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Passions: A Tangential Offering
Megan Kerr
kerr.megan@gmail.com
(c) 2005 Megan Kerr.
All rights reserved.
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1. I read Derrida's Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation. /Je
lus/ or /Je lis/ will be a difficulty for a French translator to
resolve or to leave open [thus]. The ambiguity of "I read" is my
right as an English writer, but by what right do I write
"Derrida'/s/ Passions: An Oblique Offering"? He wrote none of this
text:
David Wood . . . suggests to me [/m'offre/] that these pages
be entitled "An Oblique Offering." He had even printed it
beforehand on the projected Table of Contents of the complete
manuscript before I had written a line of this text.
Should I ascribe this quotation to (Derrida, "Passions" 12) or to
(Wood, "Passions" 12)? Derrida's only words are in square brackets
which are not his. This is no mere rite: I respond to "response"
without parenthesizing the parentheses. It is not polite to accuse
Derrida of words he did not write, but I raise the question not as
a gesture, from duty or out of politeness, but out of love. This
opposition--love vs. gestures, duty, politeness--is crucial, as is
the object of love: right now, love of Derrida and love of
meaning. May I say I love Derrida, whom I have not met? By what
right? What do I mean by that? I will have to defend my love of
meaning and my love of Derrida in order to say, "I read Derrida's
Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation," but for now, you
know what I mean--I read Derrida's Passions: An Oblique Offering
in translation:
I Read Derrida's Passions:
2. I begin by enacting the ritual of the critical reader with which
this text opens:
Friendship as well as politeness would enjoin a double /duty/:
would it not precisely be to avoid at all cost both the
/language of ritual/ and the /language of duty/? Duplicity,
the being-double of this duty, cannot be added up as a 1 + 1 =
2 or a 1 + 2, but on the contrary hollows itself out in an
infinite abyss. (Passions 7)
Let us leave /politeness/ aside for a moment. There is no such
abyss in friendship, Jacques. How does one escape the abyss? If
indeed, such a double duty were valid, the abyss would be
inescapable, the duty to avoid duty recurring in the familiar
figure of infinite regression, but only if the former putative
duty resembled the latter. One /must/ avoid the language of duty
to engage in friendship worthy of the name, by eschewing duty not
out of duty but out of what supersedes it--a compulsion, yes, but
of a different order. "It is insufficient to say that the 'ought'
[/il faut/] of friendship, like that of politeness, /must not be
on the order of duty./ It must not even take the form of a rule,
and certainly not of a ritual rule" (8). Politeness still to one
side, "insufficient" is not "inaccurate," merely lacking. Rules
supply a lack, in both senses, simultaneously creating and trying
to regulate disobedience. How do we know where in the abyss to
apply the rule and what form it should take, before disobedience
is possible? What /khôra/ is it trying to emulate with its ritual
structure? That it is a hollow copy is certain, trying to find
itself "beyond reproach by playing on appearances just where
intention is in default" (8). /Voilà/ our /khôra/, which is no
mystical arcanum unless we are so lost in the logos as to consider
everything which we cannot formulate to be formless and unformed.
"This very singular impropriety . . . is just what /must be kept
for it/, what /we/ must keep for it" (Derrida/McLeod, /Khôra/ 97).
This /khôra/ can be given a name, indeed, many names, all of which
will fall into the trap of making "one forget the vicariousness of
its own function" (Derrida/Spivak, Of Grammatology 144). As with
mercy and justice,
friendship resembles duty, but it comes from somewhere else,
it belongs to a different order, at the same time it modifies
justice, it at once tempers and strengthens duty, changes it
without changing it, converts it without converting it, yet
while improving it, while exalting it. (Derrida/Venuti/Kerr,
"What" 195)
3. Only if the intention, the friendship, the feeling, the relational
motivation, the titular passions, are missing does "duty" come
into play as an insufficient substitute, the letter of the law.
