforced concrete, which became so popular in the twentieth century for the sake of speedy building, does not deteriorate but instead needs to be broken down forcibly into rubble.The ruins of twentieth-century warfare were not beautiful like the ruins of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

No one would want to mimic such ruins for their estate.

Hitler and Speer’s Nazi architecture attempts to reinstate a classic ruin in the face of the twentieth century’s bombed rubble. Speer’s theory of ruin value determines a building’s ruin worth before its architectural inception.

It anticipates how a building will fall apart and so attempts to foresee time’s effects. Instead of planning for a building’s durability, and instead of emphasizing a building’s functional (sheltering) value, Speer’s architecture assumed dysfunction before the building became dysfunctional as a ruin.

Strangely, Speer used Hitler’s love for Romantic treatments of ruins toward the reversal of the Romantic sense of history’s wear: in Speer’s architecture, buildings assumed their dysfunction in their very blueprints and, in doing so, reversed the logic of a building whose purpose is to shelter the human body.

Whereas a building is defined by its function as shelter, a ruin is determined by its dysfunction and unlivability, and this deficiency is precisely its worth. Simmel saw the potential for “maximum charm” (Simmel and Wolff 266) in an unlivable aesthetics of ruin. Walter Benjamin saw in ruins the quintessential modernist fragment; modernist art, literature, and architecture were directed a priori toward the ruinous (178). No one fragment, no one destined ruin, can guarantee endless functionality. Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard wrote of ruins as screens upon which modernism had projected its work on temporality (43)—buildings without support, without depth or livable substance. Andrew Benjamin speaks of ruins as melancholia, as The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the representation of loss (152); thus, they stand as the re-presentation of an unnamable absence, a lost object. Jean Baudrillard writes on abandoned urban zones as an aesthetically uniform disintegration into a terrain vague; all specificity already points to an indistinguishable unlivability. In all of these models, ruins are made unlivable for humans. Surely, other living things survive in ruins, but since architecture is classically pointed toward the preservation of the human body, it becomes strange when architecture remains standing, and even revered, when it can no longer house humans.

As Andrew Benjamin argues, “Architecture is inevitably interarticulated with function or with program […] In architecture, forms function” (11).

Such a unique and originary relationship with function differentiates architecture from conceptual art or sculpture; it is this determination by originary function that links architecture from its very conception with time.

Architecture “is located in a complex movement of historical time” (6); it is constructed with this time in mind, and it functions by the unfolding of this time. We will see that ruins, the perpetual dissolution of architecture, mess with the seeming continuity of architectural time. They introduce discontinuity, a new staging of time that does not function.

If a ruin is a building constitutively out-of-function, the ruin has lost its originary program. And without its function, without its originary aim, the ruined building becomes the place of no-place, the marker of architectural threshold, the freedom from design. In its purposelessness, it defies traditional categories of architectural dialogue and rhetoric. In its purity of form, it marks its own boundary. As Simmel points out, “The mystery of organic form lies in the fact that it is limit; it is at once the thing itself and the cessation of the thing, the domain in which the being and the no-more-being of the thing are one” (63). Even in the preservation of culture or political memory, as we will see in Speer and Hitler’s ruin theory, it becomes impossible to maintain a building’s originary purpose from the first blueprint, and it is equally impossible to provide a continuous narrative from blueprint to perpetual ruin. The claim to this sort of foresight and power is the totalitarian move par excellence, one that treats the building like a surrogate for the human body. As we will see, Speer and Hitler’s totalitarian narrative claims to control history by treating the monumental building as the representation of political body and by demanding that its ruin—its carcass—be preserved by an aesthetic influence and control.

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Vitruvian Bodies

To speak of the body in relation to architecture, we must turn to Vitruvius.

Historically, analogies of buildings to bodies are attributed to Vitruvius’s corporeal symmetries: “Just as in the human body there is a harmonious quality of shapeliness expressed in terms of the cubit, foot, palm, digit, and other small units, so it is in completing works of architecture” (25).

Vitruvius creates a semiotics through the body: we derive architectural meaning from the various units of a building relating to one another, and the analogy to the human body puts these units in relation. As we will see, Speer and Hitler take these Vitruvian relations of body to building to an extreme that exceeds the reasonable implications of this analogy. In fact, they push the body-building relation to a point that cannot be maintained in any practical mode of building, durability, or ruin. Nabokov enhances and parody these totalitarian impulses to employ power through the body-building relationship. In Invitation to a Beheading, the body is forced to survive in an unlivable ruin, and the ruin responds to the body in theatrical, unpredictable, and counter-Vitruvian manners.

In his Ten Books on Architecture,Vitruvius prescribes the use of local material with the ethical suggestion that a life of symmetry indicates an intimacy with nature and with the natural ideal of the human body. It is too often that Vitruvius is remembered only for the Vitruvian Man, as made famous by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) and Cesariano’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1521).

As much as Vitruvius focused on the human body in architecture, he was also interested in the durability of buildings, and he prescribed building guidelines to avoid ruination. Ultimately, such focus was in the interest of preserving the human body—in finding an architecture that would survive for the extension of its shelter. Vitruvius consistently eschews aesthetic considerations in the interest of durability. In masonry, he argues against soft rubble, which is cheap and has a “subtle attractiveness” but is ultimately short-lived: such building materials are “not the ones that will resist ruin as time passes” (40).

Vitruvius makes his point about local materials and durability by anecdote, rhetorically impressing on his readers the need to take stock of materials and resources before determining proportion and symmetry.2 He relays the story of the architect Dinocrates, who wants to carve Mount Athos into the image of man holding a libation bowl in his right hand, “where The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the waters of all the rivers that run on that mountain will gather together and plunge into the sea” (Vitruvius 33). King Alexander is impressed by the design, but when he understands that in this city plan, food would have to be imported by sea, not farmed on site, the flaw is exposed: “As much, therefore, as I think that the design is to be commended, the choice of the site is to be condemned” (33).

This story warns us to not take the human body-architecture parallel too literally. A Mount Athos carved into the literal image of a man would starve its people, not protect them. In taking such literal form, the architecture would harm King Alexander’s body politic. The architectural form and political form that takes the body-as-figure too literally becomes dangerous to the literal body.We will see that Speer makes a similar mistake in aspiring to the literalizing of the infinite as a way of controlling the body politic.The risk here is not just the failure of the literal to do justice to the figural, but the dissolution of the body politic itself, or the physical harm of the literal bodies that compose it.

We see this physical bodily harm in Nabokov’s Invitation, in which the ruined state of the prison fortress places pressure on both Cincinnatus’s body and his political existence. The narrative stone of which the prison fortress is built has been decaying into its original rock state, back into the local cliff matter that it is built on. As a ruin, Nabokov’s building site is free of classic architectural constrictions, and so it is able to function in a counter-architectural manner in that it resists the functions of a comfortable shelter. Part of this play with conventions emerges in a reversal of the Vitruvian body-building proportions. Nabokov gives a horizontality to the human proportions of his prison fortress building. The prison fortress houses Cincinnatus appropriately at times, allowing him to stand tall, to pace within his cell; but it also constricts him, forces him down to his knees and belly to wander through its deteriorating walls: “the pitch darkness, full of crumbling and crackling, squeezed Cincinnatus from all sides, pressed on his spine, prickled his palms and his knees” (Nabokov, Invitation 159).

The deterioration of a building-in-ruin is felt through the body of its inhabitant. As the building falls to ruin, turning back to rubble, so can Cincinnatus feel his body contorting alongside this deterioration of human proportions. In fact, Cincinnatus seems almost to be regressing himself, becoming inhuman among the loss of Vitruvian ratios; he worries that The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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“the tunnel would collapse [… he] found himself in stone cul-de-sacs and, like some patient retreating animal, moved backwards; then, feeling out the tunnel’s continuation, crawled on. He was impatient to lie down on something soft” (Invitation 163–64). Cincinnatus’s body is a “mass of scrapes and bruises” after this travel through unfit spaces. His body is not sheltered by the architecture but is, perversely, damaged by it.

It becomes clear that the health of Cincinnatus’s body runs parallel to the functionality of the prison fortress. As the building collapses, he is brought to his knees under the pressure of its contracting walls. As his execution date approaches, the building peels and crumbles and festers with more intensity. Which condition is a call and which is a response is unclear; the building may be coming apart in anticipation of the execution or the execution may be announced as a result of the building’s (and the body’s) decomposition. Cincinnatus’s body mimics its surroundings, just as the building anticipates Cincinnatus’s execution. In the space of the ruin, a causal temporality is no longer so clear.We cannot say with certainty which state is original: Cincinnatus’s sentencing or the prison fortress’s disrepair.

In this space of the ruin, and of the narrative, the anticipatory gesture of time can take on a corporeal effect: Cincinnatus sits “in expectation of the unknown but near and inexorable date (which he distinctly anticipated as the wrenching, yanking, and crunch of a monstrous tooth, his whole body being the inflamed gum, and his head that tooth)” (Invitation 72–73).

Invitation is not traditionally recognized as a novel of ruins or even of architecture, in any general sense. But many of its accepted readings—on absurdism, theatricality, totalitarianism—intersect at the juncture of ruins, which litter the novel’s topography. At the center of town is a factory in ruin; between the prison fortress and the execution stage is an airport in ruin.

The novel itself is in partial ruin. From its very start, it explicitly anticipates its end, calling on the reader to feel the limits of the pages with his fingers.

Sentences break off unexpectedly.The solidity of objects is questioned: some objects will vanish into thin air; directions will suddenly change; things fail to function as they are supposed to. The novel consistently points to the instability of its setting, which is built of fiction, a dimensionless stage that only mimics a real space, a real town, and a real prison.

Invitation’s prison fortress is in disrepair, or it is in the process of being repaired—the details here do not matter. In the consolidation of past The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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and present in the space of ruin, the terms and order of causality are not applicable. Nabokov links both events in one gesture: Cincinnatus hears the inner walls cracking, and these sounds could just as well be “stonemasons […] making repairs” as it could be the collapse of walls—the further ruining of the ruins.3 But stonemasonry repair would not end the ruination; it would only prolong the ruin of the ruins, an enhancement of a site the town holds in great esteem. It would not restore; it would not make the ruins fully functioning. It would only maintain the architectural limbo.

As Nabokov emphasizes, the state of disorder is already naturalized in a ruin: “There can be no disorder here—only a shifting about” (Invitation 132).

On the level of textual form, the novel’s predetermined end denies any telos to the plot, making any suspense or crescendo of reading beside the point.

In ruins, disorder replaces the architectural order (arche) and becomes the dominating order itself.The human proportions of architecture as prescribed

by Vitruvius become geometric playthings in the transition to ruin; as a corporeal determinant, this Vitruvian mathematics becomes unreliable in ruins while still maintaining a parallel relationship between body and building.

This absurdism, as we will see, will take a psychological hold in Invitation, emphasizing the internal ramifications of formal geometry.

According to Vitruvius, there is no guarantee that a house will withstand decay, that it will be unruinable. Rather, the locality of material is meant to encourage a natural symmetry, an aesthetics of geometry that is appropriate to living—an encouragement of an architectural poetry achieved by ancient Greek architecture and ruins. And the ruin of local materials will revert the material back to some sense of its original form in its state of nature. Thus, the flow from natural material to architectural material and back to natural material, in Vitruvius’s dictums, is ultimately fluid.

But Nabokov points out that the poetics of architectural materials suggests a holistic fluidity that might not appear so poetic in its singular moments of construction and decay. On the opposite end to Vitruvius’s durability—on the side of decay—the body is squeezed into unnatural living. In the unlivable space of an extreme ruin, as the one in which Nabokov’s Cincinnatus is forced to live, the body is brought into painful, unmanageable contact with building, with decaying stone and raw rock. Appropriately, Cincinnatus’s decaying prison seems to be made of a material that can fulfill these paradoxical qualities at once: strong yet malleable, standing yet decaying, cavernous yet compressing.

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Limestone and Decay

For Vitruvius and for many other architects, the material that holds a natural disorder while also suggesting a poetic wholeness in its continual decay is limestone. An appropriate intermediary between time and space, between memory and physicality, the material of limestone has long been a subject of interest for both architects and poets, in part because it is a notoriously beautiful decayer. If the material of a building determines the aesthetics of ruins, then limestone is by far the most valued ruinable stone. As Adrian Stokes has argued, limestone’s weathering is the “most vivid” of materials, partially because of its influence by the human body: it is “carved by the very breath we breathe” and the layers of varied touches sculpt the limestone, “record on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive touching has communicated” (15).

The birth and death of limestone material is hard to pinpoint, and this makes it a material of particular theoretical interest in ruins.4 Stokes notes that its process of turning decaying bodies into rock formations is the perfect integration of the organic and inorganic into a single substance: “the symbol of life concreted into static objects, of Time concreted as Space” (52). Bodies literally form limestone quarries, and human bodies are what give limestone such unique form, as breath and touch mold the material over time.

The weathering of rock—exposure to the elements in order to strengthen its character and durability—to turn it to masonry stone is also a sort of decay.

Though it may appear to be an improvement upon nature, the strengthening of quarried limestone is also a deterioration: “all stone weathering is stone disease” (Stokes 48). And, as Vitruvius encourages, limestone is best used locally, sitting at the very angle and position it was found.The effects of misuse appear in limestone as they would on a body. Vitruvius’s analogy of body to building then works in both directions. If limestone is treated poorly—by not being allowed to weather before building, by being built with in unnatural positions, by the stone being struck at improper angles—it will discolor, bruise as living skin does. Cracks impressed during the process of change will show up as veins in the stone. Hurt rock can develop an odor. Limestone will also decay by effects of soot and acids in urban atmospheres; it will deteriorate by impregnation of soluble salts from cement mortar joinings.

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Practically speaking, limestone would seem a poor choice for a durable building. Even so, it has inspired the architecture of many cities and the art of many sculptors. Though it may seem delicate, limestone’s malleability is what has made it so widely attractive to aesthetic form. In their malleability, limestone and marble (a recrystallization of limestone) are the perfect materials for sculpture and for the intricacy of architectural details, and so were used in many ancient cities.5 Following his desire to build an immemorial civilization as grand as Greece or Rome, Hitler asked that his monumental architecture be built of limestone.

We see this choice of building material allegorized in Nabokov’s Invitation.The material Nabokov uses for the narrative’s prison evolves over the course of the novel. Like limestone, it morphs as it decays; it begins to crack, bruise, and stink; and as it changes consistency, it linguistically shifts from stone (kamen´) to rock (skala/gornyj/glyba/utes), as though the very words that construct the fortress’s architecture were devolving back to their varied original, unarchitectured state through decay. From the start of the novel, we see the “fortress” (krepost´) separated from its virgin “rocky base” (skalistogo podnož’â) (Invitation 11; Priglashenie 52). The Russian “skala” here denotes a large mass of rock, either a mountain or a cliff, full of sharp protrusions—an unquarried, unweathered rock that contrasts sharply with the stone of the architecture standing upon it. Such a separation between stone (kamen´) and rock (skala) becomes increasingly less clear as the novel progresses. And as the stone turns to back to rock, in its process of decay, the use of “stone” in the text turns figural: “pale stony light” (Nabokov, Invitation 41), “stony solitude” (72) “the night was impassive and stony” (139), chess pieces “fashioned […] so solidly, that a stone might envy them” (144). Stone becomes a figure of rigidity, impassivity, unsensuousness—an architectural artificiality that must be overcome in the ruin process for a natural state of rock to reemerge. In this way, stone comes to be seen as form that outlives its function: an unresponsive rigidity of purely systematic architecture.

From early in the novel, the literal stone of the fortress becomes explicitly linked with the rock from which it evolved: “the cold wall—undoubtedly related to the rock on which the fortress had risen” (Invitation 72). In the Russian Priglashenie, this evolution is emphasized even more strongly; rather than sitting atop the cliff as a separate entity (“on which the fortress had risen”), the fortress has grown (vyrosla) atop the rock (86), suggesting at least The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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a coevolution of material if not a directly causal relationship. Later, when Cincinnatus breaches the line between fortress and cliff, we realize that the threshold is ephemeral—it is not a visible separation but a faint smell that marks the transition from one space to another. Cincinnatus “caught the whiff of dampness and mold just as though he had passed from the bowels of the fortress wall into a natural cave, […] and [he] crawled from a crack in the rock to freedom” (164). Here, the conflation of fortress and cliff has begun, though most clearly in the fortress bowels, as though the decay infects the architecture from its base and will make its move toward its spire. As Cincinnatus leaves the site on the way to his execution, he takes one last look at his prison, which has become a “blue, elaborate, many-towered, huge bulk of the fortress,” inseparable from the cliff beneath it, no longer “stone” with a single spire but rather a nondescript “bulk” (gromada) that incorporates all peaks and crags into a single rock formation (Invitation 181; Priglashenie 158).

From within the fortress, we can see the ways decay and transformation has set in.The prison walls are made of a strange material: a sort of limestone made animated and theatrical. It is malleable; it shifts; it plays games; it interiorizes itself in its inhabitant. It seems everywhere to be constructed of shadows or of “ghostly” trimmings. By the end of its transformation, the fortress has “suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in reality ascending and vice versa” (Invitation 213). Throughout the novel, however, the prison’s material is in consistent deterioration, from its peeling walls to the very moonlight that enters its windows, shredding as it enters the rooms.

The pieces of furniture are at one moment light props that can be moved and rearranged, and then suddenly they become so heavy that they seem to be bolted to the floor. The prison fortress is alternately the cavernous, airy shell of a building and a series of foreclosed corridors and tightly clenched doorways. Its power is instituted by the state, but it also functions as the state. We see the building house the totalitarianism, which it then helps to enact upon Cincinnatus.

We receive few indications of what the prison would look like in a real space—that is, in our space. It is alternately named “prison” and “fortress,” but its spire tower would suggest that it was originally not meant for either one of these functions. From the view atop the tower, Cincinnatus briefly sees the “ruins of an ancient factory, the pride of the town” (19) before the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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reality of his cell and barred windows seep into his memories and foreclose further wanderings. Like the prison fortress where he barely sustains life, the ancient factory ruins have been intentionally preserved by the town.

If the ancient factory is preserved out of pride, out of a preservation of culture, then perhaps the prison fortress is preserved as the last memory of a political system.The building is not meant for imprisonment, but perhaps it retains some of its original law-setting function—a castle, a palace, a cathedral, a parliamentary house, the ruins of sovereignty’s seat?

In the space of such a ruin that is repurposed as a prison, the temporality of ruin becomes spatialized. The prison cell is a poetic space that morphs, entertains, and blossoms. It is an island of poetry set against the dark terrain of nothingness, a not yet poetized or visualized canvas. Nabokov is well aware of the poetic convention, and he introduces the cell not as a structural unit that would describe by microcosm the rest of the building but instead as a solitary boat on dark, choppy waters. The cell door’s peephole is “a leak in a boat,” then a “porthole,” and the jailor Rodion takes on “a skipper’s stern attention” (Invitation 12): Rodion gazed through the blue porthole at the horizon, now rising, now falling.Who was becoming seasick? Cincinnatus. He broke out in a sweat, everything grew dark, and he could feel the rootlet of every hair. A clock struck—four or five times—with the vibrations and re-vibrations, and reverberations proper to a prison. (13)

The cell-as-boat sets Cincinnatus out to a nondescript sea. He is not on a journey to a particular destination; in fact, the ship does not seem to be in forward motion at all. The cell rises and falls enough to induce seasickness, a physiological disorientation; and the rhythm that the choppy sea of nothingness has induced in the cell transforms into reverberations of a clock striking the hour.The forward progression of time maps to a vertical motion in space. The shifting building calms itself in order to provide an explanation of its movements that would be “proper to a prison” (Invitation 13): the imposing reverberations of temporality.The stones of Cincinnatus’s cell, and consequently his body, are in deterioration by the force of nature’s most impressionistic tool: water. Cincinnatus’s body is acted upon in a violent watery sculpting, as though it were being worked upon like limestone. From this first moment in his cell, Cincinnatus becomes pressured by the space The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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he inhabits and becomes haunted by the aspect of time, which has already nauseated him. Just as everything in the novel is a theatrical facade, the novel itself showcases its story world’s incompletion and deterioration.

In this way, the space in which Cincinnatus is forced to live begins to seep into his being. It tries to enter him, to impose on him, to manipulate him in order to submit him to the architectonic of its building.Totalitarianism works by functions of interiorization. Power is not just imposed from the outside but is seeded from within, so that, ideally, totalitarianism becomes a self-sustaining system. It is not just state officials who watch and surveil but also family and closest friends. The world outside the state comes to seem scarily vast and foreign, and in parallel, the world outside of the individual who is wedded to the state is scarily vast and foreign. In Nabokov’s work, we see a figure of interiorization immediately after the boat has returned to the shape of a cell: “Cincinnatus lowered his feet from the cot. A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back” (Invitation 14). As he regains his legs on land, his head continues to rock like the boat. On this unstable ground, the bowling ball maps his mind, from corner to corner and back again. A terrifying figure, the bowling ball acts like a method of totalitarian control, measuring out intimate space in order to then confer control from within.To be internally mapped by the bowling ball is to run the risk of having one’s head pin knocked down—a sort of internalized execution, the possibility emerging from an internalized control.

For its power, totalitarianism relies on the compulsory credibility of its fiction. And so it is easy for totalitarianism to take the abstract space of an imagined or intimate architecture and enforce its reality. It is easy for totalitarianism to use monumental architecture to write its own post-future.

As Hannah Arendt has described in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this is a system of practical lies, which treats a fictitious world as a tangible reality with such unrelenting vigor that it is fully indoctrinating. Such a system relies on tactics of illegality, secrecy, anti-utilitarian behavior, and anti-hierarchical structure (Origins 450–57). In the case of Hitler’s totalitarianism, an abstract, fictional system is concerned with self-preservation by telling the most absurd lies, one of which—the control of history through architecture—we examine in Hitler’s Ruinenwerttheorie. An abstract space is blueprinted so that it may appear to be real, and the unfavorable conditions of its practical concretization The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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are ignored for the sake of upholding the totalitarian fiction. It is absolutely fitting to totalitarian impulses that Hitler and Speer would set their sights on turning the most unpredictable subject of architecture—ruin—into the monument of their post-historical certainty.While exposing this totalitarian control as fictional, Invitation uses the form of its own fiction to showcase the complicity of the theory of ruin value in the literal damaging effects on human bodies and the body politic.

Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value

Speer was concerned with the anticipation of future impressions given by a city’s buildings, and he inscribed his blueprints for future buildings with their inevitable narrative of destruction and of memorialization. Hitler was enthralled by the ruins of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt (Spotts 21–22), and he wanted to maintain an impression of power and domination even in his state’s inevitable death. Unlike the Romantics, who were interested in the fleetingness of life in the face of the sublime power of time and nature, Hitler’s ruin lust sought to evade the effects of time and nature in order to showcase the futural triumph of the human will. Speer, Hitler’s architect, thus constructed his blueprints with the idea of ruin already informing the buildings’ construction. He devised a Ruinenwerttheorie (theory of ruin value),6 by which Hitler could judge his state’s architectural worth. The presumed future is already inscribed in these blueprints; impressions on the other (whether future generations or the current enemy) weigh with as much value as impressions of architecture on their present inhabitants.

In this way, Nazi monumental architecture “fulfilled its function of giving architectonic voice to a ‘political life-form’” (Koshar 130).

A building, like a human body, cannot be expected to achieve immortality, and so aging must be planned for. Especially in wartime, the open carcasses of bombed buildings make such a notion of mortality inescapable. The theory of ruin value locks into the seductive thought that because the time of ruin extends indefinitely, history can be controlled by planning for ruin.

In this theory, then, Vitruvius’s interest in a building’s durability is taken to a political extreme: a totalitarian dream of permanent movement and a posthistory. Speer perverts the narrative task of an architect to control a political future.We can see how this tactic of fictionality and narration would be a tempting model for Nabokov to expose as self-critique.

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For Hitler, architecture was a means of preservation, and the “purpose” of his Nazi architecture was to “transmit his time and its spirit to posterity” (Speer 55). All Nazi architecture aspired to be monumental architecture, buildings that would “bear witness” to future generations and would serve as a corrective. More than just a symbol of lost civilization or of nationhood, for Hitler, monumental architecture speaks for the dead. It defends a future civilization by the silences of the past: “at their lowest ebb, their architecture will speak to them of former power” (Speer 56). Hitler opened his speech for the Nuremberg cornerstone-laying with similar sentiments: “But if the Movement should ever fall silent, even after thousands of years this witness here will speak. In the midst of a sacred grove of age-old oaks the people of that time will admire in reverent astonishment this first giant among the buildings of the Third Reich” (Fest 784). Ruinenwerttheorie was meant to take the place of helpless dead leaders, as though the demands of a dead politic were being voiced through architecture. Here, again, we see figural bodies standing in for literal bodies and the body politic. Ruinenwerttheorie would mimic the aesthetic greatness of the Roman ruins, but it would also, through this aesthetic draw, resist its own decay. It would control events through its seductive form.

Such an anxiety over the future permeates totalitarian politics. Most strikingly fascistic in Ruinenwerttheorie is the thought that future peoples would have no choice regarding preservation. A perfectly executed theory of ruin value will guarantee awe and a delicate treatment of the site.We can also read this anxiety of physical mistreatment in Hitler’s decree for the treatment of his own body. In realizing that anything could happen to his body after his death—he could not control such events, just as Mussolini could not control the corporeal humiliation of his dead body—Hitler ordered that his corpse be disposed of by burning gasoline. Perhaps the Vitruvian relation between body and building did not register for Hitler, or perhaps it registered too late, after the institution of Ruinenwerttheorie, which is meant to foreclose such corporeal mistreatment.

The principles of the “law of ruins” claim, in a Vitruvian fashion, to enact architectural control through “special materials” and “applying certain principles of statics” (Speer 56). Speer wanted to avoid modern constructions such as “steel girders and reinforced concrete,” as they do not decay, and their “weathering” (rusting) was aesthetically unpleasant (528).

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He witnessed this firsthand when clearing the ground of the zeppelin field: the remains of the Nuremberg streetcar depot was a “dreary sight” of protruding iron reinforcements and concrete rubble.To build a “permanent type of construction” (56) that would also fall apart beautifully, one would need impossibly tall walls of quality material, which would let fall their roofs and ceilings yet retain their posture under the strain of hundreds, even thousands, of years of wind. Naturally, both Hitler and Speer were drawn to limestone, which had built their ideal ruin model: Rome. But time and circumstance did not allow for the appropriate treatment of limestone in Nazi architecture. Instead, the Romantic preparatory drawings that Speer presented to Hitler, when built, became the very sturdy concrete-based modernist architectures that they were trying to escape.

In Speer’s drawing of Volkshalle-in-ruin, the columns of the entranceway have withstood hundreds of years of wind and water.They stand tall and proud, leading the eye to the ruined great hall; only lightly decayed, it perches atop a rocky outcrop like the Acropolis.Though imposing, this decayed structure is not frightening and sinister as Diderot’s projected Louvre ruins.They are proud and bold remnants of an anticipated monumentalism. Yet, Speer’s drawings were considered blasphemous by Hitler’s entourage: who could dare foresee the demise of a civilization which would never end? (Speer 56).

Foresight seems to be the political move par excellence. As Arendt has noted, lying—even in its most diluted and innocent form of imagination—is the very basis of politics (“Lying”).7 To claim foresight is to make politics.Yet, Speer’s Romantic drawing inscribes a telos to the Nazi civilization; to foresee the historical end is to both raise and decompose the state. Paul Virilio has aptly called this phenomenon of an event happening simultaneously with its archive a “pseudo-event” (55), a staged reality. He connects Speer-thearchitect to Speer-the-total-war-planner. In this manner, the preservationist and the memorializer are synonymous with the stage director: “For Speer, the architect had a cinematic function similar to that of the military commander— namely, the capacity to determine in a building what is permanent and what is impermanent” (Virilio 32; emphasis in original). Ruin value is newly read as cinematic and narrative value.

In allegorizing this state of political anticipation and temporal instability, Nabokov’s Invitation asks us what life would look like in ruins. How would one live if forced into unlivable space? Invitation is created from within the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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crack between past and future that does not rely on a present tense.The novel exposes the cracks of its fiction by apostrophes, explicit artificiality of its diegesis, and reference to its translation. In this way, we are never certain of what exists in the Invitation world, of which fictional ground is stable, and we are made complicit in its ruin temporality. The novel explicitly apostrophizes at moments—in its title, in its call to the reader to turn its pages—but it also intermittently becomes script-like with “Exit” directions (Nabokov, Invitation 130) and parenthetical remarks which command action or attitude (130–33, 161, 173), as though the nondiegetic world is being folded in on the novel’s diegesis and as though discourse is being folded in on the story.

Thunderstorms are “performed”; chapters end with formal announcements—“And thus the performance ended”; characters are told to “play [their] roles”; mistakes in the mise-en-scène are blamed on “the prop man” (Invitation 116).Throughout the English translation of the novel, there are several playful textual moments that require a Russian reader. But Nabokov will also explicitly point to the frustrations of translation, and the novel will point to its own nondiegetic process of translation: “[…] for this ought not to be, ne dolzhno bïlo bï bït’—only on the bark of the Russian language could such a fungus-like bunch of verbs have sprouted” (Invitation 15). We see the novel’s physical treatment have an effect on its denizens: the little girl Emmie’s face ripples as she shakes and ruffles the pages of Cincinnatus’s books, as though she is shaking her own written face by shaking the books (47–48). In a series of requests for Cincinnatus to participate in the fiction, we have this moment in which Emmie’s face participates in the literal treatment of text. The ripples across her face expose the literality of book as book, as though the figural body is being disturbed by the very real implications of this totalitarian logic of fictionality.

The novel, in its narrative unpredictability, exists in a dimensionless, temporally unstable threshold: “Reveling in all the temptations of a circle, life whirled to a state of such giddiness that the ground fell away and, stumbling, falling, weakened by nausea and langour—ought I to say it?—finding itself in a new dimension, as it were … No one regrets the past, and even the very concept of ‘past’ has changed” (Invitation 50–51). In constant anticipation of the beheading—of Cincinnatus, of the building, of the text—the novel seems to sit at a standstill. It dares not progress linearly forward for fear The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of full disintegration; and so it seems to extend the moment of execution, delaying the inevitable cut and, in the meantime, extending the crack of time, a ruin temporality.

It is no wonder that Nabokov chooses beheading as the execution method; it replicates ruin temporality and renders it political. The act of beheading is a minimalist function, favored for its instantaneous contact between the body and the law; Nabokov’s Invitation extends this instantaneity into a temporality of ruins. In Invitation’s comment on the body politic through Cincinnatus’s physical body, we can see that the head of the body is linked with the dissolution of state through beheading the state. Just as Hitler tried to preserve his physical body through the figural architecture-body parallel, we see the figural act of beheading as having the potential to throw actual disarray into a political system.

Michel Foucault notes the uniqueness of this instantaneous contact between body and law through the moment of execution by guillotine. In this reduction of death to “a visible but instantaneous event” (Foucault 13), the guillotine takes life nearly without touching the body. Thus, with the guillotine, we have “abstraction of the law itself ” (13); if we cannot point to the moment of contact, the moment of beheading, and similarly the moment of decay, then the law becomes invisible and omnipresent, an abstraction to oppose the seemingly concrete spectacle of execution.

Daniel Arasse describes the invisibility of the guillotine blade: “there lies the frightening paradox of the guillotine: this ‘zero distance’ defining an indivisible point in time is in spatial terms a height of fourteen feet. Raised to the top of the uprights, the blade defines a space which exposes the instant, which is a spatial metaphor of the instant” (36; emphasis in original). In Nabokov, this “split second,” “instantaneous event” (Foucault 13) is spatialized and extended by the prison ruins in which Cincinnatus is forced to await his unnamed execution. As a ruin stands for all past, present, and future building events while reducing these temporalities to a single concrete model, so Cincinnatus’s prison is a spatialization, an extension, of a dimensionless temporality. Here, secrecy is both a strategy of the state to torture extracorporeally and also to extend the moment of instantaneity—a concretization or experience of instantaneous duration. Incidentally, this sense of concretized duration is often attributed to photography, and Nabokov, in the parody of this relationship, turns his executioner Pierre into a narcissistic photographer who wants to snap Cincinnatus’s photo (or, rather, wants to take his head).8 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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The model of the guillotine, however, which was designed to be philanthropic—“a sign of man’s love for man”9—in its gift of instantaneous enactment of law, does eventually malfunction. As Derrida traces, from Arasse through Hugo, in The Death Penalty, the clinical, democratic guillotine machine also comes to decay, just like every system of punishment before it has. It malfunctions and becomes impractical, eventually needing to be replaced by other types of orders, other types of legal machines, perhaps less idealistically instantaneous, but also less bloody (Derrida, Death). And these new machines malfunction, decay, and fulfill their destined replaceability.

Such an economy of substitution (Derrida, Death 207) is anticipated by Nabokov’s Invitation, and Nabokov himself had a keen interest in the concept of a shifting death penalty and the theatricality of executions. Inspired by the trials and executions of his family members and beloved writers,10 Nabokov writes Invitation quickly and with an eye to the decomposition of the theatrical capital punishment system. His Cincinnatus is written as the unwitting implementer of decay. From the start of Invitation, Cincinnatus anticipates his beheading, his corporeal ruin: He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk.

He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner.What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. (32)11

He recognizes the inevitability of ruin and systemic substitution, and he takes his body apart, almost mathematically, just as the fortress and scaffold will decompose at the end of the novel, as Cincinnatus’s body walks away from it.

For Cincinnatus, the execution itself—the moment which has been extended on the stage of contact between body and law—never comes. His torture is not just one of the body but also one of time. His execution is delayed, but as we discover in the novel’s conclusion, it is delayed indefinitely.

Cincinnatus walks off the execution stage as it disintegrates—the building had been held together provisionally by its relation to Cincinnatus’s body and to a tenuous totalitarian legality. But once this “abstraction of the law itself ” (Foucault 13) is exposed, the theater that suggested architectural The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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function decomposes. The ruin of the prison building is exposed as out-ofuse and fictional; the execution thus cannot take place on its functionless stage. Even as the temporality of the instantaneous execution would resist the fleshed function of a spatialization, the ruin itself also necessitates a constant delay of event. It would seem, then, that Nabokov’s ruined prison is fated to malfunction; we see the same inevitable failure in Speer’s theory of ruin value. Whatever pretense of architectural or political function that the novel’s theatrics presents is merely the workings of a self-sustaining system that cannot enact events outside of itself, cannot function on any particular thing.

Surveillance and Voyeurism

The building-in-ruin’s only true function seems to be surveillance. Cincinnatus is aware of being constantly watched through a peephole by observers and, later, a “predatory eye” (Nabokov, Invitation 122). In criticism of Nabokov, this eye is often associated with the state apparatus: an eye of surveillance watching over the life and death of its citizens. But in the scene of ruin theater, it is unclear what this eye is after and what it actually sees. A more appropriate understanding of the eye is aligned with voyeurism, which is also classically associated with ruins. As Rose Macaulay points out, ruin lust has to do with the exposure of what usually remains secreted and intimate: “The house has put on melodrama; people stop to stare; here is a domestic scene wide open for all to enjoy” (119). There is a theatricality already at play in the ruin, in the setting of a scene and the removal of the fourth wall. But in a ruin, the audience cannot watch in search of a narration, a representation of reality. The ruin has already surpassed its past reality and its originary purpose. However, the voyeur who looks into the ruin scene wants to regain the originary which has already disappeared. He wants to reconstitute that which was once visible and present, an impossibly tempting venture similar to the work of nostalgia and mourning. The voyeur feels called to the nostalgia of the ruin scene, and yet the ruin refuses him the reconstitutive effects of memory.

This power of ruin that eludes, misdirects, and elicits desire is the power of abstract space that works through this history-in-architecture. Such an invisibility that one desires to render visible is the basis for representations of abstract space; for without the figural, this omnipresence cannot be The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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imagined. The various dysfunctional figures of ruins pointed to earlier— Simmel’s unlivabiliy,Walter Benjamin’s fragment, Lyotard’s screen, Andrew Benjamin’s melancholia, Baudrillard’s disintegration—all point to a wider spatialization that is locally represented in ruin dysfunction. And, as we have seen, it is Speer’s project of Ruinenwerttheorie that fails to do justice to the invisibility of abstract space, as he tries to render the future, an analogously invisible category, visible through spatialization.

Derrida likens this voyeuristic ruin lust to the desire for representation as a reclaiming and a reconstitution. The ruin is not a representation, but a remnant worked over by decay. It is not an instantaneous event, but a slow apocalypse, one that cannot separate order from ruin.12 Derrida responds to Romantic ruin lust and modernism’s appropriation of this lust: The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything […] The ruin shows nothing at all and with a view to showing nothing of the all. (Memoirs 69; emphasis in original)

As “experience itself,” the ruin sees but cannot foresee. It is a fragment that cannot be integrated into the pattern from which it was born. It has disintegrated its original form, and in its dysfunction, it loses its indexical status. It no longer points to a movement or a theme; a monument does not take the place of its signified event.

But the ruin has also accumulated too much history, anticipation, and investment from its voyeurs: it will no longer fit to the original pattern. To look into a ruin is to try to access the invisible through the remainders of visibility. Through paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, Derrida addresses the ruin as an abyss; it is neither a collective nor an index but rather an invisibility that cannot be named, pointed at, or reproduced: I would rather have followed the traces of absolute invisibility. To be the other of the visible, absolute invisibility must neither take place elsewhere nor constitute another visible, that is something that does not yet appear or has already disappeared—something whose spectacle of monumental ruins The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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would call for reconstitution, regathering from memory, rememberment.

This nonvisible does not describe a phenomenon that is present elsewhere, that is latent, imaginary, unconscious, hidden or past. (Memoirs 52)

To look into the scene of ruin is to access a different sort of temporality of vision and experience. The voyeur does not see a model of past or the representation of present or a suggestion of future. Ruin, rather, sits between—in the imperceptible process of demise and transformation into the unrecognizable. Even as the voyeur thinks he can reconstitute a past memory that is coextensive of the ruin, the ruin itself is a nonindexical abyss that denies co-option within a system of representation and reference.

It is the trace of invisibility; “an Augenblick without duration” (Derrida 69)—the temporality of instantaneous experience, barely concretized in space. This mode of experience is not just aware of its inevitable demise; it lives within the moment of its demise. Even as the ruin process is already taking place from the very point of origination, the place of ruin embodies the temporality of decay.

Nabokov is well aware of this already-ruined temporality, and his characters are in constant anticipation of the text’s demise; as the text progresses, the architecture, which may have made reference to a real space in a more traditionally Cartesian narrative, deteriorates beneath their feet. As their figural destruction nears, the characters’ literal existence deteriorates. The reader becomes the executioner who invariably participates in the text’s ruin. From the start of the novel, Nabokov calls on the reader to be aware of his physical influence over the text’s narrative speed: So we are nearing the end.The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and—O horrible! (Invitation 12)

The text progresses toward its own inevitable physical and narrative death.

In this movement, we see the text as a complete, exclusive, and inescapable system with its own rigid, unchangeable laws, rules, and customs.

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time that does not associate with any true temporal markers.The clock that chimes throughout the text, much like in a Dostoevsky novel, has a sense of regulation at first; however, it quickly degenerates into unpredictable patterns, “leisurely enumeration[s]” (Nabokov, Invitation 73) of the temporal expanse of ruins, an endless waiting for a continually ruined end. Even as Cincinnatus consistently refers to his inevitable end—his beheading—he cannot be sure of when this event will happen or even that it will take place. He claims to “foresee it all!” as he prepares for “the sob [he is] destined to emit and the terrible gurgling cough, uttered by the beheaded tyro” (93). However, this point of convergence is delayed ad infinitum, and all of Cincinnatus’s preparations amount to a torture without the timed event of execution. He asks his audience to “measure [him] while [he] lives—after it will be too late” (26). But it is already too late; Cincinnatus’s body, like the fortress, is already in a state of ruin, already in the time of ruin, pointed toward the undecidable “cavity of the future” (92) and of the present. Like an architectural ruin, Cincinnatus cannot determine the moment of deterioration, only the great temporal expanse of decay. And in the time of the ruin, the crack in which he lives, the belief in a fated point, a destiny, a future is useless.

The narrative action unfolds without a history, setting, or temporality, and so it becomes, in its self-containment, a system outside specific reference.

It is difficult, then, to attribute this text to a critique of the Soviet regime, as there are no Soviet markers in place. In fact, the text denies any suggestion of or orientation with reality outside the novel. It draws into itself, denying history, nationhood, even language.13 The power system of Invitation is an absurdly intricate theater with no playwright, no director, and no controlling hand. It is self-perpetuating; it relies on absolute loyalty to what remains of central dynamism, but the edges of the stage and the illusion are starting to show. The system reveals nothing about its political inception; the body politic does not draw from any real-life examples.Without history, we cannot see how the system was established, and this seems to be the point. In these prison ruins, we have only the remnants of a past political system, continuing to sustain itself from a previous momentum but unable to draw power from a specific historical past and unable to guarantee a sustainable future.

Ruin sites in Invitation are coincidental with sites of theatricality. This pairing works for Nabokov in that it enhances the peculiar temporal crack that spatializes instantaneity and breeds absurdities: The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Beyond a bend of the Strop one could see the weed-blurred outlines of the ancient airport and the structure where they kept the venerable, decrepit airplane, with motley patches on its rusty wings, which was still sometimes used on holidays, principally for the amusement of cripples. Matter was weary.Time gently dozed. (Invitation 43)

Just as the ruined airport takes on an entertainment role in its preservation, we can assume that the prison fortress housing Cincinnatus is kept at its delicate balance of repair/disrepair for the purposes of theatrics. From the aerial view of the tower, we see that the prison fortress is placed at the center of the town’s attention: the town layout is described as a “hemicycle” (Invitation 42), positioned in arcs that wrap around the prison.The audience’s eyes are in constant surveillance of the prison’s acts; applause will suddenly erupt from no particular source.

Unlike the factory ruin or the airport ruin, however, the prison fortress intends to manipulate with theatrics more than to entertain. Here, the theater means to break down Cincinnatus into political submission—to take part in an absurdist torture of sorts.To live in ruins is to live without the stability of logic, of knowledge. And to impose dysfunction through ruins is to live with too much of the wrong logic: an excess of dysfunctional knowledge. In ruins, one cannot be certain of one’s surroundings.The illusion of a proper prison cell is always in the process of disintegrating.Walls are peeling; views to the outside are revealed to be painted backdrops; prison guards and directors are made-up, costumed, masked, scripted—they are intermittently named “clowns” (Invitation 115), “circus directors” (56), and “prop men” (132).

Cincinnatus lives within a play for which he has no script, yet which he is expected to participate in fully. Though Cincinnatus is infuriated with his position of impotence, he is not a power-hungry figure. Like his namesake,14 he does not yearn to take the place of the sovereign; he is not greedy, and neither is he susceptible to totalitarian rule himself.

These theatrical ruin sites are a parody of the Nazi buildings being constructed at the same time in Berlin. When designing under ruin theory, Speer should have constructed with a malleable material, something like the limestone mentioned earlier, for an aesthetic decay. But such construction would have taken far too long for Hitler, who demanded that Speer build as quickly as the Americans; building frames were therefore constructed with The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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easy, indestructible material and given an outer facade of soft limestone.

How much Hitler knew about this deviation is unclear, though Speer claims in his memoirs that Hitler was intimately involved in the design process and personally approved many construction proposals. In the end, Speer’s buildings were constructed as modernist architecture—with great reinforced concrete blocks—undecaying and unruinable. Speer, in effect, ruined his own theory of ruin value. In fact, in place of the ruins of a great civilization, we are left with buildings that look awfully similar to the modernist architectures from which ruin theory was intended to stand apart.15 Such a cosmetic application of a material as a facade to an underlying load-bearing structure is often called “rhetorical” by architects. It is, in effect, a theatrical gesture appropriate to the reliance on fiction in totalitarian control. In this case, however, the scale of application is inappropriate, and the resulting effect grossly misjudges the unpredictability of limestone decay, which will quickly leave the fictiveness of this rhetorical totalitarian move exposed.

With attention paid to the ruins permeating the history and narrative of Invitation to a Beheading, the book’s final scene exemplifies the flaw in Speer’s Ruinenwerttheorie: no structure, no matter how totalitarian in its control of its denizens, can predict its place in the temporal stream. Like limestone, which develops out of ruin and is perpetually in ruin, every moment in this temporality looks the same. Arendt describes the device of totalitarian terror as an acceleration of historical and natural forces “to a speed they would never reach if left to themselves” (Origins 466).This terror is tantamount to Virilio’s “pseudo-event” (55), which imposes a feeling of predeterminedness, a standstill of time and space. Just as Cincinnatus feels as though he is living in a temporal crack, so Speer’s totalitarian architectonic attempts to accelerate totalitarianism to a point of standstill temporal certainty. But this is an impossible certainty, and Nabokov exposes its workings with a poetics of constant decay without the preconceived end that is both a temporal torture and a resistance to totalitarian certainty.

Nabokov understandably eradicates traditional markers of temporality, thus fostering a breeding ground for totalitarian control, in order to establish the site for his power-ridden, uncontrollable prison. In a totalitarian model of fictive, abstract space, time is virtually at a standstill; and the “Communazist state” (Nabokov, Conclusive 217) projects to escape history—to enter a post-historical state—set up an ideal space, one that is powerful, controls The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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its inhabitants, and imposes confusion and disorientation on those who wish to map it or traverse it. A concretized architecture within this ideal space—only possible in the realm of the literary—can no longer be used for shelter, or for aesthetic experience, or for proof of cultural remains. Such a post-historical architecture as Nabokov’s prison, or an architecture that lays claim to being post-historical, cannot be controlled by human event.

Ultimately, ruins have little relation to the events that came to ruin them; and the attempt to read fluidly from past to future through a Ruinenwerttheorie fails because of the narrative break at the moment of ruin or, rather, in the time of perpetual ruin. Nabokov’s Cincinnatus, who walks off his execution stage and off the page of his crumbling narrative, recognizes the instability of an architecture’s future, even in its deceptively stable, predetermined appearance. The ending of Invitation can no longer be read as a definitive stop—to architecture, to totalitarianism, to ruin, or to the text. Cincinnatus walks off a disintegrating stage, but the stage, as we have been taught by the novel, will change form; it will be reused and repurposed according to a logic of ruin temporality. Rock is weathered and formed into stone, which decays into new rock, ready for repurposed use. Architecture is art determined by function, but function itself is not a stable category. Like Cincinnatus’s wife, who claims to have struck a deal to outlive the text— perhaps to be repurposed in another novel—architecture, even monumental architecture, has no sense of foresight, only a guarantee of substitution, a guarantee of becoming. And survival through durability, in this sense, is merely an acceptance and negotiation of this disordered order, a law of ruin.

The desire to command dysfunction and decomposition causes a misreading of the ruin scene by Speer and Hitler. The impulse for a Nazi aesthetic and the theory of ruin value is already instilled from the beginnings of architecture, from the very early Vitruvian desire to design durability, which instilled a sense of relative permanence in shelter and progress toward the advancement of civilization. But though ruin plays with architectural time by condensation, it cannot be reduced to a totalitarian staged reality; ruins resist the pseudo-event. Speer and Hitler could stage the spectacle of ruin, but the temporal scale of ruin is actually vaster than they could account for; so their rhetorical application of limestone becomes absurd.

This theatrical gesture, so common to totalitarian logic, does not function well here. Or, rather, their misreading functions so well that they cannot The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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distinguish between planned decay and natural decay, between effectiveness and obsolescence, and the totalitarian system falls prey to its own fictions.

Dr. Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of North Georgia. She works on philosophies of abstract space in modernism, cinema, and architecture. She has published on Nabokov, deconstruction, and essay film, and her current work studies the relationship of rhetoric to mise-en-scène in cinematic representations of infinity.

Notes 1 The clock may seem to be consistent at first, but later its chimes are deemed a “gimmick,” and the validity of its automated time-telling is questioned. The clock is also noted to have a blank face with painted-on hands, changed at every hour, marking a “tar brush time” (Nabokov, Invitation 135).

2 Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture is libri decem: a hybrid text that has technical instructions alongside literary aspirations. This style was popular during Vitruvius’s lifetime and inspired creative writings of handbooks. This hybrid style allowed Vitruvius to intersperse his instructional descriptions and diagrams with anecdotes and mythical stories. In this way, he shows us an experience and history of architecture that is both about functionality (with respect to the human body) and the imaginary (with respect to human creativity).

3 Cincinnatus tries to identify the source of a crumbling he hears emanating from within the fortress in hopes that it is the sounds of a rescue mission: “[he] visualized through the tympanum the secret passage, lengthening with every scrape, and sensed—as if thus the dark, tight pain in his chest were relieved—how the stones were being loosened, and he had already begun guessing, as he looked at the wall, where it would crack and burst open with a crash” (Nabokov, Invitation 147); “Maybe it was just stonemasons. Making repairs. An aural deception” (155); “some inner obstruction collapsed, and now the noises sounded with such vivid intensity […] that their proximity was obvious: they were right there, directly behind the wall, which was melting like ice, and would break through it any instant now” (157); “the yellow wall cracked about a yard above the floor in a lightninglike pattern, and immediately bulged from the pressure within, and suddenly burst open with a great crash” (158).

4 Limestone is extracted as calcium carbonate by a process of deterioration from the earth’s crust, itself deteriorated rock.This calcium carbonate is kept suspended in a solution by water’s carbon dioxide. It travels through seas, lakes, and rivers until it is extracted by plants and animals, whose decaying bodies cement back into limestone.

5 Limestone was used by Egyptians and Greeks for their classic architectures; Athens was built of local Pentelic marble; Rome was built of local travertine; London largely used Kentish Rag, a uniquely soft, almost downy, chalk limestone.

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6 Albert Speer introduced Ruinenwerttheorie as means of creating an immortal ideology: This distressing sight [of the ruins at the Zeppelin Field] made me think of an idea, which I later presented to Hitler pretentiously calling it: “the theory on ruin value.” Buildings made in the modern spirit were, without a doubt, less able to throw to future generations that certain “bridge to tradition” that Hitler demanded. It was inconceivable that some stacks of rusty iron could inspire the same heroic enthusiasm as the monuments of the past which Hitler admired. My “theory” was searching for a way to get past this dilemma. (Speer 56)

His architecture was constructed ultimately for the eyes of generations “after hundreds of (by our reckoning) even after thousands of years” (56).

7 On lying: “the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination” (Arendt, “Lying” 5). On totalitarian lying: “This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers’ frightening confidence in the power of lying—in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the ‘political line’ of the present moment or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology” (7).

8 The photography in Invitation seems to be used to raise writing as a more worthy sense of art.The more despicable characters—Marthe, Pierre—are associated with photography.We see photographs everywhere: “home snapshots” (Nabokov, Invitation 82); newspapers and magazines; kids trying to get “into the picture” at the scaffold (214). Nabokov tells us that “unsophisticated cameras record” (51).

But Cincinnatus, in his memoirs, is also trying to make a recording; he is also trying to capture himself. Nabokov seems to make a distinction between these two modes of self-capture. Unlike photography, which gives a concretization of instantaneity, a writing record has “the capacity to conjoin all of this in one point” (52), a sort of bricolage of individual moments into a single concrete model. It is also worth noting that the old-fashioned camera shutter is often referred to as a guillotine for its forceful close.

9 This classic understanding of the guillotine as philanthropic is parodied in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Cincinnatus is uncertain of the relationship between love and death: “Which will it be? A beheading or a tryst?” (67). As well, his executioner Pierre compares their relationship as one between a “blushing bride” and an “experienced bridegroom” (162).

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10 Nabokov had been personally touched by death penalties: a family friend, poet Kondraty Ryleev, was hanged in 1825; Nabokov’s grandfather, the Minister of Justice, decreed an end to public executions, minimizing the spectacle of the event by bringing it inside the prison walls; Nabokov’s father, a parliamentary leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, who introduced a bill outlawing capital punishment into the First State Duma, was assassinated in 1922. But closer to the conception of Invitation, Nabokov inadvertently had been doing research on executions for his novel Dar (The Gift). In 1930, he had meetings with a German student, Dietrich, who Nabokov wanted to save for future use in a novel: “A German friend of mine, whose hobby was capital punishment, and who saw it done with an axe in Regensburg, told me that the headsman was positively paternal.”

In his research on Chernyshevsky for Dar, Nabokov revisits the mock executions of Dostoevsky, Petrashevtsy, and Chernyshevsky, and the execution of the Decembrists (Boyd 141–43).

11 This narrative sequence is, in a way, a parody of a blason, in which each part of a woman’s body is made separate as a way of poetic praise.

12 On the origin of painting: “If revelation or contemplation brings to light what was already there from the beginning, if the apocalypse shows this there, then it also unveils in accordance with the event of a catastrophe or cataclysm. Order and ruin are no longer dissociated at the origin of drawing […] A work is at once order and its ruin” (Derrida, Memoirs 122).

13 Invitation was published in Russian in 1935–1936, and an English translation by Nabokov and his son Dmitri was published in 1959, essentially giving us two original texts in two original languages, as both Russian and English versions were written by the author.

14 Nabokov’s Cincinnatus is most likely a reference to the historical Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519–430 BC), who had dictatorship forced upon him and returned his power as soon as the position was no longer needed.

15 Barbara Miller Lane argues that several factors led to the unoriginality and failure of Speer’s design. Speer was not a very talented architect and so relied heavily on inspiration from other sources (most notably from the Semitic Assur buildings, which were published as reconstruction drawings by Walter Andrae in 1921). He was pressured by Hitler to build quickly, and so he used materials, such as reinforced concrete, that ran counter to the theory of ruin value. Ultimately, “the concluding irony of this account of Speer’s work is that, despite his genuine nationalism, his buildings closely resembled a widespread international movement in architecture in the 1930s” (305). In resisting the influence of contemporary architecture, Nazi architecture came to have features that nearly mirrored the Modern Movement’s extreme axiality and centrality, wall thickness, repetitive vertical elements, and unornamented minimalism The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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(Lane). Whereas Speer aimed to create a building like Cincinnatus’s prison, endlessly in flux, and thus never-ending, he was left with the irrelevancy of nonsingularity.

Works Cited Arasse, Daniel. The Guillotine and the Terror. Translated by Christopher Miller, Penguin, 1989.

Arendt, Hannah. “Lying in Politics.” Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1972, pp. 1–48.

———. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Stimulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, U of Michigan P, 1994.

Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy. Athlone, 2000.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne, Verso, 2003.

Boyd, Brian. “‘Welcome to the Block’: Priglashenie Na Kazn´ / Invitation to a Beheading. A Documentary Record.” Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading”:A Critical Companion. Edited by Julian W. Connolly, Northwestern UP, 1997, pp. 141–80.

Derrida, Jacques. The Death Penalty,Vol 1. Edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit, translated by Peggy Kamuf, U of Chicago P, 2013.

———. Memoirs of the Blind.Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, U of Chicago P, 1993.

Fest, Joachim. Hitler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.Translated by Alan Sheridan,Vintage, 1995.

Koshar, Rudy. From Monuments to Traces:Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990. U of California P, 2000.

Lane, Barbara Miller. “Architects in Power: Politics and Ideology in the Work of Ernst May and Albert Speer.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 17, no.1, 1986, pp. 283–310. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/204134.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and “the Jews.” Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, U of Minnesota P, 1997.

Macaulay, Rose. “A Note on New Ruins.” Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited

by Brian Dillon, Whitechapel Gallery, 2011, pp. 27–8.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir. Harper, 1951.

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———. Invitation to a Beheading. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov, Vintage, 1989.

———. Priglashenie na kazn´. Sobranie sochinenii russkovo perioda v 5 tomach, tom 4, Simpozium, 2000, pp. 47–187.

———. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology.

Translated by Hazel E Barnes, Washington Square, 1984.

Simmel, Georg. “Death and Immortality.” The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, edited by John A. Y. Andrews, translated by John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, U of Chicago P, pp. 63–98.

Simmel, Georg, and Kurt H Wolff. “The Ruin.” Georg Simmel, 1858–1918:A Collection of Essays. Ohio UP, 1959, pp. 260–62.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston, Macmillan, 1970.

Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Hutchinson, 2002.

Stokes, Adrian. Stones of Rimini. Pennsylvania State UP, 2002.

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Verso, 1989.

Vitruvius. Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Ingrid D Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe, Cambridge UP, 1999.

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Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon Alberto Moreiras Abstract: This article is an extended meditation on Javier Cercas’s 2014 novel El impostor. An extant fragment from Heraclitus says “ethos anthropoi daimon.” Marco, Cercas’s protagonist, is undecidably a “man of destiny” or a “man of character,” to use Hegelian categories recently reappropriated

by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. But, if “character” is “destiny” for the man, as the conventional translation of Heraclitus asserts, how does a destructive character relate to history?

Keywords: imposture, fate, character, happiness, satisfaction, Cercas, Heraclitus, Hegel, Benjamin, Sánchez Ferlosio Who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken man who blurts out an absurd command, the sleeping man who suddenly awakes and turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side—are they not, perhaps, implementing one of the Company’s secret decisions?

Borges (1944)1 I.

Heraclitus’s Fragment 247, ethos anthropoi daimon, is one of the earliest, perhaps even one of the most decisive, words of Western thought, particularly in the absence of more extant fragments from Anaximander. Hegel said of him, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, “Here we see land! There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic” (qtd. in Barnes 57). At the same time, Heraclitus can also be argued to furnish anti-Hegelian tools: it would be difficult to consider him a thinker of the “cunning of reason” in history (see Hegel, Lectures 89). As to Fragment 247, “ethos” can refer, as The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 68–85 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.68

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the Liddell-Scott Lexicon will tell us, to the haunts or abodes of animals, or to custom or usage, also to manners and habits, so also to disposition and character. “Daimon” is an even more complicated word, as it is difficult for us to imagine what it could have meant for a culture not inflected with Christianity: yes, it means god or goddess, or what the Romans will call numen, but it also means chance or fortune, genius or fate, and the verb daío, which refers to the power of the daimon, is about dividing or distributing destinies.

G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven translate ethos anthropoi daimon into the English “Man’s character is his daimon” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 211). It is not much of a translation. “Ethos” dubiously becomes merely “character,” and “daimon” is, well, daimon. For the human. Character is daimon, and not just any daimon, but his daimon—that is, daimon for man or for woman, a daimon for every specific human. What does that mean? In their gloss of the fragment, they say that 247 is a denial of the view, common in Homer, that the individual often cannot be held responsible for what he does. Daimon here means simply a man’s personal destiny; it is determined by his own character, over which he has some control, and not by external and often capricious powers acting perhaps through a “genius” allotted to each individual by chance or Fate. Helen traditionally blamed Aphrodite for her own weakness, but for Heraclitus (as indeed for Solon, who had already reacted against the moral helplessness of the heroic mentality) there was a real point in intelligent and prudent behavior. (211–12)

In his “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger translates the fragment very differently. He says that “[t]he (familiar) abode is for man the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)” (234). There is of course no reconciling the two versions—or perhaps there is, since “character,” in Kirk and Raven, is far from explained, which means it is open to interpretation, and “daimon,” vaguely translated as “simply a man’s personal destiny” in the gloss, could be taken to be something dictated by the unfamiliar one, by the god making herself or himself present in the home of man, itself an open region or a place of hospitality, and turning it forever into a haunted place.

Kirk and Raven’s translation is a good example, I think, of the unthinking thought, the deadening or flattening that sometimes is presented not just as thought, but as perfectly appropriate thought, by academic hegemony.

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Heidegger, at least, complicates the issue and does not give us translative mush. In Heidegger’s rendering, the old word from Heraclitus becomes provocative and worthy of thought. His gloss is not so much undecisive as it is difficult. He refers in it to “a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual” (235), for which the old word “ethos” as abode of man, dwelling place, is enlisted.This other thinking, a kind of “original ethics” (235), is, for Heidegger, as we may know, not only a thinking—“neither theoretical nor practical,” he says (236)—that would offer “directives that can be readily applied to our active lives” (236), but also a thinking that “conducts historical eksistence […] into the realm of the upsurgence of the healing” (237). This healing (Heidegger was writing this in 1946–1947) will at the end of the essay be associated with “less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter” (242). Of course, it would be madness to undertake this in today’s university. Or would it?

It is not my intention to talk to you about Heidegger, however—at least not directly. In fact, I only returned to what Heidegger says on the Heraclitus word because I found, in Javier Marías’s 1994 novel Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, a few lines that, I have to admit, not just intrigued me but worried me; but perhaps worry is not the word. They shocked me or bothered me; they arrested me. The words are “pero en realidad todo pensamiento está enfermo, por eso nadie piensa nunca demasiado o casi todos prefieren no hacerlo” [“but really all thought is sick, or ill, that is why nobody ever thinks too much or almost everybody prefers not to”] (Marías 313). Marías does not quite repeat what may have been, say, a Nietzschean theme—namely, that the body reacts to disease, that thinking is one of the ways in which the body regulates, compensates for, tries to overcome disease. The thought is rather more radical: every thought is sick, every thought is sickness. How exactly are we to understand it? Is a remedy against sickness itself part of the disease? Is autoimmunity in itself, provided that thought were an autoimmune reaction, a sick response of the body? And what is its purpose, if there is one? I suppose one could do worse than refer to the Heideggerian line just quoted: thinking leads to the “upsurgence of the healing” (237).

Even this does not quite account for the particular use of “estar” rather than “ser” in the Marías quote: “all thought is sick” does not quite, or merely, mean that all thought is sick thought. It means, rather, that all thought, any thought, finds itself with a temperature, dizzy, unstable, chilled, haunted.

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No wonder one would prefer not to think. But, if we must think, if we have no choice—for instance, in the university—do we do it with a regard to healing, do we do it with a regard to finding “directives that could be applied to our active lives,” or is it just a matter of submitting to the disease, which of course could well lead us into the other side of the healing, which Heidegger identifies as “the malice of rage” (237), or even unto harassed death? But, again, perhaps these are mad thoughts, already sick thoughts, thoughts that are sick with a temperature, dizzy, unstable, and chilling, no doubt also haunted. Could we make of them the occasion for a little attentiveness to thinking, a little cultivation of the letter? For the sake of a certain healing, there would not be much to lose.

An even older or more conventional translation of Fragment 247 says directly that character is destiny. We know of course about Walter Benjamin’s 1919 essay “Fate and Character,” and we know that it incorporates, in very abstract ways, not just Greek tragedy and seventeenth-century French comedy but also Hegel and Nietzche in its constellation of references. Benjamin’s essay is itself a gloss on Heraclitus’s fragment, although the fragment is never mentioned, perhaps because the real idea in Benjamin is to break up the identification of character and destiny that the Heraclitus fragment seems to posit: to break it, not to the point of disassociating character and destiny, whatever they are, but rather to the point of complicating their relationship.

To that effect, he begins by invoking what we could refer to as the two vulgar renderings of the equivalence (Benjamin himself does not use the term “vulgar”).

One of them would presume that “if […] the character of a person […] were known in all its details, and if […] all the events in the areas entered by that character were known, both what would happen to him and what he would accomplish could be exactly predicted. That is, his fate would be known” (Benjamin, “Fate” 201). In other words, once we get to know our own character, presumably by following the other Greek maxim, gnothe seautón, know thyself, or the character of some other person, your character, for instance, I would know your fate, your time, your life. Nothing happens to you that is not already inscribed on you: there is no pathos—nothing happens to you, nothing falls on you—or else pathos is always already singular, always already yours, and it has always already happened. Character is not identity; it is rather the kharis, the grace, as Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio has said, that defines you as a singularity of time, a singularity in time.

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(Toward the end of Vendrán más años malos y nos harán más ciegos [1993] Sánchez Ferlosio incorporates a story that he names “Descubrimiento del ‘carácter’” [“Discovery of ‘character’”].The story tells how he was taken by his grandmother to a Capuchin Franciscan convent in Fuenterrabía. It was to be a first visit, and the grandmother instructed the child not to be indiscreet, as a hunchback would open the door:“¡como se te ocurra decirle una palabra ya verás tú!” (172). But Rafaelito, irrepressible, tells us that when the door was opened, “what my eyes saw, suddenly taken by fascination, was the most wonderful creature they could ever have imagined,” a gnome right out of his fairy tale books, a little man with a long ashy beard, and asked him:“Why are you so small, why have you grown so little?”The monk responded, with a sweet smile: “Because the Lord decided I should not grow any more.” Sánchez Ferlosio concludes:“I know today that singular divine grace is Character” [172–74].

Character is grace, not identity, from kharis, grace, favor, a gift.)

There is another vulgar conception, which is the mirror opposite of the first. According to this second one, it is not that character absolutely determines fate, but rather that character and fate coincide: they are undecidably different; they are not distinguishable, since fate defines character and character refers to fate. Benjamin then rather ambiguously quotes Nietzsche: “Such is the case when Nietzsche says: ‘If a man has character, he has an experience that constantly recurs.’ This means: if a man has character, his fate is essentially constant. Admittedly, it also means: he has no fate—a conclusion drawn by the Stoics” (“Fate” 202). The point in Nietzsche is that eternal recurrence finds its utmost expressive site in amor fati as supreme character, or as a supreme characterization or internalization of character. Character does not preexist fate, as it does in the first vulgar version; rather, character comes to be a thorough identification with fate as such.

I will leave Benjamin for the moment and hence suspend his alternative rendering of the character/fate relationship. I will first attempt to analyze a particular feature in Javier Cercas’s 2014 novel El impostor. Although I should start by saying that the words “fate” or “character” are not to be found in El impostor, I also want to begin by stating that El impostor is a rather fundamental and disquieting, even fundamentally disquieting, meditation on the relationship between those two words. The words are certainly not alien to Cercas, as his readers might remember from El vientre de la ballena (1997, rewritten in 2005) and even from the beginning of Soldados de Salamina (2001). In fact, El vientre de la ballena centers on a discussion of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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fate and character and, we could say, revolves around a clear parti-pris for character against fate. The novel in fact associates literature, or writing, as such, with a defense of character against fate, or a strengthening of character against fate. Writing could be the healing of the diseases of fate—itself a sick writing, itself symptomal or motivated—but whose primary function would be to assert the priority of character, fate be damned. But, I am now more interested in El impostor.

Let me, however, begin by quoting again some words by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, from a presentation he gave during the Premio Cervantes’s awards ceremony, entitled, yes, “Carácter y destino,” which Cercas abundantly mentions in El vientre de la ballena. Ferlosio quotes Hegel’s Philosophy of History in order to develop clearly anti-Hegelian thoughts.This is the quote, translated by H.B. Nisbet: It is possible to consider history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows.The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.There are certainly moments of satisfaction in the history of the world, but this satisfaction is not to be equated with happiness: for the aims which are satisfied transcend all particular interests.

All ends of importance in world-history must be secured by means of abstract volition and energy. The world-historical individuals who have pursued such ends may well have attained satisfaction, but happiness was certainly not their object. (Hegel 79 qtd. in Sánchez Ferlosio, “Carácter” 641).

There is an active counterpoint between happiness and satisfaction in Hegel’s words, and a certain clarity concerning the notion that the world-historical individual—that is, the hero, in the Hegelian sense—is not someone looking for happiness. Satisfaction is what the hero seeks or obtains in the accomplishment of his or her goals. Let us now transpose the notion of the world-historical hero into the notion of the man or woman of destiny, which is what Sánchez Ferlosio does. From that transcoding, a metonymic chain develops: the man or woman of character makes happiness, not satisfaction, her or his object; her temporality is not properly historical unless we change the very meaning of the concept, and her expression or manifestation does not look for sense but rather for pleasure.

If one goes back to other Sánchez Ferlosian texts such as Mientras no cambien los dioses nada ha cambiado (1986), one will find the basic categories The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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that regulate his anti-Hegelianism. One is not to be interested in the “acquisitive time” of history and progress, in teleological time, but in the exceptional temporality of the now, which regulates the use of the present, the consumption of the present, Ferlosio says—“consumptive time” against “acquisitive time” (69): the use of the present, the use of the time of life, against the abuse of history, the abuse of deadly or nihilating accumulation, which must also be understood as the theft, even the auto-theft of the time of life. Of course, pleasure must also deal with the disgust or the horror of empty consumptive time, in the same way that satisfaction must deal with defeat and catastrophe, with disaster and frustration. And one must eventually choose, unless others have already chosen for one.

(In the hilarious comic relief story Javier Marías introduces in Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, we have the narrator visiting the king of Spain, no less— certainly as close as we can come in Spain to the world-historical character, to the Hegelian hero in fallen times.The king needs someone to write his speeches for him, because, he complains,“yo me doy cuenta de que no se conoce mi personalidad, cómo soy, y quizá tenga que ser así mientras viva; pero mientras vivo no puedo dejar de pensar que tal como van las cosas voy a pasar a la historia sin atributos, o lo que es peor, sin un atributo, lo cual es lo mismo que decir sin carácter, sin una imagen nítida y reconocible” [“I realize my personality is not known, how I am, and perhaps that must be so insofar as I am alive. But while I am alive I cannot stop thinking that, the way things are going, I am going to pass into history without attributes, or what is worse without one attribute, which is the same as to say without character, without a neat and recognizable image”] [169].

The king complains that a host of speechwriters have managed to turn him into a characterless man, a nobody, and he wants to rectify that by getting himself a better speechwriter—that is, one still within the “fingimiento fantástico” [“fantastic dissembling”] in which we all live, but that would at least project a character, for god’s sake: “hay mucho donde elegir, pero estaría bien que hubiera cierta autenticidad en la farsa nuestra, quiero decir cierta correspondencia con la verdad de mi carácter y de mis hechos” [“there is a lot to choose from, but it would be good if we can have some autenticity in our farce, I mean a certain correspondence with the truth of my character and my deeds”] [176–77].We have a melancholy king who does not believe in the justice of the monarchic institution:“yo dudo hasta de la justicia de la institución que represento, casi nadie se lo imaginaría, eso es seguro” [“I doubt the very justice of the institution I represent, almost nobody The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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would imagine it, that is certain”] [177]. And this is because, he says,“yo no estoy convencido de que un hombre o una mujer deban tener fijada su profesión desde su nacimiento y aun desde antes, o su destino si lo preferís así,. . . . ] no creo que para él sea justo” [“I am not persuaded that a man or a woman must have their profession fixed for them from birth, and even from before, or his or her destiny, if you prefer to call it that […] I do not believe that is just”][179]. Poor king—all he can do is “fingir, por supuesto fingir todo el rato” [“dissemble, of course dissemble all the time”] [181]. All of this comes to a devastating attack on the Hegelian concept of the world-historical man, the historical hero, about which more is to come later. A destiny is prefixed, and that annihilates character, or else there is no character, and destiny is therefore only bogus.)