The "abyss" recurs:
Taken seriously, this hypothesis . . . would make one tremble,
it could also paralyze one at the edge of the abyss, there
where you would be alone, all alone or already caught up in a
struggle with the other, an other who would seek in vain to
hold you back or to push you into the void, to save you or to
lose you. (8)
It /hollows itself out/ only if the relational compulsion is
absent. The "abyss" is anti-relational; if you are "all alone or
already caught up in a struggle with the other" then the abyss
appears, the hollow friendship, for friendship is already absent
and duty fails to wholly supply the lack. The "Passions" of the
title is also a theological intervention that this article
nevertheless lacks, and which "What is a 'Relevant' Translation?"
(Derrida/Venuti) addresses repeatedly. The Passion of Christ
heralded, theologically, the coming of /grace,/ of a love that is
higher than the law--the Spirit and not the Letter: "(literal
circumcision of the flesh versus ideal and interior circumcision
of the heart, Jewish circumcision versus Christian circumcision,
the whole debate surrounding Paul)" (194).
4. Already reading a different text from that written by Derrida, I
am now doing so perversely: the word /duty/, already split into
duty//devoir/, doubles again, for here, I say, there is /no such
duty/, there is /love./ Henceforward, I see each mention of "duty"
as perhaps duty, perhaps love, and choose my interpretation by
relating it back to the countertext that I am reading, which is no
longer Derrida's Passions: An Oblique Offering, which I
nevertheless continue to read simultaneously. The next
disagreement, arising in both, increases these ghost-texts (/res
in potentia/) exponentially.
5. One cannot simply count expotential readings--every word is an
opportunity for a new text to spring up, but I single out a few,
which I divide, though they are concurrent, into two groups: in
the first group, I disagree with /Derrida's meaning/; in the
second, I question issues of translation from French to English.
6. "Derrida's meaning" abounds with presumptions which run contrary
to my poststructuralist literary and linguistic training. I could
say simply "the text," avoiding a confrontation either with
Derrida or with meaning, and this text would be shorter for it.
Instead, I open a can of worms: that the meaning I understand is
the meaning Derrida meant; that the meaning /belongs to/ Derrida;
that I can understand his meaning; that his meaning is carried
from French to English and remains the same meaning. These are the
same worms I faced at the beginning and they will not vanish if I
say coldly "the text" and keep the presumptions secret. Why not?
Because in any case I am about to treat "the text,"
performatively, according to meaning, whether or not I avoid the
word "meaning"; because in order to mount my disagreements, I must
presume that there is meaning running through the text that is not
mine alone, that the words have enough of a meaning to mean
something which is not only my interpretation ("For a writing to
be a writing it must continue to 'act' and to be readable even
when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers
for what he has written" [Derrida/Weber and Mehlman, "Signature"
8]); because I am reading /this/ text /because it is Derrida's and
because I love Derrida/ even though Wood wrote the English words.
I still say "I love Derrida" and I mean that in general I love his
meaning (when I read in English) and both his meaning and words
(when I read in French) and so to defend my love of Derrida I
still have to defend meaning. (I feel no need to defend any notion
of Derrida or his meaning being "unitary"; I don't believe that is
true or that love depends on that.) I will defend meaning, but for
now I will demonstrate it, rely on it in my peformance, as I mount
my disagreements.
7. Nevertheless, the meaning of these words troubles me, from my own
fingers or in the article I read: love for . . . what, duty to . .
. what? I read on, perversely:
An axiom from which it is not necessary to conclude further
that one can only accede to friendship or politeness (for
example, in responding to an invitation, or indeed to the
request or the question of a friend) by transgressing all
rules and going against all duty. (8)
8. I leave aside politeness, still. This doesn't follow; that one
should be motivated by friendship, not duty (this according to my
countertext), does not necessarily require one to transgress any
rules, much less /all/: any rules, because we have not yet entered
the lack which rules will supply; all rules, because we need not
include those against incest and jaywalking. The abstract noun,
"duty," troubles me, for duty cannot be codified. Rather than
singular, it is uncountable. It was never unitary, even before I
split it into duty//devoir/ and then perverted it as "love"--what
of contradictory duties, what do I, my aunt, my mother, my father,
my lover, regard as my duty? If this insistence on duty /in life/
constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy, then
philosophy constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of life. It
is not so; such a word must remain "without a general and
rule-governed response . . . linked specifically each time, to the
occurrence of a decision without rules and without will in the
course of a new test of the undecidable" (16-7). Only by treating
the word "duty" as a homogenous summary of /all duties/, which
insists on an at least /possible/ codification whether realized or
not, can one conclude that if friendship must avoid duty, it must
avoid all duty. Any abstract noun is dangerous until we have asked
"From whom? To whom?" (6) and insisted that it is different
whenever the answers to those questions are different.