II.

What is the choice, then, in Enric Marco, the dissembling figure, the hero of dissembling, that organizes the narrative of El impostor? Of course, Marco is an impostor, and Cercas conceives of the idea of investigating and interviewing him, letting him tell his story as a real fiction or a nonfiction novel.What does Cercas want? Whatever he may want or have wanted, what is beyond doubt is that Marco is an impostor. He modified, for instance, as the very last page of Cercas’s book tells us, the name of Enric Moné, one of the Catalan prisoners in the Flüssenburg concentration camp, and turned it into Enric Marco—adding just a little caligraphic extension—in order to be able to hand over a Xeroxed copy of the original document, clearly falsified, to the Amical de Mauthausen—that is, the Catalan organization that both commemorated and kept watch over the memory of those Catalans who were made prisoners and thrown into camps, concentration camps mostly, not so much death camps, although some were both, by the Nazi regime after the end of the Spanish Civil War. That Xeroxed document, a false document, was essential for Marco to obtain his credentials as a camp survivor and become a member of the institution whose fate he would come to direct some time later.

Marco is an impostor also because he falsely represented himself in other endeavors, counterfeiting a past as an anarchist activist that helped make him secretary-general of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores in the 1970s in Barcelona, and lying and dissembling and bullshitting his way into perhaps not the first but the second or third line of memory activists in the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Spanish transition, becoming a hero of memory or a hero in memory. But Marco’s memory heroics—heroics not only because they were successful, they really made him into a hero for thousands upon thousands of high school kids and others, for instance, but heroics also because the memory itself, memories themselves, referred to heroic behavior, not just to his status as a surviving victim, a victim whose survival was already a mode of heroism— were all lies. They were all lies, and Marco perpetrated a sham, little more than a sham, a pathetic sham. Of course the sham only became one when it was detected, and not before. What is the interest of such a figure? Why turn him into a literary hero as well, albeit a catastrophic one—an antihero?

One could say that Marco, a man of character, wanted to be happy, and his interest was not in satisfaction, or, equally plausibly, that he was looking for satisfaction and sacrificed his happiness to it—a man of destiny, then. But this, the fact that we can say both, is a problem, certainly so from the Hegelian or even the Ferlosian perspective, since for both of them, one must choose character or happiness over destiny, or destiny and satisfaction over happiness (and those are the active and successful choices, because one can also opt for unhappiness and for catastrophe, even unawares). Can both options, then, be reconciled? And is that what Cercas’s nonfiction novel tells us—the silent third perspective? The one who seeks satisfaction does it on the basis of some desire for happiness, and the one who looks for happiness expects to derive some satisfaction from it.There is no clear choice, against Hegel and Sánchez Ferlosio (although, to repeat, Sánchez Ferlosio is already an anti-Hegelian), between character and destiny. Are we then back to one of the vulgar interpretations in the Benjaminian reading? Whatever we decide, I think this issue is the basis of the infrapolitical, that is, existential, reflection Cercas’s novel deploys.

Let us put moralisms aside. It matters that he is, or be, an impostor, as that makes him interesting, even if in a pathetic sort of way. But perhaps it matters for reasons that are not evident. Cercas does not hide them, although it is perhaps fair to say that he does not quite reveal them either. Why is Cercas—Cercas the narrator; we can ignore Cercas the author, I suppose—so obsessed with Marco, to the point of spending about nine years agonizing over writing or not writing the book? Is it not the case that we are all impostors?

We all falsify our history; we all falsify our lives; we all falsify our work, even if we do not necessarily always cross the material line into document falsification, and even if we are not always necessarily investigated by an The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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impenitent historian whose mission it is to reveal our bogusness (although, as you know, increasingly, university administrators take up that role quite willingly and gleefully, never mind that they are generally the first and more monumental impostors). Perhaps what really matters, then, is something else; perhaps we can attempt to name it. The real question in the novel is not whether Marco is to be saved or damned, condemned or celebrated, consigned to infamy or rescued for a dubious pantheon of rascal simpáticos.

Cercas is not seeking to determine whether Marco has repented or is, as the cinema director Santi Fillol, author of a documentary on Marco and also a character in Cercas’s novel, thinks, a reckless and unremorseful liar who “will never unmask himself. He is always acting, he is always playing the role that interests him at a given moment” (Cercas 409). Marco is like the Lacanian fellow that manages to lie with the truth, whenever he does tell the truth. Is it possible to lie with the truth? Kant would be the first to say, as a mere consequence of his moral law or concept of freedom, that such a thing, lying with the truth at all times—which is hypothetically possible as the other side of always telling the truth and being truthful even with our lies—would be also almost miraculous, improbable, a rare thing; although at the same time, it is, for the most part, all we ever do. But let us erase guilt from this equation. Cercas is interested in neither finding guilt nor cleansing it. What he seeks is an equally miraculous, rare, impossible thing: to produce a book about the truth residue of a monumental set of lies; to find what still might stand up when all the lies are eliminated. Such is the technical exercise in his nonfiction novel or real fiction: how does one go about writing a book where there are no lies? And what remains?

(Yes, I want to say something about Cercas’s novel, and I hope to say something about Marías, as well. I want to say something about Benjamin, and something about Hegel, and something about Sánchez Ferlosio, but I also want to introduce a certain existential turn in the search for a kind of thought that, while accepting its own malady, its own structural disease, could still aim at or for the upsurgence of healing.

I want to do it through the thematization of the difference between character and destiny, or ethos and daimon, provided we are still authorized to use the Greek terms.

I have impossibly invoked the notions of attentiveness to thinking and cultivation of the letter as my own tools, thus setting the ground of my own critical demise, opting for the unhappiness and the catastrophe of failure, since it will be so easy for all or any of you to dismiss my attempt and pronounce it bogus—a bit perhaps like what The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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happens to the king of Spain in Marías’s novel: comic relief. I will have become an impostor, like Enric Marco. So I can only go through him, in order to save myself, even if that is not what I want.)

El impostor is an important text, perhaps even a masterpiece, in my opinion, because it takes it upon itself to deal with two very infrequent things—one hesitates to call them literary tasks, although they are undoubtedly only possible through writing, through the cultivation of the letter as attentive to thought—namely, what I would call a denarrativizing narrative on the one hand and a will for testimonial deconstruction on the other—not for a deconstructed testimonio, but rather for the deconstruction of testimonio.

I am interested in both things—denarrativizing narrative, in opposition to mythographic or mythomaniac narrative, and the deconstruction of testimonio as a correction to the pretension of identitarian truth that has over the last thirty years plagued, and continues to plague, political discourse. It is true that both procedures, which are the essential technical procedures of El impostor, are necessarily hard—even scandalous—and expose their author to ruthless recriminations. How does one go about denarrativizing narrative?

Is that not a contradiction in terminis, an impossible endeavor? And how does one pursue a deconstruction of testimonio without leaving us all in the uncanniest form of exposure, having been denied the last shelter, which is to trust that others may trust our personal truth, which is ultimately only uttered as a request for respect and love? If you take away from us the double possibility of myth and testimony—both of them negatively enframed by mythomania—then we are left with nothing; we no longer know what to grasp for. We would have to give up not just literature and philosophy but also politics, in the necessary acceptance of a horizonless nihilism.

But perhaps it is not so bad.We know the primary intertext in El impostor is Don Quijote, and Don Quijote is, after all, both a denarrativizing narrative and a testimony in deconstruction, particularly at the end, at the terrible and necessary conclusion of the work: the death of Alonso Quijano once he gives up—thanks to that imperdonable idiot Sansón Carrasco, one of us, a critic and a humanist, he thinks—on being Don Quijote. Reality does not save Alonso Quijano; it precisely consigns him to death—perhaps the ultimate form of lying with the truth—and ultimately, therefore—and here the novel ends—fiction does not save him either. Nothing saves him; nothing saves. That is what it is, in Don Quijote and in El impostor.

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Marco’s imposture—does it falsify a character; or does it falsify a destiny?

Is that imposture not in itself the means toward a sought-for destiny? Is it rather the mechanism for consolidation, the necessary anchor, of a character that remains absent, perhaps inexistent, demanding presence through its very void? Marco’s drama—it won’t do at this level to argue that one is only talking about Marco the character in the novel and not Marco in real life, as Cercas’s narrative is built on erasing that difference—might well have become incapable of responding to those questions, even for himself: he has become lost in his own imposture, and he has done it from the initial realization that, from the start, he lacked, like the king of Spain, both a destiny and a character. Both were missing, there was no option to be made, and one could only, desperately, go for both, attempt to retrieve both, like the Yogi Berra character who, when facing a crossroads, could only think of taking it—blindly, and perhaps through a speechwriter smart enough to fake authenticity, which may be the precise role Javier Cercas takes upon himself as author of the novel on Enric Marco.

When, in one of the crucial passages of the book, Cercas attempts a description of Marco as the average man—just another Spaniard or Catalan from the historical time he had to endure, and so just another Spaniard or Catalan, a man without attributes, a fellow among others—what he hints at but never says is that Marco has neither character nor destiny: So that Marco’s final enigma is his absolute normality; also his absolute exceptionality: Marco is what every man is, except in an exaggerated form, larger, more intense and more visible, or perhaps he is all men, or perhaps he is a nobody, a great container, an empty set, an onion that has been deprived of all layers of skin and is no longer anything, a site where all meanings converge, a blind spot through which everything can be seen, a darkness that illuminates everything, a great eloquent silence, a glass that mirrors the universe, a hollow that owns our shape, an enigma whose ultimate solution is that it has no solution, a transparent mystery which it is nevertheless impossible to decypher, and that it is better not to decypher. (412; my translation)

When a man or a woman is deprived of both character and destiny—and is that not the tendential accomplishment of our societies, of our regime of labor, also at the university, the condition of existence today or the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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condition against which existence must be measured?—when neither one nor the other are accessible or practicable, it is only logical that the attempt to retrieve them be both desperate and reckless, as there is nothing to lose, nothing to be lost.The residual, tragic drama is not realizing that even in the absence of both, one must choose between them; one must opt in the nonoption. To denarrativization, to the curious detestimonization that Cercas investigates, there would correspond another counter-classic image: not Hercules at the crossroads, but somebody who is not a hero having to make a decision for which there is no decision, no deciding choices. Marco opts indifferently—either to give himself a destiny in order to gain character or to project himself as a character in order to trap a destiny—and his option undoes him. But, at this point, at this particular crossroads, here and now, does it not undo every one of us, even if most of us have not yet found the rigorous investigator that will make our drama public? Or the speechwriter that will give it some desperate authenticity? Or the administrator that will dispose of us for good?

All of this proves Sánchez Ferlosio right—that the only intelligent thing, if we were only capable of it (the king, for instance, is not), would be to opt for happiness and never put our cards on any conceivable destiny. That is, of course, also the secret, inconfessable and always already misunderstood, of Benjamin’s second take on the idea of character in his 1931 essay on “The Destructive Character.”

III.

So what was the nonvulgar interpretation of the relationship between fate and character to which Benjamin opposed the other two, and then yet a third that I have not yet clarified? Undoubtedly it is Hegel’s rendering, as he discusses it in the vibrant pages of the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History I have already referred to. It is in those pages, which I cannot discuss in full detail, where Hegel presents his notion of “the cunning of reason” (89) at the service of the idea: “the right of the world spirit transcends all particular rights; it shares in the latter itself, but only to a limited extent, for although these lesser rights may partake of its substance, they are at the same time fraught with particularity” (92).The conflict between the universal and the particular is mediated by the cunning of reason through the figure of the world-historical hero—heroes are those who, “in fulfilling the end The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of reason, [… ] not only simultaneously fulfill their own particular ends (whose content is quite different from that of the universal end), but also participate in the end of reason itself, and are therefore ends in their own right” (90). Others may be trampled: “A mighty figure must trample many an innocent flower underfoot, and destroy much that lies in its path” (89).

It is passion, reckless passion, as an attribute of character, that marks the hero and secures the coincidence between particular and universal ends that justifies the Hegelian system: “passion is the absolute unity of individual character and the universal,” says Hegel (Lectures 86); “the way in which the spirit in its subjective individuality here coincides exactly with the Idea has an almost animal quality about it” (86). And then he says, in words that cannot stop moving me, as much as I hate them: [A]nd the new world order and the deeds they accomplish appear to be their own achievement, their personal interest and creation. But right is on their side, for they are the far-sighted ones: they have discerned what is true in their world and in their age, and have recognized the concept, the next universal to emerge. And the others […] flock to their standard, for it is they who express what the age requires.They are the most far-sighted among their contemporaries; they know best what issues are involved, and whatever they do is right.The others feel that this is so, and therefore have to obey them. Their words and deeds are the best that could be said and done in their time. (Lectures 83–84)

Passion sutures the separation of character and fate, which is also the separation between private or particular ends and the idea of world history.

Passion brings them together and makes them coincide, thus granting the truth of the ethos daimon, saying, in its modern translation, character is fate.

Through passion, the hero can break an ethical whole and move toward a higher universal—that is, a new moment in the deployment of the world spirit.The hero can or always must be a revolutionary, as heroes are the ones who do not find their aims and vocation in the calm and regular system of the present, in the hallowed order of things as they are. Indeed, their justification does not lie in the prevailing situation, for they draw their inspiration from another source, from that hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies beneath the surface and seeks to break out without The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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yet having attained an existence in the present. For this spirit, the present world is but a shell which contains the wrong kind of kernel. (Lectures 83)

The Heraclitean “daimon” is here the world spirit, who reveals every time the new kernel, and “ethos” is the very opposite of ethics or morality, since it is ethos, as passion, that receives the command of the daimon toward revolutionary goals and leaves itself behind as mere shell—like a snake does every fall. Needless to say, all of this reads very well if we could still believe in the march of humanity toward an end of times to be described as the triumph of the absolute spirit or, what comes to the same, the idea of and as world history. Without it, or provided it has already happened, the hero is nothing but the worst sort of villain, nothing but a bureaucrat of hegemony, an administrator of the ceaseless mobilization of life toward senseless change at the service of interests that can no longer be understood as the interests of the universal but are not yet the interests of the singular.

The Hegelian edifice has collapsed. The righteous passion of the Hegelian hero is now either the insatiable greed of the corrupt or the stupid destiny of the deluded.We must choose, indeed; and yet we seem not to know how, or even that we must.

Benjamin goes at it through a clear demarcation: “where there is character there will, with certainty, not be fate, and in the area of fate character will not be found” (“Fate” 202). Fate and character are separate realities, as they can no longer be identified through the passion of world history, much less through their vulgar equations. How to distinguish them?

Benjamin considers fate, the daimon, consigned to the order of the law, itself “a residue of the demonic stage of human existence” (203).Tragedy, however, succeeded over law, “for in tragedy demonic fate is breached” (203). Tragic man “becomes aware that he is better than his god” (203), and the result is the consignment of fate to what Benjamin calls “the natural condition of the living” (204). But man is in excess of it, and he or she is in excess of it precisely through character. Character is no longer a tragic conceit—rather it belongs to comedy: the place, Benjamin says, “of an utmost development of individuality” that leads to freedom (205–6). Benjamin is finally saying that character is both an index and the site of the proper region of human temporality, as opposed to the inauthentic dwelling in misfortune and guilt that tragic understanding dismantles. Character is the site of freedom.

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Can we still think of freedom, the grace of singularity, as the open region for the presencing of the god as the unfamiliar one, the uncanny guest? If so, can we facilitate its advent through an attentiveness to thinking, a cultivation of the letter? Is sick thought the very possibility of helping us leave behind the residual guilt and misfortune characterized by the onset of fate, by the intervention of fate into our lives? Thought would be the haunted realm of events, and its function could not be coming to the end of itself, since that is death and termination. Haunted thought does not seek the termination of thought, the end of the haunting. What does it then seek? What could healing mean in this context?

If writing and thinking can do something other than serve the fallen fate of universal history, if we can save or rescue ourselves from narratives of destiny that have in fact already lost their destination, it is to healing we turn—not as the reestablishment of health but as the possibility of retrieval of the open region where freedom can still make an advent. Heidegger calls it “letting be,” but there is nothing passive about it. In his Caracas speech, given at the Rómulo Gallegos Award Ceremony in 1995, and talking about Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Marías addresses himself to what I can only understand by now as a critique of fate. He says “Todos tenemos en el fondo la misma tendencia, es decir, a irnos viendo en las diferentes etapas de nuestra vida como el resultado y el compendio de lo que nos ha ocurrido y de lo que hemos logrado y de lo que hemos realizado, como si fuera tan sólo eso lo que conforma nuestra existencia” [“We all at bottom have the same tendency, that is, to see ourselves at the different stages of our life as the result and the sum of what has happened to us and what we have accomplished and what we have realized, as if that were the only thing that conforms our existence”] (453). There is something we forget, and we forget that we forget it when we do theory or literature in mindless ways. But what if literature, as cultivation of the letter, or theory, as attentiveness to thinking, could be understood to be sustained meditations on what fate keeps away from us; on what could have visited us but did not; on the sum total of possibilities unrealized in our lives not as destiny but as unused grace, unreceived grace, which now becomes receivable in virtue of a gaze that no longer looks at their exhaustion but rather to its inexhaustibility? This is letting be, and it is perhaps this that Marías has in mind when he says “Las personas tal vez consistimos […] tanto en lo que somos como en lo que no somos como en lo que no hemos sido, tanto en lo comprobable The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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y cuantificable y recordable como en lo más incierto, indeciso y difuminado, quizá estamos hechos en igual medida de lo que fue y de lo que pudo ser” [“People perhaps consist equally of […] what we are and what we are not and what we have not been, equally of the provable, quantifiable, and memorable and of the most uncertain, undecisive, diffuse, perhaps we are made in equal measure of what was and what could have been”] (453).

The bad Hegelian hero or counterhero, Richard III, who is, through Shakespeare’s play, one of the fundamental intertexts in Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, had a passion that could not be accorded to universal history.

This is why those that haunt him, his victims, the flowers he trampled, come back to him before the battle and tell him to despair and die. Those very same ghosts also talk to Richmond, the future king, and tell him that “[g]ood angels guard thy battle. Live and flourish”; “Awake, and win the day”; “Wake in joy” (Shakespeare 5.3.147, 152, 160). Haunted thought could do worse than welcoming those visitations, particularly if they were addressed not to Richmond—who thinks of himself in Shakespeare’s play as the hero of providence, the hero of justice, God’s man—but rather to someone, anyone, for whom there is only a life to be lived in the happiest possible way, and no destiny to speak of; as if we were mortal, and only mortal, instead of contemplating, as Hegel wanted, the foam of the infinite (Fenomenología 914) Alberto Moreiras is a professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.

His latest book is Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada (Madrid, 2016), and “Piel de lobo, 1: Posthegemonía” and “Piel de lobo, 2: Infrapolítica” are forthcoming in 2018. He is coeditor of Política común. A Journal of Thought.

Note 1 “The Lottery in Babylon,” p. 106.

Works Cited Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers. Routledge, 1982.

Benjamin,Walter. “The Destructive Character.” SelectedWritings,Volume 2: 1927–1934, Belknap, 1999, pp. 541–42.

———. “Fate and Character.” 1919. SelectedWritings,Volume 1: 1913–1926, Belknap, 1996, pp. 201–6.

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Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Lottery in Babylon.” 1944. Collected Fictions, edited by Andrew Hurley, Penguin, 1988, pp. 101–6.

Cercas, Javier. El impostor. Random House Mondadori, 2014.

Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Fenomenología del espíritu.Translated by Manuel Jiménez Redondo, Pre-Textos, 2006.

———. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge UP, 1975.

Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 193–242.

Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge UP, 1983.

Marías, Javier. Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí. Alfaguara, 1994.

Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael. “Carácter y destino.” Ensayos 3. Babel contra Babel, edited

by Ignacio Echevarrría, Debate, 2016., pp. 631–51.

———. Mientras no cambien los dioses, nada ha cambiado. Alianza, 1986.

———. Vendrán más años malos y nos harán más ciegos. Destino, 1993.

Shakespeare, William. Richard III. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington Square Press, 1996.

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The Object of Allegory (A Polemic) Jacques Lezra Abstract: This article reads together Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cygne” and sections from Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia in order to argue that a pathology of melancholic allegory and the norm of grievable object loss coexist in an endless and nondialectical struggle that is to be affirmed. The allegory of melancholia translates the loss of the object into the defective principle on which—because of our structural disanalogy, because of the conflict between institution and principle at the heart of the catastrophe of representative democracy today—subjects stand forth as distinctly grievable-ungrievable objects, and on this defective concept may found ephemeral, transparent, and formal administrative modes, agencies, and instances of association. These are called, in the article, globally weak republican institutions.

Keywords: melancholia, object loss, Baudelaire, Freud, republicanism, modernity [L]et us speak of the leaders; for why should anyone talk about the inferior philosophers? The leaders, in the first place, from their youth up, remain , , ignorant of the way to the agora [οὗτοι δέ που εκ νέων πρω~τον μὲν εις , , αγορὰν ουκ ἴσασι τὴν ὁδόν], do not even know where the court-room is, or the senate-house, or any other public place of assembly; as for laws and decrees, they neither hear the debates upon them nor see them when they are published; and the strivings of political clubs after public offices, and meetings, and banquets, and revellings with chorus girls—it never occurs to them even in their dreams to indulge in such things. And whether anyone in the city is of high or low birth, or what evil has been inherited by anyone The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 86–101 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.86

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from his ancestors, male or female, are matters to which they pay no more attention than to the number of pints in the sea.

Plato, Thaetetus (1914)1

My topic is the historicity of the allegorical object.

I’ll need to be clear about what I mean by “object”; about where the allegorical object lodges; and about the dynamics I intend.

You won’t be surprised to hear that allegory, haunted by the agora, the forum, the public assembly, has an old relation to the speech on which the city is built. Nor will you be surprised if I say that political representation is allegorical, in the strongest sense of both “politics” and “representation”— that is, in the sense of the terms that goes to their complex roots in the violences of association and exclusion.2 These observations just unfold what the Greek couplet of allos + agorein tells us: that allegory means speaking otherwise than is spoken in the forum. We might let this individual stand for the attributes he or she bears; or we might let the name of the class of individuals bearing those attributes stand for whatever individual of the class; or we might let this particular sign, or term, or name stand for that general concept, or this concept for that class of objects. We might work on a different level; we might allow the concept of a “class of objects” to stand in place of a principle of ostensible similarity relating these “objects.” Each of these unsurprising assertions marks an episode in the story of sacrificial substitutions in which allegory’s kinship with political representation unfolds.

Political representation and the object of allegory are things wrought; they enter into circulation, acquire value, are consumed, transformed, and traded together.Together, they bear second-order values not dissimilar to the second-order value that accrues to the concept and practices of “translation,” the value of designating the processes by which value accrues to produced objects in circulation. Different moments in different modes of production will produce differently configured couplets for consumption at the time, and in later years, and under other constructions of value, production, circulation, consumption, and so on.

Say we try to spell out, historically and formally, this reciprocal relation.

Say we do so today—that is, in the shadow of the 2016 presidential election,

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at a time when political representation enters into profound crisis in the United States.We soon find ourselves in regressive dilemmas that affect, or should affect, our sense of what it means to be part of the forum, the agora.

Take the dyadic Scholastic formulas for the sign, Aliquid stat pro aliquo and Supponit aliquid pro aliquo: “something [that] stands for something else” or “something [that] serves to refer to something else,” or “denotes something else,” or “stands in place of something else.” This thing stands in place of that; but of course not every thing can stand in place of some other thing; a chair, manifestly a thing, does not stand in for or stand in the place of an apple. Or perhaps it might, under circumstances we would have to stipulate, and for a group of people who might understand the convention and who would recognize themselves as a group, partly because they share a relation to these conventions and to the objects, aliquid and aliquo, whose relation of standing-for is governed by these conventions. Perhaps we might want to say that “standing for” and “referring” or “denoting” imply a third party—what Charles Sanders Peirce called an “interpretant” who can determine that yes, indeed, Aliquid stat pro aliquo; or for whom “this” stands for “that”; or even less definitively, a third whom we imagine as an addressee or a witness to our designating, even just for ourselves, this as an object for which something else can stand, to me. Perhaps the existence of the figure of the interpretant entails the (prior) work of protocols that serve to establish just who (or what group, or agency or institution) serves felicitously as an interpretant; and the (eventual) work, performed by another or by the interpretant at a different time, establishes that what the interpretant takes to be a relation of standing-for is indeed that thing, a thing, aliquid, for the interpretant. Or perhaps the existence of the figure of the interpretant will be taken to be axiomatic, and the eventual work clarifying the norms that figure establishes will be consigned to an episcopate. As the standing-for that relates aliquid to aliquo becomes something that we or some interpretant might be able to designate, it will stand before us, for someone else again, as a thing that can stand, for me or for another, pour moi, for the ways in which aliquid stands for aliquo. Finally, today, a conflict between institutions and principles— call these the electoral college and the principle that popular votes count equally—intervenes to disaggregate the figure of the interpretant; to delegitimate it; to strip institutions and principles in conflict of whatever natural or axiomatic authority we’ve granted them.

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One way to tell the story of the relation between political representation and the object of allegory concerns the emergence, the characteristics, and the eventual fate—the dissolution, the catastrophe—of the norm-providing third.

The controversial rhyming of modernization and secularization soon shapes our approach: faith in the figure of the interpretant wanes; the episcopate charged (by whom, after all?) with administering the norms that govern what will stand for what, or in relation to what thing, loses its ground and its brief. Let’s adapt Walter Benjamin’s schema: the interpretant as flaneur, “standing on the threshold of the metropolis as of the middle class,” an embodiment of the “intelligentsia” that “sets foot in the marketplace-ostensibly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer. In this intermediate stage, in which it still has patrons but is already beginning to familiarize itself with the market, it appears as the boheme” (“Baudelaire” 10). Benjamin concludes: “To the uncertainty of its economic position corresponds the uncertainty of its political function” (10). When the aura of its hermeneutic privilege fades, the intelligentsia, the interpretant-episcopate, hands off its authority to compensatory institutions: this is the history, often bloody and always discontinuous, of secularization. When those institutions in turn disclose their contradictory, violent incoherence, a further compensation occurs: desecularization, the return and the renaturalization of the allegorical repressed, the disclosure of a long-obscured object, quo, eclipsed in modern prose’s shop-worn quid—“America,” made “great again.”

This, at any rate, is the history that the uncertain intelligentsia tells today, or that some members of that class tell about that class (that object).

It, this history, too does work: explanatory, consoling work—the work of mourning. Can allegory do other work than the work of mourning in the age of its desecularization?

It’s much too long a story to tell in a brief essay, so I’ll offer instead just a few scenes and draw a polemical conclusion.

Focus first on a shift that seems to occur roughly in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the European metropolis, thick with the wealth of the colony and with the violence of industry: between 1861, when Baudelaire published the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal, and 1917, when Freud published Trauer und Melancholie. That this period and this shift are my focus is dictated in part by our circumstances today: by the circumstance that the simultaneous crisis of credit capitalism and the reconfiguration of the nation-state around global The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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oligarchic networks produces a history for itself, rooted in the first articulations of industrial capitalism with a recognizable, post-Renanian concept of “nation”; by the catastrophic emergence of electoral fascism in the United States.

Here are verses from Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cygne,” to which I’ll return.

Benjamin remarks in the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project) that the poem “has the movement of a cradle rocking back and forth between modernity and antiquity” (“Baudelaire” 356) [die Bewegung einer zwischen Moderne und Antike hin und her schaukelndenWiege (Gesammelte 450)]. (Not all cradles rock happily: think of the answer Whitman’s poem gives, to the rhythm of the cradle’s rocking, in the exactly contemporaneous “A Child’s Reminiscence,” better known as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”: “[T]he sea, / Delaying not, hurrying not, / Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, / Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death; / And again death, death, death, death” [165–69])3 This is Baudelaire. Let’s attend to the back-and-forth movement his verse gives its allegorical object: Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal, Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l’homme d’Ovide, Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu, Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide Comme s’il adressait des reproches à Dieu! (Baudelaire 91) Here is Richard Howard’s excellent translation: I see it still, inevitable myth, like Daedalus dead-set against the sky— the sky quite blue and blank and unconcerned— that straining neck and that voracious beak, as if the swan were castigating God! (91) “I” tells the poem’s reader that it sees a swan sign; the poem designates it. What “I” sees is first a strange, fateful myth (Howard: a “still, inevitable myth”) and then—as though to disclose the register in which this direct identification of the swan sign with the myth occurs—“I” sees this “myth” at the uncertain juncture of a double simile (“like Daedalus […] as if […] castigating”). By this point, it is not obvious what it means for “I” to see an The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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object, or if it is one, since what “I” sees is not only a bird but also the acoustic echo of a sign in another sign (le signe, le cygne), as well as a myth. And since whatever it is that “I” sees can both be seen for what it is (whatever that is) and seen comme, like or as, something else, it is likewise hard to tell just what sort of thing the aliquo of our Scholastic dyad, this “I” that can see in this way, will be—is the lyric “I” something of the nature of the swan, or of the sign, or of the myth, or of what can be seen under the aspect of a similitude?

And who is it, or what—what third—is it that witnesses or constructs this strange scene? (“To the uncertainty of its economic position corresponds the uncertainty of its political function” [Benjamin, “Baudelaire” 10]) However we tell the story that the poem tells, we’ll have moved uncertainly away from the sign, the swan, “le cygne”—rocking, perhaps.

Toward what and by what means? At some point before 1917, as the object in which “I” invested affection was lost to “me,” the “shadow of the object fell upon the ‘I’,” and, Freud says, “the ‘I’ could henceforth be judged by a special agency as though it were an object [wie ein Objekt], the forsaken object” (Mourning 249; emphasis added) [“Der Schatten des Objekts fiel so auf das Ich, welches nun von einer besonderen Instanz wie ein Objekt, wie das verlassene Objekt, beurteilt werden konnte” (Gesammelte 435)].4 Mourning, the social expression of grief and object loss, disclosed its kinship to melancholia, private and endless, shadowy and seemingly objectless. Up to this point, “New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone, / Old quarters, everything,” every object, “becomes for me [an] allegory” (Baudelaire 91)—that is, every object that I, Baudelaire’s moi, and Metropolitan Europe’s “I,” as well, every object I turned up as such or could regard with affection, becomes allegory: objects made or unmade, objects single and atomic as an event, or the vision of an escaped swan, or objects aggregated of other things and objects, like a palace or a scaffolding. Every thing, every object—stony and heavy and material things, or ephemeral and conceptual ones like a rhyme; a name we allude to; a concept like “economic class” or “nation,” or whatever abstract object a word refers to, everything—becomes an allegory: every object I turned up when I walked in the city alone or alongside you; everything became grievable for me and for you.5 Everything was at hand, where we could see and hold it in public, and where you and I could lose it. And any this for that, aliquid pro aliquo, becomes, “devient,” something- or everything-forsomeone, pour moi. Whatever it is, a rule or an agency or a convention or a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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contingency, that governs this becoming derives neither from the side of the dyadic sign nor from the side of the interpretant.Whatever it is emerges and lodges with us in the forum, in the agora: a part of the city, but foreign to it as well—extimate. But from this point forth—sometime after 1917, after the violent shadows of decolonization and world war fell on the European metropolitan class and on mere mourning, and “I” stood in the light of the unconscious—the “I” began to wind its way, solitary and self-forsaken, judged by a special agency or instance, Instanz, that it generates for the purpose and carries with it.

Just how the rocking fall into, then out of, mourning allegory happens; to what it happens; and for whom—these are obviously literary questions in the mid-nineteenth century. Less obviously, they are sociological ones; and much more obscurely, they are questions that pertain to political economy.

Let’s pause with Baudelaire, to understand first the hinge that I’m suggesting obtains between mourning, objects, and allegory. Say that sometime between 1857 and 1861, “allegory” was the public loss of objects publicly recognized as losable. What I understand by the becoming-allegorical of every-such-object, by its devenir allégorie, will be tied to the sense of the terms that surround my definition: what was “loss,” then, as France’s colonial power reshaped itself under the Second Empire’s particular dispensation?

What did the “public” mean in the time of Baron Hausmann? And to whom?

What were “objects” under the regime of mass-production and of industrial capitalism? What was “everything,” tout—since it is not just this or that discrete thing that has a historical way of being, but also the collective concepts into which we group them? And perhaps most complexly, what did it mean, when Baudelaire was writing “le cygne,” for something “to become,” devenir? I will want, for every object that I affect, that it should lose, in its becoming allegorical, a specific anchor to the historic object that it is; it will lose this or that scaffolding on a building on that street or this. Every object I affect to lose will gain, will have to gain—according to an economy we would again have to examine in the philological context in which the Fleurs du mal are published—generality and exemplarity. Objects become representative; they become, ils deviennent, stand-ins for classes of objects, bearers and revealers of the concept of which they are instances. For an object that I affect, a grievable object, to become allegory means that it has shed its here-and-nowness and assumed, for you and me and as a part of a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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general lexicon, the recognizable form of its conceptuality. The swan I see becomes a sign we read as we pass, or a sign that I make to you in this poem I call “Le Cygne,” “The Sign,” or “The Swan.” The allegorical sign is marked and enriched by the loss of its ob-ject, a loss recollected in and repaid by the concept that the object, phoenix-like, becomes.We recognize that allegory is in mourning, and you and I emerge from mourning it.

Now let’s return to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. Sometime around 1917, ostensibly comparing what he calls the “normal affect of mourning” with the “pathological condition” of melancholia, Freud allowed himself to tell the little story we just heard. “[T]he shadow of the object,” he writes, “fell upon the ‘I’” (Mourning 249); it fell just there at a certain moment in the subject’s normal experience of object loss, with pathologizing effects.We’re inclined to be indulgent with Freud’s little story. The psychic system can only be referred to tropically; it is properly, that is, literally, unrepresentable.

We can analogize it to writing pads; its dynamics seem to us like the work of agencies or Instanzen—it works like the prehensile hand—or we may compare the apparatus to a hydraulic system or a battle ground, or call it an “apparatus”—but it is none of these. And when the characters in our stories act—when the hands, or writing pads, or agencies, or objects we refer to tropically act over time—in ways that are also unrepresentable and are also referred to tropically, then we are squarely in the world of narratively extended metaphors or, classically, of allegory. For no shadows are cast by the sorts of objects Freud has in mind when he says that “the shadow of the object fell upon the ‘I.’” No sun lights the corners of the psychic apparatus; the “I” is not a surface on which shadows can fall. Even the verb tense in Freud’s famous phrase is, in one of its senses, allegorical. It may well be that at a certain point in the progress of a case whatever it was that we call or called, allegorically, the shadow of the object, fell upon the analysand’s “I”: a discrete event in my description of the development of a pathology; an event followed by certain symptoms—by melancholia. But the melancholic cannot put in the past that falling of the object’s shadow; she or he cannot experience it, the falling of the shadow of the object, as past. What Freud calls the “work of melancholy” does take place, first becoming (so often) a form of mania linked to “my” regression into primary narcissism, and then becoming a recollection of the melancholic condition—but this pastnessas-regression and futurity-as-recollection is not something the melancholic The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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can look forward to. Freud’s “little story,” his sentence-long story, is not only an allegorical rendering of the unrepresentable falling into melancholia of normal grief at object loss, and of the emergence of psychic special agencies that will manage that fall; it is also a sentence-story about the representability or unrepresentability of mental objects in general, and about the Instanzen, the (minimally social, minimally political) agencies or professions like psychoanalysis or like poetry, that arise when we either seek to represent such mental objects, or seek to grieve the loss of well-known, but mistaken, ways of describing or of mourning them. “[T]he shadow of the object fell upon the ‘I’, and the ‘I’ [can] henceforth be judged by a special agency as though it were an object, the forsaken object” (Mourning 249). A fantasy, an allegory of the genesis of psychoanalysis as the melancholic agency, the Instanz, is tasked to judge, beurteilen, the “I.” A fantasy, an allegory of the special status of the languages of psychoanalysis, whose objects, the objects and dynamics of the psychic apparatus, are always only spoken of as though, wie, they were forsaken objects, lost objects—that is, doubly removed, letgo-of, or forsaken [verlassen] and spoken of as if they were forsaken.

We are social, even political, animals, to the extent that we share a disposition toward objects: we take them to be, indeed we fashion them as, things we can possess and openly lose, mourn, grieve for. For a thing to be a thing, another must know that I possess this thing or that it can be possessed, or grasped, or fastened on to; another recognizes that I can lose it, or that I can be dispossessed of it. Grieving and mourning concern the public loss of objects publicly recognized as losable: I am not mourning if you don’t know I am, or if you couldn’t know that I am, or if what I have lost is not the sort of thing one can lose. It is because we both can lose this object, this ob-ject cast before us as losable, as grievable, that we recognize in one another a likeness, a common quality, a kinship, even a form of fraternity: we fall under the same concept. The mother, of course, is our first object; part of what we express, violently, in wishing her death, is the desire that she be losable, that she may be at our disposal in the way that other objects are, as such, like bobbins or tops we can fling off, away, Fort, and recover as we will. And the father is, of course, the sign we erect in place of our desire for the mother’s death. It, too, like all objects, becomes allegorical—becomes allegory—for us to lose.

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consequence.This band of brothers is, in allegory, theologico-political society: it is society built upon an Oedipalized fashioning of the object, upon an object we understand to be allegorically sacrificeable.We are all children of the object.

So far, so good.You will have heard echoes so far of other works by Freud and works of Jean-Luc Nancy. But when Freud discloses melancholia’s kinship to mourning, we lose, publicly, that common disposition toward, and filial relation to, the object. We lose our likeness-in-respect-to-the-object—an object we imagined as grievable, as what is cast out for anyone to seize or lose. We appear to gain, correspondingly, two private qualities. The first is a shadowy objectality: the “I,” in the shadow of the ungrievable object, can now be lost, as well, to itself. As an ungrievable thing, as something potentially lost in the shadow of its objectality, the “I” is already wounded, its narcissistic integrity already unmade. It’s hard to count this as a gain, but without this unmaking of our primary narcissism, there would be no objects for “I” and thus no world. The second is that “I” gain a special agency or instance for judging “myself,” for judging my “I” objectively [beurteilen]: “I” gain a faculty, Instanz, capable of seeing “I” as if it were cast out into the world of grievable ob-jects—as if it both were a member of the class of objects and entertained no likeness at all with every other object.

But our loss goes deeper still.When I, or the “I,” fall under the shadow of the object, or when the object’s shadow falls upon me, then “I” may be losable to myself—but this condition will not be the source of “my” identification with you.You may well suffer from melancholia, as well; I may look across the Parisian street and read in your face a sign of misery that mirrors mine; you may become for me an allegory of object loss, as I become it for you.

But I will not derive, from this seeming likeness to you, kinship, the sense of association that structures public mourning, the public face of allegory.

Melancholia is not just radically individualizing; it marks the outside of collective representation, the outside of the representation of the collective as an object we share.

Yes, something’s happened in the sixty-year period between the composition of Les Fleurs du mal and the publication of Mourning and Melancholia.

Whatever it is bears on the political status of the mode of allegory: it bears on its objects; on allegory’s disciplining relation to its objects; and on how the public, collective aspect of representation comes into crisis. Over these years, allegory’s object has become, for me, ungrievable.Whatever its object, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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it is I, the “I” inasmuch as it or I can be lost as well as, or as easily as, any object that I affect; it is this “I” that I, the melancholic, lose after I, too, come onto the scene as an object. Or rather, it is when and because I come onto the scene doubly that I cannot grieve for myself as I would, say, for my dead mother, or for the father I have killed, or for the passing of the republic.

When we pass from mourning to melancholia—when we lose mourning’s public object and come instead under its mere shadow—we fall into a time when political identities and political associations must be reconceived under the shadow of the loss of the loss of the object. The logic of melancholia cannot be squared with classically understood social practices, and perhaps it cannot be squared with any form of communitarian imaginary.

The logic of melancholia: sometime around 1917, I came before myself in my likeness to another object and thus as a member of the class of objects that I am also constituting, by means of a disposition or a specific agency or instance, Instanz. I constitute this class of objects by separating them apart or cutting them apart originarily from other ob-jects: be-ur-teilen. I am, at this moment, a member of the class of objects that I can lose, as well as the dynamic principle of similarity that constitutes them as that class, distinct, cut apart from other objects. I am a member of that class; I am ob-jected from it as its principle.

It is this double logical status—as member-of and principle-regarding or principle-of relation, or principle-of-axiomatization-of—that I cannot share with you. I cannot be like you in this, alike though you and I may be in being members of the class of grievable objects. And this is the time of the melancholic. It is not time in any recognizable, phenomenological sense—not time we can experience, not the time of grieving or mourning, which will always fall to our past or characterize a future we dread—but the condition of belonging to what you are at the same time constituting as a class.

The full story, which would be complicated, long, and thrilling to tell, has a number of crossing (jostling, contradicting, rhyming) plotlines. You will have heard me trying to capture a number of them more less explicitly.

Echoes of others may have sounded as well. Each of these stories will have to be told in two times and according to two narrative procedures: in the time of mourning, in the time of allegory-as-mourning, and the logicostructural time of melancholia.

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One of the stories thus doubly told clusters about the battles regarding the formalization of the notion of a class or of a set in philosophical logic, in the period from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Here, for instance, the equivalence I have been drawing between the notion of the “individual” and that of the “object” would be fundamental. Here we will be concerned with the possible reality or nonreality of so-called abstract or conceptual objects. The main figures in our story would be Mill—whose System of Logic is a reference point for both Freud and Marx—Cantor, Frege, Meinong, Russell, and Zermelo.

A second plot also concerns classes and individuals, but in quite a different sense: it regards Marx’s articulation of historicism with structure; it turns on the absorption of Marx’s critique of the ob-jectality of objects, and on the conception of ideology that flows from it. After Marx’s critique of Feuerbach, objects cannot be lost or mourned, and commodities cannot be cast off—they cannot be ob-jects alone, because they are always part of us and are always casting their objectness upon us. The main figures in our story, on this side, will be Mill, Marx, Lukács, and Althusser.

A third plotline concerns the conceptualization of social and political association under the figure of administration, even bureaucracy. The allegorical form—that is, the political instance—of melancholia is modern bureaucratic administration. Here the main figure of our story is Weber.

There will be more such stories: they will have different intensities; they will have discontinuous and uneven relations to their two narrative frames.We might refer to the tangle of intensities that unravels from Baudelaire’s word devenir as the historical dynamics of the object of allegory. Now let me turn away from this dynamic and return to the subject of allegory and political representation. My topic was the historicity of the object of allegory. I’ve made an argument for understanding one conception of allegory’s relation to the object in terms of the production of publicly recognizable likeness among individual members of a set, which also means the production of a commonly graspable, hence also losable and grievable, ob-ject: the classic definition of the concept. This I’ve called “mourning-allegory.” But I have suggested that there’s another figure of politics that becomes available once the disposition to the object becomes, in Freud’s terms, melancholic: ungraspable and ungrievable. This figure of politics establishes, enacts, and denies the principle that individuals have objective likenesses that make The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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them susceptible of class representations. This I have called “melancholic allegory.” I have made the point historically, as if the second, a melancholic allegory and a melancholy politics, followed historically upon the first—as Freud follows upon Baudelaire, the age of global capital upon the age of the Renanian nation-state, the catastrophe upon the republic.This impression is incorrect, both as regards Freud’s understanding of the couple, “mourning” and “melancholia,” and as regards my reconstruction of the two terms as principles of political representation, one based in the Oedipal concept and one based in the logically undecidable structure of belonging-to and setting-the-principle-for a class or a concept in which objects are grouped.

Melancholia, Freud tells us, is a pathological version of grievable object loss, always trembling at the edge of experience, a permanent possibility of regression. Like Freud, I will call what I am describing and promoting today a “pathology.” The pathology of melancholic allegory and the norm of grievable object loss coexist in an endless and nondialectical struggle (a rocking motion [Baudelaire]). Both are to be affirmed. The allegory of melancholia translates the loss of the object into the defective principle on which, because of our structural disanalogy, because of the conflict between institution and principle at the heart of the catastrophe of representative democracy today, you and I stand forth as distinctly grievable-ungrievable objects, and on this defective concept may found ephemeral, transparent, and formal administrative modes, agencies, instances or Instanzen of association—in short, as weak republican institutions.

Jacques Lezra is professor and chair, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside. His recent books include Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), ‘Contra todos los fueros de la muerte’: El suceso cervantino (La Cebra, 2017), and Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010).

Notes 1 In Plato, with an English Translation, translated by Harold North Fowler,W.R.M.Lamb, Robert Gregg Bury, and Paul Shorey, Harvard UP, pp. 119–20.

2 The bibliography on each of the terms that concern me—“object,” “allegory,” “politics,” “representation”—is vast. The works that lie directly behind my argument are fewer. Centrally and manifestly is Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. I’ve had in mind two of Paul de Man’s essays, especially The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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“Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” and “The Concept of Irony.” Another work that is useful, though extremely different, is Angus Fletcher’s Allegory:The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. An influential reading of the phrase from Freud that I center on is in Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. A review of the philosophy of the object is Oliver Boulnois’s “Objet.”

For a treatment that stresses the term’s value in the Marxist tradition, see also Etienne Balibar’s “Althusser’s Object.”

3 These verses, with notes regarding the emendations and changes that Whitman introduces in different editions, can be found in Whitman (350).

4 Freud adds to his term Instanz the modifier “special,” “besondere,” in all editions after the first 1917 version.The expression besondere Instanz crops up elsewhere—in “Das Unheimliche” (1919): “Im Ich bildet sich langsam eine besondere Instanz heraus, welche sich dem übrigen Ich entgegenstellen kann, die der Selbstbeobachtung und Selbstkritik dient, die Arbeit der psychischen Zensur leistet und unserem Bewußtsein als, Gewissen bekannt wird” (247); in Das Ich und das Es (1923): “So haben wir wiederholt gesagt, daß das Ich sich zum guten Teil aus Identifizierungen bildet, welche aufgelassene Besetzungen des Es ablösen, daß die ersten dieser Identifizierungen sich regelmäßig als besondere Instanz im Ich gebärden, sich als Über-Ich dem Ich entgegenstellen, während das erstarkte Ich sich späterhin gegen solche Identifizierungseinflüsse resistenter verhalten mag” (277); in Die Frage der Laienanalyse (1926): “Als ich Ihnen das Verhältnis von Ich und Es auseinandersetzte, habe ich Ihnen ein wichtiges Stück der Lehre vom seelischen Apparat unterschlagen.Wir waren nämlich gezwungen anzunehmen, daß sich im Ich selbst eine besondere Instanz differenziert hat, die wir das Über-Ich heißen.

Dieses Über-Ich hat eine besondere Stellung zwischen dem Ich und dem Es” (253); in “Humor,” “Dieses Ich ist nichts Einfaches, sondern beherbergt als seinen Kern eine besondere Instanz, das Über-Ich, mit dem es manchmal zusammenfließt, so daß wir die beiden nicht zu unterscheiden vermögen, während es sich in anderen Verhältnissen scharf von ihm sondert” (386); in “Dostojewski und die Vatertötung” (1928): “Sie wird ins Ich aufgenommen, stellt sich aber darin als eine besondere Instanz dem anderen Inhalt des Ichs entgegen.Wir heißen sie dann das Uber-Ich und schreiben ihr, der Erbin des Elterneinflusses, die wichtigsten Funktionen zu” (408); and in the Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933):“Dem Verdrängten müssen wir eher einen starken Auftrieb zuschreiben, einen Drang, zum Bewußtsein durchzudringen. Der Widerstand kann nur eine Äußerung des Ichs sein, das seinerzeit die Verdrängung durchgeführt hat und sie jetzt aufrecht halten will. So haben wir’s auch früher immer aufgefaßt.

Seitdem wir eine besondere Instanz im Ich annehmen, die die einschränkenden und abweisenden Forderungen vertritt, das Uber-Ich, können wir sagen, die Verdrängung sei das Werk dieses Über-Ichs, es führe sie entweder selbst durch oder in seinem Auftrag das ihm gehorsame Ich” (75). See also Etienne Balibar’s entry/essay on “Instanz/Agency” in the Dictionary of Untranslatables.

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5 I’m using the notions of “grief ” and “grievability” in a way that’s consonant with Judith Butler’s, in Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning andViolence: To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief—“Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?” “What is it in the Other that I have lost?”—posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness. But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others.Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability? (30) I take the phenomenon of “grief ” more broadly than Butler does (it embraces the tout in Baudelaire’s poem: everything that becomes allegory). This in turn means understanding melancholia perhaps differently from Butler: not as a “narcissistic preoccupation,” not even as primarily concerning the self, the subject, the individual psyche, but rather concerning relations of and among objects.This in turn brings the question of moving “melancholia […] into a consideration of the vulnerability of others,” partly out of the realm of human decisions.

Works Cited Balibar, Etienne. “Althusser’s Object.” Translated by Margaret Cohen, and Bruce Robbins. Social Text, vol. 39, no. 39, 1994, pp. 157–88. JSTOR, https://doi .org/10.2307/466368.

———. “Instance/Agency.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 23–24.

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal.Translated by Richard Howard, Godine, 1982.

Benjamin,Walter. “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris” (Exposé of 1935). The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard UP, 1999, pp.10–11.

———. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 5.1, Suhrkamp, 1991.

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———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Translated by John Osborne,Verso, 1998.

Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.

Columbia UP, 1987.

Boulnois, Oliver. “Objet.” Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, edited by Barbara Cassin, Seuil, 2004, pp. 867–69.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning andViolence. Verso, 2004. de Man, Paul. “The Concept of Irony.” Aesthetic Ideology, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 163–84.

———. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–1980, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Johns Hopkins UP, 1981, pp. 1–25.

Fletcher, Angus. Allegory:The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Cornell UP, 1964.

Freud, Sigmund. Das Ich und das Es. GesammelteWerke, vol. 13, Fischer Verlag, 1998, pp. 237–93.

———. “Das Unheimliche.” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, Fischer Verlag, 2006, pp.

229–71.

———. Die Frage der Laienanalyse. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, Fischer Verlag, 1991, pp. 209–87.

———. “Dostojewski und die Vatertötung.” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, Fischer Verlag, 1991, pp. 399–421.

———. “Humor.” GesammelteWerke, vol. 14, Fischer Verlag, 1991, pp. 383–93.

———. Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey et al., vol. 14, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74, pp. 239–58. 24 vols.

———. Neue Folge derVorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. 1933. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, Fischer Verlag, 1996.

———. Trauer und Melancholie. 1917. GesammelteWerke, vol. 10, Imago, 1991, pp.

428–46.

Plato. Thaetetus. Plato, with an English Translation, translated by Harold North Fowler, W.R.M.Lamb, Robert Gregg Bury, and Paul Shorey, Harvard U, 1914.

Whitman,Walt. “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” The CollectedWritings ofWalt Whitman, vol. II: Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1860–1867, edited by Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Boldgett, Arthur Golden, and William White, New York UP, 1980, pp. 343–51.

Winnicott, D.W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 34, 1953, pp. 89–97.

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Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx and Engels Deborah Elise White Abstract: Paul de Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity” serves as a telling point of departure for reexamining the configuration of revolutionary history and revolutionary modernity in polemical writings written by Marx and Engels in the aftermath of the 1848–1849 European Revolutions.What de Man calls “literature” models an impasse between modernity understood as an aspiration to pure action free from the mediation of history and history understood as the inevitable recursivity through which such action finds itself caught in reflections on—and repetitions of—the past. Marx’s early “Letters to Ruge” already hints at the potential conflict and co-implication of a backward looking-left melancholia with a forward-driving revolutionary project. These issues get taken up not only in the much cited Eighteenth Brumaire but in the more purely polemical writings of Marx and Engels’s London exile. In these writings, Marx and Engels explore how the anarchic putschist fantasies of their fellow communists (August Willich and Karl Schapper) paradoxically converge with the most retrograde apologetics of their liberal opponents (Gottfried Kinkel and Arnold Ruge).They detail the short circuit between calls for an immediate renewal of revolutionary action and a nostalgic retreat from any action into secondhand literary posturing. At the same time, Marx and Engels’s own relation to that short circuit proves difficult to stabilize.Their allegory of history as long-term struggle does not conceal their ironic imbrication in the aporias they delineate.The conclusion is not that revolutionary Marxism has no alternative but to reiterate the same short circuit, but rather that it must recognize, with Marx and Engels, how

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revolution inevitably turns on the impasse as it takes place in a disjunction of time with itself: a conjuncture whose status remains radically undecidable.

Keywords: Paul de Man, Friedrich Engels, exile, irony, Gottfried Kinkel, Karl Marx, modernity, political Romanticism, revolution, Arnold Ruge, Karl Schapper, Carl Schmitt, August Willich I. New Beginnings Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings.

Etienne Balibar (2007)1

Paul de Man’s 1970 essay “Literary History and Literary Modernity” closes on a provocation—the suggestion that “the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions” (165).2 The claim that access to empirical facts is mediated by written texts or even the slightly stronger claim that written texts form the bases of historical knowledge is hardly shocking. As Jonathan Arac writes, de Man’s words “‘merely’ recall what every good positivist already knew” (135).3 Yet they continue to provoke, because they also allow for a more counterintuitive reading, as if the truth hidden in the guise of wars or revolutions somehow were writing—as if wars and revolutions were themselves written texts. What would give writing an ontological (as opposed to merely epistemic) priority? For that matter, what is a written text? For de Man, the “literary” of literary history and literary modernity suggests one answer. Elsewhere in his essay, what he here calls “written texts” are simply called literature. But literature, as de Man defines it, offers no criterion for the implicit opposition of authenticity and masquerade. It does not “[rest] at ease in its own self-definition” and, as “an entity that steadily puts its own ontological status into question” (164), its truth is of a very peculiar kind.Therefore, “with respect to its own specificity […] literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth” (163). As both error and truth, a written text masquerades as itself before it masquerades as anything else. Wars and revolutions effectively involve a vertiginous masquerade of masquerade. The literary self-doubling that is

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also a self-undoing is an index of how they should be read but also of what they themselves not only are, but do.

De Man does not explicitly prepare his concluding reference to revolutions.4 Like any good surprise ending, it compels one to return to the beginning—a revolution of sorts—and reread the entire essay as if revolution had been its subject all along. In what follows, I proceed in just that spirit, considering how de Man’s understanding of literary history and literary modernity might be brought to bear on the configuration of revolutionary history and revolutionary modernity in Marx and Engels, especially as that configuration informs their polemical writings in the aftermath of the 1848–1849 European Revolutions. In these highly contentious and often crude writings, Marx and Engels directly confront the impasse of revolutionary action under conditions of political reaction. “Literary History and Literary Modernity” offers a surprisingly apposite point of departure to return to their arguments, because an impasse of action is crucial to the definition of literature that informs its equation of written texts and revolutions.

For de Man, literature as such always aspires to the condition of modernity—to begin anew each time it begins. In other words, literature aspires to act and, in the immediacy of action, to annihilate the mediations of time. However, as writing, it unfolds in time and thus reflects the immediacy of its act in an unavoidably recursive loop. To be a writer is to be both the agent and the historian of one’s action. On the one hand, the writer remains so closely involved with action that he can never free himself of the temptation to destroy whatever stands between him and his deed, especially the temporal distance that makes him dependent on an earlier past.The appeal of modernity haunts all literature. It is revealed in numberless images and emblems that appear at all periods—in the obsession with a tabula rasa, with new beginnings—that finds recurrent expression in all forms of writing. (“Literary” 152)

On the other hand, “assertions of literary modernity often end up by putting the possibility of being modern seriously into question […] the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.” (152, 161). No sooner does an act of writing assert itself than its prospective energies turn retrospective. The writer’s new beginning is not only implicated in the past but inevitably returns to it with every new The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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attempt to break free. Literature may be described as “the steady fluctuation of an entity away from and toward its own mode of being” as long as one does not mistake this fluctuation for “an actual sequence in time” (163). To unfold the aporia of history and modernity (“dependence on the past” and “obsession […] with new beginnings”) into a continuous historico-narrative movement from past to future or, indeed, into an ethico-political one from text to act is to allegorize an impasse that defies the very oppositions it is being used to define. As de Man writes in “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” “what we call allegory” is “the (ironic) pseudo-knowledge […] which pretends to order sequentially, in a narrative, what is actually the destruction of all sequence” (69).

This kind of argument is often considered a retreat from ethical and political responsibility, as if impasse and aporia were high-minded code words for a Hamlet-like indecision or so many theoretical excuses. Yet, the very history of the word “revolution” testifies to the imbrication of history and modernity as de Man understands it. To recall that ambivalent philological inheritance is by now something of a commonplace but still pertinent (cf. Arac 136). In pre-Enlightenment political thought, revolution designates the preestablished round of political change.

Mimicking the circular trajectory of the stars, governments supposedly proceed through a finite number of possible forms only to arrive at a return of the same. With the American and French revolutions, this concept changes to that of revolution as a singular and transformative event—a new beginning that breaks with (or simply breaks) the circuits of cosmic history (Arendt 21–35 and passim). When de Man argues that no written text can break free of the past without inadvertently restaging it, he is, as it were, already suggesting that the difference between the pre-Enlightenment concept of revolution and its modern counterpart is less decisive than undecidable.

A similarly uneasy imbrication of history and modernity informs many of Marx’s writings. In the well-known opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, revolution names both the necessity and the impossibility of new beginnings: Just when [men] seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods

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of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. (Marx and Engels, CW 11.103–4; cf. Werke 3.115)5

In this passage, revolution is revolutionary masquerade, as it moves away from and toward its own mode of being in a single, undecidable gesture.6 Even when the text calls for the proletariat to “draw its poetry from the future” and “[strip] off all superstition” with regard to history, including if not especially revolutionary history, it leaves telltale signs that nothing can originate in the absence of repetition: “In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead” (106). A ringing battle cry of revolutionary modernity, “let the dead bury their dead” cites an imperative to modernity nearly 2,000 years old.

It also signals a kind of manic euphoria, a refusal to mourn or even to acknowledge mortality. The peculiarity of that refusal draws Derrida’s attention in Specters of Marx, where he writes that Marx knew very well that the dead have never buried anyone. Nor have the living who were not also mortals, that is, who properly bear within themselves, that is, outside themselves and before themselves, the impossible possibility of their death. It will always be necessary that still living mortals bury the already dead living. The dead have never buried anyone, but neither have the living, the living who would be only living. (114; emphasis in original)

For Derrida, as for de Man, time cannot untangle the ontological knots of entities that steadily fluctuate away from and toward their own mode of being (“still living mortals”). It cannot settle the question of truth and error or dissolve the masquerades of being. Whether or not it can finally do so in The Eighteenth Brumaire remains something of a question. Reading a little differently than Derrida, one might shift the emphasis from letting the dead bury their dead, to letting the dead bury their dead: bury their dead rather than bury the living, who, in the theater of revolution, have become the dead’s especial prey. In different ways, the figure resonates throughout Marx’s oeuvre. One may even hear an echo in the preface to the first edition

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of Capital: “We suffer not only from the living but the dead: ‘Le mort saisit le vif!’” (CW 35.7)—“the dead man clutches onto the living”.7 All quotation is repetition, but when Marx quotes the gospels in The Eighteenth Brumaire, he is also quoting—that is, repeating—himself. More precisely, he is quoting his own earlier quotation of the same passage in letters to Arnold Ruge, written in 1843 and published in 1844 as part of their short-lived editorial venture The Franco-GermanYearbooks.8 The last of the Letters sums up the journal’s aim as “the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age” (CW 3.209). This critical project was also born of exile: when both Ruge and Marx found their respective journalistic outlets banned by the Prussian censors, they joined together in Paris to start a new journal. The experiences of exile before and after 1848 may well seem sharply distinct. While Marx’s London exile lies “on the other side of the divide represented by the debacle of 1848,” his Paris exile is untouched by “the trauma of defeat” (Kouvelakis 232). Nonetheless, the Letters curiously anticipate many difficulties of the later exile texts, not least in the injunction to let the dead bury their dead.9 Though Marx broke with Ruge in 1844 over the Silesian weavers’ strikes and communism, their 1843 debate is still in a political and psycho-political register. The Letters’ complain of Ruge’s lack of faith in “the approaching revolution” and of what another generation might call his left-wing melancholy; they urge him to complete the work of mourning—bury it once and for all—in order to take up the “struggles and wishes of the age”: Your letter, my friend, is a fine elegy, a breath-taking funeral dirge. But it is utterly unpolitical […] However, I am tempted to add a finale and when all is at an end give me your hand and we can start all over again [damit wir von vorne wieder anfangen]. Let the dead bury [their] dead and mourn them. In contrast, it is enviable to be the first to enter upon a new life [die ersten zu sein, die lebendig ins neue Leben eingehen]. (CW 3.134; Werke 1.338)

Politics begins where mourning ends when it does not foreclose mourning altogether. To act politically, one must break with history and even with time (“when all is at an end”). In doing so, one becomes doubly alive as the German underlines (“die lebendig ins neue Leben eingehen”). The

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excess suggests the euphoric tendency of the demand Marx places on both Ruge and himself to be, as Derrida might say, only living.10 But while the Letters invoke a new, because only living, life that is to break with mortal (finite, temporal) history, they do so in the context of a larger Hegelian framework, in which everything new is old again: “Reason has always existed,” even if “not always in a rational form” (208).

Criticism must pursue the task of “self-clarification” by tracing “the final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality” in order to “deduce a true reality” (208; emphasis in original). The historical model that makes this self-clarification possible disallows any clear-cut opposition of old and new: “our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future but to complete the thought of the past [… M]ankind will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of its old work” (209; emphasis in original).

What is at stake in the differences between these passages and in their varied emphases on “new life” and “old work”? Obviously, the Letters reflect the young Hegelianism of the young Marx and their initial appeal to the new may be read as mere rhetorical flourish.Yet something more is at stake in the contrast between the two passages than either underdeveloped ideas or overdeveloped rhetoric. The contrast sets to work the very impasse of history and modernity that, however differently articulated, proliferates in The Eighteenth Brumaire and elsewhere in Marx’s later writings. In the Letters, revolution appears both in the immediacy of new beginnings and in the recursivity of self-clarification, a contradiction that the later work does not so much resolve as disseminate. Marx never entirely buries his younger self—or younger selves. The hyperbolic wish-fulfillment that informs the imperative to “let the dead bury their dead” is always its own curious double. What the words explicitly demand and what they implicitly acknowledge are at odds, and their repetition across such different texts as the Letters and The Eighteenth Brumaire underlines the predicament. Just “when [men] seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves, in creating something that has never yet existed” (CW 11.103–4), they remain most in thrall to the dead who are never only dead. Like de Man’s literature, Marx’s revolution exists “at the same time in the modes of error and truth” (de Man, “Literary” 163) and, one may add, in the modes of life and death.

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Balibar’s suggestive characterization of Marx as “the philosopher of eternal new beginnings” (6) captures the irony. The very phrase “eternal new beginnings” suggests something like Schlegel’s paradoxical definition of irony as “permanent [p]arabasis” (qtd. in de Man, AI 179), an interruption that takes place at every point in a text: “Irony is everywhere, at all points” (de Man, AI 179). How can the new be eternal? How can the eternal begin?

The rest of Balibar’s sentence seems to resolve the irony allegorically into a narrative. It remains a disjunctive and repetitive one: “Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings, leaving behind him many uncompleted drafts and projects” (6). A sense of incompletion and (re)turn to new beginnings similarly characterizes “proletarian revolutions” in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “they interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh” (19).11 One may even read the last sentence as covertly autobiographical. For Marx, 1848–1849 does constitute a decisive interruption. But his post-1848 exile is, by the same token, a repetition.12 That is, it is the impossible scene of new “new beginnings.”

And while Marx’s interventions into the émigré politics of 1850–1852 often exemplify the “willfulness, exaggeration, [and] overstatement” that Edward Said calls the “characteristic styles of being an exile” (182), they are also an occasion for Marx, together with Engels, to undertake a critique of revolutionary modernity as the secret sharer of the history it thinks to bury.

II. Exile in Action Hamlet may speak of action—he still remains Hamlet.

Frederick Engels13

In a short-lived journalistic venture of his second exile, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politische-öconomische Revue, (edited from London in 1850 and published in Hamburg), Marx reiterates the “revolutionary party[’s]” need for critical self-clarification: “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies” (CW 10.345).14 Unlike The Eighteenth Brumaire (an acknowledged historical and political masterpiece), Marx and Engels’s ruthless criticisms of their fellow exiles have typically seemed of largely psychological and biographical, rather than theoretical or political, interest;15 yet they strikingly crystallize the aporias of revolutionary history and revolutionary modernity for the post-1848 exile The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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in ways that speak to a larger trajectory of debate about agency, temporality, and the repetitive, recursive character of the “revolutionary process.”16 In these works, Marx (sometimes in collaboration with Engels) details a short circuit between, on the one hand, the exiles’ calls for an immediate renewal of revolutionary action untethered to recent defeats and, on the other hand, their nostalgic retreat from any action into secondhand literary posturing. At the same time, Marx and Engels’s own relation to that short circuit proves difficult to stabilize. The allegory of history that they appear to put in its place does not entirely conceal the ironic and interruptive force of their own most vituperative insights. The correct interpretation of past failures should give them a purchase on future events. As Engels writes to Marx on 13 February 1851, “we can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers, because we have learnt our lesson and they have not” (CW 11.290). Having learned their lesson, they are in a position to work through the impasses of history and modernity—practically speaking, to return to the study of political economy or, later, build a new international worker’s movement. Yet their “ruthless criticism”—Engels’s letter refers to “merciless criticism” (290)—perhaps does something more than the concept of criticism or the image of lessons learned can convey.

A particularly telling critique of the aberrant will to revolutionary modernity appears in the 1852 Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. In 1875, when Marx republished the Revelations, he added an epilogue that reflected on its harsh condemnations of his onetime Communist allies August Willich and Karl Schapper. The epilogue describes the events of 1848 and 1849 as a trauma that dislocated the revolutionaries in time as well as space. History had left them behind, and, in compensation, they denied historical reality by engaging in the conspiratorial politics of the putsch and the coup d’état:17 The violent suppression of a revolution leaves a shock [eine Erschütterung] in the minds of its protagonists [Mitspieler], particularly those forced into exile […] a shock that, for a time renders even the most able people, not responsible for their actions [unzurechnungsfähig].They are unable to accept the course of history [Sie können sich nicht in den Gang der Geschichte finden]; they are loth to realize that the form of the movement has changed. Hence the conspiratorial and revolutionary games they play [daher Konspirations- und

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Revolutionsspielerei], equally compromising for themselves and for the cause they serve. (CW 24.52; Werke 18.568–69)18

Revolutionary conspirators act as if the arbitrary seizure of power could break through all historical and temporal constraints. In other words, they seek to destroy “the temporal distance that makes [them] dependent on an earlier past” (de Man, BI 152). However, their political fantasies merely reiterate the shock of a past they cannot absorb, responding to the violence of suppression with their own (for the most part imaginary) counterviolence.

In the juridical language of the somewhat forgiving epilogue, they are unzurechnungsfähig—not guilty for their crimes—but only by reason of insanity.

The 1852 text of the Revelations quotes the speech Marx gave at the 15 September meeting of the Communist League, in which the break between the two factions became final.19 It satirizes his opponents as so obsessed with action that, paradoxically, they would rather sleep through history than acknowledge historical reality. They prefer inaction to impure action: They regard not the real conditions [wirklichenVerhältnisse] but a mere effort of will [der bloße Wille] as the driving force of the revolution.Whereas we say to the workers: “You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in conditions [um die Verhältnisse zu ändern] but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power,” you say on the contrary: “Either we seize power at once [Wir müssen gleich zur Herrschaft kommen], or else we might as well just take to our beds [oder wir können uns schlafen legen].” (CW 11.402–3, translation modified; emphasis in original; Werke 8.412–13)

The manic, conspiratorial “at once” forecloses temporal difference. It is blind to “real conditions” and to the years of struggle that real conditions entail.

Therefore, conspirators merely play at revolution. They appear themselves to be historical agents, but they are, at best, actors in the theatrical sense of the word: a pun implied in the German text by the tension between “Mitspieler” or “protagonists” of revolution, and the “Revolutionsspielerei” or “revolutionary games” that they play. These actors “strut around in the theatrical cloak of the conspirator” (CW 24.15).What the conspirators seek, even if unbeknownst to themselves, is not to take action but to deny the reality of what action in exile must be. Therefore, they require “not real The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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conspiracies [but] the appearance of conspiracies [nicht wirkliche Konspirationen, doch den Schein der Konspiration]” (CW 11.449; Werke 8.461). Marx explicitly characterizes this attitude as “dogmatic instead of critical, idealistic instead of materialistic” (402).

The hollowing out of the real has a specifically linguistic dimension in the reduction of political discourse to a series of buzzwords: “Just as the word ‘people’ has been given an aura of sanctity by the democrats, so you have done the same for the word ‘proletariat,’ you substitute the catchword of revolution [die Phrase der Revolution] for revolutionary development [Entwicklung]” (CW 11.403; Werke 8.413). For Marx, there is no such thing as a “proletariat” or a “revolution” outside of historical development—the promised fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national struggles.

When his opponents treat the “proletariat” or the “revolution” dogmatically as absolute (ahistorical) terms, they are substituting words for events. The “mere effort of will,” “der bloße Wille,” with which they think to impose the revolution, is no more substantial, no more effective or real (wirklich), than the play of the letter that links “Wille” to Marx’s opponent Willich.20 Anarchic putschist fantasies thus paradoxically converge with the most retrograde literary apologetics for liberalism’s failures. Their modernity turns out to be anything but modern.The point is made explicit in Marx and Engels’s 1852 satire The Great Men of the Exile, in which they take on their opponents en masse.21 This satire argues that is not by chance that Willich and Schaper (revolutionaries who claim allegiance to Blanqui) have broken with Marx and Engels only to form an alliance with the historically belated liberal poseur Gottfried Kinkel. Kinkel was a professor of art history and a minor man of letters who fought alongside Engels in the 1849 Baden uprising. Taken prisoner and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor, he became famous when, at one of his trials, he made a sentimental and wildly popular speech in his own defense.22 After escaping Spandau Prison, aided

by Carl Schurz (later Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of Interior), he arrived in London as something of a political celebrity—applauded alike by Dickens’s Household Words and Julian Harney’s Red Republican. But in The Great Men of the Exile, Kinkel serves as the very type of political fecklessness. His “sham romanticism” [Die erlogene Romantik] exemplifies an anachronistic relation to history that can only hinder revolution from ever realizing itself (CW 11.237; Werke 8.243). When Willich and Schapper join Kinkel in plans to The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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raise funds in the United States, they betray the true character, which is to say the fictive character, of their calls to action: “the whole romantic lie” (237). The reference to Romanticism here takes in a world of errors. More particularly, eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang and Jena Romanticism (often blurred together in the text’s overlapping citations) inform the literary fantasies that sustain Kinkel’s persona.