9. The abyss is a well of love; it becomes an abyss only when that
love is lacking and the friendship is (temporarily or permanently)
absent; it is love that does not need duty or the language of
duty. Similarly, "morality" requires its emotional antecedent.
Furthermore, would it be moral and responsible to act morally
because one has a /sense/ (the word emphasized above) of duty
and responsibility? Clearly not; it would be too easy and,
precisely, natural, programmed by nature; it is hardly moral
to be moral (responsible, etc.) because one has the /sense/ of
the moral, of the highness of the law, etc. (16)
What is "morality"? I cannot codify it any more than I can codify
duty; it too demands questions of specificity: when, where, for
whom, to whom? It, too, must be "linked specifically each time, to
the occurrence of a decision without rules . . . in the course of
a new test of the undecidable." (17) I elide "without will"
deliberately: one's morality requires /the will/ to be moral. So
far, Derrida, Kant, and I agree, but the /sense/ of morality
triggers another expotential reading within the multiplying texts
that I am still trying to read simultaneously. This sense,
sensibility, emotion, is treated, following Kant, as necessarily
"pathological," i.e., diseased:
This is the well-known problem of "respect" for the moral law
. . . this problem draws all of its interest from the
disturbing paradox that it inscribes in the heart of a
morality incapable of giving an account of being inscribed in
an affect (/Gefühl/) or in a sensibility of what should not be
inscribed there or should only enjoin the sacrifice of
everything that would only obey this sensible inclination. . .
. The object of sacrifice there is always of the order of the
sensuous motives [/mobile sensibile/], of the secretly
"pathological" interest which must, says Kant, be "humbled"
before the moral law. (16)
Everything hinges on the second "only," the sacrifice of
everything that would /only/ obey this sensible inclination.
"Sensible," in English, hovers awkwardly between its current,
common signified (/If you would only be sensible!/) and the more
archaic signified towards which the context forces it. Slyly,
through the complex relationship the two languages have enjoyed,
English proffers a violently perverse interpretation: sacrifice
everything that /makes sense./ Nevertheless, I withdraw from that
expotential bubble; I am not after common sense; it is still
Derrida's meaning that I am chasing, if only to disagree. I
reread: /sãsibl/. Anything that would /only/ obey this sensible
inclination would require its own sacrifice to the law, for it
would be an instinct forever higher than the law and beyond
control. Only if "only" is removed, can we conclude that a sense
of morality is inimical to morality and we define morality as the
sacrifice of all emotional impetus, regardless of what it drives
us towards. It thus becomes moral to commit adultery /as long as I
don't want to./ In refusing the sense of the moral, in seeing it
as an instinct, Derrida has removed "only" and acceded to Kantian
binarisms. The above passage continues,
this concept of sacrificial offering, thus of sacrifice in
general, requires the whole apparatus of the "critical"
distinctions of Kantianism; sensible/intelligible,
passivity/spontaneity, /intuitus derivativus/intuitus
originarius,/ etc. (16)
Can I make such a wild, even heretical accusation? For once,
Derrida will admit no doubt: "it would be necessary to declare /in
the most direct way/ that if one had the /sense/ of duty and of
responsibility, it would /compel/ breaking with both these
moralisms" (15); "/Clearly not/"; "too /easy/ and, precisely,
/natural, programmed by nature/"; "This is the /well-known
problem/"; "this concept . . . /requires/ the whole apparatus of
the 'critical' distinctions" (16; emphases added except for
"/sense/"). The concept that he unequivocally insists on rests
explicitly on this binary between easy, natural, instinctive,
sensible (emotional), passive, derivative, and less easy,
unnatural, intelligible, spontaneous, originary.
10. Stepping momentarily into this code, I gave the example of
reluctant adultery; we must accept that absurdity as long as we
denigrate the emotions. "The example itself, as such, overflows
its singularity as much as its identity. This is why there are no
examples, while at the same time there are only examples" (17). It
could not have been an example without my stepping into the code.
Such instances can only be pressed into service as "examples" once
the code which they exemplify has already sprung up out of these
very instances--but not from all of them. The code is an
hypothesis based on selective data and treated as truth. Creating
an "example" of an instance bastardizes it by reversing the
chronology. Derrida's instance of nonresponse that is valid or
invalid for the law and my instance of sanctioning reluctant
adultery become metonymic lies about nonresponse in general, about
denying emotion in general. The instance, made to act as an
example, is forced to lie and deny its singularity. The example is
derivative; the instance is originary. The example, however, is of
the code; it lies on the intelligible side of the binary,
pretending to be "originary." The instance rests with the other.
Derrida accepts the binary, while resisting it with "passion":
the same goes for the concept of /passion/; what I am looking
for here, passion according to me, would be a concept of
passion that would be non-"pathological" in Kant's sense.
All this, therefore, still remains open, suspended, undecided,
questionable even beyond the question, indeed, to make use of
another figure, absolutely aporetic. (16)
A non-pathological passion, for Kant, would surely be a
rational/passion, a term spliced and made impossible by such
"critical distinctions." Derrida seeks a passionate/morality that
the terms of his argument structure as impossible. Morality must
be a decision, not an automation, based on will, not on instinct.
11. A /sense/ of the moral, however, is not inimical to that will that
gives rise to decision, but is intrinsic to it. This "sense," as
something seemingly instinctive and emotional, may belong to the
limbic system of our brains, rather than to the cortex. Through
his work on synesthesia, Richard Cytowic has shaken previous
assumptions about the roles of these areas of the brain.
Previously, it was thought that "the cortex is the seat of reason
and the mind, those things that make us human" and that "conscious
perception of experience takes place in the cortex" (The Man 23,
132). According to Cytowic, the limbic system, also known as the
paleomammalian brain, is concerned with the preservation of the
species, socialization, parental care, play, and emotion. The
cortex, in the new model, remains the seat of analysis, logic, and
other "higher" functions, but its status is dramatically undermined:
The limbic system gives salience to events so that we either
ignore them as mundane and unimportant, or take notice and
act. It is also the place where value, purpose, and desire are
evaluated, a process referred to as assigning negative or
positive "valence." . . . The limbic brain has retained its
function as the decider of valence. What the cortex does is
provide more detailed analysis about what is going on in the
world so that the limbic brain can decide what is important
and what to do. (168)
While cognition can offer analysis, it remains subordinate to the
"/emotional core/ of the human nervous system" (168). Although
this seems to privilege emotion above reason, Cytowic specifically
warns against maintaining this Cartesian distinction. In The
Neurological Side of Neuropsychology, he writes of "how the
phenomenal dichotomy between reason and emotion does not hold up
at the neural level," "the illusive nature of self-awareness," and
"the false dichotomy between first-person and third-person points
of view that are usually labeled /subjective/ and /objective/" (283).
12. As long as we hold onto the emotion/reason binary, we regard
"emotional decisions" as "irrational decisions." Observation of
split-brain patients indicates that when they receive verbal
stimulus, whose nature remains unknowable to them, they
nonetheless respond to the emotional tone of something they cannot
perceive. On noting this response, "the process of verbal
attribution takes over and concocts an explanation that, while
perhaps plausible, is nonetheless incorrect" (Cytowic, The
Neurological 295-96). Refusing to accept the "irrational," they
invent the "rational." From the neurologist's "unimpaired" vantage
point, the explanation is obviously wrong. As "unimpaired"
individuals, we assume this cannot apply to us, for we can
perceive the stimulus for our decisions--or so we thought. Not
only are all decisions based on the limbic system's "emotional"
evaluation, but the decision itself remains inaccessible to
consciousness, or what we have hitherto liked to think of as
consciousness. Kornhüber's work shows that the build-up of brain
activity called "readiness potential" for decisions "far antedates
the subject's /decision/" (Cytowic, The Neurological 298). Cytowic
explains that
such a decision is an interpretation we give to a behavior
that has been initiated some place else by another part of
ourselves /well before/ we are aware of making any decision at
all. In other words, the decision has been made before we are
aware of the idea even to make a decision. If "we" are not
pulling the strings, then who or what is? One answer: A facet
inaccessible to introspection. (298-300)
Descartes, according to neurology, was wrong: /sentio ergo
cogito/, or, as Cytowic puts it, "strictly biological models of
emotion . . . place emotion as the causative antecedent of
cognition" (295).