More is at stake than the self-deceptions of exile. Kinkel’s popularity exemplifies not only the false and sentimental character of émigré society but also the false and sentimental character of the Vormärz as it contaminated the revolution itself: “Gottfried is the hero of that democratic Siegwart epoch that flooded Germany with endless torrents of patriotic melancholy and tearful lament” (229). Siegwart is the eponymous hero of a popular novel of the Sturm und Drang published by Johann Müller in 1776. Somewhat resembling Mackenzie’s man of feeling, Siegwart is self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, and quick to tears. Kinkel is all the more easily cast as the hero of a sentimental novel, because when he was in prison, he and his wife had collaborated on the production of a hero-worshipping biography by Adolf Strodtmann.23 Marx and Engels have only to quote Strodtmann’s biography—beginning with the Goethe-baiting pretentions of its title, Wahrheit ohne Dichtung—to make Kinkel look ridiculous.

Episode after episode is taken up in scathing fashion. In a scene that could come straight out of Müller’s novel, Gottfried “climb[s] the Drachenfels together with friend Paul and against this romantic backcloth he breaks into dithyrambs” (231). A long quote follows (“‘Farewell to friendship!—I shall find a brother in our savior;—Faith shall be my bride;—farewell to sisterly loyalty—I am come to the commune of many thousands of just souls!’”) until, at last, “the departure of his friend gives Gottfried the opportunity to sing an ecstatic hymn to his own soul” (231). The purpose of Kinkel’s Siegwartian melancholy, as Marx and Engels represent it, is primarily to enable narcissistic self-regard: “Inevitably, Gottfried, who on the whole has experienced nothing, constantly dwells on his inner feelings” (232). Likewise, the purpose of his myriad love affairs is “nothing but Gottfried’s coquettish flirtation with himself ” (237).

At one point, quotations from Strodtmann appear as a list of disconnected words, and phrases: “‘Destroyed!’ ‘Silent!’ ‘Most agonising torment!’ ‘Burning brow.’ Deepest sighs.’ ‘His mind was lacerated by the wildest pains,’ etc. [und The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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der gleich]” (239). Liberal sensibility is reduced to (or revealed as) a series of catchwords as empty and cliché-ridden as the revolutionary catchwords deployed by Willich and Schapper. In this use of disconnected quotation, the text recalls Heine, cited several times in The Great Men of the Exile and always a literary touchstone for Marx.24 Heine’s self-conscious deployment of conventional phrases within his early lyric poetry exposes an absence of inner experience behind the very language that most seeks to affirm inwardness. In an analysis of this dynamic, Thomas Pfau underlines the implicit suggestion that “such interior experiences can now be mass produced” (416). Marx and Engels, too, are concerned with the mass production of inwardness as symptomatic of a larger malaise. Certainly, one of their subsidiary targets is, as S.S. Prawer has written, “the industry of literature […] the commercial exploitation of political fame or notoriety; the cult of personality in the literary field” (Prawer 189; emphasis in original). They lambast Kinkel’s wife Johanna, in particular, for her capitalist acumen when keeping the imprisoned Kinkel before the public eye: “[she] employed […] Strodtmann to assemble Gottfried’s most secret diary-feelings and prostitute them to the public for a considerable sum of money; she organized collections of every kind and in general she displayed undeniable commercial talent and great perseverance in converting the feelings of the educated public into hard cash” (256). As a series of recognizable signs, sentimentalism enables emotion to be translated into the universal equivalent—money—with Kinkel himself as the ultimate in modish revolutionary commodities.

In effect, the industry of literature makes a commodity of the German revolution, and in doing so exposes the sentimental commodifications already at work in the revolution. The extraordinary public response to Kinkel’s story is symptomatic of a long-standing political malaise: It is well known that the German philistine is endowed by nature with a beautiful soul. Now he found his most cherished illusions cruelly shattered by the hard blows of the year 1849 […] Every heart yielded to a melancholy languor and the need began to be universally felt for a democratic Christ, for a real or imagined sufferer who in his torments would bear the sins of the philistine world with the fortitude of a lamb and whose sufferings would epitomize in extreme form the inert chronic nostalgia of the whole of philistinism […] Kinkel was the man of the moment [der Mann der Zeit] and as such he was immediately accepted by the German philistines. Every The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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paper abounded in anecdotes, vignettes, poems, reminiscences of the captive poet […] All other profane victims of the movement, all who had been shot, who had fallen in battle, or who had been imprisoned, disappeared into naught beside this one sacrificial lamb, […] In short, we have the perfect image of the democratic Siegwart epoch […] and Siegwart-Kinkel never felt more at home in any role than in this one where he appeared to be great not because of what he did but because of what he did not do. He seemed great not by dint of his strength and his powers of resistance but through his weakness. (255; emphasis in original)

Kinkel is the man of the moment, because the moment misrecognizes the revolution in its belated, literary simulacrum rather than recognizing it in the dead and imprisoned who are its authentic representatives. But for that very reason, he does represent something true about his time. The democratic Siegwarts of 1848 wallow in the failure of revolution because they are, like the elegiac Ruge of the early Letters, “utterly unpolitical” (CW 3.134). Transposing the bourgeois literary sensibility of the 1770s into the bourgeois political sensibility of the 1840s, they fail, all the better, to indulge in what Lacan terms “the supreme narcissism of the Lost Cause” (311). Mourning the revolution is their revolution.

The temporary alliance of Willich and Schapper with Kinkel testifies to their shared inability to come to grips with “the course of history” or historical “development.” Marx’s 1852 insistence on the need for “15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles” points to something like a sequential if not teleological vision of how the shock of exile may be integrated—or allegorized—into a larger historical narrative. But that alliance also exposes difficulties that the polemical point scoring should not obscure. In particular, it exposes the paradoxical intimacy of the violent will to action and the reflexive retreat into historicism. In de Man’s words, “the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.” Allegories of history that narrativize the short circuit of modernity and history may not be able to escape this disruptive irony.

References to Jena Romanticism in The Great Men of the Exile both underscore that short circuit and hold a peculiar suggestiveness for the problem of irony throughout the text. Kinkel is not only Müller’s Siegwart; he is also Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. (The medieval setting of Novalis’s novel is especially apropos, since Kinkel had been one of the few The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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democratic leaders in Cologne to advocate the preservation of the old medieval guild system [Sperber, Rhineland 274f].) But to be more exact, Kinkel is an ersatz Ofterdingen in search of recognition as the real thing: “[he] is searching not for the ‘blue flower’ [the object of Ofterdingen’s quest] but for a woman who will acknowledge his claims to be Heinrich von Ofterdingen. And in the end he really did find the ‘blue flower’, a little faded and yellow, in a woman who played the much longed-for comedy in his interest and her own” (237). In a theatrical display that is absent interiority and, for that reason, missing genuine exteriority, Kinkel reveals his true essence, which is none at all: “Gottfried here unveils the whole romantic lie [die ganze Romantike Lüge] which he had woven around himself; the carnival pursuit of disguising oneself as other people is his authentic ‘inner being’ [sein wahres inneresWesen]” (237, 243).

Kinkel’s inwardness is as hollow as his exterior commitments. Even his most revolutionary activities are part of “the whole romantic lie.” His politics thus reflect the inauthenticity of a being who seeks only to aggrandize subjective experience. Despite vast political differences,Willich and Schapper’s conspiracies are similarly theatrical, making their joining forces with Kinkel all too predictable. Violent fantasies and melancholic ones come to much the same thing. Decades later, Engels returns to this theme in an article on the “Progamme of the Blanquist Commune refugees”: “Hamlet may speak of action—he still remains Hamlet” (CW 24.15).

In The Great Men of the Exile, the “the whole romantic lie” is ambiguously poised as both a devastating comment on anachronistic pseudo-Romanticism and, so to speak, on Romanticism itself.25 As the last, it partly anticipates Carl Schmitt. In Political Romanticism, Schmitt argues that for the Romantic, “the external world and historical reality are of interest only insofar as they can be—to use that expression from Novalis—the beginning of a novel.

The given fact is not objectively considered in a political, historical, legal or moral context. On the contrary, it is the object of an aesthetic and emotional interest” (84). For Schmitt, the very expression “political Romanticism” is an oxymoron, since Romanticism disavows the actual conditions constitutive of the political. As a result, the Romantic ego inevitably suffers disillusionment in its escape from “the external world and historical reality.” Romanticism cannot help but become “inert, chronic nostalgia.” Its telos was always bourgeois playacting, even (if not especially) in its politics: The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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[R]omanticism as a total phenomenon ended in the Biedermeier […]

Revolutionary inner strife became an idyll.The bourgeois was in rapture over romanticism and saw in it his artistic ideal and his rejuvenation.The cycle of antitheses from revolution to idyll was ended.The ironic romantic had become the victim of an evil irony […]The romantic hated the philistine.

But it turned out that the philistine loved the romantic. (93)

The ironic relation between Romanticism and philistinism that Schmitt articulates may clarify the ambivalence The Great Men of the Exile exhibits toward Romanticism.The text exudes hatred of philistinism, a paradigmatic Romantic pose, and it exudes hatred of the philistinism that anti-philistinism itself can become—of which “the democratic Siegwart epoch” is a prime example: in place of real democratic struggle is a democratic idyll.

The irony is, as irony tends to be, double-edged. Marx and Engels strictly distinguish “real conditions” (wirklichen Verhältnisse) that must be endured in real time from the conspirators’ fantastic “at once,” on the one hand, and Kinkel’s “sham romanticism,” on the other. At the same time, their compulsive polemicizing on behalf of the real suggests how easily it may be confused with willful desires and anachronistic shadows, and the attempt to distance themselves from other factions often seems to collapse under the weight of its own rhetorical violence. As in Schlegel’s account of irony as permanent parabasis, the irony punctures the text at all points. The shock of exile seemingly produces a short circuit that Marx and Engels subject to “ruthless criticism”; at the same time, their writing suffers something like the same short circuit. In its very ruthlessness, The Great Men of the Exile echoes the will to action or modernity that is its target, even as its wide-ranging literary allusions enter into circuits of intertextuality that seem to leave that target behind for the self-reflexive pleasures of literary-historical parody.

It seeks to destroy things as they are, and yet it embeds itself in a receding past whose rhetorical effects it cannot subdue. This textual aporia testifies to something more than the “trauma of defeat” (Kouvelakis 232).The shock of exile is finally exemplary because it repeats a more original shock that Marx and Engels can neither allay nor contain: the shock of the impossible revolutionary injunction to let the dead bury their dead.

Certainly, Kinkel’s “carnival pursuits” can scarcely compete with the carnival quality of Marx and Engels’s prose. In addition to Müller and Novalis, The Great Men of the Exile includes allusions to Boiardo, Cicero, Diderot, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Goethe, Heine, Kotzebue, Nicolai, Schiller, and Von Eschenbach.26 Marx and Engels are themselves (perhaps quite knowingly) great men of the exile. Of course, they are great men whose irony allows them a margin of critical selfconsciousness and hence an escape hatch to “the external world and historical reality.”27 But irony’s critical purchase on reality remains elusive. The sheer repetitiveness and aggression of Marx and Engels’s writing operates as if to censor the knowledge that they can never be ironic enough to satisfy their own critical ruthlessness.With Schlegel and Hoffmann as points of reference, instead of Novalis, de Man remarks in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” that “far from being a return to the world, the irony to the second power or ‘irony of irony’ that all true irony at once has to engender asserts and maintains its fictional character by stating the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world” (BI 219).

Marx and Engels go so far as to describe the entire exile community as a fictional world. The world of exile (in)action mimics the actual world of which it is no longer a part: The privations of individuals, intrigues, plots, self-praise—the great men spent their energies in such paltry activities [Lumpereien]. But the emigration had gained something, a history of its own, lying outside world history, [eine Geschichte für sich, die außerhalb derWeltgeschichte liegt], its own political pettifoggery alongside public affairs. And the very fact that they fought each other led each to believe in the importance of the other. (CW 11.311; translation modified; Werke 8.318–19)

A mock-Hegelian history-for-itself (eine Geschichte für sich), the exiles’ “own” history, has the reflexivity of pure fiction. But however self-reflexive (or, for that matter, self-deceptive), how can any history be said to lie outside of world history? As Marx himself goes on to remark, “this display of alleged connections and imagined conspiracies […] was not without serious consequences. It provided the governments with the pretext they needed to arrest many people” (311).

The fictions of exile not only have “serious consequences” but effectively disrupt any stable allegorization of world history. The “lumpereien” of the exiles recalls the similarly hard-to-locate “lumpenproletariat” of The Eighteenth Brumaire (written just a few months earlier): the lumpenproletariat is the proletariat that lies outside the proletariat: “the whole indefinite, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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disintegrated mass [… the] scum, offal, refuse of all classes” (CW 11.149).

Jeffrey Mehlman describes this passage as a moment in Marx’s writing in which “heterogeneity in its unassimilability to every dialectical totalization, is affirmed” (13; emphasis in original). The lumpenproletariat disintegrates the class struggles enacted in the earlier stages of France’s 1848 revolution, much as the exiles’ “own” history of Lumpereien disintegrates world history in the wake of the revolution’s later collapse. Unless, that is, such Lumpereien show that the integrity of world history has itself never been anything other than a fiction and that the very invocation of “world history” is liable to become a catchword (phrase), like “proletariat” or “revolution,” when it becomes detached from its own historicity. One is never done learning from history in the sense Engels uses the expression in the letter already quoted: “we can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers, because we have learnt our lesson and they have not” (CW 38.290). As Massimilano Tomba writes in the preface to Marx’s Temporalities, “Historical materialism is not a passe-partout for the comprehension of history, but a practical mode of intervention into history” (vii).

The peculiar intricacies of The Great Men of the Exile become still more evident when one turns to its satirical account of Marx’s former collaborator and friend Arnold Ruge, which I will touch on briefly to conclude. During the revolution, Ruge had been a member of the Frankfurt parliament. Once in exile, he joined the Central European Democratic Committee alongside Ledru Rollin, Mazzini, and Kossuth and was briefly Kinkel’s main rival for leadership of the German exile community.While Kinkel typifies a belated Romanticism for Marx and Engels, Ruge typifies an equally belated antiRomanticism. Kinkel plays at being Siegwart or Ofterdingen, and Ruge at being the Enlightenment critic Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (cf. Prawer 190–91). Both men understand themselves on the model of a history that no longer has any purchase on events. Thus, Like Nicolai [Ruge] fought valiantly against Romanticism because it had long since been demolished philosophically by Hegel in his Aesthetics and

by Heine from the point of view of literature in Die Romantische Schule.

But unlike Hegel, Ruge agreed with Nicolai in arrogating to himself the right as an anti-Romantic to set up a vulgar philistinism and above all his own philistinic self as an ideal of perfection. (266)

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Ruge suffers from a logorrhea that, much like Kinkel’s carnival pursuit of disguise, derives from overconsumption of other people’s texts: “Every evening,” Ruge writes down all the novel or bright ideas or “anecdotes” that he has heard, read or just picked up during the day. As opportunity arises these materials are then made to contribute to Ruge’s daily stint which he performs just as conscientiously as his other bodily needs. It is this that his admirers refer to when they say that he cannot hold his ink. The object [Gegenstand] of his daily literary production is a matter of complete indifference […] This daily stylistic diarrhea [Durchfall] he likes to designate the “strikingly beautiful form” [Die durchschlagende schöne Form] and he regards it as adequate grounds for passing himself off as an “artist.” (CW 11.267; Werke 8.275; translation modified; emphasis in original)

For all of his anti-Romanticism, the “indifference” of the object to Ruge’s writing reveals him as Romantic in the sense Schmitt diagnoses. Though Schmitt characterizes Ruge as “an enemy of the romantics” (72), his account of political Romanticism as “subjectified occasionalism” (18) captures how Ruge (as Marx and Engels depict him) formalizes each episode, anecdote, or text he encounters into the occasion of his own self-regarding textual productions. The problem is not so much that Ruge is an aesthete as that his aesthetic pretentions are as delusional as his political ones. What Ruge imagines to be durchschlagend is actually a Durchfall—which means diarrhea but also, idiomatically, any breakdown or failure. Still a melancholic, Ruge is at once overly dependent on earlier texts and unable to digest them. He cannot strike anything.

Yet, rather obviously, a certain stylistic diarrhea also informs the The Great Men of the Exile. What S.S. Prawar says of Marx’s 1860 exile polemic, Herr Vogt, may easily be said of this text: “Marx overstrains the technique of literary quotation and allusion […] His dragging-in of the most diverse literary works at every opportunity seems frenzied and forced; it tends to weary the reader and dissipate the intended effect” (266). Prawer remarks on Marx’s increasing awareness of the problem. In Prawer’s words, Marx realized “that there was something amiss with his assimilation of other people’s books” (266). As evidence, he quotes a letter Marx wrote in 1868 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to his daughter Laura that explicitly addresses his relationship to books.

Its language is redolent of the attack on Ruge in The Great Men of the Exile: You’ll certainly fancy, my dear child, that I am very fond of Books […] but you would be quite mistaken. I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history. (266)28

For Prawer, Marx’s ironic self-consciousness offers a stay against the frenzied and forced excesses of his writing; but in the letter to Laura, Marx nonetheless figures himself as condemned by a law of literature that operates on the level of bodily functions that cannot be mastered by consciousness at all. He is an animal-like machine, or a machine-like animal, that consumes, transforms, and ejects the writing of others as so much dung.

The echo of Ruge’s “daily stint” in Marx’s letter serves as a reminder that The Great Men of the Exile is subject to the short circuit it critiques; it, too, is a deposit on the “the dunghill of history.”29 Marx and Engels may well take up the textual carnival with greater wit, self-awareness, and historical insight than their opponents, but they are able to do so not because they are freer of its implications; rather, they are all the more implicated in its production.

Their writing strives to be “durchschlagend”—that is, to strike through the texts of the past and the fictions of the present and thus to destroy the temporal distance that stands between the writers and their deed. But as a Durchfall, it never entirely controls its textual—or temporal—functions. In that aporia, between the Durchschlagend and the Durchfall, Marx and Engels tease out the impasse of their own revolutionary project.Whether in the Letters to the Franco-German Yearbooks or in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (to remain with examples already discussed), revolution is nothing if not the repeated encounter of history and modernity.

Does this mean that revolutionary Marxism has no alternative but to be infantile or academic? To be Willich and Schaper or Kinkel and Ruge?

Or, worse still, repeatedly to rediscover that the two are ultimately one and the same? I draw a rather different conclusion. The de Manian equation of written texts and revolutions need not leave one suspended between equally self-deceived positions.The point is rather that revolution necessarily turns on an impasse that prevents either the claims of modernity or the claims of history from ever being entirely fulfilled. As the early Letters to Ruge already show, even if they do not quite say, the elegiac and the political are at once The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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utterly distinct and impossible to distinguish.To draw one’s poetry from the future is always to begin with the past.Therefore, revolution takes place in a disjunction of time with itself: a conjuncture whose status remains radically undecidable because one can never say with certainty that this is where history ends and modernity begins—or vice versa. That residue of undecidability is the occasion of decisions that can never be completely moored to a past fractured by its own undecidability any more than it can be completely unmoored from it.30 The aporia that allegory both unfolds and obscures in such expressions as “the course of history” or “revolutionary development” may therefore be as much the birthplace as the graveyard of politics.

Deborah Elise White is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University. She is the author of Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Stanford University Press, 2000) and of essays on Romanticism, Theory, and Deconstruction.

Notes 1 The Philosophy of Marx, 2nd ed., p.6.

2 I would like to thank Jacques Lezra and Tara Mendola for their organization of the conjoined American Comparative Literature Association seminars on Allegory and Political Representation that are the basis for this special issue of Yearbook of Comparative Literature. I would also like to thank Jacques Khalip for inviting me to participate in the Brown University Colloquium on Romantic Communities, at which I presented an earlier version of this essay, as well as Frederic Burwick and Thomas Pfau for opportunities to speak on Marx and Engels when this project was still getting underway. Finally, my thanks go to Andrew Altman, Elissa Marder, and Orrin Wang for their longtime intellectual encouragement and advice.

3 The scare quotes around “merely” suggest Arac is well aware of how easily the self-evident point can be elided even when it is conceded. In developing his discussion of his final sentence in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Arac also connects it to Derrida and “what was not yet in 1970 a universally familiar slogan (il n’y a pas de hors-texte)” (135) as does Barbara Johnson (176).

Since Arac takes De Man to be making the relatively uncontested claim that “we never know history immediately but only as shaped by language” (136), he argues that the scandal over de Man’s language arises from elsewhere—in particular, the privilege de Man accords literature, but also the unacknowledged pathos of finitude that underlies the argument as Arac reads it. Johnson’s reading of the same sentence has a different emphasis that brings out what is perhaps somewhat less self-evident in de Man’s words: The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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a war or revolution is a text in the form of history, not history in the form of a text. It is inscribed in human historicity instead of on paper.The interpreter is therefore inside the text, not outside it. “Empirical facts” pretend that they are outside the text, but if wars or revolutions are inconceivable outside the domain of linguistic events, then the text has no outside in which they can exist as facts. (179; emphasis in original)

4 De Man’s essay makes brief mention of “military and imperial achievements” (“Literary” 155) in a discussion of the querelle des anciens et des modernes.The pairing of “wars or revolutions” at the end of the essay calls for further reading.

5 When quoting from Marx and Engels CollectedWorks (CW) or Werke, I give volume number and page number the first time I quote from a particular text, and after I give only the page number when quoting from that same text unless the context of the quotation requires further clarification.

6 I am touching only briefly on The Eighteenth Brumaire to introduce other less well-known works of both Marx and Engels, but the text has engendered a rich tradition of commentary on its constellation of revolution, repetition, and masquerade that I wish to acknowledge. For a sampling, see Mehlman (5–41) and (often critical of Mehlman) Eagleton (162–70), as well as Harries, Petrey, and Stallybrass. Tomba’s recent Benjamin-inflected reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire emphasizes the creative potential of the revolution’s citations of the past, as exemplified in what Marx says about the 1789 French Revolution. In doing so, Tomba recuperates tradition for revolution: “Tradition is not always, nor solely, a weight and a block: it can also serve to glorify the new struggles, to push them forward […] tradition can also be a revolutionary trigger.The parody of the past can be a brake on action, but it can also be an impulse capable of dissolving the shackles of another tradition” (42). Though I find Tomba’s reading at times closer to Benjamin than to Marx, his interpretation of tradition (which may be compared with history in de Man) has a bearing on how I read Marx’s exile writings in later portions of this essay.

7 “Le mort saisit le vif” expresses the legal principle that “the heir is considered as having succeeded to the deceased from the instant of his death” (see “Le Mort”).

On Marx’s and Marxism’s “wrestling with the difficulty of ghosts” (Wang 140) as part of a wider argument about Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Marx, and Romanticism, see Wang (140–57).Wang also reads de Man and Marx together in a chapter that focuses on de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Confessions and Marx’s Capital (63–83).

Though my trajectory is different, my conclusion follows Wang in attending to a certain figure of the machine in Marx.

8 On the Letters as they have continued to inflect a range of Marxian reflection agency, see Bosteels, “What Is To Be Dreamed?” For a brief account of Ruge’s career, see Stepelovich (209–10); for his later life in exile after 1849, see Lattek (87–95) and Ashton (139–50 and passim).

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9 The Letters also anticipate in a more sanguine vein the sardonic opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire (“the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” [CW 11.103]): “The comedy of despotism in which we are being forced to act is as dangerous for him [Friedrich Wilhelm IV] as tragedy was once for the Stuarts and the Bourbons. And even if the comedy will not be seen in its true light for a long time yet it will still be a revolution” (CW 3.134).

10 On the homologies of “despair” and “euphoria” in the Letters—and on today’s Left—see Bosteels Marx and Freud in Latin American (186-87). In a lecture given at Emory University in February 2016 and posted online, Benjamin Noys addresses the “complexity of the binding of life and labor” in Marx (14). (In the question and answer session that followed the lecture, Noys spoke of the “manicdepressive” character of some of Marx’s early writings.)

11 The whole passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire is pertinent (and may have been in Balibar’s mind), not least for the repetitive length with which Marx draws out his point before arriving at the leap out of prose, and out of German, through which he describes how the revolution is finally to realize itself in a leap out of time—as if the sentence were attempting to model the kind of revolution it describes. That its final leap turns out to be a citation, and an allusion to a citation, is in keeping with the ironic character of the entire text: […] proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Here is the rose, here dance!

As the notes to the International edition explain, the quote (meaning, “here is Rhodes, here leap”) alludes to one of Aesop’s fables and appears in Hegel’s Principals of the Philosophy of Right (CW 19.142). On a repetitive return to one’s starting point as a model for revolutionary action in Lenin—and a model for Marxian activists still—see Žižek (86–87).

12 On Marx and Engels’s multiple exiles in relation to the writing of The Communist Manifesto, including their criticisms of the post-1848 emigration in The Great Men of the Exile (a text I discuss at length below), see Puchner (59ff.).

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13 From Engels’s “Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees,” originally the second of his four-part Refugee Literature series for the German SocialDemocrats’ Newspaper, DerVolkstaat. See Marx and Engels, CW (24.14). I have modified the punctuation.

14 Throughout this section, I have drawn on accounts of German exile politics in England between 1849 and 1852 in Ashton (especially 97–167), Lattek (especially 48–137), McLellan (246–62), and Sperber, Karl Marx (263–78).

Gareth Stedman Jones’s biography of Marx appeared too late for me to draw on its rich account of Marx in exile.

15

“It is hard to miss a strong element of pettiness and exaggerated egos in these controversies. This frequently leads historians to reject the spats as trivial and unimportant comparted to Marx’s writing and ideas, while others see them as examples of his arrogance and intolerance of different points of view.There is something to that […]Yet Marx’s personality did not keep him from working with leftists of different points of view in 1848 […] Rather, personal clashes developed in the difficult circumstances of political exile and as a result of the evolution of Marx’s views on revolution.”

(Sperber, Karl 271)

16 I am alluding to Žižek’s discussion of Lenin’s “On Ascending a High Mountain:” “[Lenin] uses the simile of a climber who has to return to the valley after a first failed attempt to reach a new mountain peak as a way of describing what it means to make a retreat in the revolutionary process” (86; cf. the discussion that follows, 86–90).

17 At the time he wrote the epiloque, Marx would have had in mind the continued impact of anarchist, conspiratorial traditions on the Left—not just Blanqui, but also Bakunin and the (then) recent split in the first International.

18 Rosemary Ashton quotes this passage in the introduction to her Little Germany: Exile and Asylum inVictorian England (17).

19 On the split in the Communist League, see for example Ashton (97–114), Lattek (67–82, 110–158), McLellan (246ff.), Mehring (200ff.), and Sperber, Karl Marx (265–75).

20 Marx more or less lured Willich into exposing the extent of his self-importance, by having colleagues draw him out in correspondence. Marx quotes Hermann Heinrich Becker’s letter on Willich in a note to the Revelations: Willich writes me the funniest letters; I do not reply, but this does not prevent him from describing his latest plans for a revolution. He has appointed me to revolutionise the Cologne garrison!!! […] As soon as I have completed the revolution in Cologne he would have no objection to The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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assuming the leadership for all subsequent operations. Very kind of him!

(CW 11.452; emphasis in original)

21 Ernst Dronke helped prepare the manuscript, which was confided into the hands of János Bangya, an Austrian spy who had earned Marx’s confidence.

Bangya delivered it to the Austrian secret police. It was first published in 1930 in Russian and not published in German until 1960.

22 It should go without saying that, though extremely shrewd, Marx and Engels are not always entirely fair (or even entirely honest) in some of their attacks on “ostensible friends” (CW 10.345), whether in The Great Men of the Exile or elsewhere. Writing to Jenny Marx in 1849, Engels concedes Kinkel’s bravery in battle during the Baden uprising: “But of all the democratic gentry, the only ones to fight were myself and Kinkel.The latter joined our corps as a musketeer and did pretty well; in the first engagement in which he took part, his head was grazed by a bullet and he was taken prisoner” (CW 38.203). The Great Men of the Exile makes no such concessions. On Kinkel’s activities during 1848–1849, see Sperber (Rhineland 274–75). See notes 14 and 19 above for a selection of sources addressing the wider complex of refugee politics in which Kinkel and Ruge along with Marx and Engels were key figures.

23 Strodtmann went on to a career as a biographer, translator, and critic of some distinction. His works include a biography of Heine and a translation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, along with translations of a wide range of American, British, and French poetry (see Fränkel).

24 For Marx and Heine, see scattered references and comments throughout Prawer; compare Kaufman (695, 701ff.).

25 On the younger Marx’s increasing distrust of Romanticism and its eighteenthcentury precursors at the time of his editorial work for the Rheinische Zeitung, see Prawer (40). For a perspective emphasizing Romanticism’s contributions to Marx and Engels’s intellectual formation, see Löwy (1–7) and Löwy and Sayre (88–99 and passim). See also Kaufman for a nuanced reading of The German Ideology that teases out the convergence of Romanticism and realism in Marx and Engels; the following is an example: For the place and moment inhabited by Heine, Marx, and Engels the sense that there need be no implacable enmity between Cervantesque satiric narrative and lyric impulse finds its representative in the career and figure of Byron […] Engels aesthetic and political paeans to Byron in The Condition of the Working Class in England (written the year before he and Marx began composition of The German Ideology) are exemplary. (702–3)

26 On the radically destabilizing role of literary allusion in Marx’s philosophical writing and the “shifting identifications to which it lends itself,” see Lezra’s The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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discussion of the allusion to Schiller’s Don Carlos in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (130–40, 144–48).

27 As Martin Puchner writes, “This is not just a case of projecting anxiety onto others. Marx and Engels truly were more principled in their political stance, more thorough in their analyses, sharper in their theory” (61).

28 The original letter was written in English.

29 Compare Parker on the Marx-Engels correspondence: “many scholars have noted (how could they not?) that their correspondence is smeared liberally with excremental imagery” (34). Parker relates antitheatricality in The Eighteenth Brumaire to the anal imagery, traces of homoeroticism, and homosexual panic in the correspondence. Drawing on Arendt, Parker connects this homophobic discourse to Marx’s account of value, in which the concept of labor is modeled on heterosexual procreation (35).

30 My understanding of undecidability is drawn primarily from Derrida, but compare Badiou on the undecidability of the event and the truth of politics (62–67).

Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. “Rereading ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’: Paul de Man’s Ambivalence.” Newman, Clayton, and Hirsch, pp. 121–44.

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin, 1990.

Ashton, Rosemary. Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England. Oxford UP, 1989.

Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought:Truth and the Return of Philosophy.Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, Continuum, 2003.

Balibar, Etienne. The Philosophy of Marx. 2nd ed., translated by Chris Turner,Verso, 2007.

Bosteels, Bruno. Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in a Time of Terror. Verso, 2012.

———. “What Is To Be Dreamed? On the Uncommon Saying:That May Be Correct in Practice but It Is of No Use in Theory.” Academia, https://www.academia .edu/13420936/What_is_to_be_dreamed. Accessed 15 May 2016. de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology [AI]. U of Minnesota P, 1996.

———. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism [BI]. 2nd ed., revised, U of Minnesota P, 1983.

———. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” de Man, Blindness, pp. 142–65.

———. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” de Man, Blindness, pp. 51–69.

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———. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia UP, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, or,Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. Verso, 1981.

Fränkel, Ludwig Julius. “Strodtmann, Adolf Heinrich.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Band 36, Duncker & Humblot, 1893, pp. 605–11. Wikisource, https://de.wikisource. org/w/index.php?title=ADB:Strodtmann,_Adolf&oldid=2493571. Accessed 19 May 2016.

Harries, Martin. “Homo Alludens: Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.” New German Critique, no. 66, 1995, pp. 35–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/488587.

Johnson, Barbara. “Doing Time: Rereading Paul de Man’s ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Newman, Clayton, and Hirsch, pp. 169–80.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Belknap, 2016.

Kaufman, Robert. “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000 pp. 682–724. U of Chicago P Journals, https://doi.org/10.1086/448988.

Kouvelakis, Stathis. Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx.Translated by G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, 2003.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton, 2002.

Lattek, Christine. Revolutionary Refugees: German socialism in Britain, 1840–1860.

Routledge, 2006.

“Le Mort Saisit le Vif Doctrine Law and Legal Definition.” USLegal.com, http:// definitions.uslegal.com/l/le-mort-saisit-le-vif-doctrine/. Accessed 19 May 2016.

Lezra, Jacques. Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic.

Fordham UP, 2010. Fordham Scholarship Online, https://doi.org/10.5422 /fso/9780823232352.001.0001.

Löwy, Michael. On Changing theWorld: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin. Revised ed., Haymarket, 2013.

Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity.Translated by Catherine Porter, Duke UP, 2001. eDuke, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381297.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works [CW]. International Publishers, 1975–2004. 50 vols.

———. Werke. Dietz Verlag, 1956–1977. 43 vols.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. Harper and Row, 1973. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15514-9.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac. U of California P, 1977.

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Mehring, Franz. Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald, U of Michigan P, 1962.

Newman, Karen, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch, editors. Time and the Literary.

Routledge, 2002.

Noys, Benjamin. “Ties That Bind: Life and Labor in (Early) Marx and (Early) Derrida.” Emory University, 18 February 2016. Academia, https://www.academia. edu/22247453/Ties_that_Bind_Life_and_Labor_in_Early_Marx_and_the _Early_Derrida?auto=download. Accessed 24 September 2017.

Parker, Andrew. “Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels, and the Scene of Writing.” Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp.19–41.

Petrey, Sandy. “The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 448–68. U of Chicago P Journals, https://doi .org/10.1086/448450.

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia,Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.

Prawer, S.S. Karl Marx andWorld Literature. 1976. Verso, 2011.

Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes.

Princeton UP, 2006.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 2000.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Romanticism. Translated by Guy Oakes, MIT, 1986.

Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. Liverwright, 2013.

———. Rhineland Radicals:The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849.

Princeton UP, 1991.

Stallybrass, Peter. “‘Well Grubbed, Old Mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)fixing of Representation.” Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 3–14. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/095023898335582.

Stepelovich, Lawrence. S. TheYoung Hegelians: An Anthology. Humanities Paperback Library, 1997.

Tomba, Massimiliano. Marx’s Temporalities. Translated by Peter D. Thomas and Sara R. Farris, Haymarket, 2013.

Wang, Orrin. Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy,Then as Farce. Verso, 2009.

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Bakhtin and Gogol, or, The Question of Allegory and the Politics of Carnival Matthew Walker Abstract: The present article returns to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival in order to reconsider the role that the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol plays for Bakhtin in that theory’s elaboration, from Bakhtin’s earliest writings on the subject in the late 1930s to the publication of his study of Rabelais in 1965 and the companion essay on Rabelais and Gogol in 1972.

Whereas Bakhtin’s published works seem to present Gogol as an exemplary manifestation of carnival in the modern period, his notebooks point us toward a more negative reading of Gogol: as carnival’s nemesis—specifically, as the disorganizing intrusion of allegory into the allegedly organic and symbolic political order that carnival claims as its source and its strength.

Keywords: Bakhtin, Gogol, carnival, Rabelais, allegory, politics The messianic world is the world of universal [allseitiger] and integral actuality. Only in it does a universal history exist. Not as written history, but as festively enacted history.This festival is purified of all celebration.There are no festive songs. Its language is integral prose—prose which has burst the fetters of script and is understood by all the people (as the language of birds is understood by Sunday’s children).

Walter Benjamin (1940)1 Carnival itself […] this, of course, is not a literary phenomenon.

M.M. Bakhtin (1963)2

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It wasn’t what he read about that pleased him, but more the very reading itself, or, to put it better, the process of the very reading, that right there out of the letters some word or other was eternally emerging, though at times only the devil knew what it even meant.

N.V. Gogol (1842)3 To most Western readers of The Work of François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or Rabelais and HisWorld as it is known in English, it may sound somewhat far-fetched to assert that when Mikhail Bakhtin set out in the late 1930s to write what likely counts as his most influential book—the laboratory for his theory of carnival—one of his aims was to clarify the work of Nikolai Gogol, one of the central figures in Russian Romanticism. After all, the author of Dead Souls is not mentioned

by Bakhtin even once in the main text of Rabelais and His World, as a casual stroll through its index illustrates: “Genius, Genres, Giants, Ginguené, Goethe, Goliards,” it reads, but no Gogol (Rabelais 478).4 Nor will the reader encounter Gogol’s name anywhere in the first Russian edition of the book, published in 1965; Hélène Iswolsky’s English translation frequently omits sentences and at times entire paragraphs of the original, but on this point at least it is beyond reproach. However, for a somewhat smaller circle of Western interpreters, namely American Slavicists, our assertion might seem more plausible, though they, like the larger set of readers, may need some convincing that it matters. Bakhtin did in fact publish a short essay on Rabelais and Gogol in 1972 in the Soviet journal Kontekst, dating it from both 1940 and 1970 and thereby tying it to the earliest phase of his work on carnival; he also considered it significant enough to be included in the 1975 collection of theoretical essays Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Questions of Literature and Aesthetics), which appeared just after his death. Given its belated appearance though, “Rabelais and Gogol” strikes many as more of an underdeveloped extension than a starting point; more importantly, its relevance for any broader judgments regarding the validity of carnival as a general theory is far from self-evident.This may well have been why the essay was left out of the American analogue of the collection, which was published in 1981 as The Dialogic Imagination, but, oddly, it has not been included in any of the subsequent Anglophone compendiums of Bakhtin’s writings either.

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Some translations of it are available, but they do not circulate widely, and, barring new academic editions of Bakhtin in English, the situation seems unlikely to change anytime soon.5 Yet even as the connection between Gogol and the theory of carnival largely continues to be neglected in the West, in Russia “Rabelais and Gogol” now stands prominently alongside the Rabelais book in volume 4 of the recently completed academy edition of Bakhtin’s collected works, as if in insistence that they be read together.6 There is evidence to suggest that Bakhtin would have wanted things this way, as will be shown, and, indeed, it may well even be that in the Russian context the weight of canon hinders one from keeping them apart. Russian studies of comic genres have long gravitated toward Gogol, whatever their critical orientation, and in keeping with this, Krystyna Pomorska, in her foreword to Iswolsky’s translation, argues that the “presence of carnival” in Russian literature had already been identified well before Bakhtin by the famous nineteenth-century civic critic Vissarion Belinsky, Gogol’s contemporary, with his “renowned characterization of Gogol’s universe as ‘laughter through tears’” (RW xi). Pomorska’s claim has the air of conventional wisdom about it, even though the characterization is not Belinsky’s but belongs to Gogol himself, or, more precisely, to his narrator in Dead Souls, whose lot it is to gaze upon life “through a laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it” (Gogol’ 7.1:127).

However, before we file this away as conclusive evidence for situating Gogol within a carnivalesque tradition, we might look closer and consider how it might also fall outside of it: first, how Gogol’s “laughter” operates on one side of a set of unresolved oppositions, the other side of which does not favor carnival—between visibility and invisibility, and community and a melancholy alienated from it; second, Belinsky himself cites the remark in support of an argument that Gogol’s work is entirely nonaffirmative, the negation of life itself.7 It so happens this is an argument that will be rehearsed by a number of Gogol’s critics in the Modernist period,8 and one which Bakhtin’s theory of carnival seems designed specifically to counter, as a legacy of Romantic or “subjective-idealist” bourgeois criticism. As Bakhtin insists, “bare negation is completely alien to folk culture […] in negating, folk parody simultaneously [odnovremenno] revives and renews” (SS 4.2:20; RW 11).

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has allegedly forgotten, and that it must recover if it is to read works that were once perceived through carnival in their proper, original spirit.

So goes the theory. Readers of the Rabelais book tend to focus on a monologic “official culture” as carnival’s primary antagonist in this regard: in judging the past, Bakhtin writes, “we are too often forced to ‘take each epoch at its word’” and believe its official ideologists, “because we do not hear the voice of the people (narod) itself, we do not know how to find and decipher its pure and unmixed expression” (SS 4.2:507; RW 474). Yet Bakhtin also makes it quite clear that an equally monologic individuum he ascribes to Romanticism must shoulder part of the blame as well for abetting carnival’s decline: Unlike the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was directly related to folk culture and thus maintained the all-popular character of the agora [ploshchadnoi i vsenarodnyi kharakter], the Romantic grotesque becomes that of the chamber: carnival as it were, but experienced alone with an acute consciousness of one’s isolation.The carnivalesque worldview is as though translated into the language of subjective-idealistic philosophical thought and ceases to be a concretely experienced (one might even say corporally experienced) sensation of the unity and inexhaustibility of being, as it was in the medieval and Renaissance grotesque. (SS 4.2:48; RW 36)9

In the early notebooks for the Rabelais project, Bakhtin describes this decline in even starker, more moralizing terms: “A merry materialism was subjected to hedonistic perversion” (SS 4.1:679). Decades later, in 1962, Bakhtin writes a letter to his acquaintance N.M. Liubimov to congratulate him on the publication of his new translation of Rabelais into Russian, and in praising Liubimov’s work, Bakhtin briefly sketches the effects of this collective amnesia of carnival upon Russian literature in particular—namely, upon readings of Gogol and Alexander Pushkin: Up until now Rabelais was, in essence, completely alien to us. And this serious lacuna is palpable everywhere. It explains to a significant degree a certain one-sided seriousness in all our culture and literature. We did not receive the vaccine of Rabelaisian laughter (and the great carnival culture that stands behind it). Hence, in particular, the narrow, petty-satirical understanding of Gogol (and the lopsided development of the Gogol The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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tradition in our literature); hence the gloomy kind of interpretation of Pushkin that reigns amongst us, whose “merry reason” is akin to Rabelais […] I am deeply convinced your Rabelais will play a major, fruitful role in this regard. (SS 4.2:639–40)10

Bakhtin’s own study will finally make it into print three years later, a quarter century after it was first written, and it clearly promises to play a similar role, as announced in the very last sentence of the book—the carnival principle Bakhtin uncovers in Rabelais “casts light on the culture of people’s laughter of other epochs as well” (SS 4.2:508; RW 474). However, in the earliest sketches of the conclusion, from 1938 to 1939, Bakhtin is more specific, singling out Gogol’s work especially,11 and in the first redaction of 1940, he goes further than mere suggestion and closes the book with a detailed excursus on popular-festive forms in Gogol. These concluding pages—five in the original manuscript—propose Rabelais as a “key” for unlocking Gogol (SS 4.1:508), and they will later serve as the basis for the Gogol essay in the 1970s.Yet for reasons that shall be addressed below, they are excluded from the last two redactions of the Rabelais book, the dissertation manuscript of 1949–1950, and the final version of 1965. Instead, from the second redaction on, the other writer Bakhtin mentions in his letter, Pushkin, takes up the position previously occupied by Gogol in Bakhtin’s closing arguments, and Boris Godunov, Pushkin’s Shakespearean historical drama of Russia’s Time of Troubles, now becomes the final illustration of the essential role of carnival in historical understanding. Bakhtin writes: All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before the chorus of the laughing people. Without hearing this chorus it is impossible to understand the drama as a whole either. Let us imagine Pushkin’s Boris Godunov without the scenes involving the massed people—such a conception of Pushkin’s drama would be not only incomplete but distorted. After all, each character in the drama expresses a limited point of view, and the authentic meaning of the epoch and its events in the tragedy is disclosed only together with the people’s scenes. The last word in Pushkin belongs to the people. (SS 4.2:507–8; RW 474)

In some respects, the turn away from Gogol and in favor of Pushkin in later redactions makes for a much more persuasive conclusion to the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Rabelais book; invoking Boris Godunov in this manner allows Bakhtin to reiterate his critique of the subjective, alienated experience of carnival that he has ascribed to Romanticism, and to firmly place the key to “authentic” historical knowledge in the collective hands of the people or folk. Carnival in effect here becomes identical with a version of universal history, a history whose subject and object is the masses, whereas there was little to nothing of this polemical charge in the conclusion to the first redaction. Bakhtin of course has been accused by critics like Michael Holquist of making “excessive claims for the people” with his theory,12 but it is not otherwise clear who the protagonist of carnival or the beneficiary of its freedoms would be without them—it is certainly not the universalized placeholder of Western liberal democracy, the citizen. As another Bakhtin scholar, Ken Hirschkop, writes, in carnival, “the abstract identity of the citizen or subject is replaced by that of one who eats, drinks, procreates and labors.The pleasures of carnival are not the pleasures of mere talk but those of a discourse which has rediscovered its connection with the concrete” (35). In contrast then with the “purely formal democracy on offer from the liberal state,” Hirschkop argues, the communal moment of carnival bears within it a utopian vision of a radical, unmediated democracy, one that “ceases to ensnare itself in words” and thereby “finds a way to speak” (35).

It is in light of precisely such claims, however, that the Boris Godunov citation also begins to look highly curious. Leaving aside the larger, rather fraught question of whether Pushkin’s play genuinely reckons upon the disclosure of the “authentic meaning” of history, especially given the consistent tension in its own rhetoric between appeals to providence and laments over its inscrutability, even the reader who only knows it well enough to recall its famous ending will realize that the “last word” of the play does not, strictly speaking, constitute speech at all, much less anything like a chorus one can hear. It is in fact a stage direction: “The people are silent [Narod bezmolvstvuet]” (Pushkin 142). Does this silence signify a secret hatred for the tyrant by the ruled (“Les silence des peoples est la leçon des rois,” says Mirabeau the day after the storming of the Bastille, a remark with which Pushkin was no doubt familiar)? Or does it indicate the tacit submission of the demos to the sovereign’s authority, or even the absence of any direct expression of its political subjectivity per se? We may find one or another interpretation more compelling, but the long record of critical discord regarding the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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ending of the play suggests that the question is not easily settled.13 What we are confronted with in any event is a form of “people’s history” that is decidedly not immediate, like the history of carnival should be, but one that is mute, or at best given to us only as something to be read. Something else has to speak for it.

Furthermore, in the way it enters into the Rabelais book, the hermeneutic problem at the end of Boris Godunov generates an additional and quite peculiar ambiguity in its new context. For Bakhtin’s reference to Pushkin’s stage direction is not direct either; we as readers have to remember the text of the play and fill in the blank, as it were, and so another question arises—is this indirectness significant? In other words, is Bakhtin really offering us a straightforward reading of Pushkin’s conclusion to Boris Godunov, as I am supposing—one that may well constitute a naive misreading of it, but still an attempt to make the case for a certain vision of carnival? Or is he waging a kind of oblique protest—is he relying on his reader to draw a connection that he himself cannot draw before Soviet censorship, and to read the reference as an implicit rebuke of another tyrant, Bakhtin’s contemporary, Josef Stalin?

As has been noted, the concluding remarks about Pushkin first appear in the second (1949–1950) redaction of the Rabelais book, which was submitted to a highly hostile dissertation committee anxious to reject Bakhtin’s work for any hints of ideological deviation in light of Stalin’s ongoing campaign against “cosmopolitanism”—effectively a new round of purges in the Soviet Union following the relative cultural “thaw” of the war years. Thus, if the latter ironic reading of the Pushkin reference indeed reflects Bakhtin’s true intention, then one ought to first of all register how brazen—if not potentially suicidal—such a double entendre would have been in that particular chronotope. Second, and perhaps more importantly from a critical standpoint, one must also appreciate how admitting such a reading would perhaps put into question the very historical conditions Bakhtin claims have finally arrived to make the true sense of carnival manifest in his own, Soviet present: “In the country of victorious socialism,” he goes on in the conclusion of the 1949–1950 redaction, “for the first time in the history of humanity all culture has become a united people’s culture […] and from this height upon which we have been placed by history one may for the first time correctly understand and evaluate the people’s culture of past epochs” (SS 4.1:600–1). These lines are deleted from the 1965 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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edition, when the political jargon of Stalinism was no longer de rigueur for academic productions, but they are arguably still of a piece with the prophetic significance that Bakhtin ascribes to Rabelais in the very opening passages of the book, by way of the long quotation from Michelet that is present in all redactions,14 and certainly are a necessary epistemological correlate if Rabelais’s prophecy has indeed finally been understood centuries later by the critic—that is, Bakhtin.

Despite all of these potential obstacles to an oblique reading of the conclusion, one of the critical clichés that continues to accompany the Rabelais book’s reception in the West proceeds from this very assumption—that what on paper purports to be a study in historical poetics centered around a French writer of the Renaissance is actually a cleverly disguised critique of Bakhtin’s Stalinist present, an Aesopian account of modes of popular resistance to the official dogma in the USSR.The reference to Pushkin is one of but a few to Russian culture in the 1965 redaction of the book (the others include nods to carnival tendencies Bakhtin perceives in the reigns of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible), and according to Holquist and Katerina Clark, who together were the authors of one of the earliest American studies of Bakhtin, this reticence about things Russian is too conspicuous: “the near absence of Russia in the text makes it all the more present as a referent” (Clark and Holquist 305–6). Moreover, for Clark and Holquist, this hidden layer of meaning is precisely where we as Bakhtin’s readers must locate “the political dimension of the work” (305–6). Now, given a fuller picture of the manuscript history of the Rabelais project, one might argue that the presence of an extended excursus on Gogol at the end of the first redaction of the book undermines this hypothesis somewhat—Bakhtin would in fact be drawing a straight line from Rabelais to Russian culture, not an oblique one.Yet this manner of “Aesopian” reading was an American Slavicist’s bread and butter during the Cold War, which was reaching its second and final peak when Clark and Holquist published their monograph in 1984.To read Soviet literature was to read between the party lines back to a refracted, dissident truth, and given the high stakes involved, the possibility of that reading was generally taken for granted. Such were the accepted measures of the period, but according to their logic, Bakhtin’s critical achievement in the Rabelais book would have to depend as much on a kind of controlled obscurity as it

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does on revelation, or rather, to use Clark and Holquist’s terms, it would have to depend on an “adroit use of Aesopian language and allegory” (312).

This, in large part, is what interests us here. Bakhtin’s apparent ability to harness figural language in the service of a certain notion of politics was perhaps one of the reasons why in the early 1980s he seemed to some observers to be more than just another David challenging the Soviet Goliath. He also appeared to offer a sober alternative to the controversial and seemingly abstruse theoretical debates then raging in North American literature departments over definitions of allegory—debates whose most well-known participant was of course Paul de Man. As a record of this, consider the collection of academic papers edited by Stephen Greenblatt and published in 1981 under the title Allegory and Representation, which opens with one of de Man’s most difficult essays, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” and is bookended, as it were, by Holquist’s own response to de Man in an essay entitled “The Politics of Representation.” Holquist specifically repeats the preliminary question posed by the “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” essay, where de Man writes: From a theoretical point of view, there ought to be no difficulty in moving from epistemology to persuasion.The very occurrence of allegory, however, indicates a possible complication. Why is it that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode? (2)

Holquist replies: The answer provided by Bakhtin in both his theory and his practice, although not adequate to all the implications of de Man’s question, suffices at least to point us in a further direction. If we begin by assuming that all representation must be indirect, that all utterance is ventriloquism, then it will be clear—even, or especially, “from a theoretical point of view”—that difficulties do exist in moving from epistemology to persuasion. This is because difficulties exist in the very politics of any utterance, difficulties that at their most powerful exist in the politics of culture systems.

If the actual source of prohibition is recognized, however, the possibility of deceiving the censor becomes an option. (181–82)

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For Holquist, quite unlike de Man, allegory does not “signify precisely the non-being of what it represents,” as Walter Benjamin defined it in his landmark study of the German Trauerspiel from the 1920s (GS 1.1:406; Origin 233);15 nor does it name a radical disjunction between language and utterance or trope and episteme, a position that de Man, proceeding from Benjamin, stakes out in his late writings.16 Holquist implicitly resolves all of this in a very simple way: by appealing to ventriloquy as a metaphor for Bakhtin’s Aesopian language. Whatever our senses tell us, ultimately we recognize the master through the marionette (unless we happen to work for the censor); we still hear a voice alongside the dummy, and we know it has to be human and his. Whether by coincidence or not, even the etymology of the word “ventriloquy” recalls carnival and its “material-corporal lower stratum,” combining the Latin venter (“belly”) and loqui (to speak)—it is a voice furtively but intentionally cast from the nether regions of the body.

Holquist in effect proposes a conception of allegory as antiphrasis that circumvents hegemony, and it underwrites his entire understanding of the Rabelais book: it is what would give us the freedom to speak indirectly when something called “politics” would prevent us—we the people—from speaking at all. This, moreover, is also what allows Holquist to confidently cast Karl Marx as little more than a dummy on Bakhtin’s knee, with his language appropriated and redeployed by the master in ways altogether unbecoming of Marxism.17 Thus defined, Bakhtin’s theory and practice allows us to experience “allegory” quite differently than de Man does—not as a linguistic predicament but as “the prosecution of semantic intention by other means” (Holquist 181), which is to say a weapon in a struggle, and a highly precise one at that.

This, again, would constitute the political dimension of the Rabelais book for Clark and Holquist, and indeed for many of its Western readers.

There is no doubt that in the 1980s the persuasiveness of this argument was augmented by the pathos of Bakhtin’s still emerging biography, of the critic as a lone voice speaking in code “from the catacombs,” not to mention the knowledge already in our possession of the even grimmer fates met by many other Russian writers and critics during the purges. Today, however, our response might have to be more equivocal, for a number of reasons. For one, the discovery of texts such as Osip Mandelstam’s late “Ode to Stalin” or Bakhtin’s own references to “kulak bloodsuckers” in his forewords for Soviet The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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editions of Tolstoy has led some observers to adopt a more nuanced, and for some more troubling, picture of cultural production under Stalinism—one allowing for degrees of accommodation and acceptance, or at least one for which Aesop’s fables no longer seem like an entirely adequate hermeneutic compass.The difficult work of Andrei Platonov, perhaps the most proletarian writer in the Russian literary canon, stands as a signal example in this regard: as a highly ambiguous deconstruction of Stalinist discourse that cannot simply be reversed into an ironic rejection of it. The desire to read such texts as “double-voiced” in our (Western, liberal) favor persists, and it certainly plays a role in evaluations of the Rabelais book, but it is now harder to allay the suspicion that such understandings could just as well be aberrant or, in any case, a little too “creative” on our part.18 The fact that the sincerity or insincerity of Bakhtin’s alignment with some form of Marxism remains a point of contention among scholars and is not unanimously perceived as a mere puppet show is but a variation on the same problem, and what it ultimately suggests is that whatever side one takes in these disputes, once allegory comes into play as a critical mode, it is not so easily resolved into an antiphrasis, or even competing voices. Allegory may well have intentions, but it also has effects, ones that may not be reversible.

Furthermore, if we are willing to reconsider Holquist’s account of allegory in Bakhtin, then other important questions regarding interpretation of the Rabelais book arise as well. How, for instance, does one reconcile a reading of it as an esoteric “political allegory,” legible to only a select few, with the radically exoteric concept of carnival that it purports to develop?

After all, according to Bakhtin, carnival must be experienced by everyone, immediately: “Carnival is not contemplated, it is lived in, and it is lived in by everyone, because by its very idea it embraces all the people [on vsenaroden]” (SS 4.2:15; RW 7).The Russian adjective vsenarodnyi, the most complex term in this statement, is not easily rendered into English: Iswolsky opts here for “embraces all the people”; Caryl Emerson, translating the same phrase when it appears verbatim in the discussion of carnival in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, renders it as “belongs to the whole people” (128; SS 6:144); and Zulfia Karimova and Andriy Vsylchenko, in a discussion of Bakhtin and carnival in their more recent entry for “narod” in the Dictionary of Untranslatables, settle on what is perhaps the most literal-minded solution: “omni-popular, shared by all” (702). Each of these translations is accurate The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to a degree, but what slips away in all them is that vsenarodnyi also implies a communicative transparency within and among the collective—one that by definition ought to exclude allegory. Dahl’s landmark Interpretative Dictionary of the Great Russian Language defines the term as “everyplace (vsemestnyi), open to everyone and anyone, apparent (iavyni),” and offers as synonyms netainyi (“unsecret”) and glasnyi (“unhidden, proclaimed everywhere”), which itself derives from the Russian word for “voice” (glas, golos; cf. glasnost’) (Dal’ 1:646, 1:874). Emerson perhaps comes closest to capturing this nuance when she somewhat aggressively translates the abstract nominal form, vsenarodnost’, as “communal performance” (Bakhtin, Problems 128; SS 6:144).

19 But Iswolsky surely strays too far when, in another passage discussing the “aesthetic conception” that corresponds with carnival, that of “grotesque realism,” she translates vsenarodnyi differently, as “representing the people” (SS 4.2:29; RW 19). The passage in question is worth quoting in full, because in it Bakhtin is actually rejecting, in the name of carnival’s immediacy, the caesura or moment of formalization necessarily inherent in any form of representation. He also quite explicitly confirms the exclusion of allegory implied in Dahl’s definition of vsenarodnost’: In grotesque realism the material-corporal element is a profoundly positive principle, and this element is given not in a private-egotistical form and not at all in separation [v otryve] from other spheres of life. The material-corporal principle is here perceived as something universal and representing all the people [Material’no-telesnoe nachalo zdes’ vosprinimaetsia kak universal’noe i vsenarodnoe], and precisely as such it is opposed to any separation [otryv] from the material-corporal roots of the world, any isolation and enclosure in oneself, any abstract ideality, and any pretensions toward a signification [znachimost’] estranged [otreshennaia] and independent from the earth and the body. (SS 4.2:29; RW 19)

The Russian otryv is literally a “tearing off ”; in other senses, it translates as “alienation,” “isolation,” or “lack of communication.” For Benjamin, the experience of allegory is precisely the perception of this otryv or, as he puts it, an Abgrund or gulf “zwischen bildlichem Sein und Bedeuten,” between “figurative being and meaning” (Benjamin, GS 1.1:342; Origin 165).20 Carnival, by contrast, would close this otryv by opposing this difference—specifically by banishing “abstract ideality.” “The allegorical lives in abstractions,” Benjamin The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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writes in his study of Trauerspiel, “as abstraction, as a faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at home in the Fall (Sündenfall)” (GS 1.1:407; Origin 234). Bakhtin himself ascribes to allegory the same “abstract character” in the Rabelais book (SS 4.2:196; RW 181), and in the story it tells we also find a version of Benjamin’s “Fall,” as modernity loses its connection to carnival.

Accordingly, in Bakhtin’s eyes, it is no accident that from the seventeenth century on Rabelais criticism comes to be dominated by the “historicalallegorical method,” since by this point, “the links with the essential aspects of being, with a worldview, with the organic system of popular-festive images, have been broken” (SS 4.2:122; RW 109). Bakhtin elaborates: The fact is that the living tradition of popular-festive laughter that illuminated the work of Rabelais began to die out. It ceased to be a living and commonly understood [obshcheponiatnye] commentary on Rabelais’ images.The genuine artistic-ideological key to these images was lost along with the tradition that gave birth to them. Commentators began to look for false keys. (SS 4.2:127–28)

Rediscovering the right key here means finding a way back from allegory.

According to Bakhtin, the turn toward allegory in Rabelais criticism is a symptom of larger historical processes at work in early modern Europe— the increasing significance of “generalization, empirical abstraction, and typification in all spheres of ideology” (SS 4.2:127–28)—processes which in turn lead to the “decomposition” of laughter. However, this decomposition is still not total: despite everything, the “authentic grotesque image loses neither its force nor its significance, even when allusions have been forgotten or replaced by new ones. These are beside the point” (SS 4.2:127–28; RW 115). What is the point of the carnivalesque image, then, if we are urged to consider its force and significance apart from this or that individual allusion?

The point, to put it succinctly, is not to identify an original meaning but rather to return to a mode of signification that closes the gap between origin and meaning. In order to understand precisely what this entails for the way “carnival images” have to signify, it will be helpful to recall the Romantic distinction between allegory and symbol that Benjamin sets out to critique in the Trauerspiel book. One may of course object to this maneuver on the grounds that Bakhtin’s work is ostensibly more concerned with the history of Realism than that of Romanticism, but if recent studies can point to how The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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useful Bakhtin’s thinking might be to understanding the literature of the Romantic period, then asking how it might be ideologically indebted to it as well seems just as appropriate.21 Benjamin’s argument is extended and highly complex, so for the sake of economy, one might start simply by citing Benjamin as he cites the German Romantic philologist Georg Creuzer: whereas allegory “signifies merely a general concept, or an idea which is different [verschieden] from itself,” the symbol is “the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea”; if in allegory “a process of substitution takes place,” in the symbol, “the concept itself has descended into our physical world, and we see it itself immediately in the image” (GS 1.1:341; Origin 164–65).22 By the terms of this dichotomy, carnival is clearly aligned with the symbolic, not the allegorical; the latter is inimical to its existence.

Understood thusly, the question of allegory in carnival is no longer a matter of carrying out an Aesopian reading or of identifying this or that individual allusion, but one of the presence or absence of carnival itself—of its revival or of its decay. Furthermore, it no longer makes sense to situate carnival’s “political dimension” solely in a secret realm of reference, waiting for a community to alight upon it. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque image is already quite explicitly a matter for politics, at least if we agree that legislating the manner in which a community would appear to itself in the first place is always already political. After all, in carnival the image that escapes the abstract ideality of a general concept and descends into the physical world would be none other than that of the people, narod, the very subject of democracy as such. We perceive this “symbolic” democracy immediately, without formalization: The carnivalesque crowd in the square or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole [narodnoe tseloe], but organized in its own way [po-svoemu], the way of the people [po-narodnomu], beyond and contrary to all existing forms of its coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which for the time of the festival is as it were suspended.

This festive organization of the people [narod] is above all profoundly concrete and sensual [chuvstvenna]. Even the very closeness, the very physical contact of bodies acquires a certain significance. The individuum senses itself as an inseparable part of the collective, a member of the people’s mass body [massovoe narodnoe telo]. In this whole the individual body to a certain The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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degree ceases to be itself: it is possible as it were to exchange bodies with one another, to be renewed (through change of costume and mask). At the same time, the people senses its concrete, sensate material-corporeal unity and community. (SS 4.2:273; RW 255)

Bakhtin also insists that this popular self-awareness in carnival is not merely “geometric and static,” that is, confined to and defined by the physical space of the square. It is temporal as well: The body of the people on the carnival square first of all senses its unity in time, it senses its uninterrupted duration in time, its relative historical immortality.

Here, consequently, the people senses not a static image of its unity (“eine Gestalt”), but the unity and uninterruptedness of its becoming and growth.

(SS 4.2:274; RW 255)

Bakhtin’s language here raises some questions, however. Is the temporal continuity of the narod genuinely “uninterrupted,” or is its “historical immortality” only “relative”? And relative to what? Bakhtin addresses none of this, but the distinction needs to be examined, for in effect carnival once again finds itself circling around the difference between symbol and allegory, now in terms of its temporality. In Benjamin’s reading, the decisive distinction between the two lies in their opposed measures of time: where the experience of the symbol is the mystical instant (Nu) that Benjamin likens to a transfiguration, in which all points of history form a simultaneous, uninterrupted presence, with allegory, history instead appears to the observer as an interruption, a facies hippocratica or a death’s head—that is, as an unspeaking, static, alltoo-material image (GS 1.1:343; Origin 166).

The history of carnival would thus in its pure form be sensed symbolically, and in its decayed form, as allegory. The aim of the Rabelais book is clearly to describe and recuperate this purity, but it is also tasked with narrating its loss. It is in this regard notable that as Bakhtin describes the folk on the square in the above passage, he also makes continuous reference to Goethe’s account of carnival culture in his Italian Journey in a way that both confirms Bakhtin’s own account of carnival and exposes the Romantic era’s own supposedly restricted understanding of it. To wit, as Goethe visits the ancient amphitheater at Verona, he imagines the folk once gathered there perceiving itself in its own unity, or, as Bakhtin puts it, its “concrete-sensate The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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visible form,” but Bakhtin also states in passing that the amphitheater itself was “of course empty at the time” when Goethe visits it, as if to emphasize that what Goethe perceives is but a mere husk of carnival, not carnival itself (SS 4.2:274; RW 255).23 What is missing in Goethe’s account is precisely the experience of time associated with the symbol; it would be this experience that would make carnival something “lived, and lived […] by everyone,” vsenaroden, and not “contemplated” (SS 4.2:15; RW 7). It is as symbol that carnival becomes an event that erases the boundary between life and art or past and present; for carnival, as Bakhtin stresses, acknowledges no difference between performer and observer; it knows no “footlights” (rampa), none of the “technical aspects of theater or art” (khudozhestvenno-teatral’naia spetsifika) (SS 4.2:15; RW 7).24 Goethe, by contrast, only contemplates a ruin consisting of that very technology.

Amidst all of this, it is far from certain whether Bakhtin escapes the ante rem that marks Goethe’s position either.When Bakhtin revisits the concept of carnival in the revised version of his Dostoevsky book, he states that from the mid-seventeenth century on, “carnival almost completely ceases to be an immediate source of carnivalization, ceding its place to the influence of already carnivalized literature” (SS 6:148; Problems 131). Carnival, itself “not a literary phenomenon” (SS 6:137–38; Problems 122), moves from the square into the book. It still retains its force, however, so long as literature can be conceived in the same figural mode as carnival—that is, symbolically: Carnival has worked out an entire language of symbolic concrete-sensuous forms—from large mass actions to separate carnivalistic gestures […]This language cannot be translated in any full or adequate way into a verbal language, much less into a language of abstract concepts, but is amenable to a certain transposition into a language of artistic images akin (rodstvennyi) to it by way of its concretely-sensuous character, that is, the language of literature. (SS 4:138; Problems 122)

Thus writes Bakhtin in 1963. However, when in the Rabelais book Bakhtin writes that “the whole of the people […] speaks with its lips [govorit ustami] in all carnival images” (SS 4.2:275; RW 256), he is already equating the claims of carnival with the claims that he makes for all properly dialogic literature in general—that its images are simultaneous with speech.25 Yet, here and

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there, the history of carnival appears rather differently to its observer—not as living speech, but “literally” as fragments: The entire field of realistic literature of the last three centuries of its development is literally strewn (bukval’no useiano) with the fragments (oblomki) of grotesque realism, which sometimes turn out to be not just fragments, but manifest a capability for new vital activity. All of these in the majority of cases are grotesque images which have either weakened or entirely lost their positive pole, their link with the universal whole of the becoming world. One may understand the actual meaning of these half-dead formations only against the background of grotesque realism.

(SS 4.2:34; RW 24)

The loss of this “positive pole” is not just the loss of the affirmative moment in carnival’s dialectic; it is the loss of its simultaneity with its negative pole.

The “drama” of carnival, Bakhtin insists, is the “drama of the simultaneity of death and birth” (SS 4.2:506; RW 473). In a word, the presence of fragments means that the dialectic is not simultaneous but has become a succession.

Having traced this tension between symbol and allegory in the Rabelais book, if only cursorily, we are now finally in a position to explain why the role Gogol would play in Bakhtin’s theory of carnival calls for more scrutiny. As it happens, what we are characterizing as the question of allegory was one that Bakhtin’s notebooks posed in different terms during the 1940s—for him, then, it was precisely a question of Gogol. In notes published in volume 5 of the CollectedWorks as “Polyphony as a Precondition of the Development of the Novelistic Word,” written circa 1940, Bakhtin describes Gogol’s work as the “recreation” of an ancient struggle between “tragedy and Menippean satire,” the latter of which Bakhtin repeatedly ties to carnival during his career, especially in the Dostoevsky book: “a long historical process is here embodied in a personal tragedy […] [Dead Souls] is about the death of the old and the birth of the new. But the new turns out to be Chichikov [the hero of the novel—M.W.], a chimera” (SS 5:157–58).

Similarly, in a fragment dating from 1943 titled “Rhetoric, By Measure of Its Falsity …” we find Bakhtin musing on Gogol as a conflict between carnival and the materiality of the image. If the “image of the human” is the “central image of all literature,” Bakhtin suggests, then Gogol confronts us with the negativity of that image when it becomes a thing: “The degree of the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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thingness [veshchnost’] (respectively the absence [zaochnost’; literally, ‘beyond the eyeness,’ i.e., beyond sense perception]) of the image of the hero” (SS 5:69). Then he turns directly to Gogol: In Gogol there is an extremely developed specific ethical responsibility in the relation of the hero, despite the almost critical absence [predel’naia zaochnost’] in his images. Precisely this extreme absence [predel’naia zaochnost’], this mortification of people in the image, sharpened for him the question of their salvation and transfiguration as people. The kinship of methods of absent finalization of the image with billingsgate (bran’).

The loss in billingsgate of the positive regenerating pole [vozrozhdaiushchii polius]. (SS 5:69).

Bakhtin’s critical terminology here is remarkable, because in the space of a paragraph he moves from the rhetoric of “author and hero” that marks his earliest work in the 1920s, where Gogol often serves as a negative, abstract foil to the concrete human represented in Dostoevsky’s dialogism,26 up to the vocabulary of carnival, where Gogol was to be the confirmation of the theory, or at least an indication of its continued effectiveness in the modern era. Instead of a solution, though, we find a challenge—might Gogol in fact represent carnival’s negation, specifically, the very loss of the affirmative, regenerating side of carnival’s dialectic in the epoch of Romanticism?

This is not a question that Bakhtin ever directly addresses in his published works. One is tempted to identify this as a necessary evasion on Bakhtin’s part, and it may well be, but there are also altogether mundane explanations for why he does not pursue this less “merry” line of inquiry into Gogol’s materialism further in the 1940s. For one, it may well be due in part to professional circumstances: when later in the decade Bakhtin attempts to submit the first redaction of the Rabelais book as a dissertation for his doctorate degree, his reading of Gogol in the conclusion becomes one of three or four “crude mistakes and distortions” (SS 4.1:1090) cited by his committee as reasons warranting its rejection—perhaps even the decisive one. In this regard, the committee minutes that have been preserved from 1949 are illuminating. For example, one member, A.M. Samarin, an academic specializing in metallurgy, takes Bakhtin to task for even suggesting that the Father of Russian Realism might owe something to a Western writer: “Does this mean that had there been no Rabelais there would be no Gogol?”