13. The decision, within the emotion/reason binary, /is/ a moment of
madness. To logic it remains forever undecidable, for logic is not
neurally equipped with the capacity to make a decision:
The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension
between two decisions; it is the experience of that which,
though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable
and the rule, is still obliged--it is of obligation that we
must speak--to give itself up to the impossible decision,
while taking account of law and rules. . . . The undecidable
remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost--but an essential
ghost--in every decision, in every event of decision.
(Derrida, "Force of Law" 24)
The madness, the emotion, the /khôra/, the impetus, is the ghost
in our machine. Rather than being "just an instinct," a sense of
morality is the prerequisite for a moral decision. The code arises
out of instances analyzed; the instances arise out of the
passions. The decision is always already a subject of passion.
14. Although this article is called Passions: An Oblique Offering,
Derrida repeatedly opts for the "cold" option of rule, duty, law,
codification, rather than for the "hot" option of an emotional
response. The possibility of a /passionate/ friendship is
obfuscated with a hollow abyss and a duty to avoid the language of
duty; /passionate/ morality is held to be a contradiction in
terms--leaving us with the view that the passions are immoral,
unfriendly; the codes are the reliable or moral guide. The
passions, at the beginning, are placed /outside/ the person; to
write that "even if his activity is often close to passivity, if
not passion" (4) formulates "passion" as an extreme form of
"passivity," which would regard the passions as metaphorically
external agents acting on him who is passive. We have defined
ourselves as /those who know/, and what we cannot know within
ourselves is externalized, seen as beyond our control ("we" are
not pulling the strings) rather than as that which constitutes our
control because it constitutes us. In so doing, we generate
/khôra/--the compensatory dream and unconscious of the logos. What
has Derrida said of /khôra/? It defies "that 'logic of
noncontradiction of the philosophers' of which Vernant speaks"
(Derrida/McLeod, "/Khôra/" 89) and is indefinable: "One cannot
even say of it that it is /neither/ this /nor/ that or that it is
/both/ this /and/ that" (89). Like our retrospectively rational
decisions, "the /khôra/ is anachronistic; it 'is' the anachrony
within being, or better: the anachrony of being. It anachronises
being" (94). We cannot speak of its origins, but it appears, as
having always existed, when
according to Hegel, philosophy becomes serious . . . only from
the moment when it enters into the sure path of logic: that
is, after having abandoned, or let us rather say sublated, its
mythic /form/: after Plato, with Plato. (100)
With the logic of non-contradiction arises A/Not-A binary; A is
everything that observes the logic of non-contradiction and Not-A
is variously /khôra/, the /pleroma/, mythic thought, and Derrida's
secret. To say that the latter can have nothing to do with the
logic of non-contradiction itself rests on the logic of
non-contradiction. Hence, its compensatory function cannot be
simply contrary, for that reinforces rather than sublating or
undermining A. Rather, it needs to be /a/A--"alogical and
achronic, anachronistic too" (113). The logic of non-contradiction
makes passionate_morality impossible, but passion laughs at the
logic of non-contradiction. The passions are chronologically and
neurologically the foundation of the code, not merely in
opposition; they make the code possible, as well as (sometimes)
necessary.
15. The offering may be oblique, but the Passions are tangential to
the offering: they touch it at the point of (someone else's) title
and in the troubled concern about the Jesus motif ("By speaking
last, both in conclusion and in introduction, in twelfth or
thirteenth place, am I not taking the insane risk and adopting the
odious attitude of treating all these thinkers as disciples,
indeed the apostles" [18]), but they fail to enter the argument:
it ignores the theological motif of grace, passion, feeling, that
could redeem friendship and morality from perpetual paradox by
scorning the logical foundations of the paradox. This tangent of
Passions creates my most persistent countertext; I turn to it
again, to redeem invitations from splitting and paradox:
An invitation leaves one free, otherwise it becomes constraint
. . . . But the invitation must be pressing, not indifferent.