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But the remarks of another, A.V. Topchiev, a professor of chemistry and by all indications obedient Stalinist administrator, are much more ominous: “This work needs to be checked in connection with the cosmopolitanism manifested in it. Gogol is presented as an imitator, and it’s not just that […] there are other moments too” (SS 4.1:1092, 1093). In his oral defense, Bakhtin stands up courageously for his work, insisting that in his view the carnivalesque moments in Gogol derive immediately from Ukrainian culture, not from the West; he adds, however, that Gogol is a secondary theme in the dissertation, not its main one, and ultimately, with the encouragement of more sympathetic members of his committee, he agrees to excise any mention of him (SS 4.1:1096–1102, 1105).

When Bakhtin is finally granted permission to publish the Rabelais book in the 1960s, one of the publisher’s reviews favorably mentions the now missing excursus on Gogol, and Bakhtin responds with enthusiasm: “In reworking the book, I of course will reinstate the pages on Gogol and even expand them some” (SS 4.2:647).Yet the revision process proves burdensome for Bakhtin: certain books are unobtainable, his health is failing, and, for whatever reason, Gogol never makes it back into the 1965 redaction. The promised expansion of the pages on Gogol only comes to fruition later, when it is published separately as “Rabelais and Gogol” in 1972.

What remains missing from the Gogol essay, however, is the negativity glimpsed in the notebooks from the 1940s.The emphasis instead falls on what Bakhtin identifies as the affirmative carnivalesque aspects Gogol’s work: the abundant folk motifs in the Ukrainian tales, praise and abuse in the narrative style of the Petersburg stories, and Dead Souls as a “merry underworld” carnivalizing the relation between life and death.The “carnivalesque worldview” attributed to Gogol may well be “colored by Romanticism in the majority of cases,” as Bakhtin concedes, but he does not dwell on the consequences of this to the degree he does so in the Rabelais book. Rather, as Bakhtin reads him here, Gogol unambiguously overcomes them: “The laughing satirist is never merry. He is sullen and gloomy in the extreme. But in Gogol laughter conquers everything” (SS 4.2:515, 521).

Bakhtin’s aim in the Gogol essay is primarily corrective; it is not exhaustive, and as the case in much of his work, he does not do much to entertain counterarguments. One of the first to do so for him was Yury Mann, one of the most astute Gogol scholars of the late Soviet period, who, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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in his Gogol’s Poetics of 1978, sensed perhaps that what Bakhtin was missing in Gogol was precisely what he wanted to exclude from carnival under the term Romanticism. In particular, Mann latches on to a scene from the end of “Sorochintsy Fair,” the first story in the Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka cycle, which Bakhtin introduces as an exemplary instance of the carnivalesque—of “old people dancing (almost dancing death)”: Everything danced. But an even stranger and more enigmatic [or “both enigmatic and unresolved”: nerazgadannyi] feeling would have been stirred in the depths of one’s soul at the sight of the old women, whose ancient faces exuded the indifference of the grave, shoving their way between the new, laughing, living human being. Careless, without even a child’s joy, without a spark of sympathy, forced by intoxication alone to do something resembling the human, like a puppeteer [literally “mechanic,” mekhanik] moves a lifeless automaton, they quietly wagged their drunken heads, dancing along with the merry folk, not casting even one eye at the young couple. (Gogol’ 1:97)

It is easy enough to pick out the carnivalesque motifs here—the universal participation in the movement, the description of the crowd as a single human being—but Mann notes some crucial dissonances as well. First, the “feeling” that stirs here is not the first one Gogol describes, but the second; the first comes in a phrase leading up to the passage, which Bakhtin does not cite: “A strange, inexplicable feeling would possess the observer seeing how, from one stroke of the fiddler […] everything transformed willy-nilly into unity and crossed over into harmony” (1:97). There is a crowd and there is an observer—which is to say that someone, the narrator, does not participate in the carnival in which everyone must participate. This distance is reiterated by the narrator later on, in the last line of the story: “Dreary it is for the one left behind! It becomes heavy and sorrowful for the heart and there is nothing to help it” (Gogol’ 1:98; Mann, 16). Furthermore, as if this sense of unresolved alienation were not enough to detract from the carnivalesque nature of the scene, the dancing old women are also depicted as lifeless marionettes, a theme Bakhtin himself cites as a hallmark of a postcarnival worldview and the weakening of the regenerating moment in its dialectic: “The theme is of course not alien to the folk grotesque, but in Romanticism what comes to the fore is a notion of an alien inhuman force The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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directing people and turning them into marionettes, a notion completely uncharacteristic of the people’s culture of laughter”(SS 4.2:51; RW 40).

Mann’s point reminds us that there can be no mechanical moment in the organicity of carnival—no “footlights,” no technology that mediates between performers and participants—but this is precisely what intrudes here in Gogol’s simile: the figure of a mass body interrupted by a machine.

Carnival motifs are seemingly more abundant in Gogol’s Ukrainian tales than in his Russian works, but here we see that they do not so much incorporate folk culture as suggest its constant deferral. One could cite other instances of this, but for now it will hopefully suffice to introduce one more small episode in order to give one an idea as to where a broader reading would go. In the preface to Evenings, Rudy Panko, the framing skaz narrator of the cycle, invites the reader himself to his home: “Once you arrive in Dikanka, ask the first boy in a dirty shirt minding geese that you run into: ‘Where does the beekeeper Rudy Panko live?’ ‘Right over there’ [‘A vot tam’], he’ll say, pointing with his finger, and if you want he’ll bring you right up to farm” (Gogol’ 1:71). The joke is a subtle one, tied to the strange, discordant mix of specificity and abstraction that characterizes the description of the boy, but it becomes less than amusing if one actually wants to get somewhere (a public square, say) with a map that just states “Right over there,” in writing. Deprived of its immediate context by the very fact of its inscription, the direction cannot direct; all we get is the finger, a vulgar gesture befitting any proper billingsgate, but not where it points.

And if we agree that the folk is a sacred thing, which is to say that it claims the right to descend into the physical world and reveal itself as itself, then the gesture needs to be understood in all its profanity.

What comes into play here is something that Bakhtin tries to evade consistently throughout his career, another aspect of Benjamin’s conception of allegory: inscription. Yet as far as the theory of carnival is concerned, “Rabelais and Gogol,” and not the Rabelais book, is perhaps where he gets closest to identifying it as the threat that it is. This comes in a remark regarding Gogol’s language, one that does not appear in the first redaction of 1940. “Gogol,” Bakhtin writes, “acutely senses the necessity of the popular speech element’s struggle with dead, externalizing layers of language” (SS 4.2:517–18).What does this statement mean? For Bakhtin, the title of Gogol’s Dead Souls doesn’t point “beyond the grave” for nothing—this, he writes, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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is its “zagrobnyi moment,” the “beyond-the-grave side,” literally translated, of its dialectic of life and death (SS 4.2:514). However, no mention is made of the only empirical, literally literal existence the dead souls have in the novel, as names on paper, epitaphs, or, as Chichikov succinctly puts it, “a sound imperceptible to the senses” (Gogol’ 7.1:97). The “sound”—voices, life—is actually what is “beyond”; what appears to the senses is writing.The confusion belies the fact that Bakhtin’s own dialectic is not a proper dialectic between life and death, for according to its values, it can only operate as a struggle of the former against the latter; moreover, it has to pass through death without loss if it wants to maintain its immortality or simultaneity.

As opposed to the material excesses of the body that carnival celebrates, the excess produced by these “dead, externalizing layers of language” (SS 4.2:517–18) is one that carnival must bring under control or even eliminate in order to recognize itself. While these “layers” are consistently described in Bakhtin as a force of order, in the case of the preface to Evenings we have seen that the opposite is also true: that they can be a force of disorder.

Indeed, it may well be that this is what really guarantees that the speech of the agora remains open to dispute, or that the question of whether or not the people has indeed appeared to itself remains unresolvable, which is to say political—though now we are talking about politics in a rather different sense than has usually been the case in our readings of Bakhtin.

Matthew Walker is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Middlebury College. His forthcoming book, Gogol’s Ghosts, examines the history of Nikolai Gogol in Russian Modernist literary criticism.

Notes 1 Benjamin, Gesammelte schriften (1.3:1238) (henceforth cited as GS followed by volume and page number); “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” (405–6). Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

2 Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii (6:137–38) (henceforth cited as SS followed by volume and page number); Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (122). Translations of Bakhtin’s works have been modified throughout.

3 Gogol, Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (7.1:21). Gogol translations are mine.

4 Henceforth cited as RW.

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5 For the earliest editions of the Gogol essay in Russian, see Bakhtin’s “Rable i Gogol’ (Iskusstvo slova i narodnaia smekhovaia kul’tura)” and Voprosy literatury i estetiki (484–95). For an English translation, see “Rabelais and Gogol:The Art of Discourse and the Popular Culture of Laughter.”

6 See SS (4.2:509–21). The two subvolumes of volume 4 were published in 2008 and 2010 respectively (the last volume of the Collected Works appeared in 2012).The first subvolume contains early redactions of the Rabelais book, substantial selections from Bakhtin’s working notebooks, and archival material relating to the history of the book’s publication, while the second contains the 1965 text and the Gogol essay. Much of the material in the first subvolume has yet to appear in English.

7 Belinsky quotes Gogol’s line in his 1842 journal polemic with the conservative critic K.S. Aksakov over the alleged “Homeric” qualities of Dead Souls. “In the sense of an epic,” Belinskii writes, “Dead Souls is diametrically opposed to the Illiad. In the Illiad life is elevated to an apotheosis: in Dead Souls it decays and is denied” (58).

8 For example, Andrei Bely writes the following in his symbolist reading of Gogol from 1909: “the most terrifying laughter, a laughter that seizes one’s heart, sounding as if it were from a graveyard, and moreover troubling us as if we were dead men as well—the laughter of a dead man, Gogol’s laughter!” (Belyi 93) 9 Iswolsky often translates the Russian adjective ploshchadnoi (from ploshchad’, “square”) as “marketplace,” but as a space, its purpose is not exclusively economic, hence here the somewhat broader “agora.” The Russian vsenarodnyi, which I have rendered as “all-popular,” also presents particular difficulties for the translator, but these will be discussed in some detail below. NB: The italics here and in other citations of Bakhtin’s texts are his own; he uses them extensively in the Russian for emphasis, but Iswolsky and other translators largely leave them out.

10 Bakhtin also praises Liubimov’s translation in the main text of the Rabelais book (SS 4.2:156–57; RW 143–44).

11 “Rabelais casts light on the literature of the modern period, particularly on Gogol” (SS 4.1:677).

12 See Holquist’s own prologue to the Iswolsky translation (RW xviii), as well as Clark and Holquist (310–11). Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson express similar reservations about the “subject” of carnival in their Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (433–70).

13 For a thorough survey of the critical debates over Pushkin’s conclusion and its potential subtexts, see the excellent commentary in Pushkin (321–28).

14 At the opening of the book, Bakhtin writes: [Rabelais] was and is still considered not only a great writer in the usual sense of the word but also a sage and a prophet. Here is a typical opinion expressed by the historian Michelet: ‘Rabelais collected wisdom among The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the popular elemental forces of the ancient Provençal idioms, sayings, proverbs, school farces, and from the mouth of fools and clowns. But refracted by all this foolery, the genius of the age and its prophetic power are revealed in all their majesty.

If he does not discover, he foresees, he promises, he directs. Under each tiny leaf in this forest of dreams, the fruit which the future will harvest lies hidden.The entire book is a golden bough.’

While Bakhtin adds that all such judgments are “relative,” he insists that “it is precisely this specific and radical popular character (radikal’naia narodnost’) of all of Rabelais’s images that explains their exceptional saturation with the future” (SS 4.2:9–10; RW 2).

15 De Man cites Benjamin’s definition in “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight (35).

16 De Man reiterates this position in the very passage Holquist cites, which continues as follows: “To be more specific, why is it that texts that attempt the articulation of epistemology with persuasion turn out to be inconclusive about their own intelligibility in the same manner and for the same reasons as allegory?” (“Pascal’s Allegory” 2).

17 We assume here a familiarity with the debates over Bakhtin’s alleged authorship of more markedly Marxist texts such as Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) or Pavel Medvedev’s Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928). For the Aesopian account of this debate, see Holquist.

18 English translations of Bakhtin’s Tolstoy prefaces are available in Morson and Emerson (227–57). For a “double-voiced” reading of them, see Ann Shukman’s “Bakhtin’s Tolstoy Prefaces” in the same volume (137–48).

19 At one point in the Rabelais book, Iswolsky also translates vsenarodnost’ as “allhuman character” (SS 4.2:26; RW 16).

20 The term “bildlich” poses particular difficulty for the translation here. Osborne opts for “visual being,” but this loses the status of Sein as Bild, as “figure” or “image.” We might also translate it as “pictorial.”

21 On reading Romanticism via Bakhtin, see Reed.

22 Benjamin cites from Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der altenVölker, besonders die Griechen (1819).

23 Goethe, in Bakhtin’s translation, writes that Having seen themselves together, people must have been astonished at themselves: usually they only saw each other bustling back and forth, in a constant crush, without any order or discipline, but here this many-headed, many-minded, oscillating animal wandering in various directions unites in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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one noble body, created to be united, connected and bound in one mass, embodied in a united countenance [oblik; the original German is “Gestalt”] and animated by a united spirit.” (SS 4.2:274; RW 255).

Compare the 1940 redaction, in which Bakhtin cites Goethe further in German: “Doch nur in der frühsten Zeit hat es (das Amphitheater) seine ganze Wirkung, da dasVolk noch mehrVolk war, als es jetzt ist” (4.1:251–52).

24 Bakhtin states all of this early in his introduction and quickly reiterates it in a paragraph that Iswolsky strangely omits: Thus, in this respect carnival was not an artistic form of theatrical spectacle, but as it were a real (but temporary) form of life itself, which was not just performed but in which one almost actually lived (for the period of carnival). This can be expressed as follows: in carnival life itself is at play, acting out—without a showplace (stsenicheskaia ploshchadka), without footlights, without actors, without viewers, i.e. without any artistictheatrical specificity—a different, free form of its existence, its rebirth and renewal on the best principles.The real form of life is here simultaneously its reborn ideal form. (SS 4.2:16)

25 In his late notebooks, Bakhtin writes the following: “Consistent formalization and depersonalization […] But I hear voices in everything” (SS 6:434).

26 For this, see in particular chapter 2 of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M.M [Mikhail]. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, introduction by Wayne C. Booth, U of Minnesota P, 1984.

———. “Rabelais and Gogol: The Art of Discourse and the Popular Culture of Laughter.” Translated by Patricia Sollner, Mississippi Review, vol. 11, no. 3, 1983, pp. 34–50.

———. Rabelais and HisWorld [RW].Translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana UP, 1984.

———. “Rable i Gogol’ (Iskusstvo slova i narodnaia smekhovaia kul’tura).” Kontekst: literaturno-teoreticheskie issledovaniia 1972, Nauka, 1973, pp. 248–59.

———. Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh [SS]. Russkie slovari-iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 1997–2012. 6 vols.

———. Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975.

Belinskii, V.I. “Neskol’ko slov o poeme Gogolia ‘Pokhozhdeniia Chichikova, ili Mertvye dushi’.” Sobranie sochinenii v 9-i tomakh, vol. 5, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1979, pp. 56–62.

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Belyi, Andrei. “Gogol’.” Lug zelenyi, Al’tsiona, 1910, pp. 93–121.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte schriften. Unter Mitwerkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem [GS]. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, 1972–1989. 7 vols.

———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Translated by John Osborne,Verso, 2003.

———. “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings:Volume 4. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and others, Belknap, Harvard UP, 2003, pp. 401–11.

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Harvard UP, 1984.

Dal’,Vladimir. Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iayzka. 1863–1866.Terra, 2000.

4 vols. de Man, Paul. “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., revised, with an introduction by Wlad Godzich, U of Minnesota P, 1983, pp. 20–35.

———. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” Greenblatt, pp. 1–25. Reprinted in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology. Edited and with an introduction by Andrzei Warminski, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 51–69.

Gogol’, N.V. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 23-i tomakh. Nauka, 2001–. 23 vols.

Greenblatt, Stephen J., editor. Allegory and Political Representation. Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

Hirschkop, Ken. Introduction. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, Manchester UP, 1989, pp. 1–38.

Holquist, Michael. “The Politics of Representation.” Greenblatt, pp. 163–184.

Karimova, Zulfia, and Andriy Vsylchenko. “Narod.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 701–3.

Mann, Iurii. Poetika Gogolia:Variiatsii k teme. Coda, 1996.

Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.

Stanford UP, 1990.

———, editors. Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges. Northwestern UP, 1989.

Pushkin, A.S. Sochineniia, kommentirovannoe izdanie pod obshchei redaktsii Davida M. Betea [David M. Bethea], vypusk 2: Boris Godunov. Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2008.

Reed, Walter L. Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Shukman, Ann, “Bakhtin’s Tolstoy Prefaces.” In Morson & Emerson, Rethinking, pp. 137–48.

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Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory Erin Graff Zivin Abstract: What are the politics of allegory? For several decades, Latin American literary studies have been haunted by Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous claim that “all third world texts are […] national allegories,” accompanied, more recently, by a critical counter-tradition in Latin Americanism that rejected Jameson’s argument without pursuing alternative readings of allegory. What would happen if, after the death of allegorical reading in Latin American studies, we were to return to the question of allegory in the work of Paul de Man, who argued that allegory always allegorizes the impossibility of reading? This essay traces the politics, or metapolitics, of allegorical representation, and of allegorical readings, in Latin American studies and concludes with an analysis of César Aira’s El congreso de literatura as an example of the allegorization of the impossibility of a politics grounded in sovereign decisionism.

Keywords: Fredric Jameson, César Aira, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, allegory, Latin American literature, third world literature Whereas man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it.

Walter Benjamin (1928)1 The Metapolitics of Allegory

In his 1986 Social Text article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson (in)famously proclaimed that “all third world texts are […] necessarily allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 156–173 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.156

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to be read as what I will call national allegories” (69; emphasis in original) predictably provoking strong reactions by scholars of this so-called thirdworld literature. Criticism of Jameson’s troubling overgeneralization focused upon his grouping of all literary texts by African, Asian, and Latin American writers together into one narrow category, a move that aside from being literarily irresponsible was ethically and politically problematic as well. “It felt odd,” Aijaz Ahmad wrote in his response to the piece, which was published in Social Text the next year (4). Jean Franco, for her part, took issue not so much with Jameson’s employment of the Three Worlds Theory but with the qualifier “national”: “not only is ‘the nation’ a complex and much contested term,” she wrote, “but in recent Latin American criticism it is no longer the inevitable framework for either political or cultural projects” (130). Of the many reactions elicited by Jameson’s (surely deliberately) provocative piece, however, few or none engaged with the question of allegory itself.2 Although “allegory” was a term much in dispute precisely at this moment, Jameson’s critics largely set it aside—as if its sense were uncontroversial, or as if its use represented a lapse in taste, an overliterariness inappropriate to weightier political matters.

Around the same time that Jameson wrote his polemical essay, many prominent United States–based Latin American literary scholars were themselves engaging in precisely the kind of allegorical readings Jameson described—“national allegories”—albeit from differing ideological and intellectual positions. Doris Sommer’s 1991 Foundational Fictions (which soon found a place on Spanish PhD comprehensive exam reading lists across the United States) made the case that nineteenth-century Latin American romances allegorized the trials and tribulations of nation-building following the wars of independence in the region; Roberto González Echevarría’s 1985 Voice of the Masters and, following him, Carlos Alonso’s 1990 Spanish American Regional Novel interpreted Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 Doña Bárbara as an allegory of the conflict between civilization and barbarism, prevalent in Latin American literary and political discourse since D.F. Sarmiento’s 1845 Facundo. Each of these scholars attempted to distance her or himself from Jameson’s rather reductive reading of allegory, in which there would be a one-to-one table of equivalences between the personal and the political, the literary and the national (a reading against which Jameson himself had

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warned), and, in particular, from Jameson’s treatment of allegory as flowing from the intention of the author. Despite gesturing toward deconstructive arguments that would appear to open interpretative possibilities, their analyses remained rooted in the broader logic of intentionality, will, authority, mastery—that of the texts they read and, reciprocally, that of their own disciplinary authority, constituted through their analyses.

Which conception of allegory is implied in Jameson’s normative formulation, in the “national” literary-historical allegories told by Sommer, González Echevarría, and Alonso, and in the disciplining turn so many of Jameson’s critics take in response to his essay? What sort of decision, and what sort of allegory, lies behind the coupled assertion of a necessary allegorical reading (“third world texts” are “necessarily allegorical”) and of a “very specific” content (“national” allegory)? And what can be made of Jameson’s strangely passive, impersonal formulation: “They are to be read”? Read by whom? In order to approach these questions, and to provide an account of allegory that turns the passivity of Jameson’s formulation against its normative, mechanical frame—and thus against a notion of literature amenable to disciplinary capture—let me first approach these critical texts (Jameson’s, Sommer’s, González Echevarría’s, Alonso’s) as allegories themselves—allegories of certain practices of reading, but also of the constitution of disciplines and canons (canon here could be understood to refer to both primary texts as well as critical texts, to practices of reading as well as to their objects).

Paul de Man, the critic whose work on allegory formed the acknowledged or unacknowledged center of each of these writers’ engagement with allegory, wrote less than a decade earlier that “[a]llegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading” (205).Yet these critics specifically resist, in their formulations of allegory, the possibility of unreadability or undecidability. In what follows, I will address the following questions: what modes of reading were made possible or impossible (or were signaled as possible or impossible) by these critical allegories—these allegories of criticism? What alternative critical practices in the field of Latin American literature were sidelined or eclipsed by these canon-forming gestures? I will then, in the second section of this essay, engage in a close reading of César Aira’s 1997 El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference, translated by Katherine Silver, 2010) in order to propose an alternative politics of allegory, or allegory of politics—one The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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that would be based in what Derrida has called “passive” or “unconscious decision” (Politics 68–69), hearkening back, unintentionally, unconsciously, to Jameson’s strange, passive grammar in his injunction, “they are to be read.”

Let us return to Jameson’s article for a moment. “Third-World Literature,” as Ahmad rightly points out, concerns itself first and foremost with the question of the Western literary canon or, more precisely, with the importance of the “radical difference of non-canonical texts” (Jameson 65) from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Rather than arguing in favor of the inclusion of third-world texts on “great books” lists or “core course” curricula on the basis that these texts “are ‘as great’ as those of the canon,” Jameson makes a case for reading them in their radical alterity: as, and only as, national allegories (specifically, “conscious” national allegories that may, in fact, allow first-world readers to see the “unconscious” allegorical quality in their own traditions) (65).The radical split we see in first-world texts, at least on the surface, between private and public realms, between aesthetics and politics, is absent in the literature from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, according to Jameson. Third-world literature is faithful to, or is a faithful representation of, the events, broadly understood, of the history of the nation in which, and about which, it is written: this is what makes it allegorical.3 “National allegory” could just as easily be described as an allegory for political literature. Substitute “political” for “allegorical” in Jameson’s essay and you will see that the argument does not change significantly.

This brings us to the topic of this special issue: allegory and political representation. Let’s say that the allegorical, for Jameson, is another name for the political: an allegory for the political. The concept of politics that Jameson’s argument relies upon then seems violently normative—a matter of necessary interpretations or decisions to be performed voluntarily and intentionally by readers brought to realization of these necessities. This is not, of course, the only way to imagine allegory—and with it, politics. How would our notion of politics change if we entertained different notions of allegory—say, ones based more openly in de Man’s work or in Benjamin’s, which have highly problematical relations to the concept of representation?

What would it look like to recuperate the possibility of allegorical reading in light of de Man’s argument that allegory always allegorizes the impossibility of reading? Minimally, such readings will have to alter our concept of politics or political representation more broadly; certainly they do not square with The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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what appears to be Jameson’s (and his critics’) normative, even mechanical, politics. Let us then argue in favor of a metapolitics of allegory (in the Rancièrian sense): one that performs, rather than thematizes, political and aesthetic representation as constitutively impossible.

For what, then, is “allegory” an allegory in Sommer, González Echevarría, and Alonso, if not for politics, or if not for Jameson’s brand of politics?4 Sommer argues that romantic dramas and dramatic romances allegorize the political challenges of the nineteenth century (Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab allegorizes a reigning patriarchal order in crisis, while Jorge Isaacs’s eponymous María’s Jewishness stands for unspeakable difference between black and white, to give but two examples); in González Echevarría’s and Alonso’s work, we witness another kind of literary politics: the politics of canon formation. Both González Echevarría and Alonso identify two types of allegory at work in Doña Bárbara: the first readable, explicit, in and of the text (which is to say, placed there intentionally by an author),5 and a second, ostensibly more deconstructive, type of allegory, which, in González Echevarría’s words, “far from freezing meaning […] sets other mechanisms of signification into motion by showing the radical separation between signifier and signified” (47). Alonso, following the lead of his mentor, argues that “allegory in Doña Bárbara is not just an interpretive intention projected into the text, but also a narrative technique extensively employed to construct the events depicted in the novel” (120; emphasis added). He goes on to suggest that “[t]he veritable proliferation of allegoresis in the novel brings implicit with it the understanding that in allegory anything can stand for anything else, provided there is a discursive will that suppresses the knowledge represented by that very insight” (130; emphasis added).

This all seems well and good, until and unless we take note of several key concepts that accompany allegory in these arguments: authority, intention, will. The metapolitics of this reading of allegory, even as it distances itself from politics understood as ideological content, grounds itself in the related political concepts of sovereignty and decision—a rhetorical move that has far-reaching political consequences. Alonso allows for the possibility of interruption of authorial will, but it is only disrupted or suppressed by another will: the anthropomorphized text’s “discursive will” (130).The metapolitics of such an allegorical reading, then, still remains tied to the hegemonic concepts of sovereignty, intention, and decision. Allegory here behaves as a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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kind of cloning machine, not unlike the cloning machine we’ll see below in Aira’s El congreso de literatura.Yet Aira’s machine, as I hope to demonstrate, allows for the possibility of error; in fact, error, in Aira, is shown to have always already annihilated the possibility of sovereign decision—of mastery.

This possibility is not of interest to Alonso, and especially not to González Echevarría, the title of whose book, TheVoice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Latin American Literature, seems to point to the authority of the voice of the critic himself.That is, by investing himself with the authority to identify the (literary) masters, González Echevarría constitutes himself as a critical master, as the voice of authority in the discipline, a discipline he himself has shaped through the establishment of a Latin American canon. Mastery, authority, will—the interpretive lexicon that seemed, at first, quite distant from the ostensibly democratizing literary politics of Jameson—now reveals itself to be the flip side of the same critical-political coin. Allegories of this brand of politics, or the politics of this brand of allegory, by remaining tied to “master” concepts of mastery, work against the emancipatory possibilities of literature for which Jameson seemed to be advocating.

In response to this boom of allegorical criticism, the question of allegory began to be avoided in more theoretically oriented Latin Americanist circles; and members of these circles largely missed the opportunity to read Latin American literature with and through a more Benjaminian or de Manian (or Derridean) concept of allegory.Yet I want to suggest that such a turn away from allegory is really a turn away from a certain politics of allegory. What might a turn, or return, to allegory mean now for Latin American literary studies? Let us consider alternative modes of allegorical reading that were sidelined in the discipline but that may now be finding an afterlife. Alberto Moreiras’s 1994 essay “Pastiche Identity, and Allegory of Allegory”—a polemical afterword to a volume dedicated to the study of identity and difference in Latin America—argued in favor of a postsymbolic, melancholic allegorical approach to identity in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges’s story, Moreiras claimed, “allegorize[d] the national allegory,” exposing the way in which “the national allegory runs into its own impossibility” (227). “To posit heterogeneity is to homogenize it; to project the unrepresentable is to represent it. To allegorize is then to authorize,” Moreiras tells us (232).

This subterranean strand—which we find treated directly in Moreiras as well as Idelber Avelar’s book on allegory and postdictatorial mourning and The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Kate Jenckes’s writing on allegory as allography in Borges—could be said to relate, at least in spirit, to Bram Acosta’s concept of illiteracy (as a practice of reading that takes into account the constitutive opacity at the heart of the opposition between writing and orality) as well as my own reflections on allegories of marranismo. We may not call this allegory; we may call it deconstruction, or we may call it, simply, reading—reading grounded in its own impossibility (de Man 205).

What would a politics, or metapolitics, of allegory—of allegory based in the impossibility of reading—look like? Returning to Rancière, perhaps this politics would be a politics of dissensus: recall that, for Rancière, political disagreement, la mésentente politique, is formally related to literary misunderstanding, le malentendu littéraire. If what I have suggested here is that (to borrow from Raymond Carver) “what we talk about when we talk about” allegory is the question of politics, it is also always the debate over canon formation and disciplinary authority. If we were to extend the politics of discipline formation and canon formation to this subterranean strand, infinite disagreement over what texts would be considered canonical— which voices would be considered authority over the others—would be necessarily implied. Here, the sovereign voices of Latin American literary criticism who read texts that, in Moreiras’s words, allegorize and thus authorize would recede in favor of postsovereign critical practices (Cabezas), in which the authority of both literary and critical texts (including this one) would be called into question, masters (of texts, of departments, of fields) suspended, and allegory both wounded and wounding—both infinite and infinitely impossible.

Allegories of Decision A decision, if there is one, disappears in its appearance.

Jacques Derrida (2002)6

Jameson proposes, in a strangely normative, passive voice, that thirdworld texts “are to be read as what I will call national allegories.” I’ve just demonstrated the way in which the masters of Latin American literary criticism fashioned their own authoritative voices in the 1980s according to a non–de Manian conception of allegoresis that excluded the possibility of unreadability, grounding their analyses instead in the concepts of sovereignty, will, and The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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intentionality. In order to propose an allegorical reading of the impossibility of political subjectivity, of politics as sovereign decisionism, or of politics as intentional fidelity to an event, I will turn to César Aira’s 1997 El congreso de literatura.The work of Aira, a veritable writing machine who publishes multiple novels a year, allows us to think not only of the rapport between literature and the market (as Sandra Contreras, Phillip Penix-Tadsen, Héctor Hoyos, Craig Epplin, and others have argued) but also of literature’s relation to ethics and politics, specifically through the idea of the event as linked to Derrida notion of “passive” or “unconscious decision” in The Politics of Friendship (68–69). I will suggest that the ethical and political ramifications of the literary are traced in El congreso de literatura, through a profound (and humorous) ambivalence toward the idea of the event as either the cause or the effect of a decision.

By inhabiting, exaggerating, parodying, trivializing, and ultimately eclipsing both event and decision, Aira’s novel allegorizes the impossibility of political concepts such as sovereignty, decision, and event. In El congreso de literatura, as I hope to demonstrate, Aira simultaneously multiplies and subtracts from the idea of the event: there are either too many events or not enough to go around, or there is one that has already happened but that escapes narration.

How has the relationship between decision and event been thought of?

For Alain Badiou, the decision is central to the “truth-event”: if the event is that which interrupts the situation or status quo, the subject’s fidelity to the event (that which constitutes him as a subject) comes about through “the decision to relate henceforth to the situation from the perspective of its evental [événementiel] supplement” (41; emphasis in original). The rapport between decision and event in Badiou’s text bears a formal compatibility with the concept of decision in the work of Carl Schmitt, for whom the decision constitutes the sovereign (“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” [5]).Yet, as Gareth Williams has convincingly argued, drawing on Derrida’s argument in The Politics of Friendship, “Becoming subjected to the architecture of sovereign decisionism does not lay to rest, for once and forever more, the possible advent of reason’s unconditional opening to the excessiveness (the incalculability) of the event” (151). That is, if there is a decision in the Schmittian sense, a decision taken by the sovereign, it necessarily excludes the possibility of the event being understood as the incalculable.

While Badiou’s event heralds the arrival of what was previously unthinkable (the void of the situation) and, in this sense, might resonate with a more The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Derridean idea of a democracy “to come” (Politics 306), the key difference is that for Badiou, the unthinkable does arrive, and it becomes nameable (the very concrete historical examples he cites are “the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Héloïse and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style [as well as] the Cultural Revolution in China [1965–67], a personal amorous passion,” and so on.

[41]). The question I want to pursue has less to do with whether the event is thinkable or unthinkable and more to do with the status of the decision in relation to the event. Is the decision the condition of possibility of the event, or is the event the condition of possibility of the decision? How does the idea of “passive” or “unconscious decision” allow us to imagine an event that would exceed chronology, causality, and calculability? Finally, what does literature or the literary have to tell us about such matters? How does allegory (etymologically, “other speaking”) tell this story otherwise?

El congreso de literatura offers a possible avenue into this debate, if not as a representative example of the literary then as one possible instance of a supplementary discourse to the philosophical. The novella relates the ambitious attempt of the narrator-protagonist, also named César Aira (a writer, translator, and mad scientist) to clone Carlos Fuentes in order to take over the world. The so-called genius Fuentes, who is in attendance at the same literary conference as Aira in Mérida, Venezuela, represents the best hope of world domination, because, the narrator explains, high culture—philosophy, history, literature, classics—is the best way to distract the “unsuspecting masses”: “el disfraz de cosa anticuada y pasada de moda de la alta cultura era la estratagema perfecta para desorientar a las masas incautas” (El congreso 29) [“high culture’s disguise as something old fashioned and out-of-date was the perfect strategy to disorient the unsuspecting masses” (Literary, 21–22)]. Aira’s fantasy depends upon the reproduction of the same—totalitarian thinking in its most basic form; yet the fact that he will utilize a literary celebrity to do so exposes the potential pitfalls of literature as institution while at the same time introducing a necessary flaw to the plan through the motif of literature as translation.

After sending out a wasp to bring back a cell from Fuentes’s body for cloning—which unexpectedly comes back neon blue—he sets the cloning machine to work in the hills surrounding the city and proceeds to wait several days at the hotel swimming pool while the conference goes on without The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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him. Aira spends the next two days poolside, attempting to slow or stop his hyperactive brain, which is never, for a second, free of a thought, or a thousand thoughts. The tension between the automaticity of his thoughts and his attempt to halt them mirrors the relationship between “events” and Aira’s narration of these events. He repeatedly and obsessively refers to the quantity of details he must leave out in order to stick to his self-imposed page limit, an impossible task that requires multiple “translations,” a motif that comes to stand for the task of writing more broadly: creo que lo más conveniente será remontarme al comienzo. Pero no al comienzo de esta historia sino el anterior, el comienzo que hizo posible que hubiera una historia. Para lo cual es inevitable cambiar de nivel, y empezar por la Fábula que constituye la lógica del relato. Después tendré que hacer la ‘traducción’, pero como hacerlo completamente me llevaría más páginas de las que me he impuesto como máximo para este libro, iré ‘traduciendo’ sólo donde sea necesario; donde no sea así, quedarán fragmentos de Fábula en su lengua original. (El congreso, 25) [I deem it most appropriate to begin at the beginning. Not, however, at the beginning of this story but rather at the beginning of the previous one, the beginning that made it possible for there to be a story at all.Which in turn requires me to switch levels and begin with the Fable that provides the tale’s logic. I will then have to do a “translation,” which, if carried out in full, would take more pages than I have assigned as the maximum number for this book; thus I will “translate” only when necessary; all other fragments of the Fable will remain in the original language. (Literary, 17)]

Appealing to a Benjaminian notion of translation as the fragment of an unrecoverable whole, Aira embarks upon a kind of metacriticism as he narrates, although the internal contradictions of such literary theory expose an aporia at the heart of the novel: an unsuturable chasm between what the narrator actually does and what he says he does.

Sunbathing at the pool, failing to stop the machinations of his brain, Aira recalls the love of his life, his muse, whom he met at that very swimming pool on a trip to Mérida years earlier. The memory of Amelina is still so clear—a direct contrast to the motif of amnesia that pervades the rest of the novel—that he hallucinates her presence next to the water.Yet the memory The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of Amelina, or the memory of his desire for Amelina, hearkens back to an earlier memory, an earlier (originary?) desire—that for his first love as an adolescent: “al ver a Amelina, milagrosamente, reconocí en sus rasgos, en su voz, en sus ojos, a una mujer que había sido la gran pasión de mis veinte años. A la bella Florencia la había amado desesperadamente (lo nuestro era imposible) con toda la locura de la adolescencia, y nunca dejé de amarla” (El congreso 49–40) [“when I saw Amelina, I miraculously recognized in her features, her voice, her eyes, a woman who had been my great passion when I was twenty. I had loved the beautiful Florencia to despair (ours was an impossible love) with all the madness of adolescence, and I never stopped loving her.” (Literary 44)]. Soon after this hallucination, Aira takes a new lover, a third link in the chain of equivalences that hearkens back to Florencia via Amelina: Nelly, Amelina’s best friend and roommate.

It is Nelly (and thus also Amelina and Florencia) who accompanies César following a student performance of his play En la corte de Adán y Eva, a surreal interpretation that the narrator-protagonist describes as a monstrous adaptation of his original work: “¿Qué era todo eso? No lo reconocía, era demasiado dadaísta.Y sin embargo, yo lo había escrito” (El congreso 61) [“What was all this about? I didn’t recognize it, it was too Dadaist. Nevertheless, I had written that” (Literary 55)]. He experiences a “doubling of the self ” as he observes the audience react with pleasure to the play: “Me entretuve espiando a la concurrencia. Todos volvían a parecerme autómatas surgidos del corazón de mis experimentos. Me poseía una especie de desdoblamiento” (El congreso 59) [“I enjoyed spying on the audience.

Everyone looked like automatons from the very heart of my experiments.

I underwent some kind of doubling of the self ” (Literary 54)]. This, too, allegorizes the rapport between machine and event that characterizes the act of writing, understood here as a kind of cloning experiment: the play is a reproduction gone awry, the audience members resemble automatons, and Aira himself is “doubled.” (The monstrous play instantiates the horror of the uncanny—the unsettling presence of the familiar in the strange or the strange in the familiar—by alluding to the impossibility of reproduction without remainder.)

Meanwhile, the main cloning experiment has taken on a life of its own, exceeding the plans of the mad scientist and exposing the machinelike quality of the event and the event-like quality of the machine. Instead of successfully The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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reproducing Carlos Fuentes, the machine has instead cloned a fiber from Fuentes’s bright blue tie.The next morning, an army of enormous neon blue worms begin to descend from the hills surrounding Mérida, threatening to crush the entire city and its panicked inhabitants. Yet the catastrophe produces in Aira a certain optimism: siempre he pensado que en una verdadera catástrofe colectiva podría encontrar la material de mis sueños, tomarla en las manos, darle forma, al fin; así fuera por un instante, todo me estaría permitido. Se necesitaría algo tan grande y general como un terremoto, una colisión planetaria, una Guerra, para que la circunstancia se hiciera genuinamente objetiva, y le diera espacio a mi subjetividad para tomar las riendas de la acción. (El congreso 81) [I have always thought that in a real collective catastrophe I would find the material of my dreams, take it in hand, shape it, finally; then, even if only for an instant, everything would be permitted. It would take something as grand and widespread as an earthquake, an interplanetary collision, or a war to make the circumstances genuinely objective and thus make room for my subjectivity to take hold of the reins of action. (Literary 75–76)]

This is the dream of the sovereign subject: facing imminent disaster (event as radical interruption), subjectivation becomes possible. It is a sci-fi version of Badiou’s ethical subject: in responding to an event of truth, the subject is constituted through his fidelity to this event.

Or is it? Just as Aira is set to ascend the mountain and reverse the cloning machine, he is confronted by a new event, which calls into question the pseudo-event that he thought was happening to him. Instead of rushing to stop the neon blobs, Nelly suggests that they return to her house to alert Amelina, who is sleeping: las palabras de Nelly transportaban una urgencia de realidad que me obligaba a tomar una perspectiva más práctica, como si Amelina realmente existiera.

Y existía, sin dudas. […] Pasó por mi cerebro la imagen de Florencia, mi amor juvenil, la Florencia joven y enamorada que yo había sentido renacer treinta años después en Amelina. […] Los relevos fantasmales del amor que habían dado forma a mi vida giraban dando forma a un túnel de luz negra en el que me hundía. (El congreso 89)

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[Nelly’s words carried with them an urgency of reality that forced me to adopt a more practical perspective, as if Amelina really did exist. And, undoubtedly, she did […] The image of Florencia, my childhood love, flitted through my mind, the young and enamored Florencia, whom I felt had been reborn in Amelina thirty years later […] Love’s ghostly stand-ins, which had shaped my life, were spinning around me, forming a tunnel of black light that I was sinking into. (Literary 84)]

Now, this option not only will fail to save the city; it won’t even rescue Amelina, who will perish along with the rest of them if Aira doesn’t stop the psychedelic worms. But he cannot resist: the surprise of the event—the words that conjure the ghost of Amelina once again—forces him to make the ostensibly unethical decision of pursuing sentiment over duty, individual over collective good. After an initial euphoria—“En el momento de tomar la decisión, me poseía una euforia casi infantil” (El congreso 90) [“the very instant I made the decision to go, I became possessed by an almost infantile euphoria” (Literary 84)]—he immediately begins to feel ashamed for having abandoned his responsibility to the city in favor of his own selfish desires: “Me sentí un miserable.Todo lo que estaba pasando era culpa mía, y ahora, en lugar de jugarme el todo por el todo para aniquilar la amenaza (era el único que podía hacerlo), me dejaba llevar por un capricho íntimo, sentimental, con una irresponsabilidad que me avergonzaba” (El congreso 91) [“I felt like a scoundrel. Everything that was happening was my fault, and now, instead of putting everything on the line to rid the world of this threat (it was the least I could do), I was allowing myself to be carried away by a private, sentimental whim; I was ashamed of my lack of responsibility” (Literary 86)].

This (second) decision, too, appears to be consistent with the logic of the event in Badiou (we recall that for Badiou, a truth-event can pertain to one of four categories: politics, art, science, or love); however, immediately after leaving for Amelina’s house, Aira changes course once again, only this time we are not privy to that which has derailed the hero: “Aquí hay un blanco en el relato. No sé lo que pasó en los minutos que siguieron […]

Lo cierto es que de pronto me encontré treinta o cuarenta metros bajo el nivel de las calles” (El congreso 92) [“Here there is a blank in the story. I don’t know what happened in the following few minutes […] What I do know is that I suddenly found myself about a hundred feet below street level” (Literary 87)]. Instead of reuniting with his beloved muse, Aira finds himself The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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face-to-face with one of the enormous silkworm clones and, together with Nelly, manages to absorb the worm using an Exoscope, a prop from the monstrous production of Aira’s play. The disappearance of the worm in question causes the elimination of all of the worms, and the public breaks into applause and cries of relief: “La gente lo tomaba por una especie de milagro, pero por supuesto yo sabía que con los clones es así: uno, son todos” (El congreso 95) [“People took it as some kind of miracle, but I, of course, knew that clones were like that: one is all” (Literary 90)].

Thus, the narrator-protagonist Aira assumes the typical role of the hero, both literary and extraliterary. He confides to us that while he has indeed become a kind of hero by taking action (rather than simply writing about it), the miracle is not his but rather belongs to the logic of cloning (“uno, son todos” [El congreso 95]). But what has motivated this change of course? And why locate such an event outside the bounds of the narrative (only to signal it through the narrative)? What relationship between decision and event is traced in this strange, climactic scene? There is no doubt that decisions are made in El congreso de literatura; if anything, there is an excess of decisions.

But what is the nature of these decisions, who makes them, and what do they decide? Each supposed event that takes place in the novel seems briefly to correspond to a Badiouian event, but disappears almost as quickly as it appears, and each corresponding decision is displaced by another. Aira’s events (and decisions) are simultaneously excessive and scarce, and what seems to be the decisive event happens in a kind of unconscious haze of amnesia.

The “decisive” episode resembles less an event in a Badiouian sense than Derrida’s idea of “passive” or “unconscious decision,” an idea he develops as part of a broader critique of sovereign decisionism, exposing the paradoxical relation between and within decision and event: The aporia of the event intersects with, but also capitalizes or overdetermines, the aporia of decision with regard to the perhaps. There is no event, to be sure, that is not preceded and followed by its own perhaps, and that is not as unique, singular and irreplaceable as the decision with which it is frequently associated, notably in politics. But can one not suggest without a facile paradox, that the eventness of an event remains minimal, if not excluded, by a decision? Certainly the decision makes the event, but it also neutralizes this happening that must surprise both the freedom and the will

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of every subject—surprise, in a word, the very subjectivity of the subject, affecting it wherever the subject is exposed, sensitive, receptive, vulnerable and fundamentally passive, before and beyond any decision—indeed, before any subjectivation or objectivation. (Politics 68; emphasis in original)

The aporetic quality of the event is related to the idea of “passive decision” as a decision made not by an autonomous will, a conscious sovereign, but by “the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me” (Derrida, Politics 68). Thus, decision is called a “condition of the event” at the same time that passive decision implies an unconditional opening to the demand of the other (the other as arrivant, à venir, the incalculable) (68).

The passive decision is not made by a conscious ego, and yet this fact does not renounce responsibility and obligation: “In sum, a decision is unconscious— insane as that may seem, it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible” (69; emphasis in original). In Aira’s novella, the moment that seems to determine everything is eclipsed by the protagonist’s amnesia, or loss of consciousness: as event, or condition of the event, or unconditional condition of the event, the unconscious decision exposes the evental quality of the machine; the constitutive glitch or error of the cloning plot and thus also of literature; the specter of incalculability that haunts every sovereign decision.

The event, then, neither subjectivizes nor desubjectivizes but rather exhibits a fundamental ambivalence in Aira’s work, as in Derrida’s. What is initially thought to be an event (the impending disaster) gives way to a new event (the mention of Amelina’s name), which triggers what seems to be another event (Aira’s decision to pursue her), followed by a final but ultimately evasive event: the moment of, one supposes, a decision that has been eclipsed by the amnesia that haunts the narrative. At the end, order is restored, but symbolically it has been irreparably altered—or, rather, it is shown to have been always already altered, interrupted from within. In much the same way that the writer César Aira’s complete surrender to the market—he has “a little something for everyone” (Penix-Tadsen 183)—is linked to an ostensible resistance to or withdrawal from the market, (exemplified by the abundance of his novels published by small, independent editorials), negating both alternatives (or at least the opposition between them); the slippage between and within decision and event creates the conditions of possibility and impossibility for ethico-political interruption in and from the literary.

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Like the uncanny adaptation of the narrator’s play—indeed, like the cloning machine itself—allegory in El congreso de literatura reveals itself to be nothing more (and nothing less) than a translation machine, a machine that bears an evental quality at the same time that it reveals the machinelike quality of the event. It is here, in Aira’s monstrous work, that we can begin to think the possibility of reading the machine—or the reading machine—as (returning to Derrida) a “monstrosity … an impossible event” and “therefore the only possible event” (“Typewriter” 74; emphasis in original).

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary and the editor of The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (Fordham UP, 2017). Currently, she is completing a book-length manuscript, “Anarchaeologies: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature.”

Notes 1 Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 183.

2 If Franco discounted the idea of national allegory as genre in light of the many hybrid texts produced by Latin American writers, there was a dearth of criticism that engaged with allegory as mode of signification (in the Benjaminian sense).

3 The hypothesis is not as reductive as it can be made to appear. These events are not only historical facts—the dates of this or that revolution, colonial expedition, and so on—but also ideologies and dynamic networks of situations. First-world literature may also be faithful to these sorts of events—they may also faithfully represent them—but in first-world literature, the relation between the work and what it represents is unavoidably expressed in language mediated by post- or non-national figures (bourgeois interiority, the overdeterminations of a literary tradition tied to an international market). First-world literature, by implication, has lost a direct relation to the event.

4 Jameson’s politics is a politics of transparency or, more specifically, of concealment and revelation: “in distinction to the unconscious allegories of our own cultural texts,” he tells us, “third-world national allegories are conscious and overt” (79–80).This is perhaps a logic extension of the argument in his 1981 The Political Unconscious, in which ideological reading, or reading for ideology, relies upon the classical concept of aletheia as a buried truth brought to light. Taken to its ultimate consequences, this would imply a politics of totalitarianism (what I have The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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called, in Figurative Inquisitions, “inquisitional logic”), or a totalitarian, totalizing practice of reading: one that demands complete transparency, one that—through political or hermeneutic interrogation—aims to extract the buried truth from the text or the slave.The political turn, in Jameson’s practice of reading, is a turn toward complete readability or translatability, so that his well-meaning inclusion of third-world texts in their radical alterity within first-world criticism presumes that we know who third-world intellectuals are, what they do.

5 Alonso writes the following: [T]he doctrinaire allegorical intention of the novel dictates that there must be a struggle between Santos Luzardo and doña Bárbara, which in turn must be interpreted as alluding to the conflict between the abstract concepts of Civilization and Barbarism; I have already remarked on some of the strategies used by the text to guarantee such an interpretation. And yet, one can further establish that allegory is simultaneously used by Gallegos also as a means of depicting the very struggle between doña Bárbara and Santos Luzardo that constitutes the novel’s argument. Consequently, allegory in Doña Bárbara is not just an interpretive intention projected into the text, but also a narrative technique extensively employed to construct the events depicted in the novel. (120)

6 Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine.” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, p. 229.

Works Cited Aira, César. El congreso de literatura. 1997. Editorial Venezolana, 2007.

———.The Literary Conference.Translated by Katherine Silver, New Directions, 2010.

Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory.” Social Text, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 3–25.

Alonso, Carlos. The Spanish American Regional Novel. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Duke UP, 1999.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward, Verso, 2002.

Benjamin, Walter. “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

1928. Introduction by George Steiner, translated by John Osborne,Verso, 2003.

Cabezas, Oscar. Postsoberanía: Literatura, política y trabajo. La Cebra, 2013.

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Carver, Raymond. WhatWe Talk AboutWhenWe Talk About Love. Knopf, 1981.

Contreras, Sandra. Las vueltas de César Aira. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2002. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading.Yale UP, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques. “Nietzsche and the Machine.” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001. Edited and translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford UP, 2002, pp. 215–56.

———. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins, Verso, 2005.

———. “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2).” Without Alibi, translated and edited

by Kamuf, Peggy, Stanford UP, 2002, pp. 71–160.

Epplin, Craig. Late Book Culture in Argentina. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Franco, Jean. “The Nation as Imagined Community.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, U of Minnesota P, 1997, pp. 130–37.

González Echevarría, Roberto. TheVoice of the Masters:Writing and Authority in Latin American Literature. U of Texas P, 1985.

Graff Zivin, Erin. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion,Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic. Northwestern UP, 2014.

Hoyos, Héctor. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. Columbia UP, 2015. University Press Scholarship Online, https://doi.org/10.7312/ columbia/9780231168427.001.0001.

Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text, vol. 15, no. 15, 1986, pp. 65–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/466493.

Jenckes, Kate. Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History. SUNY, 2007.

Moreiras, Alberto. “Pastiche Identity, and Allegory of Allegory.” Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, edited by Amaryll Beatrice Chanady U of Minnesota P, 1994, pp. 204–38.

Penix-Tadsen, Phillip. “Marketing Marginality: Resistance and Commodification in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Production.” PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2009.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Julie Rose, Polity, 2011.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. 1922.

Translated by George Schwab, U of Chicago P, 1985.

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. U of California P, 1991.

Williams, Gareth. The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119031.

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The Allegorical Machine: Politics, H ­ istory, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno Patrick Dove Abstract: This article looks at how Paul de Man’s work on allegory and temporality can help to shed light on literary treatments of political violence, dictatorship, historical trauma and memory. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2013 novel El sueño del retorno [The Dream of My Return] explores the internal contradictions and limits found in one of the most influential themes in the literature of post-dictatorship in Latin America: the literary deployment of memory as a step toward truth and justice. At the same time the novel also proposes a subtle but profound critique of the legacy of militancy today.

Keywords: allegory, trauma, memory, political violence, Castellos Moya, de Man So kann ich nicht sagen, was ich nur meine.

Hegel (1970)1 For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Romans 7:192 Paul de Man proposes that of all literary modalities, it is allegory that best illuminates the temporal nature of existence—and of thought and action, in particular. Allegory, as de Man understands it, also sheds light on disjunction, on separation and finitude, as a constitutive moment or condition for history, politics, and all creative activity. If allegory discloses what de Man calls the “authentically temporal destiny” of existence, it also ruins the humanistic The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 174–201 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.174

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assumptions through which terms such as “existence,” “memory,” “language,” and even “the human” are understood in the modern philosophical tradition (“Rhetoric” 206). Allegory brings to light an inhuman dimension in what we call language, and this is a register that cannot be ignored when it comes to thinking about history, art, or politics.

I begin by discussing several of the key points about allegory and time raised by de Man in essays published from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. I then turn to the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2013 novel El sueño del retorno, situated in the early 1990s and whose protagonist—not unlike the author himself at the time—resides in Mexico and dreams of returning to San Salvador in the wake of the 1993 Chapultepec Peace Accords that nominally put an end to the decades-long Salvadoran Civil War. I consider Castellanos Moya’s novel in the context of Fredric Jameson’s notion of national allegory and propose that the questions concerning temporality and technics brought forth in de Man’s work can help us to see how El sueño del retorno problematizes some of the underlying assumptions of Jameson’s text.

We misunderstand the nature of allegory, de Man contends, if we think of it as a sign pointing to a referent—typically an abstract idea—existing outside of language. The referent to which the allegorical sign points is nothing other than another sign. But it is not just any sign; it is a special sign posited as having existed in an irretrievable past.3 Allegory, as de Man puts it in Heideggerian language, thus partakes in the “unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny” (“Rhetoric” 206). He continues by proposing that allegorical reference be understood as a specific kind of repetition, one that he associates with the name of Kierkegaard: This relation between signs necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element; it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it.The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is the essence of the previous sign to be pure anteriority […] Allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. (207) The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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In this account, allegorical disclosure of temporal destiny bears something akin to a tragic tone, marking both a debt and a non-negatable distance with respect to its own origin, an originary separation as the condition of possibility for allegorical remembrance. Allegorical reflection on the origin unfolds in view of a subject who precisely seeks refuge from fleetingness and mortality—in other words, from time itself—in a natural realm. However, allegory also discovers that its subject is constitutively barred from this natural world in which it would seek refuge, a world in relation to which the subject “bears no resemblance” (de Man, Allegories 74).This is separation disclosing itself as the secret origin of allegorical narrative. It is because the allegorical subject exists in time and in the domain of artifice or technics that it is barred from the purity of this anterior sphere in which it seeks refuge.

The point can be clarified by contrasting allegory to the symbol, the nature of which is atemporal. With the symbol, appearance and being, manifestation and idea, belong to the same totality, differing only in extension.

The components that make up the symbol exist contemporaneously with one another, and their relationship is thus not temporal but spatial. In contrast to the atemporal unity of the symbol, time and heterogeneity are the constitutive elements for allegory. Not only does allegory introduce temporal distance in relation to its own origin; it establishes its language in what de Man terms “the void of [a] temporal difference” (“Rhetoric” 206). In other words, allegorical separation constitutes a difference whose elements cannot be reconciled with one another because they are neither contemporaneous nor even part of a single chronological sequence. For allegory, the present and the archaic past prove to be something other than two points on the same (temporal) line; the anteriority to which allegory points was never present to begin with. Although de Man does not put things quite this way, it seems to me that this thought of dissymmetry calls attention to a dimension within time that is not temporal in nature—a part of time that cannot, properly speaking, be temporalized. This is one of the conclusions of de Man’s investigation; but allegory as literary form always begins with the semblance of a linear chronological relationship that could be repeated in reverse.

As for the reference to repetition “in the Kierkegaardian sense” (“Rhetoric” 207), although de Man does not explain what he has in mind, Kierkegaard’s Repetition essay offers some useful hints. The essay opposes its notion of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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repetition to two hallowed philosophical principles.The first is the Platonic concept of anamnesis as originary memory: an ontological premise that absolutizes being as what has been and thereby excludes any possibility of thinking truth as the new or as breaking with the past. The other principle is the Hegelian account of the dialectic as a mediation process capable of subsuming all difference under the logic of the same. Formally speaking, repetition and recollection are the same for Kierkegaard. Their vectors, however, are precisely inverted: “what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards” (Kierkegaard 3). The meaning of this distinction between backwards and forwards trajectories is illustrated when Kierkegaard’s character Constantin sets out to visit Berlin, a city he visited long ago and where he now hopes to relive old memories. But reliving the past (repetition backwards) proves to be impossible, because the postulated return necessarily forecloses the dimensions of chance and surprise that colored the first visit. Memory and calculation precisely get in the way of the recovery they seek to bring about.

But before we conclude that the distinction amounts to nothing more than a simple linear chronology of first time versus subsequent reiterations that may or may not be able to capture the essence of the first time, let us note that in this example, the first time only becomes what it is through repetition, which determines it as the sign of a pure and irretrievable anteriority.

What Kierkegaard calls “genuine” repetition (recollection forwards), in contradistinction to Platonic anamnesis and Hegelian reconciliation, is anything but linear and sequential. This distinction sheds important light on what de Man is up to in his discussion of allegory. Repetition introduces a distance and a dissymmetry through that which is repeated; the first time takes shape not as an ideal referent but as an anterior sign capable of temporalizing experience.

Arne Melberg emphasizes that Kierkegaardian repetition thematizes a break in sequentialized chronologizations of time (74).The now of repetition, as we just saw in the Constantin example, is also an after: a second time that refers to a then, which is the sign of a prior time. By the same token, the then (what will have been the first time) of repetition bears the trace of the after, because irretrievable anteriority only emerges in and through repetition or, more precisely, through the inability to return. Anteriority as origin is an effect of what comes after.The deictic chaining of now, then, and The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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after sustains a nonlinear circuit of reference that threatens to unravel the sequential structure of narrative time. Repetition, like deixis, is language referring to itself. It short circuits the temporal ordering of before and after through introduction of the now. The now of repetition has no proper place of its own in any temporal sequence, because in a certain sense, it has always already happened, while in another sense, it unavoidably comes too late.

Repetition, in its Kierkegaardian sense, thereby opens a site from which the new might be thought and experienced. But it is also a kind of resistance within language; it exposes a disjunction or coming apart that makes it difficult for us to be confident that we know of what we are speaking when we refer to “language.”

The peculiar movement of temporalization that is proper to allegory can be detected in one of the classic gestures of the twentieth-century Latin American novel: literary returns to a primordial time or place that has been construed as the lost, buried, or forgotten origin of Latin American consciousness. Such literary returns often come charged with hopes of escaping the ill effects of modernization for a form of life presumed to be more natural, authentic, and harmonious. What is typically uncovered or disclosed, however, is not a phenomenal reality but instead another sign or trope: the encrypted manuscript in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad; baroque nature as writing in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos; primitive accumulation as theft and reinscription in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo; and so on.

I now turn to Fredric Jameson’s much-discussed claim about national allegory in his 1986 essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” which I look at in the context of de Man’s discussion of temporalization. The controversial claim that all third-world novels can be read as national allegories is grounded in Jameson’s assessment that the divide between public and private spheres that goes without question in the developed world does not prevail in the same way in Latin America and other underdeveloped regions. First and third worlds face each other as mirror images. First-world cultural production is overcoded by a bourgeois hegemony that has succeeded in establishing its own ideas and sensibility as a general truth that goes without saying. From that point on, collective spaces and struggles can only be grasped from the perspective of the modern individual: as its playground or as a jungle in which its security is threatened.

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not clear-cut, and neither does it appear as a truth/falsehood dichotomy.

Narratives of ostensibly private, interior experiences continue to offer insight into the shared struggles of the oppressed. Juan Preciado’s return to Comala in search of paternal recognition and/or redress for the ordeals suffered by his mother turns into a poetic account of an historical wound and a deep-seated structure of domination and inequality that Mexico will need to come to terms with in order for the emancipatory promise of the revolution to be fulfilled. Third-world literature not only affords greater awareness of ideological formations, but, according to Jameson, it also retains memory traces of alternatives to the historical temporality of capitalism.

The fragmented and scattered murmurs to which Preciado bears witness in Comala, to continue with the example, contain memory traces that attest to a shared right of rebellion against tyranny. Against the individuation, fragmentation, and alienation that prevail in developed societies, national allegory opposes “the principles of community interdependence” (Jameson 86) as what de Man would call the sign of anteriority. But for Jameson, writing in 1986, this anterior sign was clearly not meant to be seen as irretrievable.

Jameson patterns the formal inversion of first- and third-world allegorical codes after the structure of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.While much could be said about the relationship between allegory and consciousness, this is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology, except to reference a recent critique of Jameson’s position in a paper by Alberto Moreiras on cynicism in the work of Castellanos Moya. While Moreiras advances reservations about Jameson’s reading of the status of “situational consciousness” in Hegel’s account of how the slave begins to acquire consciousness through experiences of negativity, my own concern has to do with the undertheorized status of allegory in Jameson’s essay. The problem I am raising is not, as many readers have alleged, that Jameson overlooks the likely possibility that there are some (or many) non-allegorical texts out there. On the contrary, I believe that close attention to de Man’s work would similarly lead us to the conclusion that there is indeed no escaping the allegorical framework and that even Jameson’s most vehement critics would have a difficult time freeing themselves completely from the allegorical model.4 The more interesting blind spot in Jameson’s claim, it seems to me, is that it is made in the absence of any sustained reflection on what is at stake in the allegorical structure of temporalization. Jameson’s thesis bears a clear The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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debt to Hegel, but it is not accompanied by any reflection on what sort of interest payments might come attached to such a loan. Jameson presumes that allegory can provide access to an anti-capitalist memory or imaginary and that it can do so even in the dark times of late modernity. However, his assertions about situational consciousness and epistemic privilege turn out to depend on the very things they seem so eager to free themselves from: the tropological language of literature and what de Man calls the narrativization of history as ideology. Moreover, if we accept Jameson’s universalization of the allegorical structure of literature, which I am proposing we do, it is difficult to see how this universalization could offer the critical awareness that he seeks—both because the subjective support provided by allegory is imaginary in nature and because allegory’s temporalizing structure may be indistinguishable from the developmentalist teleology of capitalist modernity.

If allegory provides the basic template for modern conceptualizations of history—a point I will now discuss—then it is not easy to envision how allegory could provide access to a sensibility or a way of life that is decisively other than capitalist modernity.

One of the key texts in de Man’s consideration of allegorical language is the posthumously published essay “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” (in his Aesthetic Ideology), which takes stock of the curious place allotted to allegory in Hegel’s discussions of art, philosophy, and history. It is there that de Man proposes that all modern conceptualizations of history are allegorical through and through. Hegelian thought, he observes, is at one and the same time a history of philosophy and a philosophy of history. Hegel’s system is a reckoning with the reciprocal determination of thought and history by way of a poetics of allegory in which contingency and freedom are woven together. If philosophical inquiry is dependent on allegory, by implication, the various ways of understanding history that we inherit from modern philosophy are also informed by allegory, and in a manner that may prove equally difficult to grasp or to denounce and leave behind once and for all.

Finally, de Man demonstrates that it is also allegory that provides insight into how the Hegelian system remains unable to complete itself as such, remaining dependent on a difference that it cannot subsume as a difference of the system.

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the expression of a self-conscious subject and more like an automated or ghostly machine. It provides evidence of a technics at the heart of what we ordinarily think of as the sovereign domain of the human subject: interiority, memory, expression. By the same token, allegory stages the occurrence of language as it exceeds the concepts and models we have at our disposal for understanding language itself: as rhetoric, cognition, performative, and so on. Allegory is language becoming different from itself, hence slipping away from of our cognitive grasp.

Although the discussion of allegory in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics is relegated to a marginal place, de Man demonstrates how this peripheral site provides foundational support for the Hegelian system while also threatening to undermine its structural stability from within. Allegory is the name for a constitutive limit on which the Hegelian system depends, although it remains unable to master it or fully bring it within its domain.

De Man terms it the “defective cornerstone” of the speculative architectonic (Aesthetic 104). If allegory is the weak point that threatens to bring the entire edifice crashing down, it is also as the jointure that allows the structure to stand in the first place—the conduit between exterior and interior, sensible and supersensible realms: The commanding metaphor that organizes [the Hegelian] system is that of interiorization, the understanding of aesthetic beauty as the external manifestation of an ideal content which is itself an interiorized experience, the recollected emotion of a bygone perception.The sensory manifestation (sinnliches Scheinen) of art and literature is the outside of an inner content which is itself an outer event or entity that has been internalized. (de Man, Aesthetic 100)

Although few of his readers would consider Hegel a thinker inclined to put much philosophical weight on art, the stakes when it comes to aesthetics and allegory are indeed high. Hegel understands aesthetic activity in general as the sensible appearance or manifestation of the idea. Artistic creativity serves as a bridge between the phenomenal realm of the senses and the supersensible domain of the intellect. In the absence of such a conduit to the phenomenal world, the intellect would find itself condemned to the realm of abstraction. As a particular mode of aesthetic activity, meanwhile, allegory enjoys a privileged role in this mediation. Recall that many of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Hegel’s predecessors denigrated allegory as bereft of the innate aesthetic value of the symbol. Whereas the symbol was celebrated as displaying a unified, natural connection between form and content, allegory was seen as an artificial and conventional mode of signification that relies on signs rather than natural correspondences. Philosophy and aesthetic theory have tended to disparage it, equating its contingent arrangement of sensible and supersensible elements with ugliness. While Hegel accepts the formal terms of the distinction he turns the tables on the tradition by asserting that it is precisely in this contingency of the sign that the intellect can assert its freedom from determination by the sensible world. If correspondence between phenomenal appearance and idea is conventional in allegory, then, by implication, it is only through allegory that the intellect can assert its own sovereignty over the specific form it assumes.

In the above quoted passage, we also catch glimpse of an important disjunction that emerges in the allegorical relation. Unlike what happens with the symbol, the interior content to which allegory gives form is not an ideal meaning residing outside of time.The interior state that it discloses turns out to be the product of an earlier interiorization—an occurrence whose experience inscribed itself in the memory circuits of the subject, for instance. Thus, the interior, nonsensible origin that allegory is charged with transporting into the sensible realm is in fact the product of a prior translation (external to internal). This translational loop, in which exteriorization is always already interiorization, effectively splits allegorical language from itself, overdetermining the sign as a sedimentary artifact possessing multiple temporal layers.

The paradigm for art is thought, not perception; allegorical sign, not the natural unity of the symbol; writing, not painting or music. For the same reason, de Man points out, art for Hegel is also linked to memorization (Gedächtnis) and not recollection (Erinnerung). Memorization denotes the exteriorization of internalized memory in the written sign, as opposed to the ideal internal process that is recollection. As we have seen, allegory partakes in a past whose recovery is out of the question. The object of memorization is of the past in a radical sense, and allegory “leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content” (de Man, Aesthetic 103). The result is a conundrum whereby the allegorical manifestation of interiority through The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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memorization effectively negates what it ought to preserve—not unlike the way in which Plato accuses writing, which is supposed to serve as an aide-mémoire, of in fact promoting forgetting. Memorization introduces a mechanicity that Hegel describes as an “empty link” [das leere Band] (qtd. in de Man, Aesthetic 102) between interior experience and the phenomenal world. Once incarnated in the written word, memory can no longer be understood as the ideal unification of the subject with itself: past with present, passive with active, reflected with reflecting.

I now turn to an essay that de Man first published in Critical Inquiry in 1976 under the title “Political Allegory in Rousseau.”The article was reprinted three years later, with a few alterations, in Allegories of Reading under the heading “Promises (Social Contract).” The question I want to look at before moving on to Castellanos Moya involves the difference between those two titles.The substitution invites us to ask what happens when the promise and its temporality comes to take the place of political allegory. Are these two names for the same thing? Or, after further reflection, did de Man decide to replace an inadequate term with a more precise one?

One answer to this question can be found in de Man’s account of reading as confrontation with the aporetic nature of text. A text, he tells us, demands to be read simultaneously through heterogeneous locutionary registers—for instance, as figurative language and grammatical order, as constative and performative speech, and so on.The passage from one register to another, however, introduces a difference that cannot be reconciled by recourse to the tools proper to one register or the other. The passage itself has no proper measure. As is the case with language, what we call text is therefore irreducibly heterogeneous, not one.Text necessitates a thinking of any present as always already differing from itself. It threatens the ideal unity and homogeneity of time that serves as the foundation for philosophical, political, and economic modernity. With de Man’s essay, I propose that the two titles in question inform one another in the following way: the promise clarifies what is at stake in political allegory (a strange temporality without which there could be no politics) while political allegory situates the odd temporality of the promise in the realm of power and decision. At the same time, the passage from political allegory to promise also marks a limit for the political.The demonstration of this point will have to wait until the final part of this article.

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De Man’s elucidation of this disjunction in internal language finds its political corollary in Rousseau’s view of the modern state in its static and active roles.

What we call “the state” coincides with distinct functions and responsibilities that may not be reconcilable under a single concept. On one hand, the state designates a constituted entity (Etat) charged with legislating and applying the law; but it also points to a constitutive sovereign force (Souverain) whose nature is to assign itself the law, and which is necessary, in principle, if we hope to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power and force. In de Man’s terms, this is analogous to the distinction between constative (Etat) and performative (Souverain) modalities of language, or between grammar and rhetoric, or between cognition and action. A text, such as a constitution or a treatise on political theory, must take into account both of these modalities, and regardless of the possibility that they may prove to be incompatible with one another. “It seems,” writes de Man, “that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively, like the thieving lawmaker in the Social Contract, and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows” (Allegories 270). Cognition and action, Etat and Souverain, must be brought together in order for there to be politics at all—that is, something more than arbitrary, self-interested deployment of power and expropriation. In bringing these modalities together, however, the text produces a situation in which the terms of one must be subjugated to those of the other. The disjunction that splits cognition and action is not a shortcoming that Rousseau could have fixed, just as he could not have resolved the difference between constative and performative speech. It is, as de Man writes in the 1979 version of the essay, a fact of language over which Rousseau himself has no control. Just as any other reader, he is bound to misread his text as a promise of political change. The error is not with the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act. Die Sprache verspricht (sich); to the extent that it is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth. (Allegories 277)

In the 1976 version of the essay, de Man had written “Die Sprache verspricht”: language promises (“Political” 675). In the 1979 revised version, he changed this to “Die Sprache verspricht (sich)” (Allegories 277). Both variations allude to Heidegger’s Die Sprache spricht: language speaks. The difference The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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between de Man’s formulations and Heidegger’s is marked only by the elusive verbal prefix ver-, which introduces an implicit distinction between an act that inaugurates a totality (language speaking, which in Heidegger’s formulation is tantamount to saying “the world worlds” or “being discloses”) and an act that introduces a gap between the time of speech and the time in which what is spoken will have been realized (language promising). The promise is divided from itself; its structure gives shape to a thought of time as heterogeneous and irreducible to any metaphysical conceptualization of time—that is, to any inquiry that would determine the essence of time as presence.5 Every promise, every utterance of an action still to be realized in the form of an “I will do …” finds itself divided between distinct times: between the present moment of speaking, a past whose reality the promise vows will change, and a (specified or indeterminate) future present in which the promise will be fulfilled.This is the case whether the promise appeals to the speaker’s personal life (“I vow to quit smoking after exams are over”) or to history (“The communist revolution will put an end to class conflict and exploitation”). Language promises, and it is in language that the promissory structure of the political is to be found. One of the things Rousseau teaches us is that there can be no politics without language and without the odd temporality of the promise. In the absence of this differential temporality and the potentiality it harbors, politics would be indistinguishable from mere administration of social differences and calculative expropriation of time.

In the 1979 version of the essay, de Man revises the 1976 sentence through the insertion of the reflexive pronoun, generating a new and somewhat idiosyncratic sentence: Die Sprache verspricht (sich).Transitively or intransitively, language promises [verspricht]; reflexively, language misspeaks or stumbles over itself [sich verspricht]. Language introduces disjuncture and thereby ruins the identity between form and meaning, phenomenality and truth.We must not move too hastily in dismissing this focus on language and its aporias as a sophistic evasion of the real—that is, practical—concerns of politics. As Jacques Derrida puts it in an essay written shortly after de Man’s death, it is precisely the aporetic structure of the promise that “gives or promises the thinking of the very possibility of what still remains unthinkable or unthought, indeed, impossible” (Memoires 132). The structure of the promise is not that of a simple lag time separating the moment of pronunciation from the time of action and/or fulfillment of whatever terms are set out in the promise.

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At an equally fundamental level, the promise underscores a dimension of incalculability that underlies all speech and all action insofar as they presuppose the possibility of being read, heard, and understood again in the future.

Although the promise unquestionably involves a calculative appropriation of time insofar as it projects a determinate future that the speaker vows to help bring about, the very utterance of the promise also underscores a limit for all calculation: after all, if time could be fully subsumed within calculative reason, there would be no need to make promises in the first place.

Derrida too focuses on the promise as highlighting a dimension of allegorical language that exceeds calculation, albeit from within calculation itself. He calls this dimension a Faktum.The structure of facticity resembles the irretrievable anteriority that de Man associates with the allegorical referent: [It is] a fact of language […] over which we have no control. This “fact” is not natural, it is an artifact, but an artifact which for us […] is already there, as a past which has never been present.We might say that it is historicity itself—a historicity which cannot be historical, an “ancientness” without history, without anteriority, but which produces history. (Derrida, Memoires 95; emphasis added)

Here, the dichotomy of speech and act, saying and doing, begins to tremble. Linguistic facticity is not of nature but of technics, a technics that is at work in all creative activity (art, literature, politics).This Faktum has no history, and thus it can only be represented allegorically; or it can only be represented allegorically and catachrestically—as irretrievable anteriority.

But this facticity is also the condition of possibility for anything like history and thus is silently at work in any allegory. As past that has never been present, it is the originary cut that will have severed all speaking beings from nature, a separation through which it becomes possible to conceive of “nature” and “culture.” Such a cut is not an origin in any essential sense; in other words, it could never have constituted an origin in its own time (if it had a time).

It can only become origin a posteriori, once irretrievably lost, in the speech that drowns out the silence of the cut.This retroactive temporal structuring of facticity as temporal precisely inverts the promissory structure of which I have been speaking.Thus, the promise brings to light the radical anteriority of “language” or linguistic facticity that turns out to possess the same odd temporal structure that governs allegory.

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De Man’s discussion of allegorical anteriority, of a past that was never present, opens up possibilities for thinking time and history as something other than a progressive or teleologically guided sequence. Recall that for de Man a text demands to be read at one and the same time as describing and constituting what it describes. As we have seen, this one and the same time is anything but a single, homogeneous time. Like the radical anteriority described by Derrida, it has never been present and could not become present; yet, there could be no such thing as action or politics without it. It may be that allegorical anamnesis of an anteriority that was never present offers a site for thinking the nonoppositional difference that philosophy seems destined to avoid whenever it tries to conceptualize space or time—a site for thinking the spacing of time or the becoming time of space.

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2013 novel El sueño del retorno tells the story of a Salvadoran exile, Erasmo Aragón, who is employed as a journalist in Mexico City where he lives with his girlfriend and young daughter. In 1991, with UN-brokered negotiations for a cease-fire between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Salvadoran army underway, Aragón begins planning his return to San Salvador. There he hopes to “participate in History” (131), as he puts it, by collaborating in a new cultural journal intended to foster the development of a democratic culture in his war-torn country.The novel, based loosely on aspects of the author’s own experiences during that period, engages in an interesting way with the idea of national allegory. In one sense, El sueño del retorno is a perfect fit with Jameson’s position: there is no personal and familial anecdote in this novel that could not easily be mapped onto the national history of El Salvador, no conflict that cannot be understood as echo or symptom of the history of oppression, exploitation, and violence in the region. In another sense, however, Castellanos Moya’s work precisely moves against Jameson’s account of national allegory: by questioning the Hegelian understanding of consciousness as truth of history and, by extension, refusing the idea of literature as a mirror in which memories of collective struggle against oppression can give birth to a new revolutionary consciousness.

El sueño del retorno can also be read productively alongside an earlier collection of essays published by Castellanos Moya’s at the time of his own return to El Salvador in the early 1990s. Entitled Recuento de incertidumbres: Cultura y transición en El Salvador, the essays took stock of the uncertainties, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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fears, and hopes that accompanied the end of civil war. El sueño del retorno, meanwhile, revisits and rewrites the scene of return two decades later in order to narrativize its various desencuentros—its missed opportunities and disappointments. The Recuento essays similarly bear the mark of return: a return to El Salvador that would coincide with the country’s rise from the ashes of self-destruction to reinsert itself onto the historical tracks of social transformation and progress. Writing in 1993, Castellanos Moya clearly foresaw the difficulties that El Salvador would face in its struggle not only with the destruction wrought by civil war but also with a deeply engrained history of ideological polarization in which dissensus and difference are seen—by the Left as much as by the Right and the military regimes—as a pretext for the other’s annihilation.

Primera plana was the name of the journal that Castellanos Moya helped found and direct after his return to El Salvador in 1994.The journal promoted dialogue and debate as civil, democratic alternatives to that culture of enmity and destruction. Primera plana would oppose terror and annihilation with a space for thinking and exchange—a space which, while not itself political in any sense, is no doubt an indispensable condition for any desirable politics.

The journal was short-lived, however, in large part because the editors were unable to secure sufficient financial support in the postwar environment. As Castellanos Moya would later observe, the journal’s lack of longevity was symptomatic of how the so-called transition proved unable to transform old structures, outlooks, and habits that had prevailed in Salvadoran society over much of the previous century (“El cadaver”).

One of the incisive points raised in Recuento de incertidumbres concerns what Castellanos Moya saw then as the singular status of Central America, in distinction not only from the developed world but from other regions in Latin America. Periphery of the periphery and isthmus between two oceans, Central America is not only more exposed than most other regions to the whims of nature and to the sway of the world’s imperial powers; it is also marked by seemingly endless strings of massacres, uprooting, and migration. As a geopolitical space, it is forever undergoing displacement and disjunction, its human inhabitants and natural resources spilling relentlessly beyond its borders. Alongside the optimistic culturalism that informs Castellanos Moya’s plans for his return to El Salvador, Recuento also harbors deep-seated misgivings about what he describes as a “militarism” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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underlying Salvadoran history.The roots of this violence can be traced back to the colonial period, he says, making it, in a certain sense, foundational for post-independent Central American societies. This violence would almost have to be understood as nonhistorical: it precedes distinctions between war and politics, disorder and order; it names a thought of strife at the very ground of Central American social, political, and economic orders, and as generating what Castellanos Moya terms “national deformation” (Recuento 30–31).6 The 1980–1992 Salvadoran Civil War would then be a symptom of a deeper underlying tendency, the transformation of which would entail far more than a UN-brokered détente.

The culture of war thematized by Castellanos Moya seems to return or flare up repeatedly over the course of the region’s post-independence history. This peculiar condition of dislocation, in which Central America is forever becoming different from itself, is what imparts particular urgency to the notion of retorno in the novel I am discussing.At the same time, Castellanos Moya’s reflections on El Salvador now appear uncannily prescient in view of more recent trends in our world today, where global conflict presents problems for which the conceptual tools of political modernity may no longer be able to provide explanatory power.7 Indeed, even the underlying doubts present in the Recuento de incertidumbres strike the reader as optimistic in the context of a global disorder over which the culture of democracy would appear to have little influence: Ahora, 16 años después, compruebo perplejo que la violencia no sólo se recicló en El Salvador, sino que es el nuevo gran problema de otras naciones, que se ha convertido en la peste que, junto a la pobreza, mantiene en la postración a buena parte de Latinoamérica. La realidad se volvió más grosera, sanguinaria; mi trabajo, como el de otros colegas escritores de ficción, consiste en tragarla, digerirla, para luego reinventarla de acuerdo con las leyes propias de la fabulación literaria. (Castellanos Moya, “El cadaver”) [Now, sixteen years later, I am befuddled to find not only that violence has returned in El Salvador but that it is now the major problem faced by other nations and that it has become the plague that, along with poverty, has debilitated a good part of Latin America. Reality has become grotesque and bloodthirsty. My task, like that of other fiction writers, is to swallow and digest it in order to reinvent it according to the laws of literary fabrication.] (My translation) The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Let us now go back to El sueño del retorno. Aragón’s plans to return to San Salvador are delayed when he suffers a severe case of abdominal pain, which he fears stems from his heavy drinking. He seeks the help of a homeopathic doctor and fellow Salvadoran exile, don Chente Alvarado. After examining him, don Chente dismisses Aragón’s fears of cirrhosis and informs him that he has a case of acute intestinal inflammation brought about by stress. Don Chente administers acupuncture to relieve the symptoms but warns Aragón that, sooner or later, the discomfort is bound to return. Aragón’s guts are all knotted up for some reason or other, the doctor tells him, and the condition is unlikely to resolve itself so long as the underlying cause remains unaddressed.

The doctor appeals to human evolutionary history in order to illustrate to Aragón how his physical suffering is linked to an unknown psychic conflict.

For many millennia, protohumans behaved like all other mammals in relieving themselves wherever they happened to be. But when obliged to become sedentary and reside in caves during the Ice Age, Homo sapiens learned to control its bodily processes and to defecate in a dedicated site away from where it lived and slept. In the subsequent history of the human race, every small child has reenacted that cultural evolutionary process during its early years, confronting an anxiety-producing choice: follow the physiological impulses of the sphincter, or heed the social imperatives laid down by the parents?

La angustia y el control de los esfínteres están estrechamente relacionados.

Si a un niño se le educa con métodos estrictos y se le reprime en ese momento, a lo largo de su vida llevará su angustia al esfínter y por lo mismo al colon. Y cuando como adulto tenga que tomar una decisión entre dos opciones, sentirá angustia y esa angustia le hará apretar el esfínter y tensionar su colon. De ahí viene la colitis nerviosa, un mal que sufre la mayoría de seres humanos, aunque no se hayan percatado de ello.

(Castellanos Moya, El sueño 20) [Anxiety and bowel control are closely related. If a child is raised strictly and is thereby strongly repressed, he will have anxiety throughout his life about his bowel control and, hence, his colon. And when, as an adult, he needs to decide between two options, he will feel anxiety, and that anxiety will make him tense up his sphincter and his colon. That is the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, an ailment most humans suffer from at some point, even if they’re not aware of it.] (Castellanos Moya, Dream 9) The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Individual development repeats the evolutionary trajectory of the species; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as Ernst Haeckel once asserted.

The human body, according to Alvarado, is a writing surface on which the cultural history of humanity inscribes itself as developmentalist allegory.

The distress experienced by the adult member of the species marks the return of that anxiety-filled repression to which the toilet-training child once submitted, which in turn reenacts in a condensed timeline the archaic collective repression that gave birth to the latrine—and, by implication, to technics and civilization. By the same token, when we become anxious for one reason or another, this emotional disturbance manifests symptomatically as a tightening of the colon.

Following a session of hypnosis, the doctor informs Aragón that the root cause of his immediate discomfort is an unresolved conflict lurking in his familial history and, in particular, concerning his relationship with his now-deceased father, one that don Chente characterizes as a “black hole” (El sueño 97). The doctor does not, however, reveal anything about what Aragón might have said while under hypnosis.The mystery becomes a major source of preoccupation for the journalist, who begins to suspect that he may have committed some horrific crime in his past.The doctor advises that in order to achieve a durable cure, Aragón will need to work through the knot of paternal conflict. As a therapeutic starting point, he recommends that Aragón sit down and write out his life story to provide himself with material for reflection. This exchange between doctor and patient frames the questions that Aragón repeatedly puts to himself and which perhaps has no proper answer: how to begin narrating one’s own life? Where does one start recounting what one is and has been to oneself? What is the first memory in which a memoir would find its proper beginning? These questions convey one of the meanings of the novel’s title: the return to one’s own past, the attempt to decipher what remains mysterious in one’s own history as a step in the direction of resolving the archaic conflicts and impasses that we reenact in our everyday lives without being aware of what it is that we are really doing (Freud).

The homeopathic treatment is interrupted, however, when don Chente must himself return to El Salvador to tend to the estate of his recently deceased mother. No sooner does the doctor arrive, however, than he mysteriously vanishes. The news of Alvarado’s unexplained disappearance The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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leaves Aragón shaken; his fear that don Chente has become the latest victim of the infamous Salvadoran death squads is intensified by the prospect that Aragón himself may soon face a similarly unhappy fate. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the hypnosis sessions, the patient begins to experience—in his dreams as well as in his encounters with fellow exiles—the return of long-buried childhood memories involving political violence: the bombing of the house of his nationalist grandfather by the liberal government in the 1940s; the assassination of his father during the turmoil that preceded the 1972 golpe de estado; the brutal slayings of his cousin and a close friend at the hands of the military during the civil war; but also the fratricidal purges enacted by the Salvadoran FMLN.This Proustian juxtaposition of conscious and involuntary memories discloses another way of reading the novel’s title: as the long forgotten memories that return without any bidding, as if they were moved by some kind of automaton.

In probing his distant past, Aragón unearths a knot that will prove to be the core of the novel. In his childhood memories resides an enigma that finds its somatic corollary in the intestinal knot for which he sought treatment with don Chente. It also resonates in interesting ways with de Man’s account of the allegorical referent as sign of pure anteriority. This mysterious knot becomes apparent in the context of Aragón’s pursuit of the question of a first memory, an axis in relation to which the meaning of specific experiences and recollections would become clear. As it turns out, however, this knot cannot be cut, and it renders forever dubious the idea of an excavation that could finally discern a first memory that would constitute the proper origin of the subject. The mysterious mnemonic image discloses a technics—a prosthesis and a mechanicity—at the heart of what we take to be most human: the memories of childhood.

Aragón’s first memory is of an occurrence that happened when he was just three years old—or so he had always believed, although subsequent reflection will cast doubt on whether or not the memory is, properly speaking, his own. One day, a bomb detonated in the house of his maternal grandfather, a nationalist dissident conspiring to overthrow the dictatorship of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.The blast destroyed much of the house and sent its inhabitants scurrying for safety. Aragón recalls watching as his grandmother swooped him up and whisked him out of the burning house.

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dedicate herself to undermining the image of her son-in-law (Aragón’s father) in the little boy’s eyes. Thus, this memory, whose enigmatic status I am just beginning to describe, also plays an important role in the unresolved conflict with the name of the father to which I alluded earlier.

Que la memoria es cosa poco confiable lo descubrí cuando me puse a divagar cómo comenzaría la historia de mi vida si me sentara a escribirla tal como me aconsejó don Chente […] Hasta entonces yo estaba seguro de que mi primer recuerdo de infancia, lo que más atrás podía remontarme en mi memoria, el punto desde el que tendría que comenzar a relatar mi vida, había sido el bombazo que destruyó el frontispicio de la casa de mis abuelos maternos en la primera avenida de Comayagüela, un bombazo de advertencia detonado en la madrugada por los coroneles que apoyaban al gobierno liberal contra el que conspiraban mi abuelo y sus correligionarios nacionalistas.Yo tendría entonces unos tres años de edad y mi recuerdo consistía en una imagen precisa: el momento en que mi abuela Lena me llevaba en brazos a través del patio penumbroso de la casa, entre el polvillo blanduzco que impregnaba el aire y que procedía de la pared destruida por la explosión. Esa imagen era a la que recurría hasta con cierto orgullo cuando me tocaba explicar cómo la violencia estaba enraizada en el primer momento de mi vida, aunque tendría que precisar “de mi vida consciente,” porque la violencia está enraizada en el primer momento de la vida de todos y cada uno, por algo se entra a este mundo llorando y haciendo gemir de dolor a la madre. (Castellanos Moya, El sueño 70) [I discovered that memory is unreliable when I began to digress about how I would start the story of my life if I wrote it down as Don Chente had suggested […] Until then I had been certain that my first childhood memory, the farthest back I could go, the point at which I would have to begin to tell the story of my life, was of the bomb that destroyed the façade of my maternal grandparents’ house on Primera Avenida in Comayagüela, a warning bomb detonated at dawn by the colonels who supported the liberal government against which my grandfather and his nationalist cohorts were conspiring. I would have been about three years old at the time, and my memory consists of one precise image: my grandmother Lena carrying me in her arms across the dark courtyard through the whitish dust from the destroyed wall that permeated the air. That was the image I returned The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to with a certain amount of pride whenever I was called upon to explain how violence had taken root in me at the very beginning of my life, though I would have to add “of my conscious life,” because violence takes root at the very first instant of each and every person’s life: it’s not for nothing that we enter this world crying and making our mothers writhe in pain.]

(Castellanos Moya, Dream 47–48)

Aragón confesses that he has always taken a perverse secret pride in recounting this experience to others. It illustrates an intensity of and intimacy with violence that, if more or less taken for granted by Salvadorans, may well strike outsiders as unimaginable. The anecdote allegorizes the exceptionality of the subject, the singular uniqueness of its native realm together with what is universal in it—its unlimited capacity for reflection and perseverance. This confession is followed by an important caveat.

This allegorical portrait is disingenuous to the degree that it equates a primordial and omnipresent violence with what Aragón calls his “conscious life.”Violence in this childhood anecdote is already something that happens to a subject. The originary violence that the anecdote seeks to convey, meanwhile, would necessarily precede the subject and consciousness; it is not, properly speaking, phenomenalizable. If we read this reflection alongside the discussion in Recuento de incertidumbres of an underlying “militarism” in Salvadoran society, we can understand the reference to this other violence—the violence that precedes “conscious life,” the violence of natality—as another allegory, the figuration of a kind of violence to which representation does not have direct access. Such violence need not be limited to the chronological time of infancy, and perhaps it cannot be plotted on any time line whatsoever. It is coterminous with the social and is thus not historical.

As he is preparing to sit down and write out his life story, Aragón detects something peculiar in what now strikes him as an overly precise childhood memory of an experience charged with fear. The specific memory of being carried out of the burning house by his grandmother resembles a cinematic image: it is the image of the helpless child as seen by someone else.

Lo cierto es que de pronto, quizás a causa de ese peculiar estado de ánimo en el que permanecía, me encontré preguntándome cómo era que esa The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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imagen casi cinematográfica se había instalado en mi memoria, habida cuenta de que si yo iba en los brazos de mi abuela Lena no era posible que me pudiera ver desde fuera […] que si dudaba de la veracidad de mi primer recuerdo no quería imaginar lo que sería bregar con cada uno de los eventos a los que me había tocado hacer frente en la vida. (Castellanos Moya, El sueño 70) [The truth is, I suddenly found myself wondering, perhaps as a result of my peculiar and persistent mood, how this almost cinematic image had lodged itself in my memory, considering the fact that if I was in my grandmother Lena’s arms, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to see myself from the outside […] because if I was doubting the veracity of my first memory, how unimaginably difficult it would be to slog through every incident I’d experienced in my life.] (Castellanos Moya, Dream 48)

The first memory, which ought to be synonymous with the birth of the subject in its capacity for self-reflection and thus the cornerstone for self-consciousness, turns out to be of dubious origin; hence, in the terms just described, it is defective: it fails to sustain a clear boundary between what belongs to the self and what does not. As a memory that appears to have been constructed and imprinted through some unknown process, it precisely causes that distinction to become unstable, as a crumbling cornerstone would cause the exterior wall of a building to buckle. De Man notes that the process whereby allegory produces an external, visible sign to represent an internal state turns out to mask a prior exteriority: the inner state (e.g., memory) is itself the imprint or representation of an external occurrence. Against a humanism that tries desperately to sustain the idea of a human subject that is sovereign with respect to its own nature or essence, allegory discloses that there is no originary interiority prior to the advent of technics: Pero mi mente ya estaba encaminada en la ruta equivocada: al hacer tambalear mi primer recuerdo en la vida provoqué que el péndulo me llevara a una enorme velocidad de la placidez anterior al desasosiego, porque la memoria del bombazo no estaba encapsulada fuera del tiempo, sino que apuntalaba importantes The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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imágenes de mí mismo que ahora empezaban a trastabillar, como aquella en que yo era un niño que lloraba de miedo cada vez que oía una sirena, ya fuera de la policía o de los bomberos o de una ambulancia. (Castellanos Moya, El sueño 71–72) [But my mind had already started down the wrong path: by shaking the foundations of my first memory, I had set in motion the pendulum that was now carrying me at enormous speed from tranquility to disquietude, because the memory of the bombing was not encapsulated outside of time but rather served as the foundation for important images of myself that were now beginning to falter, like the image of myself as a child who cried with fear every time I heard a siren, whether it was the police or a fire truck or an ambulance.] (Castellanos Moya, Dream 49)

This swing from the contentedness of self-reflection to unease is due not to the content of the memory but rather to the uncertainty surrounding the provenance of this first memory image, which might well have been implanted by the grandmother, but which also bears the unmistakable imprint of the technologies of mass culture. This originary memory makes up just one frame in a larger reel or feed of mnemonic images, the velocity of which indicates that they are moved by something more machinelike than the will of a subject. This mnemonic mechanicity reproduces the disorienting effects of the recollected experience, and we are left with the image of a child who, at the mere sounding of a siren, finds himself transported back to the scene of the crime and responds by breaking into a howl. But if there is a traumatic site in El sueño del retorno, this image of the shell-shocked child is not it. On the contrary, this image is part of a memoryscape that has been constructed by an adult. Perverse in its enjoyment of violence though it may be, this image is the very allegorical foundation of the subject. The image of the child’s anguished cries has always been understood as a sign referring back to an anterior sign. The connection between the primordial memory of the bombing and later memories of growing up in El Salvador resides in the formal, acoustic resemblance that the sirens bear to the sound of the child’s wailing: the aullido/llanto couplet. The child hears in the siren an echo of its own long extinguished cries.

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Things get complicated and begin to come unraveled, however, when Aragón tries to reconstruct the connecting thread through which these memory images have been conjoined and rendered meaningful for him: Entonces descubrí con sorpresa que yo no tenía ningún recuerdo de esas sirenas acercándose a la casa de mis abuelos inmediatamente después del bombazo y las cuales me habían causado el trauma mencionado, por más que en la terraza de La Veiga cerraba los ojos para intentar recordar el aullido de esas sirenas que me produjeron espanto en la niñez, en mi memoria auditiva no había nada de nada, tan sólo el silencio, lo que me llevó a preguntarme de dónde había sacado yo la idea de que mi llanto de infancia procedía de ese bombazo, en caso de que fuera realmente mi idea, y si no se trataría más bien de otra de las cosas que mi abuela Lena me había metido en la cabeza y que yo había convertido en memoria.

(El sueño 72–73) [Then, to my surprise, I discovered that I had no memory of those sirens approaching my grandparents’ house immediately after the bombing, the ones that would have caused the aforementioned trauma, no matter how much I closed my eyes on the terrace of La Veiga and attempted to recall the shriek of those sirens that prompted my childhood fear; there was no trace in my auditory memory, only silence, which led me to wonder where I had gotten the idea that my childhood cries were the result of that bombing, if that had been my idea at all, if it wasn’t something else that my grandmother Lena had planted in my head and that I had then turned into a memory.]

(Castellanos Moya, Dream 50)

In the archaic memory under examination here, Aragón finds no acoustic image of sirens. Is this because the child’s memory of those first sirens was somehow effaced or recoded as something else? Or did the three year old in fact never hear any sirens, and thus a memory trace never imprinted to begin with? Of course, one cannot know the answer to this question, and the important point here is that memory turns out to have been constructed on the basis of an empty link, a silence whose truth—forgotten, issued but not registered, or simply never present to begin with—cannot be filled in.

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The dream of returning that forms the title of Castellanos Moya’s novel is thwarted at the geopolitical level. Aragón, it seems, cannot go back to the country he left, not because the risk is too great but because that place no longer exists. He has become part of the relentless flow of displacement and migration that defines Salvadoran and Central American history.8 Deferred indefinitely at the level of geopolitical space, the movement of return is taken up again at the level of remembrance, both voluntary (Aragón sitting down to write out his life story) and involuntary (the myriad of memories that seem to be triggered not by conscious effort but by circumstance: serendipitous encounters with old friends, words that unexpectedly remind him of something long forgotten, etc.). At the level of the subject, language, and history, there is similarly an irreducible element of uncertainty, as the mnemonic foundation of self-consciousness turns out to be contaminated by a non-natural externality that ruins any possibility of determining what belongs properly to the autobiographical self and what does not. Akin to the Faktum discussed by Derrida in his commentary on Rousseau’s Contract, remembrance in Castellanos Moya uncovers the traces of a nonnatural, nonhistorical excess at the heart of the subject—a technological artifact over which self-consciousness and will have no control. The anecdote through which this Faktum surfaces supports at least two ways of understanding its import: on one hand, it points to the thought of an originary violence—a “militarism” in the words of Castellanos Moya in Recuento de incertidumbres (30)—underlying the social, a violence over which political concepts of hegemony and sovereignty hold no sway.

Insofar as political discourse claims to contain violence—as it has always done, from Hobbes through neoliberal consensus—it necessarily constitutes itself as the repression of this strife, a containment whose failure Castellanos Moya’s work seeks to record; on the other hand, this artifact also pertains to memory and language, and in that respect it calls attention to ineffaceable and unreadable traces of alterity at the heart of what we call the self or the subject. It marks the origin not as the purity of a proper space but as an opening to what will later become its outside—an opening to others prior to any possibility of distinguishing between self and other.

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Patrick Dove is Professor of Spanish American Literature at Indiana University, where he works on intersections between literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political thought in the context of Latin America. His most recent book, Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America, was published by SUNY Press in 2016.

Notes 1 Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse [Encyclopedia Logic], p. 20.

2 The Bible: Authorized King JamesVersion, 1998.

3 De Man makes this point in different ways in the essays on Rousseau (Allegories) and in “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”

4 There are at least two ways of explaining that what I am claiming is the unavoidableness of allegory, neither of which would necessarily confirm the diagnosis delivered by Jameson in its entirety. The first possible approach has already been mentioned: all modern conceptualizations of history, ranging from liberal to Marxian, are based—albeit not necessarily in a self-aware manner—on allegory understood as the postulation of a sign of radical or pure anteriority. Thus, to the extent that literature is concerned with history, it unavoidably gets its hands caught in the allegorical web. The second way appears to rely on empirical observation, although in the end, the rationale is the same. There is no escaping national allegory because, as we see from Sarmiento through to the present, every literary account of national history bases its understanding of the present on an anterior sign: civil wars and tyrannies as repetitions of colonial isolation, globalization as repetition of military dictatorship, and so on.

5 On the metaphysical determination of the essence of time as presence, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Division II, chapter 6 (385–406). Jacques Derrida, meanwhile, offers in his early essay “Ousia and Gramme-” an important clarification about the limits of any critique of what Heidegger terms “the vulgar conception of time” (Being 386); in his later Specters of Marx, he provides, with the notion of inheritance, one instance of what a non-metaphysical thinking of time might look like—inheritance as the name for a gift or sending that is always already different from itself and, hence, as a limit concept or a nonconcept.

6

“El militarismo no es una herencia de la guerra, sino un lastre histórico, un componente central de la deformación nacional, que podría explicar en buena medida nuestra inviabilidad política y económica. El desmontaje de este componente sería, entonces, más que un objetivo esencial de la transición: se perfila como un cambio fundamental en la historia de la

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nación, una condición sine qua non para poder enfrentar creativamente los retos del nuevo milenio” (Castellanos Moya, Recuento 31)

7 I discuss this point in detail in Literature and “Interregnum.” See also Galli.

8 The story ends with Aragón purchasing his ticket to San Salvador, saying goodbye to his young daughter at the airport, but then catching sight of an attractive young woman whom he begins to pursue, oblivious to (or not caring about) the fact that doing so will cause him to miss his flight.

Works Cited The Bible: Authorized King JamesVersion, Oxford UP, 1998.

Castellanos Moya, Horacio. “El cadáver es el mensaje: Apuntes personales sobre literatura y violencia.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, vol. 17, 2008. Istmo, http://istmo.denison.edu/n17/foro /castellanos.html.

———. El sueño del retorno. Tusquets, 2013.

———. The Dream of My Return.Translated by Katherine Silver, New Directions, 2015.

———. Recuento de incertidumbres: Cultura y transición en El Salvador. Ediciones Tendencias, 1993. de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. U of Minnesota P, 1996.

———. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.Yale UP, 1979.

———. “Political Allegory in Rousseau.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 4, 1976, pp. 649–75.U of Chicago P Journals, https://doi.org/10.1086/447859.

———. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, U of Minnesota P, 1983, pp.187–228.

Derrida, Jacques. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Columbia UP, 1989.

———. “Ousia and Gramme-: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” Margins of Philosophy, U of Chicago P, 1989, pp. 29–67.

———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Routledge, 1994.

Dove, Patrick. Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization,War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America. SUNYP, 2016.

Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks, vol. 12, Hogarth, 1950, pp.145–56.

Galli, Carlo. Political Spaces and GlobalWar. U of Minnesota P, 2010.

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Hegel, G.W.F. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse.

1830. Suhrkamp, 1970.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. SUNYP, 2010.

Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

Social Text, no. 15, 1986, pp. 65–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/466493.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. Oxford UP, 2009.

Melberg, Arne. “Repetition (In the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term).” Diacritics, vol. 20, no. 3, 1990, pp. 71–87.

Moreiras, Alberto. “The Question of Cynicism: A Reading of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s La diaspora (1989).” Nonsite.org, 13 October 2014, http://nonsite.org /article/the-question-of-cynicism.

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INTERPRETATIONS Each volume of  The Yearbook now includes this section devoted to innovative interpretative readings of cultural texts that are not necessarily related to the volume’s general theme.

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“God is God”: Essay on the Violence of Tautological Propositions Stanislas Breton and Tr. Jacques Lezra Note: This essay is from Stanislas Breton, Philosophie buissonnière, edited by J. Millon, Grenoble, 1989, pp. 133–40. It has been translated by Jacques Lezra for TheYearbook of Comparative Literature and is reproduced here with permission.

The name Stanislas Breton (1912–2005) is probably not familiar to many US academics. A theologian and philosopher, he taught from 1970 to his retirement at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Breton was close to Althusser’s circle; some readers will recognize his name from Étienne Balibar’s references to the essay we translate below—or from references to Breton in the work of Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, and Barbara Cassin. (“‘Dieu est Dieu’” appears in a volume dedicated to Cassin and her family.) “‘Dieu est Dieu’: Sur la violence des propositions tautologiques” (1989) is a remarkable, polemical, forcefully, and obliquely written work that stands, like much of Breton’s, where philosophical logic, political theology, and the confessional mode cross. Some of the rather subterranean links his essay has to the work of much better-known figures (Derrida, Deleuze) are briefly suggested in the notes.

—Jacques Lezra Tautological statements are by nature specious.1 It is traditionally agreed that they do not add anything to what is already known. Under both of their two recognized forms—either the mere repetition of the subject in whatever it is that one says of it (“bodies are bodies”); or the addition to a subject of a quality that makes explicit what was already the case in the subject The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 203–211 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.203

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(“bodies are extended”)—their informational content is almost null. They duplicate what one already knows.This is as much as to say that they are not concerned with an authentic desire for knowledge. Nevertheless, even when their cognitive interest is less than negligible, there are statements which, without being tautologies, resemble them in similarly lacking informational value. Such, for instance, are those insignificant phrases that train-, bus-, or air-travelers venture so as to start up conversation. There is much to say about these bare words, with their family resemblance to our truisms.

Logicians have taken up, gravely, even at times with impatient gravity, the problem of “analytic propositions,” or of propositions styled “analytic.”2 I have trouble believing that their conclusions—regardless of the answers they furnish—are exhaustive. For what is in play in these turns of phrase is a communicative practice, rather than the correctness of a syntax, or a semantic reference to truth.

I will abstain, ashamed at my incompetence in the subject, from entering into the tautological character of Mathesis. I have some reason to believe that mathematicians have little interest in matters treated at the beginning of the twentieth century by adepts of the Principia Mathematica.

Let me close this parenthesis and take up the matter of religious tautologies.

Here, we might find a number of variants: “God is God,” “Allah is Allah,” “Brahma is Brahma,” “I am [who] I am,” or simply “I am.” These formulas are manifestly related, even if they spring from very different contexts.3 I’ll pause on the first of these. I suspect, in fact, that it enjoys exemplary status and can thus serve as a general model. I’ll limit myself for that reason to analyzing it alone.

1. God is God. Thank you for that, I hear an intellectual say (he is always pressed, and has of course no time to spare).

I think it necessary to waste my time in the seeming emptiness of the statement. What does it say?

No, let’s correct ourselves: What does the statement mean, or wish, or want, to say [veut dire]? For here, manifestly, the statement carries a want, a terrible wishing-to: a want immanent to the “saying” itself, but also internal to the thing said, and which becomes “a true cause” to which one devotes oneself, body and soul.

These are the two sides of the question, the two wants I must examine.

Let me add a preliminary note. I have no doubt that I would never have The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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returned to the problem of tautology if bombs of Middle-Eastern origin bursting here and there, in our very homes, “in one of the universe’s most noble ornaments,” as Montaigne put it—if these bombs had not called me, in their bursting, to take up afresh (it bears repeating, though it’s obvious!) a question that had been thought secondary but is now compellingly illuminated and burningly topical.4 2. God is God. It would appear that this truism is the only way we have to name God. Indeed, there could hardly be anything more banal. Don’t we say, “A cat is a cat,” or “A dandelion’s a dandelion,” or (in English) “It is what it is”? It is not something else. X is X. It would be the last straw—if “God” were “not God.” God does not astonish us. He is what he is, as a pig is what it is. Would it not be blasphemy for Him to be “otherwise”?

Would not God then be, on account of the nomination that keeps him enclosed in himself, the sovereign guarantor of the principle of identity, and, indirectly, of the “principle of non-contradiction”? God cannot contradict himself. On close examination, we find that at heart this God falls under the general condition. He is what he is. Nothing astonishing about it. No big deal; there’s really nothing to this expression whose explosive nature I was intimating.

And yet there is an explosion, and an explosive force. God’s name is a true bomb. How is this possible? That’s the real question, the question that must be extracted from the apparent banality of the statement.

“God is God.” This repetition, which takes the form of a proposition with a subject and an attribute, offers a double reading. The first suggests the following exegesis: let’s say that we imagine many gods (in line with a tendency on display in polytheism). In this case, the statement “God is God” means that none of these gods manages to be what “he should be.” If there’s a difference between them, it lies in this: that one of them has something that the other does not have, since there is no distinction that doesn’t reflect a determination proper to each of them. Now, when it’s divinity that’s at issue, a determination can only be a perfection. Imaginary gods are therefore necessarily imperfect, since they are condemned to lack a perfection. As a result, since by “God” we understand “the most perfect,” or the infinite of perfections, these gods are not gods. If we nonetheless call them gods, it’s because we immediately correct the plural of the hypothesis with the unity of the predicate.This in turn would mean: if X andY have all the perfections The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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that the predicate signifies, then there’s nothing to distinguish them. A logician would add: “two things are identical when all the predicates that attach to one also attach to the other, and inversely.” “God is God” is the equivalent, as a result and henceforth, to “God is unique.”Within the tautology, the biblical imperative then sounds—an imperative whose severity we well know, and which does not exclude exemplary punishment, in the case of idolatry.

We glimpse in this reference to the Bible the relation between violence and monotheism.This relation is not just a matter of historical circumstance.

It might well be that the tie is indeed essential. That’s what we must show.

3. I will not return here to a full consideration of the concept of unity, which I have treated in a different work.5 It may be useful, however, to recall some of its elements.

We note, first off, that no matter how strong we make the affirmation of uniqueness, it will draw part of its force from the polytheistic temptation it serves to block.The categorical imperative is accompanied by such severe sanctions only so as to balance and overcome a resistance that never ceases to threaten it. I am not the first to note that the “one” of “unique” stems from “number,” and that number entails plurality. What results is a conflict of forces that can tear apart an individual and society. As a result, it would not be foolhardy to propose that monotheism exudes a reciprocal violence, to the degree that the law checks a spontaneity that strains against its yoke.

Still, there’s nothing original about this. Is culture—or civilization—anything but this perpetual tension?

We should then seek more specific traits.

For we risk forgetting that monotheism has indeed a double visage: the unique god only enters into history through the people, also unique, that he has chosen for himself. The result is that these two unicities answer to and confirm each other, each in and by the other. Despite their asymmetry, the relations work on both sides, since they entail effects that result from a covenant: the chosen people becomes responsible for the existence of their god in the world, as the god assures his chosen people that he remains faithful to them. A theandric history, in short, which consecrates the deeds and gestures, however cruel at times, of a predestined future. Holy land, holy people, and holy temple: everything without exception must partake in the holiness of the Lord. And the holiness that separates is also what purifies. And purification does not hesitate, if it’s necessary, before the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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desert of extermination.The wars that the Bible recounts are not always the expression of a sublime tenderness. Could purity be close to terror? That unity which is purity’s expression spreads on the human project the fever of the absolute. Of course, the distance that lies between the Most High and the creature is not forgotten. But—herein lies the paradox—that distance displays, contrastively, the incredible intimacy of the relation.The covenant that joins the two extremes does not, however, justify all the horrors and weaknesses of a humanity that hastens to shield itself in its god, as if behind a universal principle of sufficient reason. The Law that judges the sinner remains unbending. It would be dishonest to set this aside, in order to condemn monotheism. But, if a minimal honesty requires this reminder, it would be impossible to deny that the unicity and the election that it implies, on one hand and the other, harbor in their essence (and not just for accidental historical reasons) the permanent threat of anthropocentric absolutization from which violence may not be absent.

4. God is God. Say we grant that this first reading is indeed solidly grounded.

We will not then be astonished to find that the tautology should have, today, with its Middle-Eastern provenance, such striking effects. The politicians’ error has consisted in aggravating the situation, while denouncing barbarism.

It would have been more useful politically to seek to understand rather than to become angry. Nothing is to be gained from brandishing “human rights” against people who defend simultaneously God’s honor and their people’s.

The humiliation they suffer is also the humiliation of their Lord.The harshness of their response, which spares no one, cannot be likened to the violence of a panicked crowd that tramples and crushes everything underfoot.There is, in this murderous behavior, a fearsome coherence. What’s involved is not personal hatred or racism strictly understood, but rather a simplistic Manichaeism that divides humanity in two camps: evil men, led by Satan, whose name is Legion; and those faithful to Allah, whose appellation—“the Merciful”—arms itself with the strictures of a merciless justice. War understood in these terms is Holy, and cannot be otherwise.War sanctifies, in itself, those who fight for the Unique, the One. The cause to which they sacrifice themselves has the dignity of the ancient causa sui: it has value in itself and for itself; it deserves to be, and, because it should be, this cause looses in its militants an indomitable, homicidal, and suicidal energy, which completes, in its disdain for death, their service to the Absolute.This heroic The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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rush upon the West’s nihilism is perhaps the only commentary appropriate to our first tautology (a commentary carried out in performative fashion.)

5.The second tautology, although materially identical to the first, opens a different space for thought and action.

The exegeses that I’ll propose for it—and there probably are many more—have at least one common element: they take a decidedly critical turn. a. God is God: There’s nothing you can say about him, you should be silent instead. Be quiet. If I remember correctly, certain people proposed to translate the famous “I am Who [That] I am” loosely as “Leave me alone!”

I prefer a different translation. b. God is God: “No one has seen God.” Do not try to seize, by grasping it or by gazing at it, his ontological secret. His essence—if he has one: the matter is not settled—is beyond all understanding. One can, nonetheless, name him—since we must speak of him, as not to do so is to declare that he does not exist. But these names will never be more than sight lines. c. God is God:The phrase reads as an interdiction. It is, in truth, an imperative: “Thou shalt make no graven images,” and particularly no statues. Their three-dimensionality makes them more dangerous than painted images.

One might indeed come to believe that they harbor, as an ark might, a divine presence. God is always [what’s] absent in our encounters. d. God is God: No matter what we do—name him, represent him—we will never have anything but images of him. What’s important is not to condemn the image—but instead to multiply images to infinity so that none of them fascinates us to the point of seducing us. The person of faith resembles a kind of Don Juan, in search of the eternal feminine.

Searching for the eternal divinity or divine, he can read the tautology as a new imperative: “Stop nowhere,” for He gives you motion so you will “always go beyond.”6 “You have to stop somewhere,” we often say: but this is an axiom of laziness, like any truism. e. God is God: Master Eckhart composed a prayer from this expression: “I pray to God that he free me from God.” He would add: It is necessary to pass through, always.7 And perhaps we might also add: God is nothing but the necessity of this passage. f. God is God: Certainly. But since he is the Other [l’Autre], you will never be able to approach him except through, or by, the face of An-other The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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[Autrui].8 Do not search for him elsewhere.The p­ ractice of justice alone (and not the way of knowledge) allows us to recognize him. g. God is God: Gaze on the cross. The sign of contradiction. ­Weakness and madness. Draw your conclusions. h. God is God: The last decree offered in Matthew 26: “‘[F]or I was hungry and you gave Me food […] I was naked and you clothed Me,’” etc.9 I submit to that decree.

Which of these two tautologies, exactly matching, to choose? Violence or nonviolence? I find it impossible to hesitate when faced with the choice between the two. And nonetheless I choose all of it [tout], because both inhabit me, though mixing poorly. Could God be divided? Or might he rather be, in us, the last decree, the imperative of transit in perpetuity, which forbids us to become fixed to the negative, or the positive, of its instance? The impossibility of what is necessary, or the necessity of what is impossible?

I am not done with this painful and exalting question.

Notes 1 Breton’s immediate concern is Wittgenstein’s treatment of tautology in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.46—for instance, 4.461: Propsitions show what they say; tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing. A tautology has no truth-conditions, since it is unconditionally true: and a contradiction is true on no condition.Tautologies and contradictions lack sense. (Like a point from which two arrows go out in opposite directions to one another.)

[Der Satz zeigt was er sagt, die Tautologie und die Kontradiktion, daß sie nichts sagen. Die Tautologie hat keine Wahrheitsbedingungen, denn sie ist bedingungslos wahr; und die Kontradiktion ist unter keiner Bedingung wahr.Tautologie und Kontradiktion sind sinnlos.]

2 The “problem of ‘analytic propositions,’ or of propositions styled ‘analytic,’” had been the subject of Deleuze’s 15 April 1980 seminar on Leibniz.

3 Compare Derrida’s phrase, against Levinas’s “Tout autre est tout autre,” in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 2nd ed., translated by David Wills, University of Chicago Press, 2007: “Every other (one) is every (bit) other” [Tout autre est tout autre]—the stakes seem to be altered by the trembling of this dictum. It is no doubt The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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too economical, too elliptical, and hence, like any formula so isolated and capable of being transmitted out of its context, too close to the coded language of a password. One uses it to play with the rules, to cut someone or something short, to aggressively circumscribe a domain of discourse.

It becomes the secret of all secrets. Is it not sufficient to transform what one complacently calls a context in order to demystify the shibboleth or decipher all the secrets of the world? Is not this dictum—tout autre est tout autre—in the first place a tautology? It doesn’t signify anything that one doesn’t already know, if by that one simply refers to the repetition of a subject in its complement and if by so doing one avoids bringing to bear upon it an interpretation that would distinguish between the two homonyms tout and tout, an indefinite pronominal adjective (some, someone, some other one) and an adverb of quantity (totally, absolutely, radically, infinitely other). (82) Derrida’s “Donner la mort” was written toward the beginning of 1990; the echo of Breton’s phrasing may not be accidental.

4 Breton remembers Montaigne’s essay “De la vanité” incorrectly (the difference is minor, though): Je ne veux pas oublier cecy, que je ne me mutine jamais tant contre la France que je ne regarde Paris de bon œil: elle a mon cueur des mon enfance […]

Je ne suis françois que par cette grande cité: grande en peuples, grande en felicité de son assiette, mais sur tout grande et incomparable en varieté et diversité de commoditez, la gloire de la France, et l’un des plus nobles ornemens du monde. Dieu en chasse loing nos divisions! Entiere et unie, je la trouve deffendue de toute autre violence. Je l’advise que de tous les partis le pire sera celuy qui la metra en discorde.

Michel de Montaigne, “De la vanité,” Essais III. 9 (1595), edited by P.Villey and V. L. Saulnier, Presses Universitaires de France, 1965, p. 428.

—“[T]he bombs of Middle-Eastern origin …”: Breton may be referring to the suite of bombings in Paris from late 1985 to September 1986, attributed variously to Libyan or Iranian groups, to Hezbollah, and claimed by the “Comité de solidarité avec les prisonniers politiques arabes et du Proche-Orient,” “CSPPA.”

5 Breton, L’unité de l’intellect: réflexions sur le sens et la portée d’une controverse, Vrin, 1978.

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6 Breton is referring immediately to Kierkegaard’s treatment of Don Juan, in Either/ Or, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987, and to Goethe, Faust II: “CHORUS MYSTICUS: Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis; / Das Unbeschreibliche, / Hier ist’s getan; / Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” In Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust. Eine Tragödie, edited by Michael Holzinger, Berlin edition, pp.

364–65, online at http://www.zeno.org/Lesesaal/N/9781482500349?page=2.

7 The reference is to Eckhart’s Sermon 52, “Beati pauperes spiritu, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum (Matthew 5.3). The English translation can be found in Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn, translators, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Paulist Press, 1981, pp. 199–203.

8 On the difficulties we encounter in translating Autre and Autrui into English, see Adrian T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi’s “Preface” to their edition of Emmanuel Levinas’s Basic Philosophical Writings, Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 15.

9 New King James Bible, Matthew 25.35–40: “[F]or I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.” Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, “Lord, when did we seeYou hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we seeYou a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we seeYou sick, or in prison, and come toYou?” And the King will answer and say to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” (emphasis in original)

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“«Dieu est Dieu» Essai sur la violence des propositions tautologiques” Stanislas Breton Les énoncés tautologiques ont une nature spécieuse.Traditionnellement, on accorde qu’ils n’étendent pas la connaissance. Sous les deux formes qu’on leur reconnaît: par simple répétition du sujet en ce qu’on en dit («les corps sont les corps»), ou par un additif de pure explicitation («les corps sont étendus»), leur quantité d’information est quasi nulle. Elles redoublent ce que l’on sait déjà. Autant dire qu’elles ne concernent pas un authentique souci de connaissance. Toutefois, même lorsque leur intérêt cognitif est plus que négligeable, il est des énoncés qui, sans être tautologiques, leur ressemble par une absence analogue de valeur informative. C’est le cas de ces phrases insignifiantes que les voyageurs de train, d’autobus, voire d’avion, risquent pour provoquer un possible échange de conversation. Il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur ces pauvres paroles qui ont un air de famille avec nos lapalissades.

Les logiciens ont abordé, avec gravité, impatiente parfois, le problème des «propositions analytiques» ou dites telles. Quelle que soit leur réponse, j’ai peine à croire que leur jugement final soit exhaustif. Car, dans ces manières de parler, ce qui est en jeu, c’est moins la correction d’une syntaxe, ou la référence sémantique à la vérité, qu’une pratique de la communication. [ 134 ] Je m’abstiendrai, honteux de mon incompétence, de toute incursion sur le caractère tautologique de la Mathesis. J’ai quelque raison de croire que les mathématiciens s’intéressent peu à des questions dont s’occupaient, au début du siècle, les fervents des Principia Mathematica.

Je ferme la parenthèse et j’aborde les tautologies religieuses. En ce domaine, on pourrait observer bien des variantes: «Dieu est Dieu», «Allah est Allah», «Brahma est Brahma», «je suis qui je suis», ou bien, «je suis» sans plus. Ces formules ont une parenté manifeste, bien qu’elles ressortissent à des contextes fort divers.

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Je m’arrêterai à la première. Je soupçonne, en effet, qu’elle bénéficie d’une exemplarité, qui peut servir de modèle universel. Je me limiterai, en conséquence, à son analyse.

1. Dieu est Dieu. Je vous en remercie, me répliquerait un intellectuel, toujours pressé et qui n’a pas, bien entendu, de temps à perdre. J’estime nécessaire de perdre mon temps dans le vide apparent de l’énoncé. Que dit-il?

Rectifions: Que veut-il dire? Ici, manifestement, l’expression incorpore un vouloir, un terrible vouloir; vouloir immanent au «dire» lui-même, mais intérieur aussi à la chose qui est dite, et qui devient «une véritable cause» à laquelle on se dévoue corps et âme.

Tels sont les deux volets de la question, les deux vouloirs qu’il me faut examiner. J’ajoute une remarque en guise de préliminaire: je ne serais jamais revenu sans doute sur le problème de la tautologie, si les bombes de provenance proche-orientale, et qui éclatent, ici ou là, chez nous, «dans l’un de plus nobles ornements de l’univers», comme disait Montaigne, ne m’avaient sollicité, par leur éclat, à reprendre, sur nouveaux frais (c’est le cas de le dire!), une question, réputée secondaire, à la lumière d’une brûlante actualité. [ 135 ] 2. Dieu est Dieu. On dirait qu’il n’y a pas d’autre moyen de nommer Dieu que par cette lapalissade. Rien de plus banal, en effet. Ne disons-nous pas: «un chat est un chat», «un pissenlit est un pissenlit». Il n’est pas autre chose. X est X. Il ne manquerait plus que çà que «Dieu ne soit pas Dieu».

Dieu ne nous étonne pas. Il est ce qu’il est, comme un cochon est ce qu’il est. Ne serait-ce pas un blasphème qu’il soit «autrement»?

Dieu ne serait-il pas alors, par la nomination qu’il enferme en lui-même, le garant souverain du principe d’identité, et indirectement, du «principe de non-contradiction»? Dieu ne saurait se contradire. Au fond, à y bien regarder, le Dieu en question rentre dans la commune condition. Il est ce qu’il est. Quoi d’ étonnant. Il n’y a pas de quoi fouetter un chat, avec cette expression dont j’insinuais le caractère explosif.

Et pourtant, il y a là une explosion, et une force explosive. Le nom de Dieu est une véritable bombe. Comment cela est-il possible? C’est là la véritable question, qu’il faut extraire de l’apparente banalité de l’énoncé.

«Dieu est Dieu». Par cette répétition qui prend la tournure d’une proposition avec sujet et attribut, une double lecture s’insinue. La première The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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suggère l’exégèse suivante: supposé que nous imaginions, de par une tendance qu’illustre le polythéisme, plusieurs dieux, l’énoncé signifie qu’aucun de ces dieux ne satisfait à ce «qu’il devrait être». S’ils se distinguent, c’est donc que l’un d’eux a quelque chose que l’autre n’a pas, puisqu’il n’est de distinction que par une détermination propre à chacun. Or, quand il s’agit du divin, une détermination ne peut être qu’une perfection. Les dieux imaginaires sont donc nécessairement imparfaits puisqu’ils sont condamnés à manquer d’une perfection. En conséquence, puisque par Dieu nous entendons «le plus parfait» ou l’infini des perfections, ces dieux ne sont pas de dieux. Si nous les disons dieux malgré tout, c’est parce que nous corrigeons aussitôt le pluriel de l’hypothèse par l’unité du prédicat. Ce [ 136 ] qui revient à dire: si x et y ont toutes les perfections que signifie le prédicat, ils n’ont plus de quoi se distinguer. Un logicien ajouterait: «deux choses sont identiques lorsque tous les prédicats qui conviennent à l’une conviennent aussi à l’autre, et inversement». «Dieu est Dieu» équivaut dès lors à: «Dieu est unique».

Dans la tautologie résonne l’impératif biblique, dont nous savons la sévérité qui n’exclut pas, pour l’idolâtrie, l’exemplarité du châtiment.

Nous entrevoyons déjà, par cette référence à la Bible, le rapport qui unit violence et monothéisme. Ce rapport n’est pas seulement une contingence d’histoire. Il se pourrait que le lien fût essentiel. C’est qu’il importe de montrer.

3. Je ne reprendrai pas l’élaboration du concept d’unicité, que je proposais dans un autre travail. Je crois utile, cependant, d’en retenir quelques éléments.

On s’aperçoit tout d’abord que l’affirmation de l’unique, si forte soitelle, doit une partie de sa force à la tentation polythéiste à laquelle elle fait échec. L’impératif catégorique n’est assorti de si dures sanctions que pour équilibrer et vaincre une résistance qui ne cesse de le menacer. Je ne suis pas le premier à remarquer que l’un de l’«unique» relève du «nombre» et que le nombre engage le pluriel. Il en résulte un conflit de forces, qui peut déchirer l’individu aussi bien que la société. En ce sense, il n’est point téméraire d’avancer que le monothéisme secrète une violence réciproque, dans la mesure où la loi contrarie une spontanéité qui regimbe contre son joug. Toutefois, ce trait n’a rien d’original. La culture (ou la civilisation) est-elle autre chose que cette perpétuelle tension?

Il convient donc de repérer, si possible, une marque spécifique.

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On risque d’oublier, en effet, que le monothéisme est à double face: le dieu unique n’entre dans l’histoire que par le peuple, unique lui aussi, qu’il s’est choisi. Si bien que les deux unicités se répondent et se confirment l’une l’autre, [ 137 ] l’une par l’autre. En dépit de leur dissymétrie, les relations sont effectives des deux côtés, car elles engagent des effets qui résultent d’une alliance, une alliance telle que le peuple élu devient responsable de l’existence de son dieu dans le monde, comme le dieu assure de sa fidélité le peuple qu’il s’est donné. Histoire théandrique, qui consacre, par le sceau du divin, les faits et gestes, si cruels soient-ils parfois, d’un devenir de predestination.

Terre sainte, peuple sainte, temple saint: tout, sans exception, doit participer à la sainteté du Seigneur. Or la sainteté qui sépare est aussi l’instance qui purifie. Et la purification n’hésite pas, s’il le faut, devant le désert de l’extermination. Les guerres que raconte la Bible ne sont pas toujours la manifestation d’une sublime tendresse. La pureté serait-elle proche de la terreur? L’unicité qui en est l’expression difusse sur l’enterprise humaine la fièvre de l’absolu. Certes, la distance n’est pas oubliée qui sépare le Très Haut de la créature. Mais, et c’est là le paradoxe, la distance accuse, par contraste, l’incroyable intimité de la relation. Le pacte qui unit les deux extrêmes ne justifie pas pour autant toutes les horreurs ou faiblesses d’une humanité trop empressée à se couvrir de son dieu, comme d’un principe universel de raison suffisante. La Loi reste inflexible, qui juge le pécheur. Il serait malhonnête d’en faire abstraction pour accabler le monothéisme. Mais, si une élémentaire probité exige ce rappel, on ne saurait nier que l’unicité et l’élection qu’elle implique de part et d’autre recèlent, essentiellement, et non par un accident de l’histoire, un danger permanent d’absolutisation anthropocentrique dont la violence ne saurait être absente.

4. Dieu est Dieu. Si l’on accorde le bien-fondé de cette première lecture, on ne s’étonne plus que la tautologie ait, aujourd’hui, en provenance du proche Orient, des effets plus percutants. L’erreur des politiques a été, en dénonçant la barbarie, d’aggraver la situation. Il eût été politiquement plus utile de chercher à comprendre au lieu de se fâcher. On [ 138 ] ne gagne rien à brandir les «droits de l’homme» face à The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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des gens qui défendent à la fois l’honneur de Dieu et celui de son peuple.

L’humiliation dont ils souffrent est aussi bien celle de leur Seigneur. La dureté de leur réaction, qui n’épargne personne, ne saurait être assimilée à la violence d’une foule qui, sous le coup de la panique, piétine ou écrase tout sur son passage. Il y a dans ces conduites meurtrières une cohérence qui fait peur.

Il ne s’agit ni de haine personnelle, ni de racisme proprement dit, mais d’un manichéisme simpliste qui divise l’humanité en deux camps: les méchants, conduits par Satan, dont le nom est Légion, et les fidèles d’Allah dont le nom de miséricorde s’arme des rigueurs d’une justice sans merci. La guerre ainsi comprise est, et ne peut qu’être sainte. Elle sanctifie, par elle-même, ceux qui mènent la lutte pour l’Unique. La cause à laquelle ils se sacrifient a la dignité de l’antique causa sui: elle vaut par soi et pour soi, elle mérite d’être, et, parce qu’elle doit être, elle libère en ses militants une énergie indomptable, homicide et suicidaire, qui achève, dans le mépris de la mort, le service de l’Absolu. Cette ruée héroïque sur le nihilisme de l’occident est peut-être le seul commentaire adéquat, en style performatif, de notre première tautologie.

5. La seconde tautologie, bien que matériellement identique, ouvre un autre espace de pensée et d’action. Les exégèses que j’en proposerai – il en est probablement bien d’autres – ont au moins un élément commun: elles adoptent un tour résolument critique. a. Dieu est Dieu: vous ne pouvez rien dire de lui, vous avez plutôt a vous taire.

Taisez-vous. Du célèbre «Je suis qui je suis» de l’ Exode, c. 3, certains, si j’ai bonne mémoire, proposaient la traduction cavalière: «Fichez moi la paix». Je préfère une autre traduction. b. Dieu est Dieu: «Dieu, personne ne l’a vu». Ne cherchez pas à vous en emparer, en le mettant sous la main ou sous le regard, de son secret ontologique. Son essence, s’il [ 139 ] en a une – ce qui n’est pas certain – échappe à tout entendement. On peut, cependant, le nommer – puisqu’il faut parler de lui, car n’en point parler, ce serait le déclarer inexistant.

Mais ces noms ne seront jamais que des axes de visée. c. Dieu est Dieu: la phrase est à lire comme un interdit. En réalité, c’est un impératif: «Ne te fais pas d’images taillées», surtout pas des statues. Par leur troisième dimension, elles sont, plus dangereuses que les images peintes. On pourrait croire, en effet, qu’elles abritent, tel un tabernacle, una divine présence. Dieu est toujours l’absent de nos rendez-vous.

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d. Dieu est Dieu: on a beau faire, qu’on le nomme ou qu’on le représente, nous n’aurons jamais de lui que des images. L’essentiel n’est pas de condamner l’image; mais plutôt de les multiplier à l’infini pour qu’aucune ne nous séduise par sa fascination. Le fidèle ressemble à une espèce de Don Juan, à la recherche de l’éternel féminin. A la recherche de l’éternel divin, il peut lire dans la tautologie un nouvel impératif: «ne t’arrête nulle part», car Il te donne du mouvement pour «aller toujours au-delà». «Il faut s’arrêter quelque part», dit-on parfois; mais c’est un axiome de paresse, comme toute évidence. e. Dieu est Dieu: Maître Eckhart en faisait une prière: «Je prie Dieu de me libérer de Dieu». Il ajouterait: Il faut toujours transiter. Peut-être faudrait-il ajouter: Dieu n’est que la nécessité de ce passage. f. Dieu est Dieu: certes. Mais parce qu’il est l’Autre, vous ne pourrez l’approcher que par le visage d’Autrui. Ne le cherchez pas ailleurs.

Seule, la pratique de la justice (et non la voie de la connaissance) permet de le reconnaître. g. Dieu est Dieu: Regardez la croix. Signe de contradiction. Infirmité et folie. Concluez. h. Dieu est Dieu: le jugement dernier au chapitre 26 de S. Matthieu: «j’avais faim et vous m’avez donné à manger», «j’étais nu et vous m’avez vêtu», etc. Je reste sous ce jugement. [ 140 ] De ces deux tautologies, exactement superposables, laquelle choisir?

Violence ou non-violence? Entre les deux, il m’est impossible d’hésiter. Je choisis tout, cependant, parce que, l’une et l’autre m’habitent, tout en y faisant un mauvais ménage. Dieu serait-il divisé? Ou bien serait-il, en nous, le jugement dernier, l’impératif du perpétuel transit, qui nous interdit de nous figer au négatif ou au positif de son instance? L’impossible du nécessaire ou le nécessaire de l’impossible? Je n’en ai point fini avec cette douloureuse et exaltante question.

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Fictions of the Return Daniel Heller-Roazen Abstract: This article presents a study of selected nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives in which men long missing return too late, fail to come home, or vanish in unexpected and sometimes unprecedented ways.

Keywords: missing persons in literature, civil death,The Colonel Chabert, Balzac, The Late Mattia Pascal, Pirandello, Amerika/The Man Who Disappeared, Kafka Before a person may be declared missing in the legal sense, certain events independent of any judicial proceedings must have come to pass: it is necessary for an unexplained absence to have been observed, reported, and accepted as a fact. A mysterious disappearance needs, in short, to be granted; only then may a legal authority declare persons to be absentees, treating their rights and claims according to the rules that hold for their special status. Such considerations as how exactly a vanishing came to pass, what befell the absent person in the moment of going missing and in the time that followed it, are, for a declaration of legal absence, secondary.They may be temporarily or indefinitely unknown, without necessarily perturbing the mechanisms of due process. These circumstances, however, have never been lost from sight. They constitute the crucial matter of which literary invention, in every age, has taken hold. Epic, fable, drama, and the novel have long appropriated what the law has been uninterested or unable to ascertain. Fictions of disappearance, in verse and prose, have been the results.

Occasionally, such inventions have entered the field of legal reasoning.

Juridical exposition then becomes the occasion for constructions of a literary kind. Interlacing the formulation of rules and precepts with the recounting of parables, allegories, and fables, the Talmud furnishes some The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 218–234 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.218

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striking examples. Its tractate Yebamoth, which bears on levirate marriage, contains several chapters concerning the conditions in which a once married woman may be joined to a new husband. An initial precept contained in the Mishnah would appear to require that, before a woman may enter into a second marriage, there be incontrovertible proof of the first husband’s decease: “Evidence [of the deceased’s identity] may be legally tendered only on [proof afforded by] the full face with the nose, though there were also marks on a man’s body or clothing” (Babylonian Talmud, Yebamoth 120a).

Yet the Rabbis also concede that there are conditions in which death may be legally presumed without any bodily evidence. The classic case is that of an accidental fall into a large body of water, which is in Rabbinic law of two types. Where a man falls into “water that has [a visible] end,” he will be considered to be dead; his wife may consequently remarry. Where he falls into “water that has no [visible] end,” by contrast, “his wife is forbidden [to marry again]” (121a). Naturally, a question remains to be decided: “What is to be understood by ‘has [a visible] end’?” A thesis attributed to Rabbi Abaye provides the answer: “[An area all the boundaries of which] a person standing [on the edge] is able to see in all directions” (121a).

After such prescriptions, the tractate turns to elements of narrative, as halakhah, the domain of commandments, gives way to the fables of aggadah.

A nameless rabbi relates how “it once happened” that, when casting nets in the Jordan, a man fell into a subterranean pond, which had been built on its shore so as to retain the fish washed into it by the overflowing river (Yebamoth 121a). He appeared, then, simply to vanish. “His companion, after waiting long enough for his soul to depart, returned and reported the accident to his household” (121a). The man, having gone missing, was mourned as dead. No sooner did the sun rise the next day, however, than he found his way to the “entrance of the cave” (121a). The presumed deceased fisherman returned to his home. “‘How great,’ exclaimed the Rabbi, ‘are the words of the Sages!’” (121a).They establish that a fall into waters with a visible end may legitimately be presumed to cause death.Yet the parable of the Jordanian suggests that, at times, greater prudence is required: “In the case of water which has [a visible] end, the possibility of having remained in a subterranean fish pond should be taken into consideration! It is not unusual for a subterranean fish pond to be found with water which has [a visible] end” (121a).

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Rabbis Gamaliel and Akiva are reported to have witnessed cases no less remarkable. “I was once traveling on board a ship,” Rabbi Gamaliel recalls, “when I observed a shipwreck and was sorely grieved for [the apparent loss of] a scholar who had been traveling on board” (Yebamoth 121a).When Rabbi Gamaliel reached the shore, however, the missing man appeared. “He came to me,” the legal authority relates, “and sat down and discussed matters of halakhah” (121a).

He was none other than Rabbi Akiva. “‘My son,’ I asked him,‘who rescued you?’

‘The plank of a ship,’ he answered me, ‘came my way, and to every wave that approached me I bent my head’” (121a). The Sages are now again lauded for holding fast to the distinction between waters of visible and invisible ends.The reader learns that Rabbi Akiva himself once lived a like experience. Observing a ship “tossed in the sea,” he grieved for a scholar, Rabbi Meir, who had been aboard it.Yet when he landed in the province of Cappadocia, he relates, the lost scholar came to me and sat down and discussed matters of halakhah. ‘My son, I said to him, ‘who rescued you?’—‘One wave,’ he answered me, ‘tossed me to another, and the other to yet another until [the sea] cast me on the dry land.’ At that hour I exclaimed: How significant are the words of the Sages who ruled [that if a man fell into] water which has [a visible] end, [his wife] is permitted [to marry again; but if into] water which has no [visible] end, she is forbidden. (121a)

The position of such fables with respect to the law of missing persons is more ambiguous than at first appears. Each time, an unexpected reappearance becomes the occasion for the confirmation of the Sages’ wisdom, and the Talmudic distinction between the types of waters is verified.Yet each time, only one of two eventualities effectively foreseen by law finds parabolic illustration. Implicitly, the possibility of a disappearance without a narrative conclusion is set aside. Vanishing at sea may become the occasion of myth and parable only to the extent to which the water’s edges can be viewed as being without any “visible end,” for it is from their indefinite expanse alone that a missing man can be imagined to return, speaking for himself and explaining the conditions of his absence and the means of his homecoming.

From a disappearance in water that “has a visible end,” there is, it seems, no exemplary lesson to be drawn—if not that, as in the case of the fallen fisherman, even such a body may in truth be unbounded, such that a man lost in its depths can regain his former home.

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The most illustrious narratives of the return derive from fields beyond the law, but they are rarely insensible to the consequences of its distinctions. The earliest example in Graeco-Roman culture, of course, is also the most influential.

Odysseus, the man of many ways, is the first to go missing.While Agamemnon leaves for war and returns, meeting death at the hands of Clytemnestra, Odysseus lives out his ten years of adventures in prolonged absence from both Troy and Ithaca. When he finally washes ashore on his native island, his countrymen do not know if he is alive or dead. Odysseus then passes from one variety of absence to another. After having been in only unknown places, his life a matter of conjecture, Odysseus returns, but in concealment. Half the ancient epic concerns the period in which he hides himself at home, the better to set the scene of his unexpected reappearance.Throughout his voyages, Odysseus draws from his wanderings stories of wondrous deeds and occurrences.Yet there are signs that it is only at the conclusion of his travels, when he is at last reunited with his wife, having killed her suitors, that he offers a complete account of the circumstances of his long return. Only then, the narrator recounts, insisting on the totality of the telling, did shining Odysseus “recount all” [pant’eleg’]: “the cares he inflicted / on other men,” and “all that in his misery / he had toiled through.” Penelope seems to grant that hers is the first finished Odyssey. She listens closely, refusing to sleep “until he had told her everything [paros katalexai hapanta]” (Odyssey XXIII, vv. 306–9; Lattimore, Odyssey, 506).

In the modern era, as Dieter Beyerle notes, “the situation is different” (130).The tidings of the voyage are often reduced to a minimum, even as the return increases in importance, its details complicated, at times beyond repair.

Several sixteenth-century French chronicles recount the famously perplexing case of Martin Guerre, a man from the Basque lands, on the French side of the Pyrenees (see Davis; cf. Finlay). At fifteen, he married one Bertrande de Rols. Some ten years later, in 1548, he absents himself, following an apparent dispute concerning his patrimony. Seven or eight years later, Martin Guerre returns, regaining wife and home. In 1560, however, he stands accused; his father-in-law and, after some hesitation, his wife declare him not to be the man who once went missing. As the trial unfolds in Toulouse, a most remarkable occurrence comes to pass: Martin Guerre returns again, denouncing the man who returned before him. Judgment is passed, and the false Guerre, having confessed the spuriousness of his pretensions, is hanged before the door of the home he called his own.That such a decision struck some of its observers The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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as less than certain can be gleaned from the terms with which Montaigne, in 1558, recalls his presence as a jurist at the trial. “Being young,” he writes, I saw a law case, which Corras, a Counsellor of Tholouse, caused to be printed, of a strange accident of two men, who presented themselves one for another. I remember (and I remember nothing else so well) that me thought he proved his imposture, whom he condemned as guiltie, so wondrous-strange and so far-exceeding both our knowledge and his owne, who was judge, that I found much boldness in the sentence, which had condemned him to be hanged. (Essayes VI 228; Les Essais 1030)1

That “strange accident of two men” reaches completion solely through the event of an unexpected return. Only after his belated homecoming can the second Martin Guerre, ultimately revealed to have been the first, account for the conditions of his prolonged absence: after years spent in the military service of a cardinal, after battles fought in Spain and Flanders, the Basque lost a leg in battle and repaired to a monastery, before making his way across the mountains to reach the trial of the man who had claimed his name.