It should never imply: you are free not to come and if you
don't come, never mind, it doesn't matter . . . . It must
therefore split and redouble itself at the same time, at once
leave free and take hostage: double act, redoubled act. Is an
invitation possible? (14)
Free--from what? To what? This paradox depends on /free/ being
always and only /free from constraint, obligation/, in short, free
from duty--but I can be free from duty without being free from
feelings. Perpetual friendship would require no politeness, for it
would already exceed it; when friendship is lacking (momentarily
or permanently) politeness can step in as its /appearance./
16. Let me return to politeness: "A critical reader will perhaps be
surprised to see friendship and politeness regularly associated
here" (8-9)--and once more the obliging critical reader, I agree,
but only to disagree:
the hypothesis about politeness and the sharp determination of
this value relates to what enjoins us to go beyond rules,
norms, and hence ritual. (9)
What is sometimes called "true" politeness is not /just/ polite:
should politeness and sincerity coincide exactly ("That was a
wonderful speech"), one is not /just/ being polite: "I'm not just
being polite, I really mean it!" The rules, norms, and rituals are
hard to apply and must be disguised, for they, like duty,
substitute for the genuinely considerate, responsive behavior that
cannot be codified. The intention, emotion (the usual litany)
supersede the rule and in overflowing it make it unnecessary.
"Mere" politeness remains a pretence in ways subject to one's
society, micro and macro: for instance, "children . . . must not
'answer back' (at any rate in the sense and tradition of French
manners)" (20)--well then, what of the macro society that uses the
word /politesse/ and not /politeness/? What is /politeness/ in
England is not /politeness/ in South Africa; what is /politeness/
in English is not /politesse/ in French.
An Oblique Offering in Translation
17. "A difficulty suddenly arises, a sort of dysfunctioning, what
could be called a crisis" (5): I am trying to read Derrida, with
the familiar difficulty of the referent being withheld--"a
crisis," /what crisis?/ The nature of the crisis is withheld until
the next page, and immediately after it is being identified,
another is established, also based on an antecedent hypothesis and
strung with its own hypotheses, and while everything is thus held
in the air, in parentheses as it were, I am (via parentheses)
given a new ghost-text to hold in the air as well:
At a certain place in the system, one of the elements of the
system (an "I," surely, even if the I is not always and "with
all . . . candor" [sans façon, also "without further ado"]
"me") no longer knows what it should do . . . But does the
hypothesis of such a risk /go against/ [à l'encontre] or on
the contrary /go along with/ [à la rencontre] the desire of
the participants, supposing that there were only one desire,
that there were a single desire common to all of them or that
each had in himself only one noncontradictory desire? (6)
I am jolted from unravelling subclauses and hypotheses into
speculating better translations for /sans façon/ which might not
require such an interruption and wondering why [/à l'encontre/]
and [/à la rencontre/] were deemed necessary when "go against" and
"go along with" also echo each other's structure. I become aware
of the French text--haunting this text, or in a different
dimension to this text--and begin to translate mentally (/le désir
des participants . . . commun à tous/), to attempt a retrieval of
the French text, at the moment that this text breaks with it.
/L'autre n'a pas de crochets/.[1 <#foot1>] If the "Passions" of
the title and "I have my two hands tied or nailed down" cast
Derrida as Jesus, then the translator here casts himself as John
the Baptist, granting me a vision of "the original" while
insisting he is unworthy to carry His sandals (22, 10). In other
words, the translation is not good enough to substitute for the
French, but must be supplemented with it.
18. What is the purpose of this supplement? Before the purpose, let me
consider the effect. "The supplement is maddening, because it is
neither presence nor absence" (Derrida/Spivak, Of Grammatology
154). I am now reading not Derrida's Passions, but the
translation. I no longer trust the translator, for he does not
trust his translation to /carry the meaning/, and I regard phrases
skeptically. For instance, in "what one calls in French a /secret
de Polichinelle/, a secret which is a secret for no-one" (Passions
7), I see a French ghost of that entire phrase as simply "un
secret de Polichinelle" and an English ghost, an alternate
translation if that French ghost is indeed real, "an open secret."