Later recordings of the married man’s return end far less conclusively.

Perhaps the single most striking case in modern fiction is that of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert. First published in 1832 under the title “The Negotiation” (La Transaction), this “scene of private life” is set in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. The action opens with the repetition of an unsettling appearance: an outmoded overcoat, in 1816, hovers before the door of a Parisian legal office. The unidentified individual inside the garment has come to be known to the office clerks as “the old overcoat” (le vieux carrick) (311).2 Soon the narrative discloses more. Having succeeded in obtaining a private audience with the lawyer, the visitor removes his coat, showing himself in his likeness to a figure just “dug up” from the earth (316). Now he recounts his tale. He is none other than Hyacinthe Chabert, the once famous colonel generally believed to have been killed at the battle of Eylau in East Prussia in 1807. “Unfortunately for me,” the mutilated man observes, with remarkable perspicacity, “my decease is an historical fact” (323). He wishes to regain the rights he possessed while alive. Yet an obstacle now bars his path back toward legal personhood. His former possessions belong to the woman who had been his wife, and she has joined herself to another: in his absence, she has remarried one Count Ferraud.

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Chabert is the first to acknowledge the difficulty of his situation.

“When I say these things to lawyers, to men of good sense,” he avows to the sympathetic professional, Derville, to whom he entrusts his cause, when I, a beggar, propose to make my case against a count and a countess, when I, a dead man, stand up against a death certificate, a marriage certificate and several birth certificates, they show me out, either with the air of cold politeness—which you all know how to assume to rid yourself of a hapless wretch—or brutally, like men who think they are dealing with a swindler or a madman. It depends on their nature. I have been buried underneath the dead. But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society, which wants to shove me underground again! (Balzac 328)

The lawyer suggests that a solution may be found, as long as the veteran assents to a first condition: “You may be obliged,” Derville immediately advises Chabert, “to negotiate” (il faudra peut-être transiger) (Balzac 333). His interlocutor admits to being perplexed by that proposition: “To negotiate [transiger], colonel Chabert repeated. ‘Am I dead or am I alive’?” (333). The novella constitutes an extended response to the question that its protagonist raises, setting out the conditions in which legal transaction, as both “negotiation” and “compromise,” proves strictly impossible.3 At the beginning of the tale, Chabert is a “stranger” in every sense; he is a man from whom humanity seems to have receded. “If this is a man,” one clerk asks another, pointing to the body of the insistently returning figure, “why do you call him old overcoat”?

(311–12; emphasis in original).4 Once the legal experts accept the validity of the stranger’s claims to his name, Chabert seems to regain a vestige of his former vitality, as if in preparation for entering the society from which he has been excluded. The language of the narrative, however, never ceases to mark the returning hero’s curious legal and social position. It refers to him as “the deceased” (le défunt) (323) and “the dead” (le mort) (321), lingering on his “cadaverous physiognomy” (323) and waxlike immobility.

A man of the Empire condemned to the society of the Restoration, Balzac’s protagonist soon learns that he is no match for either the law or his former spouse. When Countess Ferraud is first told that “Chabert exists,” she feigns disbelief, explaining to her lawyer that she has “already pushed away all the Chaberts,” who, in the years since his disappearance, have The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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imposed themselves on her. When confronted with the undeniable fact of her first husband’s survival, she arranges to meet Chabert without a legal proxy. In confidence, she contrives to persuade him to sign a document; in exchange for part of her fortune, he is to relinquish all claims to be the surviving Colonel Chabert (365). She pleads her case: were Chabert to be restored to legal life, her second marriage would be judged invalid and her children consequently declared illegitimate. Moved by her charms, Chabert resolves, at first, “to remain dead.”When he overhears her explaining to her lawyer that should he refuse the terms of her “transaction,” she will have him consigned to the Charenton asylum, the dead man makes a different choice.

He confronts her, declares his contempt for her and expresses thanks for the chance that has “disunited” them. “I will never reclaim the name that I may have decorated,” he pledges. Chabert, the text relates, then “disappears” (367). At the end of the novella, the men of the law, having long lost his trace, come upon him in an infirmary for the aged, where he is living out his last days at the edges of society. Resembling “one of those grotesque carved figures we know from Germany,” the erstwhile colonel now “takes enjoyment in drawing lines in the sand” (372). Chabert no longer responds to his own surname, if not to deny it and replace it with a complex number: “Not Chabert! Not Chabert!” “My name is Hyacinthe,” he exclaims, adding, “I am no longer a man; I am number 164, Room 7” (372).

Obstinately returning husbands haunt the French literature of the nineteenth century. Five decades after Balzac, in 1884, Maupassant imagines another belated Odysseus in “The Return.” In a Norman fishing village at a time impossible to identify with precision, an unknown man reappears before the door of a modest house, where a woman sits inside, knitting in the company of her five children. Her husband is at sea. From the doorway, one of her daughters, peering into the street, calls out, in an insistent dialectal phrase: “He’s back” (Le r’voilà) (185). The family does not know who he may be, although, as the daughter has observed, he seems to know them well. The next morning, he appears again, and the woman’s husband, who is now home, invites him in. It is revealed that the stranger is also the fisherwoman’s husband—not the father of her three younger children, but the one who, having vanished at sea more than twelve years before, was long presumed dead. He explains the conditions of his return: how he and two shipmates saved themselves after the destruction of their boat, how The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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they were “captured by savages” before his companions died and an English traveler brought him back to Normandy (192). It is too late for him to ask for his former spouse; but he lays claim to the house that belonged to his father, where he was born. In the last pages of the story, the two husbands resolve to pay a visit to the priest, to “put” themselves “in order” (en règle), although not without stopping, along the way, “for a drop” at the café du Commerce (196). There, the newcomer, identified as the one who had formerly “been lost,” introduces himself by echoing the words with which the tale began: “I’m back” (mé v’là) (196).

In the same years, Zola conceives two of his variations on the return.

In 1879, he publishes “The Death of Olivier Bécaille,” a story whose first sentence sets on stage a first-person narrator who bears witness to his own past absenting: “It was on Saturday, at six o’clock in the morning that I died, after three days of illness” (803). That day, Olivier Bécaille, a nervous and sickly husband, suffers a “syncope” of his “entire being”; left almost entirely immobile, he retains the faculty of hearing and some sight, his left eye perceiving “confusedly,” his right eye having been “completely paralyzed” (803).

“My God! My God! He is dead!” he hears his wife exclaim (803). Like Poe’s Madeline Usher and Flaubert’s Monsieur Ohmlin, Olivier Bécaille is entombed alive. Having regained control of his limbs inside his coffin, he succeeds, however, in freeing himself, climbing from the earth, and, once below the sky, scaling the cemetery’s walls. After a further loss of consciousness and a slow recovery in the home of a philanthropic physician, he revisits the street where he and his wife once lived. His former spouse is nowhere to be found. He repairs to the small restaurant in front of his old residence, where he observes a garrulous neighbor in conversation with a friend. She is explaining that his wife left Paris with a handsome young acquaintance, the same man who consoled her as Olivier Bécaille, paralyzed yet sentient, lay on his deathbed. “When she is no longer in mourning—isn’t that so?— they’ll do as they like” (829). “Listen!” the insistent neighbor concludes, “The other one did well to die. It’s an opportunity” (830). Olivier Bécaille now sees all too keenly that none is left to him. “I was never her lover,” he muses, pondering his devoted wife. “It is a brother that she has just grieved. Why would I change her life? A dead man is not jealous […] Well then! I was a good man for being dead, and I was certainly not about to commit as cruel an error as to resuscitate” (830).

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In “Jacques Damour,” published in 1883, Zola imagines a homecoming far closer in its circumstances of its setting to that of Colonel Chabert. After enduring the hardships of the War of 1871 and suffering the loss of his only son, Damour, one of the “last defenders of the Commune,” is arrested and sentenced to “simple deportation” to New Caledonia. Before departing, he assures his wife: “I will return—wait for me” (903). The narrative follows him to Nouméa, where he seems patiently to expiate his crimes. His official pardon appears imminent “when, one day,” the narrative relates, without explanation, Jacques Damour vanishes (903). Five prisoners escape the penal colony, and Damour is one of their company. Three months later, the wrecked pieces of a boat are discovered on the shore; corpses of three French fugitives are found. One is attributed to the late Jacques Damour.

The truth, however, is that Damour is alive and well. He means to write immediately to his wife, but he happens on a newspaper containing “the account of his evasion and the news of his death” (904). “From that moment onwards,” the reader learns, “a letter seemed to him imprudent; someone might intercept and read it, discovering the truth. Would it not be better, for everyone, to remain dead?” (904).

Damour travels to America, England, and Bruxelles, having been granted a new freedom. “He was dead; he had no one in the world, nothing mattered any longer to him” (Zola 905). Ten years after his condemnation, however, he learns that, in France, an amnesty has been decreed: “All the communards are returning. That woke him up” (906; emphasis in original).

Soon back in Paris, Jacques Damour succeeds in locating his wife, who, in his absence, has married a prosperous butcher. When he appears in her shop and reproaches her for the fact of her bigamy, she hardly knows how to defend herself, if not by showing him the now aged certificate of his death.

She claims innocence: “when people are dead, they ought not to return” (920). Persuaded by her sincerity and the presence of her small children, Damour accepts her arguments. “I am finished, I am nothing,” he tells her, “and you no longer love me” (923). Rescue of a kind comes through the solicitude of his daughter, who, in the years since his departure, has become a wealthy courtesan.The narrative ends after their reunion: “He has only his daughter, who took pity on her old man. Moreover, he has refused to try to re-establish his civil status in any way.Why trouble government documents? […] He is in his hole, lost, forgotten, being no one” (929).

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From these stories of return and thwarted resuscitation, Pirandello would draw the threads of his 1904 novel of multiple absences, Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal). The complexity of the plot defies summary, but its fundamental trajectory may be retraced.The eponymous character recounts how, after a series of acrimonious disputes with his wife and mother-in-law, he decides one evening to disappear without a trace. He flees his home in Liguria and makes his way to the casinos of Monte Carlo. Upon learning, from a distance, that a corpse found near his former residence has been identified as his own, Mattia Pascal embraces the unexpected situation in which he finds himself. He decides, as he himself recalls, “to make of myself another man”: “Now I was alone, and I could not have been more alone on earth, being suddenly loosened from every bond and every obligation, being free, new, and absolutely master of myself, without the weight of my past, and before the future, which I would be able to shape as I liked” (96).

He renames himself Adriano Meis and moves to Rome. Grasping, however, that, in the absence of any legal identity, he has the right neither to enter into contracts, such as marriage, nor to defend his remaining possessions from theft, he concludes that he is now “worse off than dead” (Pirandello 219). He contrives, therefore, to dispose of his second persona, constructing a scene that will suggest to his Roman circle of acquaintances that Adriano Meis has committed suicide. Inevitably, he returns to his former wife, who has married his best friend and recently become the mother of a small child. “I’ll tell you everything,” he promises the astonished couple, adding that the greatest lesson he has learned is that “playing dead is not a good profession” (157). “I am making myself alive again,” he promises; but, when faced with the prospect of regaining his former life, invalidating a new marriage and rendering an infant illegitimate, he elects to live out his years in the absence of legal resurrection, tending to the shelves of a neglected library in a deconsecrated church (257).

Like Olivier Bécaille, whose unbalanced eyesight he shares for a while, “the late Mattia Pascal” speaks for himself, his book being written solely in the first person.5 Zola’s character begins his discourse with the mournful recollection of the day on which, as he writes, “I died” (803). Pirandello’s protagonist-narrator announces himself in more complex terms, which conjure up vertiginously plural and posthumous existences. In the first of his two prefaces to the novel of his many lives, he stipulates that he is The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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“bequeathing this manuscript of mine” to the library in which he works, on a single condition: “no one is to open it until fifty years after my third, last and definitive death” (Pirandello 5; emphasis in original). “For I have died,” he hastens to explain, “yes, twice; but the first time it was in error, and the second … you will hear” (5). As if in homage to “Jacques Damour,” the late Mattia Pascal learns of his death from a distance and by reading a newspaper. In Pirandello’s novel, the documents of decease are present in abundance. Meaning to return by train from Monte Carlo, Mattia Pascal buys a paper and, perusing its pages, happens upon the report of a “corpse […] later recognized as our librarian Mattia Pascal, who vanished many days ago” (85). He then procures for himself fifteen copies of the Foglietto, his hometown’s daily. It contains a lengthier article concerning the hitherto “inexplicable absence” of Mattia Pascal (92). The “late Mattia Pascal” who redacts the story of his lives, includes this article, in its entirety, in his book (91–93). Finally, the narrative ends with the visit that the self-surviving narrator pays to his gravestone. The novel reproduces the epitaph in its entirety and, as the posthumous narrator reads of his death alongside the reader, the inscription fades into the text of which it is a part. The entire novel becomes an extended epitaph at once proleptic and metaleptic, false and also self-fulfilling (280).

After the tales of Bécaille, Damour, and Chabert, the novel of the “late Mattia Pascal” ends in impeded resuscitation.The author of this book himself suggests that the last lesson to be drawn from his many lives is that there exists a survival beyond the law.To a friend’s well-intentioned insistence that “outside the law and outside the particularities—be they happy or sad—on account of which we are ourselves, it is not possible to live,” the keen-eyed autobiographer responds: “In no way have I entered again into the law, or into any of my own particularities. My wife is Pomino’s wife, and I could hardly say that I exist at all [non saprei proprio dire ch’io mi sia]” (Pirandello 279). His newfound “life” thus reveals itself to be a literary afterlife. The Late Mattia Pascal has become the volume with whose title his proper name is homonymous. Both are beings of the library.

The power of the return, in each of these narratives, is unmistakable.

Establishing the certainty of the departure in overtaking it at last, the homecoming surmounts, by different means, what would seem the most irreparable of occurrences. Absence, rendered obsolete in being recollected, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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gives way to a new presence. Nothing less than the statement “I died”—an utterance that is, in principle, inexpressible by any living subject—becomes a phrase that is not only written but also spoken and repeated.6 Vanishing is made relative. However distorted it may be, the circular trajectory of the ancient epic of homecoming is still distinctly perceptible in each of these narratives: from Balzac to Maupassant, Zola, and Pirandello, Odysseus, his story concentrated into that of a long return, remains the distant model.The end of the period of absence brings with it tidings of its unknown inception and its unfolding, which lead ineluctably to its conclusive surpassing. Once a disappearance has been bounded in time, if not also in space, the condition of narrative has, in each case, been fulfilled: tales can then be told and retold.

Yet it could also be argued that such absences are only ever apparent.

Each time, a narrative “negotiation,” in Balzac’s phrase, has been tacitly conducted. The line demarcating the state of being missing from that of being present has been redrawn; the literary texts constitute nothing if not its retracing. The existence of such a border, however, has hardly been contested. A real state of being missing might possess a different structure. It could be that of an absence that persists without an end and also, therefore, without a clear beginning: an Odyssey of not return but rather constant vagary, in which adventure follows adventure without the guidance of any orient. Within a decade of Pirandello’s account of the posthumous Pascal, Kafka would conceive of such a narrative of vanishing. It was to be his first novel, in which the seventeen-year old Karl Rossmann wanders across new lands, not despite the fact of being united to a woman at home but rather as a consequence of this circumstance. Rossmann has, as the novel’s first sentence states, been “sent off to America by his unfortunate parents because a servant girl seduced him and had a child by him” (Verschollene 7; Man 30).

Kafka worked on his novel from 1912 to 1914, when he interrupted it. Introducing his project to Felice Bauer in a letter dated 11 November 1912, he insists on its indefinite magnitude and its title: “The story that I am writing and that stretches out absolutely into the infinite [allerdings ins Endlose angelegt ist] is called—to give you a preliminary notion—The Absentee [Der Verschollene]” (Briefe 1.225). When Max Brod published the manuscript in 1927, after Kafka’s death, he renamed it Amerika, thereby effacing what was, in Kafka’s letter as well as in his diaries, the index of a technical legal notion that the author knew well: Verschollenheit, or in other words, that “variety The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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of absence” (Art der Abwesenheit), as Conrad Ernst Riesenfeld explained in a monograph that Kafka could have read, which combines the features of “a certain duration,” the “unknown residence of the absentee,” and a “lack of any reports as to the life or death of the same” (7).7 Hawthorne, living in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, placed the man he called Wakefield, his absentee, in “the great mass of London life” (292). Kafka, writing in Prague in the early twentieth century, makes an inverse choice for his adolescent hero: the United States, with its “movement without end,” its “restlessness, transmitted from the restless element to helpless human beings and their works” (Verschollene 26–27), would become the country of his “absentee,” the “one who disappeared,” or, to choose another rendition of the German phrase, der Verschollene, “the one who was never heard from again” (Vedder 552).8 Critics have noted that it is far from obvious why Kafka chose to evoke his youthful wayfarer as “the absentee.”9 Several circumstances have perplexed his readers. There is the question of age. Rossmann is seventeen when the novel opens; he therefore stands before the threshold of full legal personhood, his status being close, as Hans Helmut Hiebel has noted, to that of the “father of a minor age” (minderjähriger Kindesvater) that attracted Kafka’s attention in his own legal studies (see Hiebel 228).10 One wonders whether Rossmann is missing as a legal minor or rather as an adult. It is also conceivable that his “absenting” involves the transition between these two legal states. The most obvious question, however, concerns the dating of the protagonist’s alleged disappearance. When the reader first encounters him, Rossmann has already reached the continent to which his parents have remitted him; he therefore seems, as Ulrike Vedder observes, to be “in no way an absentee” (552). From that moment onwards, he errs across the expanse of a country at once historical and fantastic, without becoming the subject of any mysterious disappearance.

Chabert, Bécaille, Damour, and Mattia Pascal all absent themselves, by chance or by choice; their odysseys are consequently subordinated to the variously interrupted homecomings that ensue. Rossmann, by contrast, always wanders, without appearing to be the subject of any single event of vanishing.

Yet each of the incidents that compose Kafka’s novel could also be read as the scene of a different deviation, detailing the circumstances in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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which Rossmann is missing from the place where he may be meant to be: from the opening, in which the young man reaches New York and fails to disembark, to his sudden identification, or misidentification, as the nephew of one Senator Jakob with whom he does not expect to be united, from his escape or banishment from his transitory family home in America to his dismissal from the Hotel Occidental, to his admittance into the marvelous “Theater of Oklahama,” where it seems that “everything that he had done up until now would be forgotten, and no one would hold it against him” (Verschollene 399; Man 481). Asked by the officials of the theater for the nickname by which he was known in his last position, Rossmann offers an answer that, in addition to being textually unmotivated, seems to render his own civil identity illegible: “Negro.” “‘Negro?’ asked the boss, turning his head and pulling a face, as though Karl had now reached the height of preposterousness. The secretary too looked at Karl a while, but then he repeated ‘Negro’ and wrote it down” (Verschollene 402; The Man 499).11 Each time, Kafka’s obscurely “missing person” confirms his place by being driven from it, if not by secretly renouncing it himself.

The uncertainties proper to Karl Rossman’s state of being absent are the consequences of the work as its author conceived and abandoned it.

Since Kafka denied—or spared—this novel any conclusion, the reader cannot hope to reconstruct how, or even if, its titular disappearance began.

In its plain and often disquietingly narratorless prose, Kafka’s fiction thus implicitly rejects the legal axiom that for there to be a missing person, the circumstances of an absenting must be granted in advance.Yet in its concomitant refusal to concede even the suggestion of a return, it also defies a longstanding narrative presumption that is no less dogmatic: that a mysterious disappearance may become the subject of a finished tale alone. From the ship stoker’s cabin to “Oklahama,” from the attic of Hotel Occidental to the “little smoke-filled compartment” from which, in the novel’s last fragments, he begins to “grasp the size of America” (418), “guiltless Rossmann,” as his author would later name him, journeys outside the wide compass of the Odyssey.12 In error or in ignorance, “a little disappointed” (411), he drifts through a new land that has no “visible end.” For him, a father and son too old to be a child and yet too young to be a married man, there is neither departure nor return.

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Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (Zone Books, 2017).

Notes 1 Davis points out that when he wrote these lines, Montaigne may not have read the confession of the presumed imposter, Arnaut de Tilh (199).

2 It has been observed that Balzac’s text announces Gogol’s “overcoat” in more ways than one; see Meyer (26–33) and Nilsson (61–72).

3 On “narrative transaction” in Le Colonel Chabert, see Brooks.

4 On the legal status of Chabert’s uncertain humanity, see Caruth, especially pages 121–23; see also Cardinal.

5 On The Late Mattia Pascal and Zola, see Lo Vecchio Musti (83–84) and, more extensively, Cudini (705–9).

6 Cf. Barthes’s analysis of the sentence “I am dead” in a tale by Edgar Allen Poe (47).

7 In 1911, a year before Kafka began work on his first novel, his second cousin, Bruno Kafka, edited a textbook in Austrian family law by the jurist with whom Kafka himself had also studied; see Krasnopolski. As Hiebel has shown, Kafka’s novel echoes Austrian and German legal terminology in a number of ways (226–28).

8 On Kafka’s America, see Anderson. The word “verschollen” contains an index of sounding; as Sam Weber writes, “someone who is verschollen has dropped not so much out of sight as out of earshot: schellen means to resound, resonate, reverberate. The Verschollene is one from whom noting has been heard from a long time” (69). Stanley Corngold, by contrast, suggests that Kafka’s title be rendered The BoyWho Sank out of Sight (121–38).

9 It is worth pointing out that the German phrase derVerschollene omits any reference to the “person.”

10 Kafka would have encountered the “father of a child of a minor age” in Krasnopolski’s Familienrecht (4:265). On Kafka and Krasnopolski, see Brod (45) and Wagenbach (127–28). In Brod’s edition of Kafka’s novel, Karl Rossmann is said to be sixteen.

11 On Karl’s final self-identification, see Politzer (161) and Suchoff (127–28).

12 In a diary entry from 1916, Kafka calls Rossmann “the guiltless one,” evoking an ending he does not appear to have composed: “Rossmann and K., the guiltless and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end, the innocent one with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down” (Tagebücher 1.757).

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Works Cited Anderson, Mark. “Kafka and NewYork: Notes on a Traveling Narrative.” Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, edited by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, Columbia UP, 1989, pp. 142–61. De Gruyter Online, https://doi .org/10.7312/huys06644-008.

The Babylonian Talmud. Translated by Isaac Epstein, Soncino, 1935–1952. 35 vols.

Balzac, Honoré de. Études de mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée, Scènes de la vie de province, edited by Pierre-Geroes Castex et al., Gallimard, 1976.

Barthes, Roland. “Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe.” Sémiotique narrative et textuelle, edited by Claude Chabrol, Larousse, 1973, pp. 29–54.

Beyerle, Dieter. “Die Heimkehr des verschollenen Ehemannes bei Balzac, Zola, und Maupassant.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch, vol. 27, 1976, pp. 129–51.

Brod, Max. Über Franz Kafka. Fischer, 1974.

Brooks, Peter. “Narrative Transaction and Transference (Unburying Le Colonel Chabert).”

Novel, vol. 15, no. 2, 1982, pp. 101–10. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1345218.

Cardinal, Jacques. “Perdre son nom. Identité, representation et vraisemblance dans Le Colonel Chabert.” Poétique, vol. 135, no. 3, 2003, pp. 307–32.

Caruth, Cathy. “The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property and the Law.” Law’s Madness, edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merill Umphrey, U of Michigan P, 2003, pp. 119–46.

Corngold, Stanley. Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature. Stanford UP, 1998.

Cudini, Piero. “‘Il Fu Mattia Pascal’: Dalle fonti chamissiani e zoliane alla nuova struttura narrativa di Luigi Pirandello.” Belfagor, vol. 6, 1971, pp. 702–13.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard UP, 1983.

Finlay, Robert. “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre.” American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 3, 1988, pp. 553–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1868102.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tales and Sketches. Edited by Roy Harvey Pearce, Library of Hawthorne, 1982.

Hiebel, Hans Helmut. “Parabelform und Rechtsthematik in Franz Kafkas Romanfragment Der Verschollene.” Die Parabel: Parabolische Formen in der deutschen Dichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Theo Elm and Hans Helmut Hiebel, Suhrkamp, 1986, pp. 219–54.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, Harper & Row, 1967.

———. The Odyssey. Translated by A.T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimrock, Harvard UP, 1995. 2 vols.

Kafka, Franz . Briefe. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Fischer Verlag, 1999. 4 vols.

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———. The Man Who Disappeared.Translated by Michael Hoffman. Penguin, 1996.

———. Tagebücher. Edited by Hans-Gertrud Koch, M. Müller and Malcolm Pasley, Fischer Verlag, 2002. 3 vols.

———. Der Verschollene. Roman in der Fassung der Handschrift. Edited by Jost Schillemeit, Fischer, 1983.

Krasnopolski, Horaz. Lehrbuch des österreichisches Privatrecht,Vol. 4: Familienrecht.

Edited by Bruno Kafka. Duncker & Humblot, 1910–1914. 5 vols.

Lo Vecchio Musti, Manlio. L’Opera di Luigi Pirandello. G.B. Paravia, 1939.

Maupassant, Guy de. Œuvres complètes illustrées: Yvette. Librairie Ollendorff, 1906.

Meyer, Priscilla. How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostovesky,Tolstoy. U of Wisconsin P, 2008.

Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin, Gallimard, 2007.

———. The Essayes, or, Morall, Politike, and Militarie Discourses of Lo. Michaell de Montaigne. Translated by John Florio, Gibbings & Company, 1603.

Nilsson, Nils Åke. “On the Origins of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” Gogol’s Overcoat: An Anthology of Critical Essays, edited by Elizabeth W.Trahan, Ardis, 1982, pp. 61–72.

Pirandello, Luigi. Il fu Mattia Pascal. 1904. Edited by Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Einaudi, 1993.

Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Cornell UP, 1962.

Riesenfeld, Conrad Ernst. Verschollenheit und Todeserklärung nach gemeinem und preussischem Rechte, mit starker Rücksicht auf dieVorschläge des Enwturfs eines bürgerlichen Gesetzbuchs für das deutsche Reich. Wilhelm Koebner, 1890.

Suchoff, David. Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition. U of Pennsylvania P, 2012.

Vedder, Ulrike. “Die Figur des Verschollenen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Kafka, Burger, Treichel).” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, NF, vol. 21, no. 3, 2011, pp.

548–62. Ingenta Connect, https://doi.org/10.3726/92134_548.

Wagenbach, Klaus. Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, 1883–1912. Francke, 1958.

Weber, Sam. Theatricality as Medium. Fordham UP, 2004. Fordham Scholarship Online, https://doi.org/10.5422/fso/9780823224159.001.0001.

Zola, Émile. Contes et nouvelles. Edited by Roger Ripoll, with Sylvie Luneau, Gallimard, 1976.

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Radical Empiricism Revisited Joshua Kates Abstract: “Radical Empiricism Revisited” accomplishes a twofold task. In its early going, it raises questions concerning what arguably remains the most prominent force in continental philosophy and theory today: the radically empiricist, albeit also transcendentally inflected, projects of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze or Bruno Latour. After arguing that such empiricism, whatever its other merits, still trades on fairly standard Kantian frameworks for its own thinking, alternatives are explored. More novel, because more radically temporal (i.e., disappearing or evanescent), approaches are traced in the early writings of Jacques Derrida and, above all, in Michel Foucault’s first masterpiece, Folie et déraison: Histoire de folie à l’âge classique, on the basis of a different genealogy for transcendental questioning that follows Maurice Merleau-Ponty—a middle figure, to whom Deleuze was close—back to Edmund Husserl.

Keywords: empiricism, transcendentalism, absolute, phenomenology, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Husserl I.

The most powerful force in contemporary continental theory today takes shape as radical or transcendental empiricism.1 Under this rubric, I class the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (and those thinking with them and in their wake);2 the philosophy of science of Isabelle Stengers and of Bruno Latour;3 political and social thinkers that build on the Deleuzean initiative, such as Manual De Landa or, in a more limited fashion, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri;4 as well as the current revival of the thought of William James and Alfred Lloyd Whitehead.5 Included here, as well, would be variations of systems theory, especially those found in media studies and The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 235–285 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.235

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some stretches of the posthumanities. The overlap of these with the prior initiatives (Luhmann,Whitehead, James, Latour) becomes particularly visible in the recent work of a Mark Hansen or a Cary Wolfe.6 Empiricism, transcendental and/or radical, thus covers a wide swathe of endeavors and includes initiatives not usually grouped together.7 All of these programs, however, may be termed (a) empirical, since they give pride of place to what can be learned or is known about objects or objective formations rather than persons, and (b) transcendental, since they investigate the constitution of such objectivities and expose or invent new forms of mediation pertaining to their existence. This twin orientation, to concrete objectivities and their assembly, warrants the rubric transcendental or radical empiricism and, indeed, in the present context, defines it.8 (1) Radically empiricist theory, to specify it more precisely, focuses on things, objects, objectivities—experienced, experimented upon, classified, grouped and networked together, or functioning autopoetically. Decisively, it eschews any appeal to subjects or persons, as found in classical or even contemporary philosophies.This work stands back from the subject-oriented phenomenology of Husserl, or even the existence-oriented one of Heidegger, as well as from the footing in the subject shared by thinkers from Descartes to Kant. It opts for objects over subjects, things over persons, relations over intentions and intentionality.

Yet even as transcendental or radical empiricism renounces such classical schema, these projects, despite their wide variation, also steer clear of what is sometimes called objectivism or naturalism, as found in logical positivism and its offshoots.9 That is, such approaches, while vaulting over the subject, do not simply sink themselves into objective knowledges; they are not empiricist in the sense of recognizing only what empirical knowledge has to say about objects and things. Instead, these undertakings assume that something further may be proposed about what determines the entities in questions—what makes possible their appearing as, and being what, they are.

Radical empiricists invent or disclose hitherto unrecognized systems and registers to perform this latter, specifically constitutive, task.10 From those inventions, these endeavors derive their signature titles—the systems of systems theory, the machines of Deleuze and Guattari, the processes of Whitehead, the networks of Latour—hence their transcendental status (even in those cases, most prominently that of systems theory, where this The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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term would not be self-applied). On this account, while bypassing the subject, these empiricisms also do not rule out much of the arsenal of earlier philosophies of existence: sensibility, meaning, horizons, life. Accordingly, despite their obviously wide variation in respect to such mediation, as well as a similar variation in their envisioning these objectivities themselves—some formations have no truck with things as encountered in the world; others do—they converge in affirming interrelations and intelligible contexts as transforming and constructing the objects in question; none are simply realist.

Transcendental empiricisms offer meta-accounts of how objects, objectivities, and things are determined and related by situating these frameworks within a broader network of matters, textures, and logics of difference.

A well-known passage from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition vividly embodies the distinctive double thrust of radical empiricism. In the course of glossing Samuel Butler’s claim that the corn needs “faith in its own existence in order to grow,” Deleuze affirms that “only an empiricist can happily risk such formulae.What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation” (75).

In question for Deleuze at this moment is at once an object or thing (here wheat) and a moment of mediation (“contraction,” a term from Bergson, and “contemplation,” from Butler), without which this objectivity would not be what it is. Despite being called “contemplation,” such a mediating moment is not located elsewhere, in some consciousness or divine mind; rather, Deleuze situates it in the object’s own operation, and in this consists his self-avowed empiricism. Put otherwise, Deleuze’s description of wheat becoming wheat charts, within a specifically empirical horizon, a transcendental operation: the contemplation that, bringing about its own “auto-satisfaction,” causes this “contraction” and lets the wheat be wheat—an empirical yet transcendental becoming, which obviously no science, such as botany, treats.11 Radical or transcendental empiricist initiatives more generally, then, dispense with subjectivity, while never abandoning much of what traditional philosophy imparts to subjects—here “contemplation,” as well as sensibility, logics, and, at times (as in James and Deleuze himself), a kind of (nonpersonal) consciousness, as well as self-adaptation, transformation, and life. Empiricism’s strategy of bypassing the subject has a second set of consequences, however, now for beings like ourselves. Another equally significant trait defines this The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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same formation, although this feature is neither as readily discernible nor as evenly distributed as the first.

(2) The transcendental empiricist approach, its production or disclosure of a constitutive dimension of entities and objectivities, stands in the service of an insertion into history, often entailing a specifically political charge.

Accordingly, the goal of radical empiricism includes aims previously viewed as exclusive to persons or subjects, even as their importance is demoted by this work. Much of the urgency of the radical empiricist project indeed flows from the conviction that only if thought pursues a transcendental or radical empiricist course—only thanks to interrogating our experience in terms of new objectivities and new types of mediations—can suitable positions be crafted toward our rapidly transforming historical worlds, and new, more suitable modes of inhabiting and occupying such settings be found. As witnessed by Latour’s ever more profound reflections on science, as attested

by Hardt and Negri’s multitudes, as well as by current investigations in new media, and by Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with schizophrenia and capitalism, part of empiricism’s labor consists in creating new styles of political orientation and intervention, along with new reference points able to take these up and perform them—constellatory subjects believed better able to keep up with events around them—thereby yielding multitudes, nomads, lines of flight, new forms and understandings of modern society (as in Luhmann), the ultimate rejection of our isolating and ethnocentric modern standpoint (as in Latour), and so on.12 The subject, the human individual, is indeed here deemed to be outstripped by the world and by objects around it—outpaced by drones and cell phones, virtual code and nanotechnology, gene splicing and the scientific-industrial complex. Radical empiricism, accordingly, is to furnish the intellectual hammer capable of shattering this now vestigial anthropomorphic shell; from out of the shards, new, more adequate stances toward contemporary life and society will proceed.

A brief, indeed almost lapidary, article from the turn of the last millennium, David Lapoujade’s “From Transcendental Empiricism to Worker Nomadism” makes this second trait visible, as well as its linkage to the empiricist turn.

Lapoujade, invoking William James, who spoke of his own “radical empiricism,” at first sketches a radical or transcendental-empirical formation: a field from which the mediating work of feeling and thought is not absent, yet one that, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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abandoning all known subjects as well as the stable forms of objects, ultimately is given over to what Lapoujade calls the “material” of experience.

Such material, immanent to and determinative of an impersonal transcendental field, Lapoujade defines as “the ensemble of all that which is related to something else without there necessarily being consciousness of this relation” (193). Lapoujade, accordingly, privileges beings in relation, accompanied by their own indwelling mediations, set apart from the active work of any subject, all of which, at the same time, refer back to an “unlimited field” (192), one emptied of all preexisting subjective and objective forms; these items are encountered in this field in the course of their self-constitution in a correlatively “‘pure experience’” (193).The “transcendental empiricism” announced in his title subsequently modulates, however, into what Lapoujade calls “worker nomadism” (193). Relations actualized in this same experience (such as the experience of experiment—“the crystallization between chloride and sodium” here counting as such: an indwelling self-constituting event, similar to the self-contraction of water and earth in wheat [193]), according to Lapoujade, eventually form a patchwork. A larger landscape composed of radically different neighborhoods or regions “linked together in different ways,” constitutes the texture of this material of pure experience, composing lines that become disclosed through what Lapoujade calls an “ambulatory” cognition; a knowing that proceeds through this material from the inside and never stands apart from it nor grasps its horizons as a whole (194–95).

Thus, thanks to deft references to both the sociology of hoboes and the history of cities, this patchwork space permits Lapoujade to conceive new possibilities of dwelling and resisting the environing capitalism, the structures and operations of which this network simultaneously maps. The mosaic of cities that confronted James, composed of fragments and the connections strung between them, previews the “the great developments in 20th-century communication networks,” Lapoujade writes, while the hobo, a symbol of “a less triumphant social order,” “closer to a migrant worker […] than to a businessman,” ultimately stands as an instance of the nomad, furnishing an icon of today’s radical empiricist philosopher (198).

II. Radical Empiricism’s Transcendentality and Historicity

Accordingly, not just new mediating structures and transcendental events indwelling in objective formations are provided by transcendental empiricism, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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but also a means of renewing historical becoming, a way of forging more adequate modes of relating historically and acting politically. Despite the self-evident desirability of both goals, especially as they are intertwined with one another—for who can doubt that today we lack the means to chart the transformations of society and the planet that our knowing produces?— I find myself, in the remainder of this essay, enjoined to put some critical pressure on this endeavor. Transcendental empiricism, with its near-perfect and often self-avowed immanence to its own time and the institutions in which its discourse takes shape, by dint of this very capacity, invites questioning.

To be sure, such empiricism, precisely because it privileges objects and objective relations, seems perfectly situated to contest the sprawling realm of empirical research; working from the inside out, it penetrates the substance of a given realm of knowledge (law or education as in Luhmann, specific scientific discoveries as in Latour, initiatives in biology as in Varela and Maturans, or a variety of work—in mathematics, social theory, linguistics, geology, and biology—as in Deleuze and Guattari). It thus displays an often admirable relation to scientific research, by being knowledgeable without being humbled or overwhelmed. Further, thanks to all that can be termed “transcendental” or mediatory in it, while giving these findings due deference, radical empiricism departs from the self-evident consensuses operative in the sciences it instances: it opens up the sciences’ results, expanding and transforming their significance, thereby contesting the work of knowledge production, and the techno-scientific-industrial complex more broadly, from within.

Such a guerilla operation, the desirability of which in its own right appears incontestable, nevertheless also ultimately refers back to just those subjects and subject positions that this empiricism most wishes to question. The concrete historical self-consciousness that lends credence to this stance, that to which radical empiricism owes much of its popularity and hegemony—in a nutshell, the belief that the world is changing out from under us through the changes in our objects, owing to the productions of science, technology, new media, and so on—itself inevitably reinstalls a self or subject at the very moment it proclaims its disappearance. Not that nomads, or war machines, or subject-objects, or systemically differentiated observers are themselves just another version of the traditional subject. Rather, the historiographical forms standing behind these innovations and motivating their embrace, the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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framework that permits speaking of our time as a unitary historical present and detailing what that time demands, inevitably recur to a familiar subject of history and an agent of historical self-insertion. The historical apparatus informing the transcendental empiricist innovation continually retains the subject that this enterprise elsewhere claims to overcome.

Its latent historicism is one of two features of radical or transcendental empiricism here to be questioned: its retention of a unitary present, as well as this empiricism’s corresponding reliance on the period, the epoch, and the date.13 In the periodizing narratives of Anti-Oedipus and in Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy (if not the dates of A Thousand Plateaus), in the “new” of new media, the “post” of the posthumanities, in the modernity that we now finally can fully inhabit (Luhmann), or in the moderns that we will prove never to have been (since Latour grants this same optics, while glossing it differently), the standard frameworks of history and subjectivity continue to resound. It is almost as if, thanks to bypassing the subject or person in its first phase (leaving it to be produced anew and transformed at the end), transcendental empiricism necessarily lets categories formerly exclusive to persons, especially those of history, remain unquestioned, thereby recurring to these models it leaves unaddressed, both in its prejudgment about its own situation and intermittently throughout its discourse.

More light is shed on this difficult matter of transcendental empiricism’s historical positioning by the second issue I wish to press, which ultimately converges with the first, while being more technical. Transcendental empiricism’s construal of transcendentality itself needs to be interrogated, in addition to the historical self-contextualization and modeling of history that accompanies it. It is all well and good, doubtless, finally to be rid of the subject (or demote it, inscribing it in a larger and different matrix that it no longer commands). Yet, to do so while still insisting on seemingly transcendental structures and entities (Deleuze’s Aion and his pre-individual singularities), on supervening constitutive logics (as in systems theory or in Badiou’s work), on new ontologies and ontologics (as in Latour or in Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages and machines), which at times retool fragments of earlier philosophies of consciousness—sense, sensibility, faculties, consciousness itself (as in Deleuze and the revivals of James and Whitehead)—raises problems of a new, or perhaps even of a very old, sort. There is, for one, the question of the fashioning of these concepts The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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themselves—of a certain intellectual cleanliness (Sauberkeit), as Edmund Husserl once put it, attendant on the proliferation of these structures, events, processes, becomings, and novel singularities (Cairns 57). At a conjuncture in philosophy when metaphysics is believed by many across the spectrum of philosophical schools to have ceased to exist as an active area of inquiry, the positing of such new formations, including hitherto unidentified classes of entities, as well as logics of constitution, raises the question of whether these innovations remain credible, self-consistent, well-fashioned, true.14 Perhaps still more pressing in the present context, however, is the scope and range of the transcendentality envisioned by these undertakings, emerging, as they do, in an ultimately empirical register. Empiricism, as it has previously been identified, doubtless encourages the proliferation of new structures and logics. Its attention to the multiplicity of objects and objectivities, over and against the monotony of a single subject, permits a devising of a presumably unlimited number of mediating frameworks. The path to such configurations raises questions, however, both about the style of such thinking and what it betokens for the future and present of thought.

Specifically, the issue arises of whether transcendental reference points so fashioned are themselves sufficiently radical and fundamentally conceived, or whether they may not instead be the result of a sometimes all too visible bricolage.Though the mediatory formations of the new empiricism doubtless differ from already existing common or scientific portrayals of the subjects from which they begin, recognizable empirical circumstances often glimmer through these accounts anamorphically.15 Such empiricity, however, may limit the scope and conception of transcendental empiricism’s own inquiries; for ultimately here in question is whether transcendentals of any sort today remain conceivable, as well as whether the ones proffered by transcendental empiricism are not too familiar, too quotidian—in their interpretation of transcendentality as such and in the reference points and models through which they fill out this framework. Such empiricism, after all, stands in marked contrast to a different possible affirmation of the transcendental: namely, that if it exists at all, the transcendental would be, simply, nothing—a stance that admits that there may be no transcendentals while simultaneously fashioning a trancendentality—to the degree that such remains conceivable—more foreign, untethered, and radically itinerant than those found in most contemporary The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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empiricisms. At this late date, must not any appeal to a transcendental or mediatory dimension also recognize the tenuousness, the precariousness, of its invocation—unlike the context in which a James, a Whitehead, or a Husserl wrote?

The two broad problems raised here—the status of empiricism’s conception of the transcendental and its modeling of history—ultimately prove to be one. The issue of the arc of the transcendental (in the sense of the arc of flame in spot welding), its ability to leap elsewhere, the distance and degree built into its vault, ultimately converges with the empiricist initiative’s tendency to secure its own historical horizons in advance. One and the same empiricism subtends how both the transcendental and history are modeled, raising the possibility that the radical empiricist approach, thanks to what gives it its force, may also limit thought’s program and represent a diminution, rather than an increase, of speculative energy. Radical empiricism, in addition to all else it accomplishes, which nothing said here is meant to draw into doubt, may, when placed in a broader context, signpost a reluctance of thought to jump known bounds, a refusal to inhabit, like the spark, two sites at once: to exist both here and elsewhere—in some other (non)place—thanks to a transcendentality functioning in a manner, and embedding itself in a formation, ultimately unknowable even to itself.

III. World in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Projects

Initially, and for much of the remainder of this article, I will treat the more technical of the two problems just mentioned—that of the transcendental’s modeling.To do so, I propose to trace out a different template of transcendentality, one that, though familiar to theory, is not commonly recognized as diverging from the transcendental empiricist configuration.This is a template found in the early writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In Derrida’s case, and in Foucault’s as well (since significant overlap exists on just this score), I will argue that the imprint of an alternative, radical transcendentality—a transcendentality without reserve—may be discerned.While it is also an event or structure of mediation, this version of transcendentality (a) lacks any internal attributes or positive contents; (b) when taken on its own terms, does not answer to any specific region of objects—and those through which its setting forth passes, like writing or the human sciences, are not left intact by this contact; and (c) as an alternative configuration, contests the historical The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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frameworks upon which current empiricisms draw. Derrida’s and Foucault’s “transcendental” is not underpinned by a unitary historical present, nor is it subject to those other historiographical formations (period, date—though, in Foucault’s case, the subject matter through which it is mounted clearly is) that operate relatively straightforwardly in current empiricisms.

Of course, Foucault and Derrida are rarely grouped together, and this work, especially Foucault’s, is not easily distinguished from empiricism.

Thus, to arrive at what is indeed a virtual point of contact—to actualize, foreground, disclose, or invent one—it is necessary to gain a running start and begin from a different perspective that often proves at issue here in any case—namely, that of phenomenological transcendentality, as initially set forth by Edmund Husserl.16 This starting point proves further needful, since Husserl himself is often believed to have coined the phrase “transcendental empiricism” as a description of his own work—a circumstance that has recently made it difficult to distinguish his and other phenomenologically inflected views from those of contemporary empiricism’s.17 The factual basis for this attribution is cloudy; in none of his published writings does Husserl use “transcendental empiricism” to describe his own enterprise.18 Leaving aside the strictly philological question, a more pressing difficulty resides, however, in Husserl’s program being sketched relatively appropriately by this term, even as what might be called his transcendental empiricism remains distinct from all those here in question.

The salient difference resides not only, nor primarily, in Husserl’s invoking, unlike these projects, a specifically transcendental subject or ego, as he initially did in the 1907 lecture The Idea of Phenomenology and subsequently in his 1910s Ideas I, both following on his first masterwork, the 1900–1901 Logical Investigations. After Investigations, a text that appeals to a pure consciousness to account for objects and objectivities, Husserl indeed began to affirm what is technically called the “ego pole.” He insists that the disparate experiences in which acts of consciousness and objects interact necessarily recur to a single transcendental-intentional subject with its own unifying structures and frameworks, the most notable of which is a living temporality. Husserl’s positing of such a subject makes possible his later important treatments of transcendental genesis and transcendental history. Nevertheless, from the moment he announces his own turn away from a more “objectivist phenomenology,” his appeal to the subject came The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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under scrutiny, and many of those authors that today’s empiricists draw on—from Jean-Paul Sartre (Deleuze’s teacher) to Jan Patocka—either prefer this initial phase or, like Eugen Fink (another important resource for current empiricism), return to it.

Husserlian phenomenology’s affirmation of a transcendental subject is not, however, simply or finally the most significant factor in distinguishing Husserl’s own empiricism from that of today’s transcendental empiricists.

After all, both phases of Husserl’s research, either with or without an explicit subject, would be termed by Husserl as this sort of inquiry; yet both differ significantly from the contemporary conception such that the subject’s presence or absence cannot be the key to the entire matter.The most salient difference therefore instead redounds to Husserl’s commitment to a radical “autonomy of philosophy,” as Steven Galt Crowell nicely puts it (24).

Husserlian and Heideggerean transcendental phenomenology—and those here classed as akin to it—grant an autonomy to philosophy and constitutive inquiry distinct from their empiricist counterparts. As Husserl himself says, his transcendental labor involves “an absolutely autonomous field of real and possible researches” (Psychological 245). Husserl’s investigations thus take place in an autonomous transcendental field that in a singular fashion stands removed from both beings and world—a field with contours, shapes, and necessities of its own; while Heidegger’s transcendental hinges on a singular, unprecedented event (of being) with a parallel autonomy.

Husserl’s and Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism, accordingly, is an empiricism of the transcendental: a tracking of an experience of transcendentality in its operation within a horizon distinct from worldly beings, their knowledges, and their truths. By contrast, contemporary transcendental empiricism maintains itself against the backdrop of a single world, a world already known, no matter how novelly construed or reconstructed—something that remains true even in Deleuze’s work, which doubtless is the most difficult case. In these instances—as attested by Deleuze’s early talk of the univocity of being—empiricism as an inquiry takes place on the same ground, within the same unitary horizon, in which the objectivities of the constitution of which it investigates, emerge.

The transcendental possibilities, operations, and conditions, disclosed by contemporary transcendental empiricism, no matter how otherwise novel or errant, remain a subset of one single world, while—in the phenomenological instance, most clearly in Husserl’s work—the reverse relation holds.

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Of course, especially as first encountered in Husserl, this other-worldliness of autonomous transcendental research poses problems in its own right: most obviously, the problem of how to conceive or arrive at it without positing another world, the topos ouranos (heavenly space) of traditional metaphysics. Husserl addressed this set of issues through the themes of the phenomenological and, above all, the transcendental reduction, topics whose reworking extend from one end to the other of his corpus. The operation of these reductions, along with the problems they encountered—and they indeed encountered significant ones—will be covered shortly. Preliminary to this, to cement the distinction here in question between the Husserlian (and ultimately Heideggerian) version of the transcendental and that of today’s radical and transcendental empiricisms, it is worthwhile to first turn briefly to the writings of another important thinker in the phenomenological tradition: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s thought allows the difference between the two sorts of transcendentals here in question to be further delineated, since his work stands at their crossroads: it is at once a direct forebear of today’s empiricism (Merleau-Ponty’s early support of, and influence on Deleuze, for example, is well documented, and his work plays an important role in new media and other contemporary empiricist endeavors), even as Merleau-Ponty claims Husserl’s project as the primary antecedent for his own.19 A long passage from the preface to The Phenomenology of Perception— along with his posthumously published TheVisible and the Invisible, MerleauPonty’s most important text—in which Merleau-Ponty discusses Husserl’s transcendental reduction permits the relevant issues to appear: All the misunderstandings with his [Husserl’s] interpreters, with the existentialist “dissidents” and finally with himself, have arisen from the fact that in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it, and, also, from the fact that from this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world.The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction […] The philosopher, as the unpublished works declare, is a perpetual beginner, which means that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know. It means also that philosophy itself must not take itself for granted, in so far as it may have managed to say something true; that it is an ever-renewed experiment in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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making its own beginning; that it consists wholly in the description of this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection amounts to a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is its initial situation, unchanging, given once and for all. (xv–xvi)

Merleau-Ponty, having just sided with Husserl over Kant (he states that “Husserl’s transcendental is not Kant’s” [xv] prior to the passage just quoted), here glosses Husserl’s transcendental reduction in the service of making it his own.Yet the inflection that Merleau-Ponty gives to Husserlian transcendentality quite self-consciously bypasses that autonomy at which Husserl’s reductions aim. Merleau-Ponty affirms that “the most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” Husserl would deny, however, that a full reduction is impossible— that a complete change of attitude could not be executed—though, to be sure, within the reduction’s new perspective, its own task proves to be never-ending. Merleau-Ponty’s rejection, not only of the completeness of the reductions but the very possibility of such, thus departs from Husserl by denying what Crowell explicitly affirms: phenomenology’s autonomy.

It insists that all of phenomenology’s findings must ultimately belong and refer to one and the same world, whose upsurge and status as “beginning” Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in this same passage.

For Merleau-Ponty, as he presents it here, the reduction is thus finally but a form of estrangement from the world (he has just spoken of it as a species of “wonder”). What can be gained from it is not the disclosure of a more comprehensive dimension than the world itself, a radically autonomous space, but the registration of the world’s “unmotivated upsurge” and philosophy’s “consciousness of its dependence on” the world and on “an unchanging life.” The reduction brings thought up short and provokes reflection, yet a reflection that, for Merleau-Ponty, at every moment must and does remain within the provenance of world.

Whether Merleau-Ponty’s claims are right or wrong as a reading of Husserl’s text is not, to be clear, the issue that concerns me, though obviously I am following a different line of Husserl interpretation than MerleauPonty at this moment. (Merleau-Ponty’s account of the reduction, written nearly forty years after Husserl first spoke about it, has the character of a chess game; it casts ahead a number of moves with an eye toward problems already encountered by others concerning the reduction’s formulation: “the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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‘misunderstandings,’” of the “interpreters,” “dissidents,” and so on to which Merleau-Ponty refers.) Instead, what become visible in these divergent interpretations are two different possible economies of transcendental thinking: a first, like Merleau-Ponty’s own, never arrives at an approach toward being that is not worldly; it stays alongside the empirical, within the given worldhorizon and its “unmotivated upsurge.” A second possibility, by contrast, takes the phenomenon of world as included, comprehended, and articulated in a matrix that it neither simply commands nor exhausts. In the first version, the transcendental indicates a detour from and back to the world—a discovery or invention waiting to be made within it (this ultimately being, in MerleauPonty’s case, his notion of “the flesh”); in the second, by contrast, at issue is a disclosure of the world as such: the worlding of the world, ultimately from a standpoint other than its own.20 A second trait appears in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, correlative to this first, equally definitive of contemporary transcendental empiricism.

Just as the reduction for Merleau-Ponty results not in a site ultimately foreign to the world but instead in a world estranged, redescribed afresh in a transcendental or quasi-transcendental register, the reduction for MerleauPonty too continues to allow access to the sciences and existing knowledges, even as it renders them foreign and removes from them their self-evidence and finality. In The Phenomenology of Perception, immediately following his preface, findings from Gestalt psychology, physiology, neurology, and related branches of research are canvassed as part of Merleau-Ponty’s own inquiry.21 His transcendentality is thus empirical in a second, technical sense of making use of empirical knowledge. His analysis indeed begins in medias res, from the findings of the sciences—from what has been discovered or known about a constituted subject matter—without, of course, confining itself to these findings or simply accepting them at face value. Merleau-Ponty’s statement above, that the philosopher “takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know,” thus signals that these results have been deprived of their finality and authority while they continue to contribute to his own transcendental-empirical inquiry.

This second trait of Merleau-Ponty’s work, like the first, marks contemporary transcendental empiricism across every one of its variations. The capacity to poach on the sciences (in italics to indicate a wholly nonpejorative usage) is common to all of these disparate instances and distinguishes these instances’ The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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work with transcendentality from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s, as well from Derrida’s and Foucault’s. Early Deleuze, in the service of articulating his version of a transcendental field, for example, takes up not only developments in mathematics and biology but also in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis as an entry in to a transcendental dimension foreign to these knowledges as such, thus without confining himself to these teachings or depending on their authority for that of his own discourse but still employing them as models and making use of their results. Similarly, Luhmann begins from the functioning of a field of social knowledge or administration, such as law or education, assumed as valid and legitimate—as Varela (and so many of today’s transcendental empiricists) takes up researches in biology and life.22 The transcendental of contemporary radical empiricism thus includes the empiricism of the sciences, while Husserl’s (and those classed with him) do not. Of course, this is not to say that this first set of authors does not invent, create, universalize, transform, and disclose differently what first arises in these fields—if they didn’t, they would be empiricists tout court, not radical or transcendental empiricists.They do, however, follow Merleau-Ponty, not only implicitly, in taking the transcendental posture as one of estrangement from the world while everywhere retaining a worldly horizon, but also by emulating his practice in regard to science’s findings: for them, scientific results, stripped of their finality, directly contribute to their investigations.

Husserlian transcendentality, by contrast, first and foremost entails what Husserl calls a change of attitude, one that takes the entirety of beings and their articulations—those found in the sciences, but also of history and life—as phenomena within the more encompassing whole of the transcendental. Rather than isolate an aspect or part of the world—sense, the body, self-organization, or even human consciousness—and invent or disclose this aspect’s specifically transcendental appurtenance, Husserl, more concretely, envisioned a double operation: (a) a new inclusion, achieved by the transcendental reduction, upon which the radical autonomy of philosophical research depends, coordinated with (b) an equally unique exclusion of the sciences, as well as other causal beliefs, arrived at through the phenomenological reduction. For Husserl, the entirety of what is given in the world—everything found within everyday understanding as well as the sciences, technai, politics, and history—is to be grasped from the standpoint of a fundamentally foreign register that exceeds and includes both this array The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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and the world as such. Simultaneously, the accession to this new whole— one unknown to contemporary transcendental empiricism, and also to all previous philosophy, according to Husserl—necessitates the exclusion, the shutting off, of all explanatory hypotheses and beliefs, of every reference to scientific findings: a shutting off of atoms, gods, souls, physical laws, logics, psychological norms, mathematical multiplicities, and so on, since all of these maintain a reference to this same world.23 Breaking with the worldly horizon implicit in contemporary transcendental empiricism, Husserl not only refused to draw on already constituted areas of belief and knowledge (consciousness as studied by psychology, as in James, or the brain, as in Deleuze and Guattari); in addition, he aimed to derive and clarify the sense and possibility of just these knowledges themselves: what life and thus a biology, and what matter and thus a physics were. This was the program of so-called regional inquiry, which Heidegger also affirmed, albeit differently. Husserl, from Ideas I on, explicitly conceived of a radical investigation of the senses or meanings through which all the areas of knowledge, all of the various subdivisions of worldly things (matter, history, society, and persons), appear, as part of a ground-clearing and ground-laying operation that treated not only these various larger articulations through which the world gave itself (viz., the regions themselves) but also the putatively more universal domains of logic and mathematics.24 By contrast, transcendental empiricism, taking up these already constituted areas of inquiry and their findings in a variety of fashions, in Husserl’s eyes at least, could never prove radical enough; all such endeavors potentially fall into what he calls a metabasis eis allos genos or category error: an illicit substitution of one species of knowledge for another.25 By drawing on constituted knowledges and their objects, no matter how freely and inventively, transcendental empiricism, from a Husserlian perspective, assumes what it should explain.

It takes various sorts of beings (cells, partial differentials, administrative apparatuses), their being, existence, and organization as given, rather than explaining how they appear and count as and as what they are.

Of course, Husserl’s program of ground clearing, and ground laying of the sciences and their object, and even of logic and mathematics, seems to many, perhaps including the current author, as not embraceable in the precise form he proposed; this conviction, accompanied by a due modesty when it comes to all foundational ambitions, doubtless also contributes to The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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contemporary transcendental empiricism’s currency. At the same time, not only does an appreciation of Husserl’s program permit an alternative modeling of the transcendental to come into view, one no longer saddled with these aspirations; it also raises questions about the somewhat odd middle space contemporary transcendental empiricisms seem to occupy. Unlike earlier transcendental attempts (including those of Kant), transcendental empiricism from Luhmann to Latour to Deleuze is indeed nonfoundationalist: the transcendentals it educes are not strict grounds, nor do they contribute an essential clarity to the achievements of the various branches of knowledge, which an earlier generation of thinkers deemed inherently obscure. Granting this, what is the status of these interventions, of the descriptions or logics they offer and the new registers they disclose? For example, how does Luhmann’s notion of differentiation as a kind of knowledge or discourse relate to that of the discourses this notion covers? How does it identify these as fields that fall under its own theory while also retaining the status of its own autopoetic system and itself as the product of this same movement of differentiation?26 Or, moving in the other direction, if the discourse of philosophy as presented in Deleuze and Guattari’s last published work, What is Philosophy? finds a version of autonomy through a special type of immanence and thus finally has no referent in common with science, art, or the everyday, what sort of difference can it make to our understanding of these matters? Moreover, what of those terms it apparently shares with fields from which it absolutely diverges (such as differentials, matter, Oedipus, the writings of D.H. Lawrence, etc.)? When used by philosophy, are these mere homonyms? How are such crossovers, which occur all the time in their work, to be conceived if philosophy is what Deleuze and Guattari claim it is?

IV. The Alternative to Contemporary Transcendental Empiricism

Such questions, once registered, may now be set aside—they will return again—in favor of describing the answers supplied by this alternative transcendental: how an alternative transcendentality is modeled and the type of intervention at which it aims.The former comes into view when the difficulties that Husserl encountered in conceiving his own transcendental standpoint are made visible; for the radicality and thoroughgoingness of his transcendental ambition presented significant obstacles to Husserl himself, not only in successfully carrying out transcendental inquiry, but even in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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satisfactorily articulating the task—difficulties that Merleau-Ponty indeed refers to when he offers his gloss cited above. A brief survey of perhaps the major problem Husserl confronts in this area makes evident this transcendental’s difference from that of contemporary empiricism’s while opening the door to Heidegger’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s subsequent reworkings.

Husserl—in his first initial formulations of the reduction, those found in Ideas I—falls prey to something close to that empiricism here brought into question: a parallel, albeit tacit, and, in his case, illicit dependence on world emerges in his initial articulations that attenuates or diverts the force of his presentation of phenomenological transcendentality. Husserl’s empiricism, to be sure, appears in regard to the subject and to the sphere of consciousness rather than with respect to things or other objectivities. Yet the assumption of the mundane can affect both spheres—it applies to the pure consciousness of James as well as the quasi hybrids of Latour—proving thornier still in the former case.

To be clear, Husserl from the first insists that the subject he wishes to give a transcendental employment to is not to be identified with a human one, nor is it found in any field of study such as psychology or anthropology (already differing in this way from the above authors, as well as James or MerleauPonty). Nevertheless, as Iso Kern points out in his now classic article, “The Three Ways to the Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction,” Husserl, by deriving the transcendental attitude from the phenomenological (at this epoch, Husserl simply speaks of a single transcendental-phenomenological reduction) and coming upon the transcendental field as something left over—as what remains after the phenomenological reduction has been performed—retains the world as background, with the result being that world continues to inform the entirety of this operation.

Husserl at this epoch begins the reduction from a property or attribute of a being in the world: not the self-organization of life or society, not sense and its vicissitudes, but the immanence of consciousness to itself—the purported ability of consciousness to function independently of anything else, to intend without regard to the ultimate reality of that about which it speaks or thinks. Husserl makes the radical apodicticity of “thought” to itself, as foregrounded in the Cartesian Cogito, the linchpin of his transcendental exercise in its first articulations.This starting point, however, proves insufficiently radical, since such immanence, if it exists, is indeed The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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also a property of worldly consciousness and thus fails to distinguish the transcendental from the mundane. Husserl himself later recognizes this fact and assigns the study of a consciousness so understood to phenomenological psychology.27 Put in different terms, the distinction between transcendence and immanence takes priority at this stage over the distinction between the transcendental and mundane—as it does, in fact, in much empiricism, including that of Deleuze and of Luhmann.Thus, in Husserl’s case, this first opposition, as Kern also points out, obscures the second, covering over the unique inclusiveness and autonomy of transcendental inquiry, as Husserl had begun to conceive it. Indeed, using a special kind of immanence in this fashion, as a gateway to the transcendental attitude, the transcendental as such is finally determined only as a strange or special part of the world (a piece of the world apparently able to exist in isolation from the rest of the world). This region, this piece, thanks to this property of self-immanence, is thus assigned a transcendental standing, while the world goes missing, even as it continues to exercise its force. Determined precisely as what was left over when the world and belief in it are removed, this stance retains the world in the form of such a consciousness given as uniquely self-relating while simultaneously losing sight of the actual transcendental constitution of the world. As Kern points out, speaking of the path to the reduction, later deemed by Husserl “the Cartesian way,” “if [in it] the world is retained as a ‘phenomenon,’ nevertheless it is retained only as a phenomenon, only as a subjective representation,” a subjectivity that indeed continues to refer back to that world that the this same consciousness defines itself as standing apart from (130).

Thus, by starting from consciousness and the phenomenological epoche, by beginning from the supposed ability of consciousness to do without the world, itself a worldly determination, Husserl obscures, if not wholly erases, the radicality of his transcendental standpoint. By contrast, Husserl arrives at a more satisfactory formulation of this same standpoint, thanks to his own turn or return to the object and objectivity—not, however, a partial turn to the object, such as that found in transcendental empiricism, but to the world and existence as such.

Along the path now commonly called the ontological way, which Kern cites Husserl as also calling the “objective way,” Husserl arrives at a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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new, more satisfactory formulation of transcendentality. The work of the transcendental does not, on this account, transpire thanks to consciousness first discovering and then withdrawing into a territory of its own; instead, it depends on a deepening understanding of both existence and world—of the world as that unique horizon back to which attributions of existence refer. The transcendental sphere so conceived now takes into account the totality of world and existence, such that it itself simultaneously appears as other than they, and indeed as including the world and being, taking them up in its own operation, since it is responsible for such worldpositing—for world and existence in their positivity. This stands in stark contrast to the Cartesian way, in which being and the world are partially set aside and this implication correspondingly obscured. On Husserl’s subsequent construal, moreover, transcendentality and the transcendental subject themselves appear as radically new—as unprecedented and previously unknown positionalities. Working to fashion the world as world, making possible every “positing of existence,” transcendental subjectivity differs from every already known subject and consciousness, themselves all worldly, instead emerging as “the origin of the world” in a new nonmetaphysical sense, as Eugen Fink long ago put it (“Phenomenological” 126).28 In Husserl, the transcendental subject thus attains its successful articulation when conceived as responsible for a world from which it itself differs. As Husserl himself states, “the original and chief question” leading to a transcendental standpoint is thus “the world […] as a meaning of Being (Seinsinn) that originates […] for us” (TP 243).

So formulated, Husserl’s ultimate standpoint furthermore clearly borders Heidegger’s—specifically, the Heideggerean conception of Being at the time of Being and Time (Sein and Zeit). Heidegger saw the transcendentality of Being as related to the world in its uniqueness, while the world itself pertained to something not far from a unique subject (Dasein), even as Being included and withdrew from both the world and Dasein.

Heidegger indeed insists that an entity different from any within the world, one that has being-in-the-world, and thus has the world as such (in contrast to inner-worldly being) as defining of its own being, contributes to the projection and disclosure of the rest of the beings: “The intelligibility of beings within the world,” as he puts it in Being and Time, only becomes “discovered along with the Being of Dasein” (193).

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A singular back and forth, however, takes place between these two styles of beings (inner-worldly and the Dasein type, correlated with world as a whole), on the far side of which Heidegger’s own transcendental, Being, comes into view. Inner-worldly beings, Heidegger insists, depend for their intelligibility on Dasein’s understanding (from it, they participate in what he calls “sense [Sinn]”, although not sense, but the beings are disclosed and understood).

Contrariwise, Dasein’s self-relation entails a detour through these same beings that depend on it, such that only “Dasein finally ‘has’ sense,” Heidegger insists, and it does so insofar as “the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world can be ‘filled in’ by the entities discoverable in that disclosedness,” (Sein 193/152).

This interplay between Dasein, other beings, and sense permits Heidegger’s own transcendental, Being, to appear. Being, a transcendental foremost in the traditional sense of applying to a diverse array of ontological phenomena (as do “the good,” “the one,” or “the beautiful” of pre-Cartesian philosophy), becomes determined as what holds sway across this interplay of kinds of beings; as what pertains to the Being of Dasein and other sorts of being; to inner-worldly being and that being whose Being is Being-in-the-world. Being, in Being and Time, ultimately is determined as an occurrence—an event that plays across this difference and interrelation, encompassing both kinds of beings while retaining their differentiation and thus appearing as autonomous and inclusive in its own unparalleled fashion. Being emerges in respect to this initial difference among beings, filling in this differential articulation and rearticulating it in its own dimension. Being takes this difference between beings within its scope, and unifies it, in the sense of further unfolding and letting it be, thus operating as what Heidegger on other occasions calls the “Same.”29 For present purposes, the traits Heidegger’s transcendental shares with Husserl’s—namely, autonomy and inclusiveness—prove central.World, as the horizon or site of the projection of the beings within it, situated at the intersection of inner-worldly beings and of Dasein, here also opens the door to the transcendental, to Being—in contrast to transcendental empiricist efforts, where an inner-worldly stratum (whether entities, a preformed logic, or some state of science or society) takes on a transcendental function or furnishes a transcendental space.

Heidegger, to be sure, recasts these attributes; he reworks the dimensionality of the transcendental as found in Husserl (perhaps to the point of unrecognizability), establishing a template that Derrida and Foucault The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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further adapt. So conceived, Heidegger’s transcendental proves to be a finite transcendental, eluding any standing as ground, entity, substance, or subject.30 Rather than performing the work of constitution proper, it arises instead as a difference from an earlier difference (between Dasein and inner-worldly being), articulating this difference and itself across a space of its own. Being occurs, holds sway autonomously, while also filling in that upon whose heels it emerges—embroidering a sense of an entirely different order across this fabric woven by the variety of beings, thus overtaking and comprehending being, world, and Dasein as such, while simultaneously staying at a distance and remaining differentiated from all three. For Heidegger, too, Being, the transcendental, thus flashes forth in a fashion that takes in the world as a whole (along with Dasein and the other beings), and this differentiates Heidegger’s endeavor from contemporary transcendental empiricism, even as the Heideggerean meditation remains a form of finite thinking in a fashion that Husserl’s transcendental enterprise finally is not.

An alternative structure of autonomy and inclusiveness, of transcendentality and world, thus emerges in Heidegger, crucial for the subsequent career of the transcendental in both Derrida and Foucault. Heidegger’s version in fact clarifies why the alternative approach to transcendentality that has begun to be set out here and that of contemporary transcendental empiricism often fail to be distinguished. Heidegger’s Being, though autonomous and inclusive in a fashion akin to Husserlian transcendentality, is by no means an absolute in the usual sense, and its distance from reason in any form especially brings it in proximity to current empiricism. The finitude built into Heidegger’s transcendental account, entailing the interplay of a radical receptivity and an equally radical poeticizing or production of his transcendental, makes possible the blurring of the lines between the two models, even as the latter contemporary empiricism actually remains closer to a more standard Husserlian or Kantian notion of constitution than Heidegger himself.

Put otherwise, a fourth determination of the empirical, different from the two attributed above to contemporary empiricism and from a third (shared by Husserl’s and Heidegger’s empiricism of the transcendental) here makes itself felt—a determination that applies to Derrida and Foucault, as well. For without being itself worldly, and while still removed from any interaction with the sciences, the difference between fact and principle, the distinction between quid juris and quid factum, finally has no hold on The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Heidegger’s project—on his notion of Being, in particular. Standing at the furthest remove from reason or any of its incarnations, Heidegger’s absolute lands in the camp of receptivity, the given, and is thus also a kind of empiricism. Thanks to his conception of Being as an event, Heidegger’s project is indeed given over to a radical albeit novel facticity, such that it would be pointless to withhold the empiricist label from his productions.

Foucault and Derrida, albeit differently, also ultimately do not have a commitment to the logos, even the transcendental logos, or to the principled, the essential, the eidetic—to the work of the concept or of reason; they, too, disclose finite transcendentals to the degree that they disclose transcendentals at all.31 The line between their programs and Heidegger’s and the transcendental empiricism of today in this one respect therefore remains not wholly sharp. Nevertheless, the traits of autonomy and inclusiveness defining Heidegger’s and Husserl’s transcendental also define Foucault’s and Derrida’s, such that a case for the differentiation of both Derrida’s and Foucault’s programs from contemporary empiricism can be made, especially if nothingness, that crucial reference point earlier invoked, returns to the foreground.Thanks to being nothing, no-thing in its own right, a transcendental indeed becomes conceivable as at once inclusive and autonomous (as is Husserl’s), yet also breaking with reason and grounds.

Heidegger pioneered this strategy: the recourse, as Derrida sometimes puts it, to a “determined nothing.” Accordingly, his example shows how this balancing act between finitude and a radical transcendental is possible, and how distinguishing the efforts of Derrida and Foucault from contemporary transcendental empiricism remains possible as well.

V. Derrida’s Absolute

Of course, nothingness plays no role in contemporary empiricist approaches (with the partial exception of Badiou), yet it indeed permits the conception of a transcendental, as well as autonomous and inclusive, finite. Charting how nothing is deployed in the early work of Foucault and Derrida thus proves crucial, along with a second issue in these texts. In Derrida and Foucault, albeit in a different manner, the foundationalist vector present in Kant from the beginning of modern transcendental argumentation falls away—a departure to some degree shared by contemporary transcendental empiricisms. In their case, however, because their modeling of transcendentality The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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is at once more radical and more tenuous than contemporary endeavors, it can depart all the more from every existing template of transcendentality as such. In Foucault’s and Derrida’s work, the transcendental undergoes a much wider variation than in transcendental or radical empiricism (which, as the integration of James and others suggests, hews to a relatively standard Kantian framework while renouncing Kant’s pretense of providing strict grounds). Derrida’s and Foucault’s ambitions in their early writings, going still further in a direction away from the Kant of the transcendental analytic, do not, then, aim to supply conditions of possibilities or constitutive logics of any sort, but instead aims to frame, as did Heidegger, a radically new style of absolute as such—one no longer tied to either philosophy’s traditional models or the work of the empirical knowledges.32 Attending to their conception of transcendentality thus necessitates distinguishing the work these thinkers do in what might appear to be regional fields of knowledge—those of language and history, for Derrida and Foucault, respectively—from the labors of contemporary transcendental empiricism, which often have a pertinence to a particular region of knowledge. Rather than identify a part of the world and raise it to a transcendental function, Derrida and Foucault instead deploy the fields to which they refer as sites for conceiving the transcendental in a new way.Theirs is thus less an appropriation of a given area of the world—of an empirical space, no matter how original, powerful, or even deterritorializing—than an expansive expropriation aimed at a new absolute that never belonged to this field at all and remains unrecognizable on its terms.

Put otherwise, in both authors’ work, an experiment with transcendentality takes place—not an empirical transcendentalism nor a transcendental empiricism but rather an experimental transcendentalism aimed at repurposing and redirecting the energies of the absolute. To be sure, the fields that furnish a site for this undertaking also end up as thought anew; they are ungrounded rather than grounded.Yet this outcome is really only legible within and remains in the service of launching a new adventure in the thinking, writing, and production of a transcendental or absolute instance.

This is why those interpretations of Derrida’s and Foucault’s projects that measure them against an essentially Kantian template, though some of the best work on these authors we have, run the risk of obscuring their most central and radical achievement. Foucault and Derrida indeed depart from The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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all foundations and grounds; they finally shun rather than disclose conditions of possibility of any sort, since both were all along searching instead for an unprecedented formatting of transcendentality, a radically new conception of the absolute.33 Relying on the Kantian framework, no matter how modified, such interpreters effectively force Foucault’s and Derrida’s work back into a template close to that of contemporary transcendental empiricism, and this is yet another reason it has proved so difficult to distinguish the work of Foucault and Derrida from these alternatives.

Derrida’s radicalization of transcendentality in his early writings proceeds along the lines just indicated. His kinship to a phenomenological type of transcendental is in fact relatively easy to chart, since in these works Derrida remains in contact with the original Husserlian model, more so, obviously, than Foucault, who instead comes at this possibility more directly from Heidegger. In Derrida’s early writings, transcendentality becomes braided with nothing on a site provided by language (not necessarily itself a simple part or portion of the world), while Foucault accomplishes a similar repurposing of (transcendental) nothingness, this time on the ground of history.

Derrida’s powerful transformation of the transcendental, including his reliance on the Husserlian model, in his early work appears at a moment when Derrida self-consciously disavows the sort of empiricist transcendentalism even today assigned to his program (which sees language as a new sort of quasi-transcendental condition or ungrounded ground)—at an instant when he also decisively breaks with Husserl.

In the introduction to Speech and Phenomenon (hereafter SP), more specifically, Derrida raises the question of phenomenology’s relation to language—and to the notion of and term “life,” in particular. Life, while seemingly a mundane referent, proves central to Husserl’s transcendental conception, according to Derrida. “Lebendigkeit (livingness),” as he puts it, “diffracts its light in all the fundamental concepts of phenomenology” (10).

Yet Derrida insists that Husserl nowhere gives an account of such livingness, of the concept of life, nor of the word or term itself.34 Having posed the question of Husserl’s own transcendental discourse, Derrida does not, however, conclude that language or discourse (and this mundane referent) are themselves the true conditions, the genuine transcendentals or quasi transcendentals. That is, he does not opt (as does The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Merleau-Ponty, for example) for the sort of empiricist transcendentalism with which Derrida’s early stance even today is often confused; nor does he affirm that worldly speech and language provide the unexplored possibility—the transcendental or quasi-transcendental condition of Husserl’s and indeed every philosopher’s project. Derrida instead tacks back toward Husserlian transcendentality to rethink it in terms of a radical nothing while further inserting and withdrawing this nothingness’s operation from the site of language, thereby also contesting the latter.

More specifically still, Derrida, on the one hand, taking up Husserl’s talk of a parallel between the psychological and transcendental ego, brings forward a nothing conceived as operating at the basis of the transcendental reduction itself, and thus inclusive of all that is, while appearing as and indeed being nothing in its own right. “This nothing,” writes Derrida, that distinguishes the parallels, this nothing without which precisely no explication, no language […] could be developed […] this nothing arises when the totality of the world is neutralized,” in an “operation (which) is that of the transcendental reduction” (SP 12).

Transcendentality emerges thanks to, and finally as, nothing: a nothing without which anything else—things, entities, or objectivities—can be grasped as and what they are (“a fundamental difference without which no difference in the world would appear” [Derrida, SP 11]). Accordingly, this nothing is not only inclusive but also radically autonomous, since being nothing in itself, it, of course, can be identified with no-thing: no portion or aspect of the world. Derrida himself also identifies the relation of this nothing to the world, criticizing “transcendental psychologism” (the taking of pure consciousness as sufficient to define the transcendental field—a fallacy of which Lapoujade and James, as well as Husserl himself at moments, may be guilty): to appear “the world […] needs this supplementary nothing” (SP 13).

On the other hand, however, even while locating nothing and difference at the heart of Husserl’s transcendental, Derrida further directs transcendentality away from the subject, by positioning it in relation to language in a movement that by no means leaves the latter notion untouched. Transcendentality as here conceived resides in language rather than a subject or person. Not itself being something, this nothing, this difference, Derrida insists, “cannot reside in the world […] but only in language” (SP 14).

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At the same time, Derrida is equally clear that apart from this nothing and the opening to the world it enables, there would be no language at all— no discourse, no speech—such that “language preserves the difference that preserves language” (SP 14). Moreover, this nothing, not being a thing, this opening of language, eludes language’s capacity to speak—a capacity rooted in the ability to talk about something, to mean some one thing. Language and discourse cannot address this nothing; they cannot name it, nor in any way adequately speak about it, insists Derrida, even as it stands at the base of their own functioning. Appearing nowhere other than language, this nothing does not properly appear there, either, but instead registers there as a fundamental disquietude, as the “origin of the insecurity of discourse.”

The transcendental nothing that Derrida is in the course of conceiving thus topples language’s own self-evidences. Indeed, since language’s relation to its others—to the real, meaning, and reference—depend, for Derrida, on this opening rebarbitive to discourse, all language, all talk, he will insist, can only consist in what he here calls “analogy” (“language never escapes analogy […] it is indeed analogy through and through” [SP 13]). From the moment nothing, rather than something, opens the capacity of language to perform as language, the signs, meanings, signifiers, and referents of language at best behave analogically rather than as a genuine logos. This shift—this proliferation of analogy, moreover—counts most with respect to this nothing itself: only by setting language loose against itself, only by taking such analogy to a maximum pitch and engaging language “in a war against itself,” Derrida concludes, can this difference, this nothingness, in any way be inscribed therein (SP 14).

“Life,” accordingly, as reconceived, here embodies such strife (Derrida, SP 15). “Life,” a piece of language, a portion of speech worked and reworked along a path that in part passes through Husserl’s text, ultimately designates the absolute or transcendental nothing that disturbs language and withdraws from it, upsetting all its established relations while also being housed nowhere else. “Life,” as Derrida puts it, has indeed ceased to represent the “unity of worldly life” as it did at the outset of his discussion (SP 10) and instead has become an “ultratranscendental concept” (15).

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it, including language. Comprehending the world in its own unique fashion, it undoes that region that offers a site for its apparition while leaving its traces there. Language, however, does not appear as absolute, as a ground, unground, or final instance of any kind, even as it also ceases to appear in its traditional or everyday form.

Derrida thus endeavors at this epoch to engage a new style of absolute: to experiment with the production and registration of an unprecedented transcendentality. His project knows an analogous inclusiveness and autonomy to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s, and even continues to depend to a degree on Husserl’s own to mount its unique style of thinking. At the same time, it is by no means identical to the latter; it is no longer taking its stand on any known ground, neither that of the subject or the object nor within the philosophical or the regional. At this phase, Derrida neither wishes to absolutize language’s domain by making it the condition of all that appears, nor ground, while exceeding, philosophy as such, since he is interested neither in grounds nor conditions.35 Instead, he reconceives the absolute and the very possibility of the transcendental in the direction of a certain nothing, thereby forging a new, and largely unprecedented, style of thinking and discourse.

VI. Foucault’s Absolute

A parallel transcendental innovation becomes visible in Foucault’s early work.

In his early writings, the role language played in Derrida’s, as at once site and nonsite of a determined nothing, is filled by history. Of course, connecting Derrida and Foucault in this fashion today appears problematic. Beginning at this epoch, now famously, contention and even discord emerged between the two, occasioned by Derrida’s presentation in Foucault’s seminar and his subsequent review article on La Folie.36 Such strife, however, arguably also indicates the proximity between them at this epoch and how close their conceptions of the absolute were at this time. Derrida flagged this kinship at the outset of “The Cogito and The History of Madness,” deeming himself Foucault’s “disciple” (31–63). Derrida’s conception of a radical transcendental nothing, labile in its relation to both philosophy and regional knowledges, in part flowed from Foucault’s early work and teaching, as Derrida himself indicates.

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the two thinkers. Foucauldian transcendentality emerges across the plane of history, and, like Heidegger’s, it entails a limitless facticity, despite Derrida’s concern expressed in “The Cogito” pertaining to Foucault’s historicism (44). Nevertheless, in the fashion sketched above, at this stage, Foucault’s transcendental is neither simply a proper part of the world, nor does it arise wholly within it; rather, it appears as and at its limits. So situated, it also proves a no-thing, nothing, at once autonomous and inclusive, in a manner akin both to Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Life in Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena.

Foucault, at this time, set forth perhaps his most notable formulation of this transcendental in his “A Preface to Transgression”; that this term, “transgression,” with all it implies, can designate his absolute’s production makes clear the unprecedented novelty of Foucault’s innovation.

For, transgression, as set out by Foucault in “A Preface,” does not focus on conditions of possibility of any sort; instead, it foregrounds the ambiguity of a limit’s appearance as a limit. Foucault himself makes this explicit, insisting that “no analysis of constitutions and of their transcendental ground can serve as support for thinking about such an experience or even access to this experience” (37). Foucault thus replaces the framework of transcendental constitution proper with a movement akin to that of Heidegger’s Being, yet one that, retaining the limit, harbors a vector toward Kantian reason while contesting the template of transcendental and constitutive conditions so closely tied to contemporary empiricism.

The ambiguity of the limit’s appearance as a limit, as presented by Foucault, consists in the limit’s appearing as a limit, while also cancelling its functioning as such; the limit ceases to be a limit, to work to limit, as soon as it is recognized as one, since only from some point beyond the limit, as Wittgenstein (86) famously noted, can the limit as limit come into view.

Foucault’s reworked absolute—this nothing—accordingly makes its appearance at the moment the limit becomes both visible and delimited; it appears precisely as that outside, that nothing ejected by the limit when it functioned as limit without being recognized as such—a nothing that only now emerging, and transgressing and contravening that same limit, discloses itself, both as the outside of the limit’s demarcation and as the no-thing of the limit’s violation while simultaneously forcing the limit to appear in its own right.

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In the second section of “A Preface,” Foucault lays out just this play of limit and newly conceived absolute: “The limit and transgression,” he affirms “depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess,” such that “transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; and forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to experience its positive truth in its downward fall” (34).

The installation of the limit and the production of radical transcendental nothingness thus take place in the same single extraordinary movement.

Such nothingness, previously excluded and rejected, at this moment proves responsible for the limit’s installation, while that to which the limit had lent self-evidence, its own contents, is disclosed as hollow, empty, void in itself.37 This nothing, this outside, accordingly becomes disclosed as having always informed the limit, which only now appears as a limit—and, facing its truth, disappears—even as this nothing uniquely appears (and disappears) in its own right.

As is starting to become clear, the “absolute” Foucault sets forth in “A Preface” innovates in respect to any recognizable transcendental configuration.Yet the foregoing is but the first stage in a still more complex operation: the setting forth of which alone permits grasping the scope of Foucault’s conception of the absolute and its deepest kinship to what has here been called an alternative transcendental. Nothing not only appears, and appears as absolute, but it must be underscored, thanks to contravening and violating the limit, in this movement, it affirms the limit as well: it must and does embrace what it also transgresses. In this affirmation ultimately resides such nothing’s radical absolute character, since only on these terms can this outside, this nothing, by affirming what it also contests, fully absolutize itself.

Foucault not only stipulates that this absolute, as nothing, is, of course, nothing positive (it “contains nothing positive, no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it” [“Preface” 36]); but more surprisingly, for this reason, he declares that this same apparition, this movement of transgression and violation, is nothing negative as well: “it contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence” (35–36).

Foucault’s absolute, affirming both itself and its other—the limit it transgresses, and contests, by making it apparent along with itself—in this instant appears at once as both inclusive and autonomous. It mounts itself The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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across those limits it contests, finally including them in itself, affirming their and its own being, thereby disclosing a wholly unprecedented difference, a radically reconceived nothingness. Foucault, accordingly, speaks of the nothing brought forth in transgression as a “flashing line that causes the limit as limit to arise” (“Preface” 35). “Transgression,” he further specifies in lines pregnant for all that he subsequently writes, is “neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world) […] it is simply an affirmation of division […] retaining (only) that in it which may designate the existence of difference” (35).

This final twist—delivering an overdetermined nothing that contests limits yet includes them in its own being, ultimately affirming both them and itself—distances Foucault from every version of Hegelian negation, as well as from Kantian transcendentality.38 It represents a radical innovation that places Foucault at a distance from all traditional philosophy but also from all contemporary empiricisms, since he indeed reckons on nothing, on a version of the absolute, with an inclusiveness and autonomy similar to Being and Derridean ultratranscendental “life”—a nothing at once disclosive, delimiting, and affirmative in a wholly unprecedented manner.

This innovation in the absolute, which like Heidegger’s is both a finite and a transcendental or absolute formation, doubtless remains the most surprising and difficult feature of Foucault’s thought. All that has most bedeviled readers—yesterday, today, and perhaps tomorrow—in regard to this enigmatic thinker arguably can be traced back to this innovation, even as Foucault’s projects and goals also prove the most mobile over time of any of the authors here discussed.

Even as fine a reader as Fredric Jameson, as recently as 2009, questioning a Foucauldian notion apparently far removed from these concerns, namely “biopower,” registers this still enigmatic aspect of Foucault’s standpoint, albeit in the form of critique. Biopower as a global conception, Jameson avers, cannot ultimately be identified as either “positive […] or negative” and is ultimately “lacking an opposite” (43).

Such a characterization, for Jameson, implies that biopower is “insufficiently dialectical” (43); yet the foregoing makes plain that this notion’s force— here, its specifically political force—depends precisely on what Jameson both identifies and questions: the ability to contest and affirm limits at once—to contest limits by exceeding them, by disclosing them as such, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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while simultaneously affirming these limits as included within this excess, within this nothing only produced by way of this disclosure, which thereby proves both unprecedented and radical. The contestatory force of this, and perhaps of all of Foucault’s leading notions, indeed redounds to such a divided, complex gesture. It cannot be confined to the moment that Foucault in his 1963 essay already labeled “critique” (the unmasking of limits), but must also take in what he there calls “ontology” (“Preface” 38) (the affirmation of these limits and itself). The precise force of Foucauldian resistance—its vector toward an absolute and radical departure—as will soon become clearer rests on this style of absolute affirmation, at once contravention and affirmation, which sketches a leave-taking that finally refuses to install some other thing, some already known objective, entity, or condition, as a goal, without for all that, leaving existing conditions intact.

In Foucault’s work, most clearly at this stage but perhaps always, a moment that can perhaps still be called critique, though already radically reworked, indeed everywhere proves coeval with another: the apparition of a radically affirmative outside, a no-thing, at once inclusive and autonomous, thus absolute.The axis of Foucault’s thought, certainly his earliest thought, as is also true in Derrida’s case, entails a revision of the transcendental bearing a family resemblance to Heidegger’s and, in the present context, hearkening back to the late Husserl.

This endeavor, furthermore, as has started to appear, neither grounds nor founds something else—like Derrida’s, it ungrounds (and installs), and only as a moment in a different, more radical and unprecedented operation.

So proceeding, both Derrida’s and Foucault’s absolutes body forth a new relation to time and history. Unlike contemporary transcendental empiricism that foregrounds a philosophical or theoretical transformation coordinated with our history, the rethinking of transcendentality performed by both these thinkers reworks and/or rejects history’s already existing reference points.

It does not claim that its innovations are enjoined or validated by history as known—by the current epoch, conjuncture, and its defining events. Instead, it cuts against the grain of our existing relation to the present, including by itself inscribing a novel relation to time and history.

VII. Foucault’s (and Derrida’s) Absolute in History

This perturbation of historical conceptuality doubtless emerges most visibly in Derrida’s work—as attested, among other things, by the contribution his The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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thought made to the formation of the once nascent postcolonial studies. It is less visible in Foucault’s case, where a new set of historical narratives, a reworking of the contents of history, provides the staging for this transformation.

Foucault, unlike Derrida, never wholly ceases to employ the templates of the period and the epoch, even as he contests our existing relations to history, including those relations these frameworks imply. Only thus, after all, with such a divided and complex allegiance to history, could one and the same author write works that are themselves essentially histories—though by no means the totality of Foucault’s corpus, historiography remains the most central element—while also offering devastating critiques of historicism and the historicist worldview, as found, for example, in the famous chapter 7 of Les Mots et les Choses.

Embarking on this discussion’s final phase, which is devoted to this alternative transcendental’s effects on history, the way history is situated in Foucault’s writings at this epoch should be made visible. Foucault’s masterwork in this era, Folie et déraison, offers the most perspicuous view of his absolute’s relation to history, one that proves to be fascinatingly and complexly coordinated with the two other works roughly contemporary with it: “A Preface,” and Foucault’s “Introduction” to his own translation of Kant’s Anthropology.39 More specifically, in the original preface to La Folie, describing how this absolute—or what will prove to be its equivalent—stands in relation to historical time, Foucault declares: The history of madness […] must go back to that decision that both bound and separated reason and madness; it must tend to discover the perpetual exchange, the obscure common root, the original configuration that gives meaning to the unity and opposition of sense and senselessness.That will allow the lightning flash decision to appear once more, heterogeneous with the time of history, but ungraspable outside it. (History vii/xxxiii)40

These lines, affirming an event (“the lightning flash decision”) at once within yet heterogeneous to history, already indicate that a new relation to history is at stake in a book that today bears the word “history” in its title.

These are the same lines that Derrida subjected to a fairly harsh interrogation, however, and Foucault removed them from subsequent editions of his work.

They are best understood in light of the foregoing discussion.

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The relation between madness and its other, Foucault here indicates, pertains to an “obscure common root.” This root, which Foucault also presents as a “perpetual exchange […] that gives meaning” to the division between the sense and the senseless, can be identified with the play of limits just brought forward. A single movement, again at once same and other, unites and differentiates sense and what lies beyond it, thanks to a pure division or caesura—a nothing—here active in “a lightning flash decision.”

Such a movement lets both sides be—indeed on account of a difference, which itself ultimately involves the privileging of what is here excluded, the senseless as such.

Foucault in La Folie sets forth the same operation and performs the same series of motions that he summarizes under the heading of transgression in “A Preface”; in La Folie, however, their Darstellung (order of presentation) occurs in reverse. That is, Foucault begins from the simple establishment of the limit as limit, the differentiation of reason from its other: madness.

Once registered, however, he subsequently foregrounds that absolute, which installs and disestablishes these limits, while itself going beyond them, in an operation that throughout his text becomes signaled by the figure of the lightning bolt or flash—a figure already prominent here.41 This absolute or radical outside in La Folie will thus be conceived as madness, the titular subject of this work. Yet, as Foucault also states, in question in his work cannot be a “madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted” (xxxiii). The role of absolute nothing in La Folie more specifically, then, becomes filled by Unreason, the original titular subject of his study (the full title of the first edition was Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique). Unreason, emerging, as Foucault here indicates, on no other site than history (“ungraspable outside” it), is precisely reason’s other—what it excludes: a beyond, an outside and remainder. In La Folie, Unreason, inherently a Janus-faced conception, at once points to madness in all its radicality even as it defines and articulates itself by way of that other whose limits it ultimately delimits and to which it owes its own manifestation: reason.

Perhaps paradoxically, it turns out that madness as such, according to Foucault, does not exist in the classical age. Despite Foucault’s title or subtitle, the specific absence of madness from this age turns out to be this age’s most distinctive feature in respect to this topic. Such an omission, among other The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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things, for Foucault is a sign of the confinement of madness at reason’s hands—the determining trait of the classical age in regard to madness.42 At the same time, while madness, by being determined as Unreason, in the classical age indeed becomes excluded, set apart—deemed at once sheer outside and nothing in itself—Unreason is simultaneously also revealed to essentially communicate with reason. Unreason is itself but the nothing and excess of reason, implicated in, and by, reason’s being, in a fashion that will subsequently fall away, or at least be obscured, in future epochs. Unreason itself thus proves not to be a regional nothing, a worldly nothing (as it is for every modern psychology), but instead a nothing, an excess bearing on reason’s own being and truth, potentially comprehending the whole of what is, even as Unreason stands apart and excluded from that whole.

As so conceived, Unreason thus proves to be an avatar or instance of that new absolute that Foucault sketched in “A Preface.” It flashes forth as an excess, a nothing, that reveals reason (without an opposite) to have been installed thanks to what it excludes—Unreason, which simultaneously passes beyond these limits, revealing them as such, while uniquely manifesting itself in a movement at once contestatory and affirmative.43 Unreason, unlimitedly affirmed, is indeed an instance of this radical nothing—of transgression’s pure difference—and the impact of this moment on history, the entirety of Unreason’s relation to this sphere, accordingly must also be made more explicit. For Unreason, as should already be plain, in one sense, remains historical through and through; it arises wholly within an historical context and is articulated by Foucault on historical ground.Yet its import, its potential, when plumbed, ultimately resists being graphed in terms of any known history. Unreason, as sketched in La Folie as this new absolute, ultimately proves incapable of answering to history, even while existing nowhere else, nor standing simply apart from it. It is at once “heterogeneous with the time of history” while remaining “ungraspable outside it,” just as Foucault himself put it in the paragraph quoted above from the preface to La Folie.44 Foucault’s absolute’s heterogeneity to a history to which it also ceaselessly refers—an unprecedented relation to historical time as novel as its status as absolute—is revealed in the most economical fashion by what could be called the historical topology of La Folie. In every period that Foucault treats, Unreason, particularly in the form of delirium, provides a site for a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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transgressive operation, even as the historical landscape alters to the point that Unreason, as a historically credited version of madness, disappears.45 Unreason as a site of transgression therefore not only pertains to Corneille’s Andromaque, its initial radical avatar, but, according to Foucault, also emerges in Diderot, Artaud, Nietzsche, and Nerval, as well as Sade, Holderlin, and Roussel. Each time, at every epoch, the circumstances attendant upon its transgressive apparition alter—after Diderot, most notably, delirious Unreason and madness indeed cease to form a single condition (La Folie 344)—yet Unreason repeatedly contests madness’s settled determination and allows an affirmation of radical difference, sketching an outside, a beyond that exceeds, while also affirming, these same limits. As Foucault himself puts it, at the end of part 2, referring to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, the latter’s depiction of madness “illuminates like a bolt of lightning the great broken line” that constitutes Unreason, and “announces the most modern forms of Unreason, the contemporaries of Nerval, Artaud, and Nietzsche (344).” 46 Foucault’s absolute subsequently entails a novel graphing of historical time, wherein the plane of history is affirmed as the whole, as all there is (as world in Heidegger and in the late Husserl), even as an absolute (nothing or difference), works beyond it, implicated in it while also exceeding it.

Moreover, Foucault never simply abandons such a stance toward historical time.While the form it takes here, the assignment of this Other or Outside to a distinct temporal configuration of its own, signaled by the “verticality” of “the tragic,” may soon cease (La Folie xxix), with the exception perhaps of Discipline and Punish, the aim at such a nothing and the resulting deviation it installs from every known framework of history remains visible in Foucault’s writings: in biopower (and its contestation of sexuality, which seemingly has since become lost); in that discontinuity, that “pure difference,” or “flashing line” that ushers in the successive epistemes of Les Mots; in Foucault’s repeated characterization of his own project as historicophilosophical;47 as well as in his so-called ethical turn.48 In each case, history affords an avenue to something else—something at once nothing in itself, yet also absolute; something that ultimately contests the prevailing forms of history’s understanding while never ceasing to occupy an historical ground.

Elsewhere I have suggested that today “theory” is the most appropriate name for this attempt that the early work and perhaps all the work of Foucault instances. Theory, so understood, undertakes to reinvent what The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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some call thinking—above all, the thinking of the absolute—in part for the sake of forging new forms of insertion into history. Of course, it would be shortsighted to exclude from this category any of those thinkers canvassed here as empiricists—from Deleuze to Luhmann to Latour. In their own right, as is perhaps clearest in the first and last instances, each attempts to resituate thought, feeling, knowledge, science, and society in a becoming and a history novelly conceived.

At the same time, this tendency’s most profound embrace remains visible in Foucault and Derrida, owing, as should now be clear, to the radicality of their reworking of the transcendental, thanks to their unprecedented experiments with the absolute and their novel embrace of (a determined) nothing. Contemporary transcendental empiricism’s framing of the transcendental indeed inhibits the scope of its reconceptualization of history.

Remaining with the world, or attempting to depart from it only from within “pure immanence,” it has no way to reconceive the whole, and so no way to coin new stances toward history.

When seen in this light, of all of those surveyed, Foucault’s absolute, perhaps surprisingly, stands furthest removed from the transcendentals of today’s empiricism—his work thus proving a suitable instance to close with.

Because his pure difference exists only within the time of its own operation, because it indeed consists in a radical nothing or outside achieved through transgression, outstripping limits without replacing them with anything else, Foucault’s absolute, in stark contrast to those of transcendental empiricism, indeed lacks all contents of its own (even more so than Derrida’s, which carries traces of such set matter in its notions of difference, trace, supplement, and so forth). Foucault’s meditation installs no transcendental apparatus on its own terms, being almost entirely absorbed by history, varying from it only by the space of a pure and absolute difference that comes and goes in a lightning flash; it exists in a multiply divided and bifurcated, yet still ephemeral, instant. Foucault’s endeavor thus yields the most slender, most evacuated, absolute, of all those here canvassed and in this way stands diametrically opposed to those interventions, at once more content-laden and more limited, staged by empiricist approaches.

Foucault’s absolute is not only the most ascetic, but on these same grounds, it is arguably the most viable form of absolute at present, precisely because it borders so closely—indeed is nearly indistinguishable—from The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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nothing. Understood thus, Foucault’s example indicates a space at which the practice of theory has for the most part yet to arrive. Foucault’s work points the way to a localized absolute, a multiple, labile nothing—at once more and less historical, more and less absolute than those otherwise found here. One path for experiments in theory, a field seemingly congenitally preoccupied by its future and the question of whether it has one, may thus lie in a direction that Foucault signposts: in a distancing from transcendentality as such, in favor of an intrusion of a transgressive, nonmonolithic, mobile, yet finally undemarcated, excess.49 So conceived, theory’s investigations—perhaps turning toward theory’s own now extensive historical accretion—might, like Foucault’s, function at once as history and not, as an intellectual history or genealogy, simultaneously opening on to a nontime, a nonplace—an instantaneous yet excessive nothing—displacing current historical configurations. Such a procedure would indeed attempt to skirt all the now tired figures of transcendentality, as well as all of historicism’s often unwittingly self-congratulatory ones.

Instead, such theory in the zero-degree, “théorie,” as Althusser christened it, would pursue something like the thinking—excessive yet ephemeral, autonomous and inclusive, subsidiary and transitory—that has here begun to be disclosed at the entirely virtual intersection of the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and the early Foucault.50 Joshua Kates has published two books and many articles on Derridean and other sorts of theory, and on Husserlian and other sorts of phenomenology.

He has contributed to numerous anthologies, and he is the editor of the Oxford Online Bibliography of Deconstruction. Since 2007, he has also been working with, and publishing on, the analytic philosophy of language. Kates is about to complete a book, Discourse: Neither Nor, that advances new notions of literature and textuality, as well as collectivity and politics, by way of treatments of Cavell, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Davidson.

Notes 1 I owe the impetus for some of this thinking to a year at the National Humanities Center, and especially to two scholars at Duke University, whom I had the privilege to get to know better during that time: Mark Hansen and Rob Mitchell.

Part of the thrust of my Derrida treatment first became plain in an extensive correspondence that I conducted with Henry Staten.

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2 An example of such empiricism in Deleuze follows below; for a more extended treatment of his thought, alone and in tandem with Guattari, see Kates’s “Historicity and Holism: The Example of Deleuze” 3 The Latour perhaps most aligned with the formation that I set out here is found in Part II of The Pasteurization of France, “Irreductions,” especially section 1. For Stengers, see The Invention of Modern Science, among others. Stengers’s view of science, she affirms, does not attribute “to the subject the right to know an object, but to the object the power […] to put the subject to the test” (33), thus privileging the object in the fashion sketched in what follows.

4 See De Landa’s “Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World,” as well as his recent New Philosophy of Society; for Hardt and Negri, see, of course, Empire. (Though these authors repeatedly critique the transcendent and the transcendental, their work, in one of its two major gestures, affirms what they call a deconstructive “ontology”: an ontology readily mapped on to that empiricism in question here [47–48].)

5 In addition to David Lapoujade’s “From Radical Empiricism to Worker Nomadism,” discussed further on, see Ralph Pred’s Onflow. Stengers’s most recent book to appear in English is devoted to Whitehead (Thinking withWhite head).

6 For Cary Wolfe, see his magisterial What is Posthumanism? Anticipating my treatment of Luhmann, upon whose thought he repeatedly draws as a quasi-transcendental empiricist, as well as some of the problems this may pose, after noting that “Luhmann […] becomes more and more ‘philosophical,’” (110), Wolfe, citing Luhmann, speaks of a “supertheory” that stands to philosophy as does philosophy to religion, even as it “acknowledges its own contingency” (111). For Mark Hansen, in addition to his forthcoming articles on new media and time consciousness, as well as his forthcoming book on the latter topic, see the introduction, cowritten with W.J.T. Mitchell, to Critical Terms for Media Studies. After citing Kittler, the authors designate “media” as “infra-structural basis and quasi-transcendental condition for experience and understanding” (1; emphasis added).

7 Though this grouping is both broad and relatively novel, other authors have recently offered parallel classifications. Ruth Leys, in an important intervention in affect theory largely conducted in a critical vein, has focused, as I do here, on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and on work descended from it, setting it alongside other important developments in the humanities, including neurohistory and some of the presuppositions of the writings of the later Eve Sedgwick. In a more positive vein, Tony Bennett has framed the thought of Deleuze, Latour, De Landa, and others as initiating a “flat ontology” (254; c.f. 259), able to provide an alternative to an older sociology of literature that focused on the “metaformal properties” of the literary work and correlated them with the structures and functions of society as a whole (253).

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8 So understood, Bill Brown’s pioneering thing theory also figures prominently among these initiatives (see his Sense of Things and, in this context especially, his edited volume, Things, which makes explicit the connection to many of the authors here discussed). As I indicate below, though objectivities of some kind are privileged in all these initiatives, their concern is not necessarily always with things per se. Thus, the systems of Luhmann are neither situated in things, nor do they necessarily shape them, unlike the pre-individual singularities of Deleuze or the networks of Latour (which, in some versions, make things a privileged site while extending beyond them). Yet Luhmann’s work also falls on the object side, such that he himself repeatedly stresses his alignment with a new, postphilosophical empiricism (see, for example, his “Modern Sciences and Phenomenology,” which turns on the status of the contemporary sciences and the need for “a new empirical problematic” [51]). By contrast, Latour’s overcoming of the gap represented by “our modernity,” a gap which, despite his title, Latour does not deny but ultimately glosses in quantitative rather than qualitative terms, turns on the status of what he calls “quasi-objects,” exemplified

by Boyle’s air pump (We Have 111ff.).

9 In the analytic tradition, the positivist thesis that the empirical sciences alone could make authoritative statements about objects and their knowledge was given new life by W.V.O. Quine in his program for a “naturalized epistemology,” after Quine himself had dismantled the positivistic framework of epistemology and philosophy of science. (For the setting out of the first program, see “Naturalizing Epistemology” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. For the dismantling, see “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in From a Logical Point ofView.) The various work of the Churchlands, Paul and Patricia, which is aimed not at the reduction but instead at the eventual elimination of all reports on consciousness or mental states (“I believe,” “I feel,” and so on), represents an extreme and, for that reason at least, important contemporary application of Quine’s thesis.

10 Of course, things, as so situated, themselves prove constitutive (of other phenomena) or co-constitutive of these matrices. Nevertheless, a broader moment of what might be called “quasi constitution” remains in play, and this distinguishes the empiricism of these endeavors from more familiar and more straightforward empirical scientific treatments.

11 See Keith Ansell Pearson’s influential gloss on the notion of contemplation in this passage, which presents it in broader terms (100–1).

12 That the radical empiricist turn is driven by the conviction that our times demand a new mode of subjective address and historical self-insertion is a relatively straightforward claim; in addition to being confirmed in the Deleuzean/Jamesian instance discussed subsequently, it is evident in the entire orientation, for example, of Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” or in Luhmann’s self-differentiation not only from phenomenology but also from deconstruction (c.f. Luhmann, Theories 109). In all of these instances, not to The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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mention those in new media and in most appeals to posthumanism (although Wolfe, at times, unlike N. Katherine Hayles, attempts to nuance this thrust), a relatively straightforward historicism—an often explicit diagnosis of where we are now—supplies the motivation for the perspective being presented. (For Wolfe, see What is Posthumanism [xv–xvi], where he both displaces and invokes such historicism; for Hayles, see her now classic HowWe Became Posthuman, which appears to subscribe to this premise without remainder.) On Latour’s “Why Has Critique,” see Kates’s “Neither a God nor ANT Can Save Us.” 13 In an analysis of Althusser’s thought at the time of Reading Capital, aimed at reconstruing the task and status of theory (without attribution, or to the zerodegree), I have unfolded and further articulated Althusser’s own critique of the historiography of the period and of a unitary historical present, arguing that this framework continues to be visible in much contemporary literary critical work and suggesting that theory’s task is to depart from it (see Kates, “Against,” especially pp. 136–46).

14 This is all the more striking when contrasted with the objectivist or naturalist turn in analytic philosophy referred to above.These naturalized accounts, with their radical excision of much of the existing vocabulary of the humanities and of everyday life, make the recursion to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology, even that claiming to be Nietzschean invention rather than discovery or knowledge, appear innocent and almost naive.

15 I have made this case in my article “Historicity and Holism” in regard to Deleuze’s pre-individual singularities, which, like everyday objects, are said to “circulate,” “flow,” “diverge,” and so forth (71).The Luhmannian alternative, with its emphasis on difference, obviously stands furthest from this problem—yet a certain version of life continues to underlie it, as do the pregiven notions of both system and logic.

16 Bringing forward this new modeling of the transcendental—which could be called a “phenomenological transcendental” with the phenomenological placed under erasure, if one wished to bother with this subterfuge, which I don’t—is by no means a straightforward hermeneutic exercise—a matter of correcting our readings of Derrida and Foucault, or of the thinkers here classed as empiricists.

The transcendental ambition shared by Foucault and Derrida indeed, at best, represents a virtual locus, actualized only thanks to staging an intersection between theory’s recent and somewhat further past, along with posing a question that belongs to none of the authors under discussion, pertaining to thought’s future—a formation that I have elsewhere described as historicity.Thanks only to a temporal setting foreign to every writer I treat can the virtual point of contact between these two very different thinkers be brought forward—especially since, speaking factually or historico-biographically, Foucault obviously always felt himself to be far closer to Deleuze than to Derrida. Foucault deemed our present century not Derridean but Deleuzean while also attributing to himself a lineage in the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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objectivist phenomenology of “Cavaillès, Bachelard and Canguilhem,” thereby seeming to endorse a kind of transcendental empiricism (Foucault, Introduction, On the Normal 8).

17 Natalie Depraz’s influential account of Husserl’s thought in “Scientific Metaphysics and Transcendental Empiricism” may have contributed to this conflation, though Depraz gives this term a quite narrow scope at the moment she defines it (38).

More recently, Joe Hughes in his Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation identifies Husserl’s work in broader terms as a “transcendental empiricism” in the course of an argument that presents Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thought as continuous with the project of phenomenology (4).

18 Sebastian Luft, in part following Steven Galt Crowell, also speaks of Husserl’s work as a transcendental empiricism; in his “Husserl’s Concept of the ‘Transcendental Person,’” Luft gives two instances from Husserl’s Nachlass, where Husserl speaks of phenomenology as “transzendentale Erfahrungswissenschaft,” which could be translated as “transcendental experiential” (or “empirical”) science, though even this is not “Empirismus” (14n29; for Crowell, see Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, 18–19). I have not been able to locate any use of this or a synonymous term by Husserl in his published writings.

19 For Deleuze’s occasional reliance on Merleau-Ponty in his early work, see, for example, his discussion of “depth” in Difference and Repetition (229–30). For new media studies, see, among other instances, Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code (71ff.).

20 The notion of the flesh, chair—indeed chair du monde, flesh of the world—is central to the last chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—the Chiasm.” (Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body, specifically the body-schema in The Phenomenology of Perception, anticipates his conception of flesh in important ways, even as the latter remains distinct from it, their precise relation being an ongoing subject of debate in the literature, in part owing to Merleau-Ponty’s distancing of himself from his first setting out of the problem.) For a good treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body and perception in Phenomenology of Perception in comparison to Husserl’s treatment of these topics, see Taylor Carman’s “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.”

21 The first sections of Phenomenology of Perception, “Introduction: Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena” (3–63), for example, are a review of the existing scientific literature; Merleau-Ponty sketches the problems he aims to resolve and, in part, the route that he will take to do so.

22 Varela, of course, was himself a biologist, and his work is still more disciplinary, more empirical in this second sense, than the others here instanced. For an important presentation of the issues involved in his and related attempts to chart an intersection of the biological and cognitive sciences and Husserlian phenomenology, see “Beyond the Gap,” the introduction to Naturalizing The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Phenomenology. For an instance of Varela’s own fascinating work in this area, see his essay “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness” in the same volume.

23 Husserl’s best known accounts of the phenomenological and transcendental deductions occur in chapters 1 and 2 of part 2 of the first book of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, otherwise known as Ideas I (51–104). Some of the problems attendant upon these formulations are discussed further along in this article.

24 For regional inquiry, see Ideas I, part 4, chapter 3 (349–70) and the whole of Ideas II. (I treat at length the project and structure of this latter work in the course of a comparison of Derrida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of touch and intersubjectivity in chapter 7 of Fielding Derrida, “Derrida’s Contribution to Phenomenology: A Problem of No Species?”) Husserl began the fundamental research into logic in Logical Investigations by already understanding it as an investigation which was to provide the ground for all other (scientific) knowledge (see Book One, chapter 11 of Logical Investigations, “The Idea of Pure Logic” [225–47]).

25 These considerations first emerge in Husserl’s famous refutation of psychologism in Book One of Logical Investigations (see, especially, chapter 8, “The Psychologistic Prejudices” [168–96]). They reappear again in a powerful form in Ideas I, part 1, chapter 2 as Husserl makes his way to the statement of his “Principle of Principles” (33–48).

26 Hans-Georg Moeller in his Luhmann Explained describes this paradoxical implication well: “What a supertheory says,” he writes, in reference to Luhmann’s late thought, “has to make general sense to it. But this sense itself is not general, it is contingent on the theory that is constructing this horizon of sense” (201; qtd. in Wolfe 111).

27 See especially section 13 of the “Amsterdam Lectures” in Husserl’s Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31) (243–48), hereafter TP. 28 As the “contemporary criticism” of Fink’s title refers to the neo-Kantianism of the first half of the twentieth century, the entirety of Fink’s essay is instrumental for the interpretation of Husserlian transcendentality put forward here.

29 For one notable instance of the “Same,” see Heidegger’s Identity and Difference (47).

30 Heidegger, moreover, will begin to believe that he has not conceived Being— transcendentality—radically enough at this epoch, and the correspondence here noted will further erode (see Heidegger’s handwritten note in Sein and Zeit [153]).

Heidegger eventually foregrounds the disclosedness, or understanding—the “Da” or “there” of Dasein—in preference to Dasein as such, while incorporating both it, Dasein, and inner-worldly beings more deeply into the giving or sending of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Being in its difference from beings, highlighting the latter’s event-full character.

Nevertheless, in the present context, and despite the numerous abysses already separating Heidegger from his teacher, a convergence on a moment of radically new transcendentality can be discerned. Oriented by the phenomenality of world as answering to the existence of the beings, a giving or operationality, a field or matrix—the transcendental—steps forward, at once distinct from all being, holding sway on its own, even while taking up and uniquely including within it the world.

31 Derrida’s relation to a transcendental logos in the specific form that Husserl presents it in his late works arguably remains infinitely complex and problematic, as attested by Derrida’s own affirmation in his Introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry”—that this “Absolute is Passage” when referring to this “Logos” (149). I have commented extensively on the still underappreciated role of the Introduction in Derrida’s thinking in chapter 3 of my Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction. That Husserl’s late work remains the site of this appropriation and puzzle of course attests to the singular fashion in which reason in these last writings has come to be conceived by Husserl himself.

32 The Kant of the transcendental analytic aimed to show that construction of worldly phenomena through the categories of the understanding (categories such as quantity or cause) was valid for our type of knowing, thus legitimating the sciences (“Division I: Transcendental Analytic” [Critique]). Foucault on occasion of course places his own thought within a Kantian lineage; yet this is not primarily nor originally a matter of the analytic and the work of the first division of the first Critique, but rather of Division II (“Transcendental Dialectic”) and the singular interplay of the limits of reason and metaphysics that Kant there sketched. In the novel notion of metaphysics as produced through reason’s own limitation and self-violation, Foucault recognized a predecessor to his own enterprise of thinking a new style of absolute. (See “A Preface to Transgression,” where Foucault, essentially encapsulating his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology written the year before, both proclaims that Kant is owed this “opening” that Nietzsche and he himself still exploit, even as Kant “ended by closing this opening” [38].)

33 This is not to deny that Foucault, especially, does not tactically make use of this formulation at times, particularly in Les Mots et les Choses and the Archaeology of Knowledge, as both Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (see Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics [79ff.]), and subsequently Beatrice HanPlie (see Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical [4]), have emphasized. Nevertheless, these readers, arguably fixing too strongly on this familiar philosopheme, neglect to place Foucault’s ultimately stillborn methodological notion of the episteme in the broader context that he himself announces for it in his Archaeology: namely, that of inserting “the Other in the time of our own thought” (12).

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34 In this instance, as in almost every other one in this phase of his work, with the exception of the first part of Of Grammatology, Derrida broaches the problem of language in the context of philosophical language; he asks about the language and discourse of the absolute as such. Doing so, Derrida, in the present case, pursues an issue first raised by Eugen Fink. Fink, Husserl’s last research assistant, thematized and questioned what he called “operative concepts” in Husserl’s philosophy: concepts and terms that Husserl used to describe the transcendental sphere, despite there being no single meaning applying to both it and the mundane realm. Because Husserl’s transcendental includes the world while, strictly speaking, not belonging to it, the language and conceptuality through which that transcendental is to be presented poses significant problems.

Transcendental description borrows its concepts and terms from the everyday world, while its dimensionality and standpoint differs fundamentally from that world, thus necessitating a translation of the one into the other that not even Husserl, Fink averred, could always control (see Fink 44ff.)

35 Rodolphe Gasché in his Tain of the Mirror views Derridean deconstruction as revealing an infrastructure to philosophy that both makes philosophy possible (i.e., it furnishes philosophy’s transcendental condition) while also contesting and exceeding it (7). In his earlier “Deconstruction as Criticism,” Gasché suggests that Derridean deconstruction aims at “an absolute other,” a hypothesis closer, and indeed contributing to, the interpretation found here (45).

36 In fact, though keyed to Derrida’s 1963 text, this rupture apparently took shape and emerged only after 1967. See Didier Eribon’s account in his Michel Foucault (145–47).

37 “A limit,” Foucault tells us, could not exist in the first place “if it were absolutely uncrossable,” nor would “transgression” have a point if it “crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows” (“A Preface” 34).

38 As noted above, when Foucault in “A Preface” does explicitly refer to Kant, he invokes not the transcendental analytic in its specificity but the “still enigmatic” articulation of “metaphysical discourse and the limits of reason as such” (38) as a gesture sketching an operation akin to transgression. Foucault here further highlights his transformation of the Kantian inheritance by insisting that transgression includes “absolutely and in the same motion, Critique and Ontology, an understanding that comprehends both finitude and being” (38).

39 Taking La Folie in tandem with Foucault’s earliest publications on psychiatry, as well as his book on Roussel and his treatment of psychiatry in Les Mots et les Choses, Fredric Gros arrived at a reading of La Folie close to the one put forward here, both in questioning Foucault’s historicism and stressing the role of unreason (35–36), as I do in what follows. In general, the French reception of Foucault’s thought has been more greatly influenced by La Folie than the anglophone, doubtless owing to there being no complete English translation of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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this work available before 2007. Pierre Macherey, for example, says of La Folie that “it was Foucault’s first theoretical work and the effective point of departure of all his later investigations” (77), an estimation with which I largely agree.

For the anglophone reception of La Folie, see, among others, Gary Gutting (Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, 69ff; and more recently, on this work’s reception among historians “Foucault and the History of Madness” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault); see also Todd May on Foucault’s earlier writings on madness and psychiatry and the changes these underwent at the time of La Folie (“Foucault’s Relation to Phenomenology”).

40 Hereafter, all references will be to the newly restored edition and new English translation (History of Madness) under the heading La Folie. (When the French edition has been consulted, those page numbers come first. All French references are to the first edition of this work: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.)

41 To be clear, the adjectival phrase translated in the preface as “lightning flash,” fulgurante, is neither the same nor cognate with the French word for lightning flash, l’éclair, forms of which repeatedly appear later and also in “A Preface.”.

42 A major aim of Foucault’s analysis is to show that neither in its practices (such as confinement of the mad alongside the poor) nor in its theorization does madness emerge as a thoroughgoing concept or category in the classical age, in the way it will in subsequent psychology or in the fashion it had in the Renaissance. At the same time, a parallelism, even a unity, also exists across these mutual absences, comprising a framework that stands in for madness at this epoch. This latter is Déraison, Unreason (see the introduction to part 2 of La Folie, especially where Foucault introduces “Unreason” as both what accounts for the different status of madness in confinement and in knowledge [both of which function to keep it from being “manifest on its own terms” (171)], even as Unreason regulates this difference across this divide—Unreason being “the secret coherence that stretches out across the great divide that we have just evoked” [173].) The revelation of the category of Unreason comes as something of a surprise—Foucault himself notes that “it might be asked why we have waited so long before evoking it” (173), and on this account, as well as owing to subsidiary distinctions pertaining to madness within Unreason remaining (c.f. 145ff.), the radical absence of madness in the classical age is relatively easy to overlook.

43 A significant instance in which Unreason so appears—as a nothingness and excess more comprehensive than reason, a reason without which it itself could not be thought—arrives at the end of Corneille’s Andromaque, as glossed by Foucault. Building on the presentation of delirium (the paradigmatic and most powerful instance of Unreason), and again keyed to the figure of “the lightning bolt” (246), “Unreason,” in excess of reason, in its own right, at this moment “appear(s) for an instant […] when language sinks back into silence” (249).

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44 Compare with Gros, who states that “the problem of Foucault, at least in his first work, is less that of the historical transcendental for which one wishes to reproach him, than that of a transcendental of history” itself (32n2; my translation). Gros himself recognizes that the tragic verticality at this moment in question is an “excess” that contests history rather than simply supplying its ground (36).

45 This sequencing, wherein Foucault presents the advent of Unreason and its subsequent forgetting as the concealed ground of the installation of the modern, positivist version of madness, is ultimately common to La Folie and his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. In the latter, essentially the same forgetting of reason and its transgression leads to the installation of the anthropological figure of man (La Folie 158–59; Introduction 122ff.). Gros also notes this articulation in La Folie, and he compares it to Heidegger’s forgetting of Being (35).

46 Foucault himself registers that such an affirmation is “out of step” with “a chronicle of evolution.” This departure has been necessary, he insists, to reveal “the great structures of unreason,” which “slumber beneath the surface of Western culture, and just below the temporality of historians” (La Folie 344).

47 For this formulation, see especially Foucault’s “What is Critique?” (391).

48 See A.I. Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought.” For a somewhat different view, see Thomas Osborne’s discussion in Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth (102ff.).

An extrapolation of the view of Foucault that I propose to this phase of his work would land between these two approaches.

49 The “referential holism,” drawing on Heidegger’s and Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language, that I have elsewhere tried to model, represents one version, one attempt, to sketch this new sort of absolute (see Kates’s “Historicity and Holism: The Example of Deleuze.”), 50 The series Althusser edited for the publisher Maspero was titled simply “Théorie,” the first usage of this phrase in its current sense to my knowledge.

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Carman, Taylor. “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 205–26. Philosophy Documentation Center, https://doi .org/10.5840/philtopics199927210.

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POLITICAL FICTION: AÂ SYMPOSIUM The short symposium that follows represents a lightly revised transcription of the spring 2016 Lionel Trilling Seminar at Columbia University.

By tradition, the Trilling seminars, inaugurated in 1976 and sponsored by The Hayman Center for the Humanities, consist of a principal lecture followed by two invited responses.

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Political Fiction, Ancient and M ­ odern: From David’s Court to Fabrice’s Charterhouse Robert Alter I would like to begin with a brief autobiographical anecdote. In the late 1970s, through circumstances not entirely of my devising, I found myself working on two large projects separated from each other by nearly three thousand years—a critical biography of Stendhal and a book on biblical narrative.

From time to time, I would ask myself whether I might be a little daft to be doing this, wondering whether there could be any conceivable connection between the two subjects. On the biblical side, because the David story is one of the greatest pieces of extended narrative in the Hebrew Bible, I drew many examples from it for my book.With the passage of time, it dawned on me that because the David story and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma are two of the supremely knowing narratives about politics in our literary tradition, there might be connections between them, for all the obvious differences.

Let me first note the most salient of those differences.The David story is told by a narrator who, like his counterparts elsewhere in the Bible, makes a point of keeping a very low profile, not commenting on the characters and events, allowing actions and dialogue to speak for themselves. Stendhal’s narrator, by contrast, offers a good deal of commentary on the characters and often seems virtually to chat with the reader—a procedure Stendhal may have picked up from Fielding, whom he passionately admired—as he sets almost everything in a worldly ironic perspective. The satiric outlook of Charterhouse generates moments of high comedy, a quality entirely absent from the urgently intense biblical story. In addition to these differences, Stendhal’s novel of 1838 is even more strongly attached to European romanticism than it is to the scintillating acerbic prose of eighteenth-century England and France that it emulates. Its The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 287–302 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.287

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rapturous lyric evocations of landscapes are of course inconceivable in the Bible, and though the book swarms with political intrigues, at its center is a tale of extravagant romantic love.The novel in fact has no less than four extravagant lovers: Fabrice; Clélia, whose love for Fabrice proves to be as measureless as his for her; Gina, Fabrice’s aunt, whose unswerving devotion to him barely conceals an incipiently incestuous passion; and Count Mosca, who loves Gina beyond all his prudential considerations as a consummate courtier. The one instance of headlong love in the biblical story is Michal’s for David—she is the only woman in any biblical narrative of whom it is explicitly said that she loves a man. Piquantly, she anticipates Clélia in risking her father’s dangerous wrath by enabling her beloved to escape from assassins. But this is scarcely a romantic story of love unto death, and in the end, we see her, after David has long been separated from her and taken other wives, seething with resentment against him. Other joinings of man and woman in this story seem to be either cases of self-interest or lust rather than love.

A word is in order about the status of each of these narratives as fiction.

The court of Parma and all that transpires within it are, of course, patently fictitious, in this instance being Stendhal’s novelistic expansion of a sixteenthcentury Italian story he had come across. There are skeptics among biblical scholars who contend that everything in the David story is equally fictional invention, though that seems to me unlikely. I would propose that the writer, who might conceivably have lived only a few decades after David, had before him an account, written or oral, of the principal events of David’s reign, but in order to make compelling sense of them, he felt free to elaborate and to improvise and to employ techniques that are characteristic of fiction, such as interior monologues (brief though they may be), dialogue where no one besides the two historical personages is present, pointed literary allusion, and the thematic shaping of the narrative through recurring motifs and episodes that mirror each other. This is, in other words, what we would call historical fiction, as well as political fiction. As in Shakespeare’s history plays, the writer cannot allow himself to invent significant historical events that never happened, but he does imagine the historical figures as characters and perhaps may introduce some that are chiefly or even wholly his own invention. We should, of course, recognize that this writer presented his narrative to his audience in good faith as a record of historical events, but the means through which the story is fashioned are essentially those of fiction.

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The question, then, that I would like to propose is, what insights into the workings of politics might the medium of fiction make available? A suspicious person could claim that the two realms really don’t belong together—no more than, say, demographic surveys and depth psychology. Stendhal’s narrator, in a famous aside late in the novel, seems to express something like this view, though with a qualifying twist that is worth pondering: “Politics in a work of literature,” he observes, “is a pistol shot in the midst of a concert, something crude but to which nevertheless it is impossible to refuse one’s attention” (Romans et nouvelles II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 405; the translation of this and all subsequent quotations is mine). My guess is that Stendhal’s implicit fantasy of an unalloyed work of literature would be a perfect chain of such moments as Fabrice looking out with rapture over the Italian landscape from his prison perch in the Farnese Tower, or Clélia telling him, in grand operatic fashion, as they come together in the dark at last to consummate their love, “Entre ici, ami de mon coeur,” “Enter here, my heart’s beloved.” (Stendhal’s analogy of a work of literature to a concert is revealing in this regard.) In a literary work so conceived, politics is indeed a violent disruption. But as the qualifying last clause here intimates, politics, however much we might dream of escaping it, is the context in which we live, the force that determines much of our collective and individual lives, crude (grossier) though it may be. An adequate representation of human destinies in society cannot easily exclude it, and when it makes its presence felt in a work of fiction, it compels our attention through the force of its decisive importance.

The special purchase that fiction has on politics is through character.

Political events are not the purely mechanical consequence of historical forces, whether economic, social, or institutional, but are shaped, even driven, by the individual players in the political arena. It is individual character that writers of fiction at their best subtly understand, and good political fiction serves as a medium in which revelatory hypotheses about the relation between character and power can be played out. One may safely set aside the once fashionable notion that the individual is the invention of the Renaissance or of Protestant introspection or of capitalism. Only a bad reader of ancient literature (of Homer, as well as of the Bible) could come to that conclusion. In the protonovelistic narrative of the Book of Samuel, the distinctive character of David and Saul and Joab and Samuel is altogether striking and dictates much of what happens in the political realm.

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Let me propose a few underlying perceptions about the nature of life in politics that are shared by Stendhal and the author of the David story and then trace the workings of these perceptions in the two narratives: politics requires dissembling—one can rarely afford to seem like what one really is; a measure of ruthlessness—sometimes murderous ruthlessness—is often necessary for attaining or hanging on to power; the possession of power generally corrupts, according to the old adage, and when it does not actually corrupt, it may nevertheless compromise or discomfit its possessor; power itself is ambiguous and subject to unanticipated reversals; the character traits of the political agent are often determinative as to how he or she will fare in the momentous clashes of the political arena.

Dissembling.This is a very old story in politics, and every four years, Americans are obliged to witness a crude public carnival of dissembling in their national elections. It is an idea subtly articulated by Machiavelli, and in our narratives, both David and Count Mosca clearly qualify as Machiavellian princes.When Fabrice returns from his imprudent and farcical volunteering in the Napoleonic army at the moment of its final defeat, instructions from his early mentor the Canon Borda prescribe the regimen he must follow in order to avert any suspicion of political unreliability: he must avoid contact with anyone pretending to exercise wit; he must speak with horror of rebellion; he must read only conservative newspapers and no books published after 1720 (with a possible exception made for the novels of Walter Scott); and he must court a local beauty belonging to the aristocracy. A little later, Count Mosca advises him in a similar vein: “if a brilliant line of reasoning, a triumphant rejoinder, occurs to you that could change the direction of a conversation, do not yield to the temptation to display your brilliance, keep quiet [. . .] It will be time enough to be witty when you are a bishop” (137). All this, one can say, is political dissembling as comedy, though, as is often the case in Charterhouse, the consequences of the comic byplay may be deadly. The frequently beguiling interactions between Mosca and the Prince of Parma and, more strikingly, between Gina and the prince are, necessarily, calculated playacting, and at one point it is said of the splendid, brilliantly improvising duchess that she altogether relishes playing such a role on the royal stage.

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and we are told that “all Israel and Judah loved David” (1 Sam. 18.16; all quotations from the Bible are my translation). It is noteworthy that David is repeatedly the object, never the subject, of the verb “to love.” He resembles Fabrice in being a beautiful young man who repeatedly attracts the solicitous attention of women, but whereas Fabrice is an innocent, and in some respects continues to be that, David, as far as we can tell, is never an innocent. Seeing David’s appeal to the people, Saul is consumed with jealousy and hatches a scheme to do away with him: And Saul said to David, “Here is my oldest daughter, Merab. Her shall I give you as wife, only be a valiant fellow for me and fight the battles of the Lord.” And Saul had thought, “Let not my hand be against him but let the hand of the Philistines be against him.” And David said to Saul, “Who am I and who are my kin, my father’s clan in Israel, that I should be the king’s son-in-law?” (1 Sam. 18. 17–19)

A second round of this exchange occurs. It turns out that Merab has been promised to another man, and so Saul proposes his daughter Michal instead.The king sends his courtiers with this message to David, who carefully maintains the same posture: “Is it a light thing in your eyes to become son-in-law to the king, and I am a poor man and lightly esteemed?” And Saul’s servants told him, saying, “Words of this sort David has spoken.”And Saul said, “Thus shall you say to David,‘The king has no desire for any bride price except a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take vengeance against the king’s enemies.’” And Saul had devised to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. (1 Sam. 18.25–27)

The pointed contrast throughout this passage is between a bumbling king and an astute contender for the throne (who has, of course, been clandestinely anointed by the prophet Samuel). Saul’s intentions are entirely transparent, as one sees in the deployment of interior monologue (“Let not my hand be against him”) and in the narrator’s spelling out his scheme (“For Saul had devised to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines”).The scheme itself is equally transparent, for the courtiers enlisted as go-betweens would surely have realized that a plan for David to bring back the foreskins of a hundred slain Philistine warriors was intended to be his death sentence. (Later, David, having lost his political edge after his adultery with Bathsheba, will commit The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the very same blunder by plotting to have Uriah killed by having him put in an exposed place under the walls of the besieged city Rabbath-Ammon where the enemy will cut him down.) But what do we learn about David in this encounter? There is no interior monologue for him, no narrator’s analysis of his motives—only public speech. This is a pattern that will be repeated throughout the first half of the David story.That speech has roughly the same revelatory value as Fabrice’s ostentatious reading of conservative newspapers. Perhaps he actually feels unworthy of the hand of the king’s daughter, though his profession of poverty and low esteem is surely excessive, for his father is a prosperous pastoralist. Perhaps such declarations are a matter of court etiquette. What seems most likely, however, is that David declares he is scarcely fit to marry into the royal family because that is just what he wants to do, in order to buttress his eventual claim to the throne, and just what he does not want Saul to suspect. One attains eminence by seeming not to seek it. In the end, it is the artfully opaque David, not the all-too-transparent Saul, who will possess the throne and found a dynasty.

Ruthlessness. The acquisition and preservation of power are not for the faint of heart, and a person who betrays you in the political give-andtake may have to be eliminated. In the words of the adage Mosca quotes to Fabrice, “It’s better to kill the devil than to let the devil kill you” (184).

Though this is an assumption that casts a dark shadow over the events of both these narratives, there is what one might call a quantitative difference between the two. The David story is strewn with corpses. In Charterhouse, a few executions have been carried out prior to the events of the novel: one killing occurs that is not a political act; there is a regicide; and of course we are aware of the hovering threat to Fabrice’s life, whether by poison or by execution.This smaller body count accords with the notion that Mosca and, even more emphatically, Gina cultivate of politics as an enlivening game, a notion they would have difficulty preserving were there blood everywhere in the court of Parma. It is a game for Gina, in particular, in her role as the brilliant and seductive Duchess of Sanseverina that enables her to cling to a sense of youth, which she often fears, sometimes quite comically, is slipping away from her. Nevertheless, we are repeatedly reminded that the stakes of this game are deadly.

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that may also serve a political end.When Prince Ranuce-Ernest IV violates his written pledge to free Fabrice from prison, exploiting the absence of the one binding sentence in the agreement he signs that Mosca, out of a courtier’s reflex, has decided to delete, Gina determines to make the prince pay for his treachery. She is, one should note, the exact opposite of a Machiavellian, acting on impulse, often unpredictable even to herself, as the narrator tells us. Gina proceeds, then, to enlist the poet and revolutionary Ferrante to poison the prince, and the murder is never traced back to her. It is an act that satisfies her sense of outrage in having been betrayed in the matter closest to her heart, but it is also a politically useful death.The prince, after making sure that Fabrice remains in his cell in the Farnese Tower, might readily take steps to have him killed. And in regard to the exercise of power within the court, Gina has been thwarted by the prince, put at his mercy just when she appeared to have the upper hand, so it serves her interests as well as her vengeance to eliminate the ruler. This aspect of the regicide is highlighted in a passage we will look at later.

The analogous murder in the David story is Joab’s assassination of Abner (2 Sam. 3), the military commander of the forces loyal to the house of Saul, who has come to broker a peace agreement with David after a protracted civil war between the northern and southern tribes. Joab is furious with David when he learns the king has parlayed with Abner, and setting out after him, he lures him to the roadside and stabs him to death.The motive spelled out by the narrator is vendetta—Abner had killed Joab’s brother Asahel in battle, and so Joab now exacts vengeance, in the stark Hebrew idiom, redeeming the blood of his brother. But Joab surely has a political motive as well: Abner is, after all, his counterpart as field commander, and with the twelve tribes now to be united under David, the king could well decide to replace him with Abner. Much later in the story, Joab carries out another assassination on precisely these grounds, with no consideration of vendetta involved: David, evidently angered over his killing of Absalom, appoints Amasa to replace him as commander of the troops, and Joab regains his position by murdering his rival, again in a roadside stabbing.

One of the fascinating aspects of the David story is that Joab (who is actually his nephew) serves as an implacable political alter ego for David, exercising a ruthlessness that is, or comes to be, beyond David. It remains murkily ambiguous whether David might be complicit in at least some of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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Joab’s murderous acts. Upon the death of Abner, David takes extravagant steps to dissociate himself from the killing and to profess helplessness before Joab and his equally fierce brother Abishai: “I am gentle,” he says (the Hebrew adjective “rakh” could also mean “soft”), “and just anointed king, and these sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me” (2 Sam. 3.39). It does not seem, in fact, that Abner’s death would be in David’s political interest, though we may at least wonder whether he could have some indirect role in the progressive elimination of scions of the house of Saul. In any case, there is a dramatic clash between David and Joab over the killing of Absalom. Despite Absalom’s usurping of the throne and his deadly intentions toward his father, David has enjoined the troops as they go out to battle to “[d]eal gently with the lad Absalom” (2 Sam. 18.5). Joab is too unblinking a political pragmatist to allow Absalom to survive—he no doubt perceives him as the devil you must kill before he kills you—and Joab makes sure to finish him off when he finds him caught by his hair in the oak. David is, memorably, devastated by the news of his son’s death, at this point ceasing to be a political animal and overwhelmed by his instincts a father. Joab, returning from the battlefield, roundly rebukes him with a threat, ordering him to put aside his grief and go out to speak words of encouragement to the troops, who seem about to disperse: “For by the Lord I have sworn, if you go not out, that not a man shall spend the night with you, and this will be a greater evil for you than any evil that has befallen you from your youth until now” (2 Sam. 19.8).

The two men have undergone decades of hardship and dangers together, on the battlefield and in the court, but now the relation of power between them is painfully reversed.

The uneasiness of power. Ranuce-Ernest IV is a virtually absolute monarch, with no evident constitutional constraints and a weak political opposition held to be subversive and persisting more or less underground.

But his exercise of absolute authority is unsettlingly troubled by two doubts: is the authority in practical terms absolute, or are there people in the kingdom, such as the Duchess of Sanseverina, who might undermine that authority? And, given Parma’s standing as a puny state, how does the power of the prince measure up to that of monarchs in grander realms?

Stendhal translates these insecurities into lively satiric comedy. The prince has a large portrait of Louis XIV hanging in his chambers and habitually tries to strike the pose, the facial expression, the regal manner of the roi soleil.

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The discerning eye of the Duchess of Sanseverina takes all this in and is alert to its ridiculous aspect: “The Duchess found that at certain moments the imitation of Louis XIV was a bit too pronounced—for example, in his manner of smiling benignly while all the while tossing back his head” (125).

The prince has all the political power, but the duchess has the greater power of confident poise and subtle intelligence. This contrast is played out in the brilliant scene that begins Part II of the novel, when Gina, whom the prince expects to see dissolved in tears, imploring him to save Fabrice, arrives at the palace buoyant and radiant, in her travel clothes, announcing that she is about to leave his kingdom forever. The potentate of Parma is reduced to a repeated splutter—“Comment, comment,” “What? What?”—and is altogether nonplussed by the duchess but also compelled to admire her and to tell himself what a grand thing it would be to make her his mistress.

Much the same confrontation, with a somewhat related reversal of positions of power, is enacted in Gina’s last encounter with Ranuce-Ernest IV’s son, who assumes the throne after his father’s assassination. The young prince has promised Gina that he will free Fabrice, in prison a second time and again in danger of being poisoned, if she will make a solemn vow to yield to him once Fabrice’s safety is assured.When she arrives at the palace, once again in traveling clothes, the prince first proposes that she enjoy all the privileges of becoming his royal consort and ends by compelling her to fulfill her vow. (People have told him that once a woman submits to you, she will be forever bound to you as your mistress.) In one of the most amusing elisions of a sexual act in the nineteenth-century novel, he makes his final demand at three minutes before 10:00 p.m., and “[a]t 10:30, the Duchess climbed into her carriage and left for Bologna” (468). If we allow time for the two to make their way to the royal bedchamber and for Gina to divest herself of whatever of her no doubt layered garments is strictly necessary in order to perform the act, and then to put them on again, the prince’s longed-for consummation will have taken no more than a few minutes, and having exerted his power over Gina, he is left defeated in his conquest and powerless to prevent her from leaving Parma forever.

The signal reversal of power in the David story also turns on a sexual act. David, having risen to the throne largely through military prowess and having endured many perils during his time in the badlands, has conquered Jerusalem and made it the seat of his monarchy. At this point, he becomes a The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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sedentary ruler in the strict etymological sense of the term: “And it happened at the turn of the year, at the time the kings sally forth, that David sent out Joab and his servants and all Israel, and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. And David was sitting in Jerusalem” (2 Sam. 11.1).

First he is sitting, then lying down for his siesta, then awakening (perhaps even in an after-sleep condition of physical arousal), and before long, lying in the sexual sense. Men in power, ancient and modern, need agents to carry out their designs, something like a governmental bureaucracy, which David, ensconced in his new capital city, appears to have. The paired terms “send” and “messenger” appear again and again in this pivotal story: the toand-fro-ing of all the messengers makes it virtually impossible for David to keep secret the act he urgently wants to conceal or to have his orders implemented precisely as he has dictated. Everything in his long trajectory as commander and then king begins to unravel in this episode. He will immediately be castigated—in fact, really cursed—by Nathan the prophet, and his royal house will be torn apart, the trigger to the chain of disasters being another sexual transgression: the rape of his daughter Tamar by her half-brother Amnon.

It is worth pondering the question of power in the relationship between Bathsheba and David. At first glance, it seems that she is purely passive: he sees her bathing, summons her to his bed, and she unquestioningly submits.The only words ascribed to her in the entire story are “I am pregnant” (2 Sam. 11.5).

Here, there is no possibility of the exercise of personal magnetism, as in Gina’s case. David sees a beautiful naked body from a distance, wants to enjoy it, and gives the command so that he can consummate his desire. But we do not know whether Bathsheba complies simply because the king’s command can brook no resistance. She does, after all, emerge from this dubious affair as one of David’s wives. She then disappears from the narrative until many years later, when an aged, enfeebled David is lying on what will soon be his deathbed. At that point, however, she shows remarkable astuteness in manipulating the evidently befuddled king to assure the succession of her son to the throne, and after David’s death, she subtly contrives matters so that Solomon feels impelled to execute his rival Adonijah. Perhaps this shrewdness is a quality she has acquired during her years in the court, but it leads one to wonder whether her initial response to David’s lust might have been not out of passivity but from calculation—whether the seemingly The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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powerless soldier’s wife might have understood that sexual submission to the king could lead to gaining access to power in the court. And this whole affair, as I have noted, inaugurates the decline of David’s power.