What the French /might/ be and what the translation /could have
been/ double and redouble the already-legion ghost-texts.
19. The insistence of my countertexts makes it harder and harder to
read Passions: An Oblique Offering:
What we are glimpsing of the invitation (but of the call in
general, as well) governs by the same "token" the logic of the
response, both of the response to the invitation and the
response by itself. (14-5)
20. I have rejected the model of the invitation and substituted my
countermodel instead; how, then, can I apply it to "the response"?
Moreover, in trying to understand "politeness" and "response," the
second group of expotential readings re-emerges: "And to wonder
whether 'to respond' has an opposite, which would consist, if
commonsense is to be believed, in not responding" (15). For a
moment, I am prepared to wonder this alongside Derrida, as a
metaphysical problematic, but my wondering is cut short as my
native language readily supplies just such an opposite: /ignore./
This opposite, like "responsiveness," is unavailable in French;
the reading splits expotentially, again (so many times), for in my
reading that particular question no longer haunts the text,
unanswered. And while I, too, "cannot fail to wonder at some point
what is meant by 'respond'" (15), my wondering is of a different
order from Derrida's: the vision of /réponder/ floats above or
behind each appearance of "respond"; I read and interpret
"respond" while holding /réponder/ in the air as that which might
make my interpretations invalid and lay to rest at least some of
these spectres: "Is it possible to make a decision on the subject
of 'responding' and of 'responsiveness?'" (15). Decisions being
ultimately "emotional" (in a sense that refuses to oppose itself
to "rational"), responding and responsiveness are that which
/permit/ decision-making: both /respond/ and /responsiveness/ rely
on a motivation of feeling. I respond out of feeling, and my
degree of responsiveness is the degree and immediacy of my
feelings. Given this, the second "fault," if Derrida responds to
the invitation, is no fault at all: "If I did respond I would put
myself in the situation of someone who felt /capable of
responding/: he has an answer for everything" (19). On the
contrary, to be capable of responding is not at all to have an
answer, a solution, for everything, but to be capable of reacting.
To respond would be to use the texts as a springboard, not to
answer them; to show the texts capable of stirring him, which is
to respect them, not to resolve them, which is to disrespect them.
If "respond" means "respond," then /not/ to do so "would smack of
a hybris" (19)--but what does Derrida mean by "respond"? I read
further, looking now only for a definition of a single word:
The overweening presumption from which /no response will ever
be free/ not only has to do with the fact that the response
claims to measure up to the discourse of the other, to situate
it, understand it. (20)
This does not describe the word "response"; if an English word is
required, then "answer" would be more apt--and would fail to
connect with "responsibility" or "responsiveness." The sentence
does not make sense as it stands, but how is one to translate
it--ought one to settle for "from which /no answer/ [/réponse/]
/will ever be free/?" This is what Tr. frequently chooses to do in
this article--though not here, where the sense requires it. I
criticize the translation "while running up an infinite debt in
its service" (Derrida/Venuti, "What" 174)--a two-fold debt: that I
can read it in English; and that his translation provides me with
material. If I criticize the translation, I must answer two
questions: what do I think he /should/ do, and why am I reading
Derrida's Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation, when I
could read it in French?
21. I answer the first in conjunction with an earlier question: /what
is the purpose of the supplement/? The purpose--for whom?
According to whom? Consider some of the supplements in this text,
in addition to those I have already quoted: "aspects [/traits/]"
(5), "brought their tribute [/apporter leur tribut/]" (7), "/Let's
not beat around the bush/ [/N'y allons pas par quartre chemins/]"
(9), /"n'y allons pas par quatres chemins/ [an almost
untranslatable French expression which invokes the cross or the
crucial, the crossing of ways, the four and the fork of a
crossroad (/quadrifurcum/) in order to say: let us proceed
directly, without detour, without ruse and without calculation]"
(9-10), "/what is at issue/ [/il s'agit de/]" (10), "/in front of
you/ [in English in the original--Tr.]" (10), Deconstruction
[/'la' Déconstruction/]" (15), "testimony [/témoignage/, also the
act of "bearing witness"--Ed.]" (23), "having to respond
[/devant--repondre/], having-to-tell [/devant--dire/] . . . before
the law [/devant la loi/]" (29).