The common denominator between these two stories is the overconfidence of power. If troops march and heads fall and courtiers bow and scrape at your bidding, you may slip into the illusion that you can always act with impunity. Even in the democratic United States, there have been many egregious instances of men in positions of power who have behaved precisely in this manner. David imagines that he can simply have the wife of one of his loyal fighting men at his beck and call. The result is a botched effort at a cover-up, his murder of the husband (and many others perish with Uriah through Joab’s pragmatic revising of David’s instructions), and a chain of disasters in the royal house.The Prince of Parma thinks he can coolly renege on his pledge to free Fabrice, quite failing to recognize that the Duchess of Sanseverina can be as implacable as she is charming, and the consequence is his death. Both these writers understand that even purportedly absolute power is not entirely absolute and that a ruler may overstep his mandate and find himself confronted by an adversary he had not anticipated or entangled in moral and social snares he had not reckoned with. (The masculine pronoun is appropriate here not only because the monarchs in both narratives are men but also because they exhibit a certain overweening male confidence, which makes them especially vulnerable to the shrewdness of women.)

The ambiguity of power. The novelistic imagination manifested in both these stories enables us to see that power, however much it is a goal aspired to, exacts a price from its possessor and is also prone to slippage.

One principal effect of power is that it isolates the person who has attained it. David, before he is king, is the leader of a band of fighting men, its core recruited as a kind of family militia from his hometown of Bethlehem, and he no doubt enjoys a degree of camaraderie with them. He is also surrounded by admiring young women who celebrate his feats in song and dance. And he has an intimate friendship with Jonathan, though in keeping with David’s calculating political posture, the indications are that all the expressions of spontaneous affection come from Jonathan’s side. Once he settles in as king in Jerusalem, David seems alone—indeed, he is alone on his couch when he sees Bathsheba bathing, while his old companions at arms are out on the field, and no intimates or counselors surround him, only courtiers ready The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to do his bidding. Stendhal’s narrator, reporting his character’s thoughts in free indirect style, reminds us that the Prince of Parma, too, is very much alone. On a certain cold and rainy Thursday, he hears the rattle of carriages on their way to the Duchess of Sanseverina’s soiree: “He felt an impulse of impatience: others enjoy themselves, and he, the sovereign prince, the absolute master, who should enjoy himself more than anyone in the world, knows only boredom” (140). Not long after, he confides this predicament to Mosca: Yes, my dear friend, let us agree, the pleasures and care of the happiest ambition, even of power without limit, are nothing in comparison with the intimate happiness that is granted by a relationship of tenderness and love. I am a man before I am a prince, and when I have the good fortune to love, my mistress turns to the man and not to the prince. (155)

These words have a special emotional edge because the prince is addressing the person whose mistress is the Duchess of Sanseverina, the very woman he desires.

The split between the man and the prince makes itself felt in the David story in a different way. As I have observed, through the first half of the story, we are denied any knowledge of David the man as against David the military hero and political agent. All this changes upon the death of the baby boy to whom Bathsheba gives birth. David’s words to his courtiers, his very first speech that could have no possible political motive, are a wrenching recognition of his own mortality: “And now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I am going to him and he will not come back to me” (2 Sam. 12.23). Much of the subsequent narrative will turn on David as father rather than on David as king and on the conflict between the two roles. That is precisely the issue in his clash with Joab after Absalom’s death: Joab demands that he act as a king and commander, for whom the elimination of Absalom was an urgent political necessity; David, wracked by the loss of his son, even a son from whom he had been estranged and who usurped his throne, cannot set aside his paternal feelings, cannot see himself in relation to Absalom except as a father, just as the Prince of Parma imagines that a mistress must turn to him as a man, not as a prince. The difference between the two, of course, is that the conflict within David is dead serious, making him a tragic hero, and it follows him till his last days, whereas the prince’s notion of being a man rather than a prince is fleeting, and he remains an essentially satiric figure.

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Power, both these writers see, takes a toll in the inner life of its wielder.

At the same time, as I noted earlier in a different connection, power is inherently unstable and may slip away for one reason or another. In the case of David, the slippage occurs because in the hardball game of politics, he yields to the imperatives of his private self. At the very end of his story, he is helpless before the machinations of Nathan and Bathsheba because of the painful decline of body and mind in old age, a representation of the sad end of a life that is unique in ancient literature. In the case of the two princes of Parma, the slippage occurs because they make the mistake of provoking a woman who has the inner resources to outmaneuver them. It is deeply instructive in this regard that Stendhal conveys Gina’s state of mind after she has determined to have the prince murdered, precisely as a reversal of positions of power: From that moment, a kind of gaiety re-emerged in the character of the Duchess. Before the fatal resolution, in each turn her mind took, in each new thing she saw, she had a sense of her inferiority in relation to the Prince, of her weakness and her gullibility; the Prince, in her view, had cravenly cheated her, and Count Mosca, by virtue of his courtier’s impulse, however innocently, had seconded the Prince. From the moment vengeance was resolved, she felt her power, each turn of her mind made her happy. (372)

One of the most rewarding achievements of these two consummate practitioners of political fiction is their ability to imagine the political realm not as a fixed hierarchical structure but as a system in which institutional constraints are sometimes loosened by the pressures of individual personality, with vested power on occasion exhibiting a surprising fluidity.

Politics and character. There is some room for dispute about the connection between these two terms. One great novelist,Tolstoy, famously argued in War and Peace that the determination of historical events by powerful leaders, whether generals or emperors, was illusory, but this remains, I think, a minority opinion among novelists, given the bias of the very genre in which they work toward representing the distinctive force of individual character. And even a cursory glance at the political actions of our day—of, say, George W. Bush,Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump—leads one to conclude that the propensities and limitations and personal quirks of national leaders often have far-reaching consequences.

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The study in contrasts between David and Saul is especially instructive in this regard. (It also argues against the view maintained by many biblical scholars, on shaky philological grounds, since the 1920s that the so-called Rise of David is an independent narrative, essentially separable from what follows.) Saul, though initially chosen by the prophet Samuel, perhaps chiefly because he is head and shoulders taller than all the people—it has been observed that chief executive officers are often rather tall men—appears progressively unfit for kingship. From the very beginning of his narrative, he is seen as someone seeking knowledge that he is incapable of attaining on his own. In the first episode of his story, he is looking for his father’s asses, and, despairing of finding them, is prepared to go home. He needs his servant’s guidance to learn that there is a man of God in the vicinity who can help him, and, again, he needs his servant’s offer of a quarter-shekel of silver so that he has something to pay the prophet for his divinatory services.

This pattern of seeking information or guidance out of ignorance will be reiterated several times in Saul’s story. On the last day of his life, before the fatal battle with the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, Saul is desperate to find out what awaits him on the morrow. He consults an oracle, prophets, dream interpreters, and divinatory devices, but gets nowhere. Finally, he turns to a necromancer, a practitioner of the very occult art he himself has made a capital crime. The dire knowledge he finally attains from the ghost of Samuel is a death sentence for him and his sons: “Tomorrow—you and your sons are with me” (1 Sam. 28.16).

David, on the other hand, keeps close counsel but appears to have a savvy sense of what is going on around him and what he needs to do in order to attain his political ends and, when his life is threatened, to preserve it. (In the latter connection, he even has a mole in Saul’s court in the person of Jonathan, as he will have a clever mole in Absalom’s court in Hushi.) A kind of theurgic manifestation of his access to knowledge is his possession, when he and his followers are in flight from Saul, of the Urim and Thummim, the divinatory apparatus that conveys to him direct guidance from God as to what course he should follow. He is, in sum, a man who has the Mosca-like penetration to reach the keys of power. But like much else in the story, all this changes after the pivotal Bathsheba episode. When the woman from Tekoa, sent by Joab to persuade David to countenance the return of the fugitive Absalom to Jerusalem (it proves to be a grave miscalculation), says The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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to him, “And my lord is wise, as with the wisdom of a messenger of God, to know everything in the land” (2 Sam. 14.20), we are aware, as probably she is, that virtually the opposite is now true. Penetrating wisdom may be necessary to acquire power, but it is not guaranteed for a lifetime, and one of the remarkable aspects of the David story is that it shrewdly follows the changes in his character over a long life. At the very end, he has become altogether unwitting, reduced to an object of manipulation by Nathan and Bathsheba.

It is equally evident in Charterhouse that political events are determined by the distinctive character of the individual players in the game. The self-defeating acts of both princes of Parma flow from their narcissism and their insecurities, compounded in the younger prince by callowness and inexperience. Mosca is in effect the supreme power in the kingdom by virtue of his subtle, worldly intelligence, his ability to calculate the suitable means to attain any given end (except for his lapse in deleting that crucial sentence from Prince Ranuce-Ernest’s pledge to the duchess).

And it is a brilliant move on Stendhal’s part that he pairs his Machiavellian minister with a woman who is the very opposite, someone who gets what she wants not through calculation but through her natural gift for improvisation and the fierce resolve of her character. As the narrator observes when she determines to avenge herself of the prince, “There were two elements in the character of the Duchess: what she had wanted once she wanted always; she never reconsidered that which she had decided” (371).

The very end of the novel is notoriously huddled. Stendhal, perhaps exhausted by his fifty-two days of breakneck dictation, in a few swift sentences kills off the child born to Fabice and Clélia, then Clélia, then Fabrice, then Gina. According to the assumptions of the somewhat improbable romantic plot, no one can survive the loss of the one he or she unconditionally loves.

But the concluding sentences of the novel return us to the political story, to Mosca, who even after the loss of Gina continues to prosper through his unswerving political acumen, and to the prince, who also prospers, surely with Mosca’s help, but in a report of success that is not without a hint of irony: “The prisons in Parma were empty, the Count immensely rich, Ernest V adored by his subjects, who likened his government to that of the grand dukes of Tuscany” (482).

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Fiction, as has often been observed, enjoys privileged access to the inner life of its characters, to their motives, their ambitions, and their selfdeceptions, deploying all the technical means available to it from interior monologue and narrated monologue (i.e., free indirect style) to analysis and revelatory dialogue, act, and gesture.When focused on the world of politics, it can provide illuminating insights into how individual character strives for power and how power affects character. The true novelist, Henry James said, is someone on whom nothing is lost. It seems remarkable that a writer exercising this sort of subtle observation should have emerged in ancient Israel almost three millennia ago, at a time when prose narrative was scarcely evident elsewhere, though it is less surprising that a kindred intelligence should have been active in France in the wake of the Enlightenment.The two writers differ drastically in tone, sensibility, and narrative strategies, yet they both triumphantly demonstrate that fiction can be a supple instrument for encompassing the contradictions and the ambiguities and the sheer brutality of life in the political realm.

Robert Alter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of numerous books on the European and American novel, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His English translation of the Hebrew Bible will appear in September 2018.University of Toronto Press

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Political Fiction, Anonymous and ­Pseudonymous (A Response to ­Robert Alter) Herbert Marks I

In traditional Jewish homiletics, one strategy often adopted by the darshan or expositor was to select two texts as remote from each other as possible and, by a series of deft interpretative moves, to demonstrate their deep affinity.

It is in something of this spirit, recalling the rabbinic adage that in scripture there is neither early nor late, that Robert Alter has traced for us the surprising parallels between the David story and The Charterhouse of Parma. In responding to his paper, I shall try to explore a little further his intermillennial pairing, taking as guide the two words of his title, “political” and “fiction,” but turning them around and, since the political has already received generous treatment, concentrating on the complementary term, “fiction.”

By “political,” I take it Alter means what Balzac meant when he claimed, in his famous review of the Chartreuse, that Stendhal had “written the modern Prince,” the book Machiavelli would have written had he lived in the nineteenth century. Machiavelli’s political theory rests on the premise that “everyone sees what you seem to be, but few feel what you are” (ch. 18).The wise ruler must therefore know when not to be good.This is what modern philosophers call a consequentialist view of politics: good and evil are only means to an end, which in Machiavelli’s view is power over others. Moreover, for his prince, as for Stendhal’s, the final end of political power is not “the human good,” as it was for Aristotle, but the gratification of personal vanity.

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“Stendhal”), was a substitute for “roman” or “novel,” a term formerly tied to the tradition of chivalric and sentimental romance, which de Stael wished to demote in favor of such realistic themes as vanity, greed, and ambition—in short, political fiction. In its root meaning, however, “fiction” refers to what is made or invented or imagined; hence, it stands rather opposed than allied to the realistic (nonfiction). In this sense, “poetic fiction” is a pleonasm, just as “Scheinpolitik” would be an oxymoron; and fiction and politics (Realpolitik) are at odds with each other, their opposition a potential source of drama for writers who, like the biblical authors and Stendhal, habitually paint by contrasts. In order to understand the place of politics in the David story and the Chartreuse, we have then to define for each its opposite pole: the fiction or fictions against which the reality of politics is set. I shall try to do this in two steps, of which the second will subsume the first, so that in the end, the resemblance between “ancient” and “modern” will be as much structural as thematic.

II

At the most basic level, the tension between politics and fiction that drives the David story is reflected in the abstract shape of the plot. If we ignore for the moment scholarly debates about the history of composition, its outline is deceptively simple: two curves—one rising, one falling—joined in a classic arch or parabola.We are given an initial version of the pattern in the career of Saul, whose decline following his anointing intersects with David’s ascent. What makes the David story distinctive is that its two movements belong to different domains. During the initial rise, the emphasis is public or political; during the decline that follows, it is personal or psychological.

Taken together, the two halves form a tale of metamorphosis, as the shrewd and ruthless strong man of the early narrative, who conceals his true thoughts following the death of Saul and deflects suspicion with his magnificent elegy, becomes the suffering, impotent father of the Court History, reduced to a pathetic stammer following the death of his beloved son.

It is no accident that the Machiavellian figure Alter describes so well—the calculating master of disguises—is drawn exclusively from the first half of the story, the account of the rise. (The one exception, the mission of Hushai and Zadok during Absalom’s revolt, in fact confirms the pattern, as I’ll explain when we come to our second level.) Beginning with the Bathsheba The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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affair, by contrast, David’s actions are no longer sly so much as inept, a pitiful string of false steps and misjudgments. He neglects duties, bungles intrigues, misreads intentions, mistakes friends and enemies, lets himself be gulled, and in the end precipitates a civil war by gratuitously insulting his would-be supporters in the North. Meanwhile, the Machiavellian role devolves on his intimates—Joab, Nathan, Bathsheba, the panderer Jonadab, and, above all, Absalom, who puts on his father’s ruthlessness and cunning, winning the people’s favor by public flattery, like young David himself, or, in a more grisly instance, using his sister’s rape by their half brother Amnon as a pretext to assassinate the one sibling who stands between him and the succession. The crucial point about this second movement, however, is that David’s failures of political judgment are accompanied by the revelation of a new emotional depth and vulnerability, human qualities that seemed lacking in the ambitious upstart and wily courtier.

It is no accident that this shift in David’s character corresponds to what I, like a majority of biblical scholars, consider a compositional seam between the story of David’s rise and the Court History. On this question, however, as on the background of the biblical text more generally, Robert Alter and I have long had an amicable disagreement. Put briefly, where I tend to side with recent European scholarship, which stresses redactional layers, incremental accretion, and relatively late dating, and reads Samuel like much of the Pentateuch as political allegory, in which issues and conflicts of urgent concern to later authors have been projected backward into a remote and largely fictitious past, Alter, like many North American scholars, posits a more unified composition and a date closer to the “actual events”—events to which, it is assumed, the text provides a reliable witness. The argument, like most arguments about composition history, depends on a highly detailed analysis of the text, but the idea that the account of David’s rise to power, which constitutes the first half of the David story, was once independent of the Court History that follows is based, I would maintain, not on “shaky philological grounds” but on the observation, meticulously documented, that the two compositions, beyond their obvious differences of emphasis and characterization, reflect quite different ideological and political biases. Indeed, divergent networks of allusion suggest that the Court History is not only secondary to David’s rise in order of composition; it is, in ideological terms, its correction or antithetical completion. But no matter how we describe its The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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genesis, in its final form, the David story evinces what Paul Ricoeur would call a homology between narrative structure and kerygmatic function. Like his literary progeny, from the Jesus of the Gospels to Shakespeare’s Lear, Balzac’s Goriot, and Faulkner’s Sutpen, David attains his greatest stature and universality through his loss of power—through weakness, failure, and suffering.

In the Chartreuse, politics is defined by the Lilliputian spectacle of the court of Parma, contrived as a satirical portrait of French society under the Restoration. Stendhal’s own political views, despite his liberal affiliations, defy categorization. A disciple of Rousseau in the dress of Helvétius, to his early readers he seemed a throwback to the philosophes of the eighteenth century, while sixty years later, his cult of energy made him seem a prophetic forerunner of Nietzsche and Barrès. “I love the common people and detest their oppressors,” he wrote in his autobiographical Vie de Henry Brulard, “but for me to actually live among the people would be an incessant torture” (Oeuvres intimes 2.686). This ambivalence is reflected in his greatest novel, which heightens our sense of the political by promoting a view of fulfillment that is indifferent to it. Like the opera buffa he loved, with its oscillation between comic recitative and lyric irony, the Chartreuse is defined by its oppositions: France and Italy; reason and passion; vanity and sincerity; engagement and flight; culture and nature—each pair intersecting at a slightly different angle with the axis of the plot, which has ambition as one pole and love, or la chasse au bonheur, as the other. It is the prince who gives expression to the Davidic tension in its simplest form when he professes to his minister, “I am a man before I am a prince” (Romans et nouvelles 2.155), but his actions belie his words, and the petty vanity that drives his obsession with power makes him at best a caricature of the Machiavellian ruler. By contrast, the three characters who dominate the novel are all endowed by their author with an intelligence as subtle and complex as his own.

Count Mosca, “the most skillful man and the greatest politician Italy has produced in centuries,” as even his mistress concedes (290), is arguably the fullest embodiment in modern literature of the political mind in all its complexity. But though he admits no principles beyond ­self-interest, he is also, as a projection of the author’s ideal self-image, surprisingly vulnerable. A model of resoluteness in the political arena, he first enters the novel in the least dignified role in the repertoire of Italian comedy, the The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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middle-aged man in love, “timid with powdered hair that without it would be gray” (117), as he has the wit to recognize—even as he recognizes that the unexpected emotions that have brought on this timidity have given him a renewed lease on life. It is in fact Mosca’s willingness to renounce his position at a word from Gina and to commit himself to a life of happy obscurity that humanizes him and wins him our affection. Like David, he is great by virtue not of his skill but of his weakness.

The woman who transforms him, Fabrice’s supposed aunt la Sanseverina, is Mosca’s polar counterpart. If the count is reason humanized or softened by impulse, Gina is impulse stiffened and made deadly by reason. Though as proficient as he at court intrigue and as capable of playing a part, she is fundamentally indifferent to power, position, and wealth. She is as happy following the defeated army on a baggage cart or living penniless in a fourth-floor walkup as ruling over the court of Parma, the “entrancing game” she condescends to play for amusement. She is Stendhal’s answer to Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien: an actor fully at one with the role she is playing. Her greatest triumph of power diplomacy—compelling the prince to absolve Fabrice of the murder of Giletti (an actor by profession)—is not studied but improvised on the spot. Her threat to leave Parma is not acting but impulse: “her behavior,” as the count says on the occasion of a different crisis, “is unforeseen, even by herself ” (153). Such impulsiveness is a force of nature, capable when unleashed of literally flooding the city of Parma and overturning the entire political order—or it would be, were it not for the sangfroid of the count, who manages to restore order at the cost of a few republican lives.The vengeance she eventually orchestrates may be even more lethal and underhanded than the prince’s treachery, but the prince, as a politician, acts from vanity, whereas Gina acts from pride. For Stendhal, her espagnolisme is at the opposite extreme from political expediency.

The most dramatic challenge to the political comes, of course, from Fabrice, whose choice of solitary imprisonment in the Farnese tower sets the entire theater of politics at naught. Fabrice is the paradigmatic nineteenthcentury hero, alienated from a society that values power and wealth rather than happiness or the “promise of happiness” (Stendhal’s anti-Kantian definition of beauty). A changeling, none of whose various adopted names is truly his own, he is constantly evolving and dissolving with the mobility of a figure in a dream. He is at once Italian and French, aristocratic and plebeian, virile The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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and feminine, Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty. The love for which he waits unawares crystallizes only when he enters the cloister of the prison.

Fabrice is not without political talents of his own; Mosca himself admires the seeming artlessness with which he negotiates his ironic elevation to archbishop of Parma. But even amid the hypocrisy and corruption of the world, he remains somehow detached, protected by an essential innocence, which appears in his spontaneity no less than his credulity (his faith in omens and his indulgence in prayer) and the ease with which he relinquishes control, sleeping through the battle of Waterloo, for example, or dozing off in the middle of his escape from the tower—moments of lethargy worthy of the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers. In politics, it is the rule that every act must be governed by its end. In love, however, where the end is by definition elusive, what matters is the pursuit. Once Fabrice succeeds in entering the hidden garden and possessing Clélia, Stendhal loses interest. But even in pursuit, it is hard to see Fabrice as having a clear object. Most of his attention is taken up with means of expression: the manipulation of the physical setting, the devising and deciphering of codes, the close interpretation of the least response. And Clélia herself is almost a mirage—pale, remote, impassive (ultimately invisible in the darkness)—her beauty at the furthest remove from the radiant, full-blooded animation of the duchess, her rival.

The formless vision of love that dominates the second half of the Chartreuse has its counterpart in the formless vision of war that commands its opening. The significance of these opening chapters goes beyond their comic portrayal of Fabrice. The battlefield at Waterloo, which we witness partly through his eyes, is a kind of primal chaos. Generals and privates, equally lost, wander or stampede through flooded fields, where even the wet ground, in an image of cosmic decreation, explodes into black fragments (64). It is a world of flounderings, of thefts and desertions, smoke and mire, in which men and animals are indistinguishable; in which soldiers seem, to our youthful observer, to “follow one another like sheep” (75). Mad as it is, such lawlessness is a form of freedom, which is why Fabrice at Waterloo experiences the same sense of happiness he will feel when he falls in love.

In escaping the hierarchical worlds of family and court, in ignoring the rules of engagement, whether by running away to war or adoring Clélia, Fabrice succeeds in entering the world of fiction. And allowing for the moderation that comes with experience, the same appetite for the boundlessness of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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fiction distinguishes Gina and Mosca. Mosca relishes the foolish timidity he feels during his first courtship of Gina, as he relishes the foolish bravery he feels risking his life to put down Ferrante’s revolution, because they give him the illusion of youthful freedom; Gina’s entire career is an attempt to recapture a paradise lost, to recreate the feverish happiness of her early years in Milan—that legendary time of gaiety and freedom under the loveable Prince Eugene with which the novel begins.

What makes for the great irony of the Waterloo chapters is our knowledge that war is not a fiction, unlike the dream of happiness or love.

We know that those chapters were fashioned as parlor entertainment months before Stendhal conceived his novel, but they are as essential as the opening description of Milan to a work so engaged with politics, for it is Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo that allows Parma to exist. Metaphysically, the theater of politics is the little world suspended between the infernal chaos of war and the paradisal boundlessness of love. Psychologically, it stages its worldly spectacles in competition with the twin dreams of memory and hope, of paradise lost and regained. Eliminate the dreams and one is left with a static emptiness, the hollow triumph of the political in the last line of the novel: “The prisons of Parma were empty, the Count enormously rich, Ernest V adored by his subjects.” In the end, Mosca survives alone in a world rife with dissembling but devoid of animating fictions (love, liberty, authenticity). It is not only the prisons that are empty.

III

I want to move now, more briefly, to what we may call the second level, where new terms reorient the play of contrasts. So far, we have seen how the David story redefines reality, shifting it away from politics by opposing the public and the private. We have yet to see how it opposes politics and fiction, which in the Chartreuse define the axis of the plot. The Bible, too, has its antithetical fiction, its equivalent of the chasse au bonheur, but it is opposed as much to private feeling as to political ambition. In place of Stendhal’s apolitical paradise, his Milan of dreams, it envisages a legendary time, represented in the books that precede the book of Samuel, when a newly liberated Israel acknowledged God as its king. Theocracy originates and is at home in the wilderness, in the years of divinely guided wandering, which the prophets liken to a honeymoon. Once Israel crosses over and takes The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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possession of its inheritance, the honeymoon ends. For a while, the vision of divine kingship survives under a succession of temporary guardians, but the tensions are apparent. Gideon can still remind the people who want to anoint him king that “the Lord shall rule over you” (Judg. 8.23), yet he names his son Abimelech, “my father is king.” In time, it becomes ever clearer that the alternative to a stable political system is anarchy and collapse. As the narrator comments drily in the last verse of Judges, where intimidation, gang rape, and collective fratricide seem to have become the norms: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

Samuel, the book that follows, tries to deal with the implications of this lesson.When the people, hard-pressed by the neighboring kingdoms, clamor for a king of their own so they can be “like all the nations” (1 Sam. 8.5), YHWH, bowing to reality, declares himself willing to abdicate, and Samuel, having delivered a lecture on the rigors of the Machiavellian world they are about to embrace, proceeds at God’s insistence to anoint Saul as Israel’s first king. All this takes place before David appears, but it is crucial to his story.The book opens with a kind of prelude, in which the youthful Samuel, destined to be a “prophet like Moses,” displaces the aging priest Eli, who has sheltered him like a son. Similarly, in the body of the book, the youthful David will displace his adoptive father Saul on the throne of Israel. The difficulty lies in the fact that Saul is the duly anointed king, while David is an obscure upstart, who at one point seems to be running a protection racket in a remote corner of the Judean desert. Thus, his unlikely accession at the expense of Saul’s descendants could be viewed historically as an act of usurpation, or theologically as a sign of divine inconstancy—of an irresolute and ultimately faithless God whose word cannot be trusted.

The theme of divine inconstancy becomes explicit in the pivotal episode of Saul’s rejection, which creates the conditions for David’s rise, as God’s own rejection by Israel created the conditions for a political world in which usurpation is a constant threat. When Samuel underlines the finality of Saul’s rejection by declaring categorically, “the Splendor of Israel will not lie or repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent” (i.e., change his mind; 15.29), he is ignoring God’s own word to the contrary and echoing, ironically if inadvertently, the words of the Gentile prophet Balaam. The narrator knows better: “and the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel” are the last words of the chapter.

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Hebrew nah.am, commonly translated “repent,” connotes more than a change of mind; it hints at an inner conflict (as when, in the prelude to the flood in Genesis, God “repents” that he created man). Repentance takes an even stranger form in the conclusion to the book, where God provokes David into taking a census—an offense against the fiction that it is YHWH, the divine king, who fights for Israel—and then, when he does so, punishes him by unleashing a deadly pestilence. The suggestion of malice is so troubling that a later writer, recounting the episode in Chronicles, ascribes the initial provocation not to God but to Satan. But the point of the original, reinforcing the rejection of Saul, is precisely our inability to comprehend or anticipate God’s acts. Thus, even as the avenging angel is stretching his hand over Jerusalem to destroy it,YHWH, we are told, “repented him of the evil” and spared the city (2 Sam. 24.16). As so often occurs in the Hebrew Bible, the author then presents us with a second stumbling block: for in the very last verses—that is, after God has spared the city—we see David building an altar on what will become the site of the temple and entreating God to spare the land: “So the Lord was intreated […] and the plague was stayed” (24.25).

The puzzle, which turns on the sequence, the apparent reversal of cause and effect, transposes the central dilemma to a different key:it is no longer a matter of politics versus theology but, to adopt a much later terminology, of salvation by works versus salvation by gratuitous or prevenient grace.

The David we see in this final scene belongs to a register we have not yet discussed: he is neither the Machiavellian strongman nor the love-stricken man of sorrows but the exemplary servant of God—a title otherwise reserved (aside from the prophets) for Moses and Joshua. Elsewhere, he may be ruthless, but, in contrast to Saul, he never omits the proper appeal for divine assistance. The oracular machinery that falls mute when consulted by Saul functions faultlessly for David. His successes in the field testify to his skill, but also to the divine guidance he faithfully seeks at each critical juncture: before attacking the Philistines at Keilah, or pursuing the Amalekite raiders, or going up to Hebron to be anointed, or relinquishing Saul’s sons to the Gibeonites, to name a few. “The battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hands” are his words to Goliath (1 Sam. 17.47), and he is still repeating the same idea at the end of the book in his final psalm of thanksgiving, which praises God’s governance. The David of the Court History may have lost his political flair, but he never loses God’s love.

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Even the crucial decision to send Hushai and Zadok back to Jerusalem after Absalom has occupied the city—which many readers take as an example of Davidic cunning—is closely bound to a confession of trust and an appeal for divine assistance: “O Lord, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness,” David prays. “And it came to pass, that when David was come to the top of the mount, where God was worshipped, behold, Hushai the Archite” (2 Sam. 15.31–32). At this second level, our questions about David no longer concern the limits of his political ambition but rather the reason for God’s special favor. Is it his piety, or is it his capacity to surprise us, his refusal to be consistent, that makes David the “man after God’s own heart” (1 Sam. 13.14)?

For Stendhal, transcendent fictions were not an option: as he put it in the celebrated phrase envied by Nietzsche, “God’s only excuse is he doesn’t exist.” Though he sometimes treats love as a religious vocation (and Fabrice sacrifices sincerely on both altars), the third term in the Chartreuse, subsuming the tension between politics and fiction, is not the voice of God but the urbane voice of the author, at once delicate and vigorous, nostalgic and ironic, as free of pretensions as of adjectives.That voice not only unifies what, transposed to another key, would be an ill-sorted pastiche of political anecdote, lyrical effusion, gossip, romance, and adolescent thriller; it turns the duel between court and tower, engagement and withdrawal, into a dance or diversion. It does so by constantly shifting registers—from amorist to analyst, from sensibility to wit—with an unpredictable, improvisatory abandon. Stendhal invents the moods and responses of his characters, their inner dialogue no less than their actions, without a fixed plan.Their passions are his passions, and they elicit a corresponding complicity in the reader.

Our willingness to believe in the illusion, knowing it is an illusion, is the image of theirs.We feel while reading him that we are ourselves “living with the hero and creating with the author,” as Jean Prévost put it in La Création chez Stendhal. Stendhal’s identification with his characters at the moment of writing is so intense in part because each of them has been projected from his own experiences and traits. It is significant that the Chartreuse begins at the very point where the autobiographical confession undertaken in Henry Brulard breaks off: the author’s arrival in Milan in the wake of Napoleon and the beginning of his hopeless love for Angela Pietragrua. Too painful to recount directly, Stendhal transposes his memories, as he had transposed The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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his political critique, seeing himself in Lieutenant Robert, the true father of Fabrice, whom Stendhal treats throughout the novel with the indulgence and affection of the loving father he never had. Mosca’s lucidity, Gina’s impulsiveness, Fabrice’s alienation and reclusiveness—all are his own.

But if writing for Stendhal is self-recollection, it is also self-display and self-mockery. The pages of his Souvenirs d’égotism, composed in 1832 but left unpublished, depict a master of disguises, capable of deceiving even his closest friends. Authenticity is simply one of the fictions, and hypocrisy (etymologically, the “playing of roles”) is its faithful shadow. As Machiavelli said, one is never what one seems; it is not the author who writes, but a fictional author, a pseudonym: “Henry Brulard” or “Stendhal.” Pseudonyms can be a disguise, as they are for Fabrice, who in the novel assumes a succession of false names, beginning at birth with the name “del Dongo.” But for Stendhal, who assumed over 200 names in the course of his life, they seem to be more—to reflect a discomfort with the very notion of discrete identity.

Fifteen months after dictating the Chartreuse, he jotted down a fanciful wish list of personal endowments under the title “Les Privilèges.” Among them was the ability, four times a year, for the privilégié “to change himself into any man he chooses; and […] to occupy for an unlimited time two bodies at once” (Oeuvres intimes 2.984). In a remarkable essay on Stendhal, Paul Valéry speculated that the need to dissemble, the playing of roles and the relentless irony, expressed a horror of being merely one among others—a horror “d’être semblable” (Oeuvres 1.563) To dissemble is to refuse to be like those around one, to preserve the possibility of future transformations. Like the pseudonym “Stendhal,” the elusive mobility of the narrator’s voice is a defense against definition.

To summarize, both the David story and the Chartreuse give salience to a Machiavellian vision of politics by juxtaposing it to something more compelling. Their countervailing fictions, both sublime expressions of irrational impulsiveness, are of different orders: a belief, on the one hand, in divine governance and, on the other, in the pursuit of happiness. This thematic difference then corresponds to a more abstract distinction between anonymous writing, objectively focused on an incorporate and dramatic figure of the unnamable, and pseudonymous writing, subjectively focused on dramatizations of a fictive dissimilarity or dissemblance.

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The difference is reflected in the endings of the two works. Where the Chartreuse ends with the empty prisons, the book of Samuel ends with a theological enigma. Note, however, that David does not die at the end of Samuel but at the beginning of Kings, where, having surprised us one last time with a show of the old ruthlessness, he is reabsorbed into the larger sacred history as attention shifts to the future of the nation.Thus, beyond the contrast between politics and fiction—between the pragmatic demands of the world and the burden of incommensurability—lies the further contrast between fiction and history. The ultimate fiction of the Chartreuse is that its author is Stendhal. The ultimate fiction of the Bible is that it is not fiction.

Herbert Marks teaches comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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Response to Robert Alter, “Political Fiction” Michael Wood I’d like to pursue a connection that Robert Alter makes early in his lecture and use it to look at some of the implications of his argument and examples.

It has to do with the kind of narrative commentary found in Stendhal and not in the David story, and that Alter thinks, surely rightly, is something that Stendhal “picked up from Fielding.” It is in one of those commentaries

by Fielding, which Alter knows very well, since he wrote an excellent book on that author, that we get a remarkable comic anticipation of one of the governing ideas of his lecture: the idea that “the special purchase that fiction has on politics is through character.”

I’m thinking of Fielding’s “praise of biography” in the chapter introducing Book III of Joseph Andrews. The jokes begin right away, since by “biography,” Fielding means novels: true stories about fictional people as distinct from fantasies about real countries, the sort of thing we usually call history. The latter set includes books with titles like, in Fielding’s instances, “the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, etc.” These historians, Fielding suggests, get the time and place right but almost everything else wrong.They widely differ in the narrative of facts; some ascribing victory to the one, and others to the other party; some representing the same man as a rogue, while others give him a great and honest character; yet all agree in the scene where the fact is supposed to have happened, and where the person, who is both a rogue and an honest man, lived. (146)

“Now with us biographers,” Fielding says, “the case is different; the facts we deliver may be relied on, though we often mistake the age and country wherein they happened” (146). Listing a whole series of characters The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 315–318 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.315

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from Don Quixote, Fielding suggests that while Cervantes may have been wrong to place them in Spain, no one can doubt their actual existence. “The most known instance” of this kind of error, he says, “where the inimitable biographer hath made a notorious blunder,” is in Gil Blas.This novel situates a lamentable doctor (who drains his patients of their blood and fills their veins with water) also in Spain, when anyone “who is the least versed in physical history” knows that “Spain was not the country in which this doctor lived” (146). Fielding evokes further examples of biographical narrative capable of such mistakes—the works of Scarron and Marivaux, the Arabian Nights—and excludes from this category the people he actually calls novelists, “the authors of immense romances, or the modern novel,” who don’t get close enough to the truth even to make mistakes. He then claims that Don Quixote is “more worthy the name of history” than its French successors, because whereas even the best of the latter are confined to a particular period of time, and to a particular nation, the former is the history of the world in general, at least that part which is polished by laws, arts, and sciences; and of that from the time it was first polished to this day; nay, and forwards as long as it shall so remain. (147)

There are two arguments here: one quite traditional, the other mischievous and radical. Let me recall Fielding’s key sentence: “The facts we deliver may be relied on, though we often mistake the age and country wherein they happened” (146).The first argument is about universality and probability, and is entirely faithful to Aristotle’s thinking on the distinction between history and poetry—except that Fielding is saying that poetry is better history than history. The second argument centers on his insistent, mischievous use of the concept of the “mistake.” In one sense, there is no mistake—only what might look like one. Once we relocate the characters in the right country, the truth stands out clearly. In another sense, “mistake” is still the right word, because we have to correct the author’s history, and Fielding doesn’t actually want us to think England, France, and Spain are all the same. That’s what fiction is: a mistake that is and is not a mistake.

And this is why it has, as Alter says, “a special purchase […] on politics.”

Indeed, it is in this sense itself political: it requires us to think about where we are and where we might be. Stendhal’s phrase about the pistol shot in

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the middle of a concert,1 so astutely glossed by Alter, clearly says that guns should not be part of the show if they are not part of the score, but also allows us to distinguish between loud, obvious, and obtrusive talk of politics and the subtle meditations about people and power that occur on almost every page that Stendhal wrote.

When we say we know that “Spain was not the country in which this doctor lived” (146)—the one who borrowed his patients’ blood—of course we know nothing of the kind.What we mean is that we know someone just like him who lives much closer to us. Or we might mean that our doctor is undoubtedly the real one; the Spanish fellow must be a fraud or a copy.

Either way, the thought underlines the analogical, anachronistic element in all reading of fiction, and perhaps in all reading, the recognition of the reality of what never existed.

It’s not that the characters in the David story and in La Chartreuse de Parme are universal types and can be recognized anywhere. On the contrary, our anachronistic reading at its best relies on sound chronologies, on a real awareness of distances of time and place. If in the book of Samuel we have what Alter calls “the first full-length portrait of a Machiavellian prince in literature,” it is not because such princes are everywhere but because they can be found in quite particular historical contexts. And Alter offers us a powerfully attractive way of linking these locations, of cross-referencing insights that have very different sources. As he says, it is, among other things, the “techniques that are characteristic of fiction” that make this cross-referencing possible and illuminating.

In this sense, Alter goes further than Fielding and adds another creative mistake: not only does he offer a reading that mistakes the time and place of two remarkable narratives; he mistakes the historian for a novelist, and the novelist for a historian. That is, he suspends the epistemological questions about fiction—in what way is it not true? What is its relation to the facts?—and replaces them with questions of style and method. I’ll close by recalling, if I may, what Alter himself says about this move in relation to the David story: I would propose that the writer, who might conceivably have lived only a few decades after David, had before him an account, written or oral, of the principal events of David’s reign, but that in order to make compelling sense of them, he felt free to elaborate and improvise and to employ

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techniques […] such as interior monologues […] dialogue where no one besides the two historical personages is present, pointed literary illusion, and the thematic shaping of the narrative through recurring motifs and episodes that mirror each other.

That’s a lot of fiction, yet in the magnificent instances Alter has evoked for us, history only gains from these uses. One can imagine the job done badly, but in the present context, even the epistemological question gets a new look. One would tell lies, not by making “compelling sense,” using Alter’s phrase, but by failing to make such sense, or by making only tilted, programmatic sense. The very idea of lying changes, and we may now understand an epigram of Stendhal’s better than we did before, and perhaps rather differently from the way he did: “Lying: bad in reality, worse in a novel.”2 He may have meant simply that it’s not good to have characters in novels tell lies. But the larger suggestion is appealing too: the reader knows when the novelist is lying.

Michael Wood is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His most recent book is On Empson (2017)

Notes 1 “La politique dans une oeuvre littéraire, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert, quelque chose de grossier et auquel pourtant il n’est pas possible de refuser son attention” (Le Rouge 250).

2 “Mentir, mauvais dans la réalité, plus mauvais dans un roman” (Lucien 316).

Works Cited Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. W W Norton, 1987.

Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir. Gallimard, 2000.

Stendhal, Lucien Leuwen. Vol. 1, Editions du Rocher, 1945.

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HORST FRENZ PRIZE ESSAYS The Horst Frenz Memorial Prize is awarded to the best paper presented by a graduate student at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association.

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“Dialogue in Monologue”: Addressing Darwish in Hebrew Yael Kenan Abstract: Mahmoud Darwish is considered the national Palestinian poet, a symbol of the national struggle against the Israeli occupation. Sami Shalom Chetrit and Almog Behar, two prominent Israeli poets of Arab decent (Chetrit was born in Morocco; Behar’s family is from Iraq), have both written poems directed to Darwish in which they address both his vast poetic corpus and his public and political figure. Close reading these poetic addresses, I discuss Darwish’s own poetry as an intertext in these Hebrew poems, as well as the significance of writing about him and to him in Hebrew and in Israel, specifically by poets of Arab descent. Moreover, this discussion serves as an opportunity to read Hebrew and Arabic together, challenging the clear-cut national distinctions while still acknowledging their pervasiveness and the inevitable questions of power, as the poems do themselves.

Keywords: Israel/Palestine, monolingualism, translation, siege, dialogue In January 2002, Ramallah was besieged by the Israeli army.The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote A State of Siege ( , haalat hisaar), a ˙ ˙˙ book of interconnected poems grappling with life under military siege; they are poems that reflect on violence in its extreme and mundane expressions, on a sense of timelessness under siege, on boredom, and on poetry. In this cycle of poems, Darwish wonders when the siege might end, referring both to this specific siege of Ramallah, of which he became a symbol, and the Israeli occupation in general. But he also wonders about poetry’s capacity to act within and against narrowing borders. He addresses poetry and calls on it to “besiege your siege,” and to a poet (thus, to himself) he says, “be The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 320–327 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.320

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present in absence,” a play on the legal term “present absentees,” designating Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 but remained in what became the State of Israel or returned to it thereafter, much like Darwish did himself (State 149).1 Presence and absence continuously inform Darwish’s relationship to the land in his work.

Darwish’s A State of Siege was translated into Hebrew in 2003 by Muhammad Hamzah Ghanayem, which is likely the language in which it was read by two Jewish-Israeli poets, both of Arab descent—sometimes referred to as Arab-Jews. In the following years, Almog Behar and Sami Shalom Chetrit wrote poems addressing Darwish, evoking this poem and others of his. Both poems express an affinity and admiration to Darwish’s work, which is certainly a transgression from mainstream Israeli discourse, but they are also very aware of the asymmetrical power relations in which they inevitably, and complexly, participate—writing about Darwish and to him as Israeli Jews and in the same language in which the orders to besiege Ramallah were given. Addressing Darwish is therefore an attempt at a poetic dialogue, which constantly contemplates its own ability to be more than a monologue, more than monolingual.

Almog Behar’s poem, “Before the Siege and Thereafter” ( , lifney ha-matzor ve-akharav) was written in 2003 and is a direct response to A State of Siege.2 Behar declares in the poem, “a week ago I read your book A State of Siege and I wanted to speak to you” (96); however, this desire to communicate elicited by reading poetry is soon met with reality—that of exploding buses during the height of the second Intifadha. Behar explains the setting in which he writes: “You wrote in Ramallah of January 2002 about the siege, / And I would want to write in Jerusalem of June 2003 about its end, / Or its non-beginning” (96). This desire to overturn time is reminiscent of Darwish’s own reflections on time in his poem: “In siege, life becomes the time / between remembering life’s beginning / and forgetting its end”; “In siege, time becomes place / fossilized in its eternity. / in siege, place becomes time / that didn’t make it” (State 161).3 Siege obstructs time, obstructs life, and Behar wishes to use poetry to undo its harms, a desire complicated by the violence surrounding his poetic attempt. Behar explains: “I am trying to write a dialogue in monologue” (96), since an actual conversation is not an option given the political circumstances. Poetry is thus

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particularly needed in these turbulent times, but its ability to do anything is also particularly doubtful.

Behar’s family came to Israel from Iraq. He does not know Arabic, his grandfather’s tongue, a fact he laments in many poems declaring that his “Arabic is mute” (with its corollary “And my Hebrew is deaf ”).4 He does feel a close affinity to Arabic culture and tries to restore a relationship to it; it has been obscured by Zionist-nationalist efforts to define Jews and Arabs as ultimate and irrevocable others, discarding long years of shared life and culture. In this, he is part of a group of artists and activists who wish to restore a connection to a past and an identity deemed unacceptable by the establishment. For Behar, as he strives to reconnect to his grandfather, to challenge political divisions, and to read poets such as Darwish, this restoration effort is personal, political, and poetic.The poem thus addresses Darwish as “My brother, Mahmoud Darwish,” and asserts that the two are not, in fact, born enemies. Rather, “we share a vocabulary from ancient Semitic times / And from present times” (Behar 94). They have similar roots, both linguistic and cultural-religious: “Ibrahim our father taught us / That Elohim and Allah are one” (94–95). Behar refers to Abraham in his common Hebrew moniker “our father,” ( , avinu), but in using the Arabic pronunciation “Ibrahim,” the possessive becomes more inclusive; “our” does not refer only to Jews but rather to Jews and Arabs, those who call him “our father” and those who call him “Ibrahim.” Likewise, he uses both the Hebrew and Arabic names for God, similar to the mention of both sets of place names in the poem’s first stanza.

This poetic vision based on a move toward inclusion is thwarted, however, by a far less harmonious reality. Unlike the shared lexicon and holiness, “now our gazes are inverse,” a separation marked by a blindness and deafness to history (Behar 95). Thus, “your shahiid could be a bell ringing in / The last bus stop of my life and my death, / And my generals have not heard of the rhythm of Persia / And the agony of Andalusia” (95). The contemporary generals wish to take the rhythm and music of a shared cultural past and turn them into weapons: “they want to beat / our violins into choppers and our flutes into guns and aim them at you” (95), ironically reversing Isaiah’s comforting prophecy: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Bible, Isa. 2.4).This verse was itself evoked

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by Darwish in his vision of a possible truce, as he wonders, “would fighter jets work as plows?” (State 169).

Darwish’s poem oscillates between the stagnation of siege and a hopefulness that the country or homeland is “on the verge of dawn” (State 121)—a line which functions as a kind of refrain. But until such a day comes, history, Behar explains, has been “unsettled,” and it has created deadly separation: “Who erected concrete and metal walls and set up cameras / And split us into occupiers and occupied / When we are meant to be brothers?” (95).

Behar poses this as a rhetorical question, perhaps to demonstrate the historical contingency involved, but this also raises the issue of responsibility: is it really a question, or are there known answers to this, complex as they may be? In other words, what does paralleling “your shahiid” (or martyr) and “my generals” do to the question of power, made especially urgent by the threat of violence posed by both?

Sami Shalom Chetrit’s poem responds to the question of power differently. Chetrit was born in Morocco and came to Israel with his family as a child. Like Behar, he also addresses Darwish in a poem, titled “A Mural with No Wall” ( , tziyur lelo kir), an allusion to another poem by Darwish, “Mural” ( , gidaariya). Accordingly, the poem’s subtitle states that it is a “Qasiida to Mahmoud Darwish”; qasiida is the ˙ Arabic word for poem ( ) in Hebrew letters (“Mural” 13). Chetrit professes a longstanding desire to write to Darwish: “I’ve wanted to write to you, not / about you” (9), and throughout his 2006 poem, he constantly acknowledges the power dynamics between himself, a Jew in Israel, and the Palestinian Darwish. For example, in a kind of flagellation against himself and the Israeli left, he asserts that “When it comes down to it, I am the murderer / And a thousand petitions against the occupation won’t help me” (9). Chetrit not only acknowledges his responsibility as a member of the privileged group but links it to Darwish’s poetry: “It was me who shot the forsaken horse, alone beside the / house that became my new house,” later referencing the Israeli city of Ashdod where Chetrit grew up, which was established on the ruins of the Palestinian Isdod (9). The forsaken horse is a reference to Darwish’s collection of poems, Why DidYou Leave the Horse Alone? ( , lmaadha tarakta al-hisaan wahiidan). Chetrit repeats ˙ ˙ this move of assuming responsibility while alluding to Darwish’s corpus later

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on: “As in my life I embody your death, /You are suffocated because I breathe, / You are hungry because I eat, / You are bound because I am unfettered, / Write it down, /Your shackles are my wings” (11).The injunction to “write it down” derives from one of Darwish’s most famous poems, “Identity Card,” in which the speaker orders a clerk to register him as an Arab, using the Arabic verb (sagil), meaning to write down in a record.

The allusions to Darwish’s poetry are poetic and political gestures.

While Chetrit claims that his envy of Darwish is not “that of a poet but of an exile” (“Mural” 9), it is clear that these two aspects are intertwined.

Thus, Chetrit describes himself as passing through “the verse-houses of your poems, homeland of the / words” (9), owing to the fact that in Hebrew (and Arabic), a poetic verse is called a house ( , , bayit)—the very same thing Darwish writes about longingly.The semantic field of space, which in this context is inextricably bound with exile and precarious departures, is evident in the mention of the suitcase, a trope used by Darwish.The suitcase is a sign of leaving, or being forced to leave, but it is also what one carries with oneself while away; it marks presence and absence.

Chetrit wants to pick up a suitcase and leave; the departure is different than Darwish’s, but it is one that emanates from it in many ways. However, he also wonders whether this is at all possible: “And how am I to write you words of peace, of coexistence, ta’ayush ya’ani, / Even if I buy myself a suitcase just like yours and travel far away from here, / And I have traveled so, so far away from here, and it does not go away, this thing” (“Mural” 11).

Traveling (as Chetrit explains later in the poem, he has left with his family to the United States) does not suffice, and something lingers, perhaps this sense of accountability mentioned earlier; one man’s departure does not guarantee another’s return. Chetrit wonders how he can write words of peace and coexistence to the Palestinian poet and inserts the Arabic (ta’ayush yaʿani), which appears in Hebrew characters and functions in a complex and destabilizing manner (tziyur 15). First of all, (ya’ani) means “in other words” in Arabic, but it is also used in spoken Hebrew and denotes a kind of incredulity. Furthermore, the possibility of coexistence is questioned through the use of the Arabic (ta’ayush), which, grammatically speaking, is a verb pattern whose meaning is mutuality but here indicates doubting that very option. Language, therefore, fails the poet, performing his query: “And how am I to write”?

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Words and poetry thus stand at the center of all three texts: Darwish’s A State of Siege, Behar’s “Before the Siege and Thereafter,” and Chetrit’s “A Mural with No Wall.” All three poems wonder what poetry can do in the face of political turmoil, and they do so necessarily through words. Much like Darwish oscillates between despair and hope, he also oscillates between faith in the power of poetry and a lack thereof: “I wrote twenty lines about love / and imagined / this siege / has withdrawn twenty meters” (State 151), he writes. On the one hand, this seems to be attesting to the power of words; but, it is only in the imagination that this is possible, whereas the actual siege remains in place. Moreover, even in the imaginary vision, the siege only retreats twenty meters: no walls are broken down, and even the dream is modest, only allowing for a slightly more relaxed breath.

Darwish seems to be asking whether poetry—whether his poems—can affect a political reality of siege and despair; he is asking whether his status as “the poet of the siege” can in some way help bring an end to the siege.

This question is echoed in Almog Behar’s monologic dialogue, which he concludes as follows: “My brother Mahmoud Darwish, how can we turn the heavy gates— / Under which stand suicidal Samsons wishing to bring down upon you and I every pillar and structure— / Into gateways of poetry?” (96).

This final stanza comes right after the statement that “my bible is yours, too / and your Jahilliya poetry is mine too”—a sharing without appropriation, because while what’s mine is yours and vice versa, it is also still mine and yours, respectively. Soon after, the “you” and “I” of the poem unite—“will we succeed in ending the siege”—and their mission, to salvage the gateways of poetry from violence, is political and poetic (96). The “suicidal Samsons” refer to the biblical character who chose to “die with the Philistines” (Judg.

16.30) and toppled over a temple’s pillars, burying under it a large group of Philistines and himself. But in addition to this myth of heroism, whose impact on Hebrew and Jewish cultures is profound, this is also an allusion to Palestinian suicide bombers during the Intifadha, who are here aligned with the biblical myth. Both kinds of violence, the logic goes, threaten the delicate mission to turn heavy gates into gateways of poetry. The poetic project is posited as an open question, which can be read either as a sign of despair—as this is very doubtful—or as an invitation to find a way.

Chetrit likewise has a complex relation to the very words he uses, and in the second half of his long poem, he turns to a different medium: “And The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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so, dear Arab poet, I write to you in Hebrew, / And so, painter of eternal words, I paint for you in Jewish” (“Mural” 11). Importantly, painting does not substitute language, but the two occur in tandem: Darwish is both a poet and a painter, and the poetic “I” both writes and paints. But painting and writing are both impossible, as this is “[a] mural I have no wall for, nor will I ever” (12). This image is revisited at the poem’s closing, prophesizing “that day, which will nevermore come,” in which he can be who he is: “A Jew with no Jews, / An Arab with no Arabs, / A suitcase with no homeland, / A homeland with no suitcase, / A painter with no words, / A poet with no paint, / A wall with no mural, / A mural with no wall” (12). The vision is truly a utopia—it is nonexistence, a nonplace, a nonpoem. It obviates the suitcase and the homeland, the wall and the mural, and any form of demarcation—but only because it will never come.

The final poems of Darwish’s A State of Siege glance upon the verge of dawn in a series of images of Salaam—the Arabic word for peace but also an act of communication, a greeting. Darwish clarifies that this must include an acknowledgment of the suffering of the weak at the hand of the strong, but after that he does see a possible future: “Salaam is two enemies longing, each separately, / to yawn on boredom’s sidewalk / Salaam is two lovers moaning to bathe / in moonlight” (171), writes the poet who said he wanted to be known more than anything as a poet of love, demonstrating that that does not mean not being political. While Darwish lived to see the end of the specific siege on Ramallah, the occupation’s ongoing siege is still in full force. The question of poetry’s ability to act and respond remains open and still calls on us to respond, not only by turning heavy gates into gateways of poetry but using those gateways to bring down the walls that remain.

Yael Kenan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation focuses on national mourning in Israeli and Palestinian literatures after 1948.

Notes 1 Mahmoud Darwish, excerpts from “A State of Siege” from The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah. Copyright © 2007 by Mahmoud Darwish.

Translation copyright © 2007 by Fady Joudah. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www .coppercanyonpress.org.

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2 Behar’s poem has not appeared in English translation and so translations here are my own. Page numbers refer to the Hebrew publication.

3 I have modified the translation here.

4 Behar’s poem “My Arabic Is Mute” appears in Hebrew in the same collection as “Before the Siege and Thereafter,” Behar’s first (Tzima’on Be’erot), p.15. An English translation by Alexandra Berger-Polsky is available online: https://almogbehar .wordpress.com/english/.

Works Cited Behar, Almog. “ lifney ha-matzor ve-akharav [Before the Siege and Thereafter].”

Tzima’on Be’erot [Wells’Thirst], Am Oved, 2008, pp. 94–96.

Chetrit, Sami Shalom. “A Mural with No Wall.” Jews: Poems, translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Dena Shunra, and ShayYeshayahu Sayar, Červená Barva, 2014, pp. 9–14.

———. “tziyur lelo kir [A Mural with No Wall].” Yehudim: Shirim 2003–2007 [Jews: Poems, 2003–2007], Nahar Books, 2008, pp. 13–38.

Darwish, Mahmoud. haalat hisaar [A State of Siege]. Riyaad al-Rayyis, 2002. ˙ ˙˙ ———. A State of Siege. The Butterfly’s Burden: Poems, translated by Joudah, Fady, Copper Canyon, 2007, pp. 120–73.

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Chamoiseau’s Literary Creolization: The Stylistic Potential of a Vernacular Mandy Mazur Abstract: In his novels and theoretical works, Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant favors a process of creolization that entails a creative mixing of languages rather than a reinforcement of linguistic hierarchical binaries. For Glissant, creolization does not produce direct synthesis but resultants, a sort of polylingualism within. Patrick Chamoiseau, Glissant’s protégé, also seeks to bridge the gap between standard and nonstandard language through a stylized hybrid. Intended to be self-glossing, the work of Chamoiseau is infused with Creole in sophisticated, didactic ways so as not to alienate the uninitiated reader.

In this way, Chamoiseau solicits readers’ active participation in his display of the literary beauty and inventiveness of Creole and, thus, ultimately portrays the vernacular not as an inferior form of speech or simply as other but rather as a language capable of being elevated above standard French. Moreover, Chamoiseau upends traditional methods of incorporating nonstandard language in literary texts by treating the standard form of language as if it were a dialect or patois.

Not only does standard French appear in italics, but the intonations of stilted, conventional academic speak are typographically represented in a way that parodies pejorative, humorous representations of the vernacular and other forms of marginalized language. By focusing primarily on diglossic situations involving French and Creole in the works of Chamoiseau, this article explores the ways in which “creolization”—the stylistic representation of a nonstandard form of language—captures the becoming of all languages through its celebration of relational interactions and distinctiveness rather than isolation and hegemony.

Keywords: creolization, diglossia, Patrick Chamoiseau, didacticism, vernacular, French language, stylistics The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 2015 p. 328–335 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.328

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In his novels and theoretical works, Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant favors a process of creolization that entails a creative mixing of languages rather than a reinforcement of linguistic hierarchical binaries.

For Glissant, creolization does not produce direct synthesis but resultants, a sort of polylingualism within. Glissant’s protégé, Martiniquan author Patrick Chamoiseau, also seeks to bridge the gap between standard and nonstandard language through a stylized hybrid. In an interview published in The French Review in 2006, Chamoiseau relays a lyrical piece of advice he gives to students, offering insight into the motivation behind his literary creolization. The following is my translation from the French: In the end, it’s not about incorporating tidbits of Creole here and there but rather about transcending linguistic absolutes.That is to say, whatever language you use, make it explode, breathe life into it, show that it’s available, that it’s open, that it’s not academic, that it vibrates with innovation, that it’s weaved with emotion—this, it seems to me, is the essential part. (Morgan and Chamoiseau 194)1

As this excerpt intimates, Chamoiseau makes use of Martiniquan vernacular to create a literary language that disturbs the norms of standard French and resists facile categorizations. Eschewing classifications bandied about in contemporary Caribbean studies such as creolized French and frenchified Creole, Milan Kundera astutely refers to Chamoiseau’s stylized hybrid as “Chamoisified French” (qtd. in Gauvin 21).While Chamoiseau does indeed incorporate many Creole expressions in his writing, he does not do so with the sole intent of establishing authenticity (a sort of couleur locale).

Rather, Chamoiseau preserves the cadence of spoken language and plays with linguistic borders for aesthetic reasons—most notably, to create an idiolect capable of transcending linguistic absolutes, one that jars French and Creole-speaking readers alike.

In the chapter titled “Vernacular Forms and Wandering Genres” of Wendy Knepper’s critical introduction to Patrick Chamoiseau, Knepper alludes to the existence of this idiolect when she describes Chamoiseau’s free play with French-Creole languages as “utopian to the extent that it projects a nonexistent shared psycho-social reality” (66). Certainly, the transcription of a predominantly oral language produces a distancing effect for Creolophone

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readers, but her claim that French-only speakers must learn another language in order to fully understand Chamoiseau’s creolized use of language negates, I would argue, the motivation behind and implications of such an innovative text. Chamoiseau’s stylized hybrid can also be seen, Knepper maintains, “as an erudite art that requires hermeneutic skills on the part of both French and Creole readers” (66). While there may perhaps be some truth to this claim, insofar as any sophisticated type of writing requires methods of interpretation on the part of the reader, Knepper fails to realize that full comprehension (let us tread lightly with that as a hypothetical concept) may not be the objective and, furthermore, that Chamoiseau may himself be invested in helping readers decrypt this so-called Chamoisified French.

To begin, I would like to briefly consider what it might look like, from a theoretical standpoint, to embrace a text that intentionally resists this full comprehension. In Glissant’s theoretical works, particularly Le Discours antillais and Poétique de la relation, Glissant explicates a theory of opacité in defiance of a universalizing and reductive humanism. The most human objective, he claims, is to accept the irreducible density of the other. Humanity is, therefore, not “the image of man” but rather the ever-growing network of opaque structures. Although each language has its own opaqueness, Glissant’s opacity refers less to the differences between two languages and more to the intralingual particulars of a single language. As a result, this notion of opacity is not a categorical refusal of the other but rather a refusal to consider the other as an easily understandable or communicable transparency.

By resisting full comprehension and encouraging appreciation of textual opacity, Glissant promotes multiple contacts among cultures—that is to say, a relational identity in which dialogic interaction replaces conquest— leading to depth and distinctiveness rather than division and dominance.

The danger with this approach for a writer is, of course, the propensity of verging on the unreadable. In the British tradition, for example, Alan Garner’s Strandloper (1996) proves to be a linguistic tour de force but pushes the limits of comprehensibility with its whimsical phonetic transcriptions.

William, the main character, speaks English in Garner’s native Cheshire dialect (a resurrected rural patois) and then mixes it with an Australian aboriginal language. Although the linguistic playfulness has a poetic effect, the reader may become frustrated unless he or she manages to grasp the gist of passages rather than specific words or phrases. Strandloper at once maps The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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the creative potential of extending the boundaries of the English language and also, ironically, its limits.

Chamoiseau, on the other hand, infuses his work with Creole in sophisticated, didactic ways so as not to alienate the uninitiated reader. As opposed to the hermeticism of Mallarmé, for instance, Chamoiseau seeks to bridge the gap between standard and nonstandard language through a stylized hybrid that is intended to be self-glossing. He solicits readers’ active participation in his display of the literary beauty and inventiveness of Creole and thus ultimately portrays the vernacular not as an inferior form of speech or simply as other but rather as a language capable of being elevated above standard French.

To demonstrate the self-glossing nature of this stylized hybrid, I will identify several of the stylistic techniques Chamoiseau employs to familiarize readers with the Creole terms and expressions incorporated in the narrative.

While Chamoiseau’s more widely read texts such as Solibo Magnifique and Texaco (recipient of the Prix Goncourt in 1992) also exhibit these techniques, I would like to focus on the aesthetic project at work in his lesser studied autobiographical trilogy, Une enfance créole (consisting of the volumes titled Antan d’enfance, Chemin d’école, and Á bout d’enfance). By drawing attention to the text’s self-glossing devices, I aim to demonstrate the way in which Chamoiseau’s literary work functions as a mise en pratique of the theoretical positions on language developed in Éloge de la créolité (1989), his manifesto, coauthored by Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, for creolization. I also hope to demonstrate the feasibility of conducting a formal study of a linguistically heterogeneous text, a practice sorely lacking but with much potential in Caribbean studies these days.

In Chemin d’école, his novel about a colonial subject being schooled in French, Chamoiseau infuses the text with Creole in ways that cleverly familiarize the reader with an unknown lexicon. Occasionally, words in Creole appear in italics with a gloss that either directly precedes or follows.Words in Creole also appear in italics without being glossed. A less conventional tactic, Creole is used at times with neither italicization nor gloss.When this latter tactic is employed, the reader can usually deduce the meaning from contextual clues. An example of the playfully didactic approach Chamoiseau takes in order to make himself understood is his use of the Creole word “ouélélé,” which loosely translates into English as “disaster.” Chamoiseau The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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first uses “ouélélé” with neither italicization nor gloss but in a way that the reader may be able to deduce its meaning from the context (Chemin 58).

In order to confirm or correct readers’ guesses, he then glosses the word thirty pages later with the sentence, “c’était un ouélélé, un conflit” (93): “a conflict, a clash.” Finally, Chamoiseau employs the word again twelve pages later in a way that both tests the perspicacity of his readers and reinforces the new vocabulary word that has just been learned (106).

Chamoiseau encourages contextual guessing (i.e., learning) not only through repetition but also through strategic syntactic positioning. In Antan d’enfance, Chamoiseau takes advantage of the analogous juxtaposition in the phrase “des gens qu’on apprécie, des mounes qu’on déteste” (88) to show readers that the unitalicized Creole “mounes” is equivalent to “gens” or “people.”

While semantic equivalence is achieved through syntax, sociolinguistic equivalence is achieved through typographical consistency.

Another technique Chamoiseau frequently employs to incorporate Creole in his Une enfance créole triology is the use of words in standard French that have implicit Creole inflections. In the beginning of Chemin d’école, for instance, Chamoiseau addresses his dedication to “Petites-personnes” (literally “little people”), first from the Antilles and then from the periphery of any empire (13). Although written in perfect standard French, the term “Petites-personnes” engenders a certain foreignness for the French-speaking reader, since it is, in fact, a French calque of the Creole “ti-moun,” derived from “petit monde,” meaning children. In this way, Chamoiseau constructs his own fanciful language, one that makes us as readers—irrespective of mother tongue—“strangers to ourselves,” to borrow a term from Julia Kristeva. The strangeness made manifest by Chamoiseau’s idiolect is the result of a creative mixing of languages—what I previously referred to as creolization. Such creolization reveals the ongoing human potential to encounter something other and opens space for the creation of new linguistic and cultural expression. It underscores, for Glissant, the promise of polylingualism. Chamoiseau’s literary creolization may be regarded, thus, as a concrete example of Glissant’s largely abstract ideas, particularly in its ability to transcend linguistic absolutes and dismantle perceived hierarchies.

Chamoiseau employs various other techniques that challenge linguistic hierarchies and representational norms. From a theoretical standpoint, Chamoiseau upends traditional methods of incorporating nonstandard The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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language in literary texts by treating the standard form of language as if it were a dialect or patois. Not only does standard French appear in italics, but the intonations of stilted, conventional academic speak are typographically represented in a way that parodies pejorative, humorous representations of the vernacular and other forms of marginalized language. Like many authors dealing with multilingual texts, Chamoiseau makes use of footnotes to gloss sections of his narrative. Unlike these authors, however, Chamoiseau incorporates what I call inverse footnotes, in which the Creole is supposed to function as the clarifying text: Ce rituel, permettez, avait ses apôtres, ses acolytes, ses répondeurs, ses exciteurs, ses pousseurs-repousseurs, ses rabatteurs-de-capron, ses griots éphémères, ses compteurs-de-points-sentis, ses voyeurs-de-bobos, ses partisans-criés, ses pilleurs-d’infortune, ses plus-enragés-passé-personne, ses conseilleurs-en-saignée, ses évaleurs-de-dommages, ses donneurs-dedestins, ses pleureurs-sans-mouchoir, ses gémissants-de-sang, ses inutilesau-fil, et le reste mal défini des innommés en langue française.

Footnote: 1. Permettez-moi de préciser: ses Apiyé-konchonni, Raché-koupé-fannedwèt, Mouch-bobo-senti, Dékalè-pa-anba, I-sinbôt-san-manman, Labous-ou-lavi, Fini-bat-san-batèm, Misérab-dyab, Koko-boloko, Sisi-menm-pri-isi, Sousè-lan-mô, Frisi-pété-doubout, Mandibèlè-salop,Afarel-gragé-rouj, Déchirè-dan-lapèn, Koupèkou-boulou-kou, Rachè-grenn-milé, Fourè-bwa-ba-makak, Dyèp-sal, Krapolad-la-fyèv, Grafiyad-tétanos, Pisa-vyé-fanm, Grokako-anmè, Piman-cho…et tous ceux sur l’existence desquels le grand pape du créole de l’universalité AntillesGuyane ne s’est pas encore prononcé. (Note de l’Omniscient.). (Chemin 127)

Yet again, sociolinguistic equivalence is sought by positioning the vernacular in a way that is comparable to the representation of standard language.

As is made clear from the above citations, the point of the stylized hybrid is not necessarily comprehension in a categorical sense. Rather, the idea is to create a feeling, a sort of double consciousness, a fluidity based on language play—not power structures. In the aforementioned manifesto for creolization, Éloge de la créolité, the critique of dogmatic thought leads to the promotion of opacity and an emphasis on the aesthetic possibilities of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015

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heterogeneous Caribbean writing.There is a notion, however, that creolization cannot be reduced simply to hybridity. There must always be an element of artful unexpectedness, and a large part of this unexpectedness resides in realizing a text’s polysemic potential. For the authors of the manifesto, the polysemy inherent to practices of literary creolization gives rise to a multilingual canvas of allusive and suggestive forces, as well as a relation between multiple intelligences. To simultaneously experience the poetry of many languages is not only to enrich each individual one but also, and perhaps more importantly, to unsettle the commonplace and challenge convention.

That is why Chamoiseau’s core investment in creating a new language, an idiolect forged from an acrolect (Martiniquan French, in this case) and a basilect, his Martiniquan vernacular, is such a revolutionary endeavor. To put it more succinctly, when studying linguistic hybridity in the postcolonial idiom, the vernacular is valorized if aesthetics come before politics and before sociolinguistics. Chamoiseau’s literary creolization does just this. It demonstrates the as-of-yet unexploited aesthetics of Caribbean writing, and, in doing so, captures the becoming of all languages through its celebration of relational interactions and distinctiveness rather than isolation and hegemony.

Mandy Mazur is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her dissertation focuses on disruptions of linguistic convention in French and Francophone literature through both sociolinguistic variation and stylistic transgression. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (2008) and her MA in French Literature from New York University in Paris (2011).

Note 1 The original reads as follows: “Et c’est ce que je dis aux élèves, il ne s’agit pas de mélanger des petits mots créoles, c’est « sortez des absolus linguistiques »—c’est-à-dire, « quelle que soit la langue que vous utilisez, faites-la exploser, habitez-la, montrez qu’elle est disponible, qu’elle est ouverte, qu’elle n’est pas académique, qu’elle tressaille comme ça avec la vision, qu’elle va avec les sentiments »—c’est ça qui me paraît plus essentiel.”

Works Cited Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la créolité.

Gallimard (Presses universitaires créoles), 1989 Chamoiseau, Patrick. Antan d’enfance. 1990. Gallimard (Folio), 2006.

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———. Chemin d’école. 1994.Gallimard (Folio), 2006.

Garner, Alan. Strandloper. Harvill, 1996.

Gauvin, Lise. “Glissements de la langues et poétiques romanesques: Poulin, Ducharme, Chamoiseau.” Littérature, vol. 101, no. 1, 1996, pp. 5–24. Persée, https://doi.org/10.3406/litt.1996.2391.

Glissant, Édouard. Le Discours antillais. Seuil, 1981.

———. Poétique de la relation. Gallimard, 1990.

Knepper, Wendy. Caribbean Studies: Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Mississippi Scholarship Online, https://doi.org/10.14325 /mississippi/9781617031540.001.0001.

Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Fayard, 1988.

Morgan, Janice, and Patrick Chamoiseau. “Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau.”

French Review (Deddington), vol. 80, no. 1, 2006 p. 194.

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