22. The intention is presumably to replicate the original as closely
as possible. The subtleties of "/n'y allons pas par quatre
chemins/" and the punning on /devant/ must be replicated somehow
if the meaning of the French text is to be transferred to this
text and if English does not have an equivalent for that phrase or
permit that pun. That the square brackets do not replicate the
original is already apparent: /l'autre n'a pas de crochets/
[French in the original]. I am alternately grateful for, bemused
by, and irritated by the interjections: grateful for "/devant/,"
bemused by "/apporter leur tribut/," and irritated by
"/témoignage/, also the act of 'bearing witness'" which I judge as
unnecessary, for "testimony" already has both the legal and
religious overtones of "bearing witness." In this instance, the
effect is "[I don't think you quite got that--Ed.]" and "[I'm
still here--Tr.]." Effect--on whom? Me, of course; I hate to be
interrupted when I'm reading. Even if I judge my irritation to be
singular, and hardly exemplary, part of that effect remains: " . .
. which I judge . . ." If one cannot understand a word of French,
most of the words in French add nothing to one's experience of
reading, though one might garner the pun on "/devant/"; if one
understands the French supplements, the effects are in part to
remind one that this is a translation and to prompt one to
evaluate the translation. Every square bracket, whatever else it
says, says also: This is a translation and translation is
ultimately not possible--[Tr].
23. Is translation possible? "/Je viens de lire/" (/viens/--come--etc.
etc.) and "I have just read" (just--only and justice, etc. etc.)
invite very different responses. "I have just [/viens de/] read"
is not at all both at once: it is a double-take, a break in the
flow, an excess, a superfluity, an invitation to compare "have
just" and "/viens de/," an invitation to respond to the act of
translation (which breaks with the source-language version which
offered no such invitation), which is precisely what I have just
[/viens de/] done [/faire/]. Past participle vs. infinitive:
discuss. /Je réponds à ce texte/: in English (in which I live and
breathe and have my being), I /respond/ to the text (the text is
my springboard), I /answer back/ (cheekiness--of confronting The
Derrida, my superior in age, degrees, prestige, knowledge, and of
confronting the translator) but I do not claim to /answer/ the
text. Nevertheless, I do answer my own questions.
24. Is translation possible? What are the conditions of translation?
Can it be "the transfer of an intact signified through the
inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever"
(Derrida/Venuti, "What" 195): in other words (I translate from
English to English), meaning that exists independently of
signifiers, a wholehearted breach of faith with poststructuralism
and Saussure, a restoration of the old lost faith in language,
before the Fall. The example to which the question "What is a
'Relevant' Translation?" returns is "mercy seasons justice." The
corporality of the signifier prevents the transfer of an intact
signified: "seasons" relates itself both to seasoning ("season to
taste") and the seasons (of the year). One could call this an
accident of language--sometimes such correspondences are
"accidental." A word enters the language and finds there a homonym
or homophone with which it shares no ancestry. Sometimes the two
words share a common derivation, though they are now quite
different--sense and sensibility. Sometimes a word will leave a
language and re-enter from another language, to find its relations
have grown up quite differently, as with /relevant/ rejoining
/reléver/ in French. Nevertheless, their corporeal correspondence
is such that, whatever their derivation, they inform each other
and open up multiple entrances--as with /réponse/ and
/réponsibilité/, /response/ and /responsibility./ This corporality
is untranslatable precisely because translation requires a
/substitution/ of one signifier (or a set of signifiers) for
another. One might say a transubstantiation, if one believed that
the spirit could thus be transferred--which would be to believe
already in a signified, a meaning, a spirit, which is in the word
but not of the word--/l'être du mot/ not /letter du mot/,
/l'ésprit du mot. / How shall I translate "/ésprit/"--with spirit,
mind, or wit? How relevant[2 <#foot2>] is it, in this context,
that /ésprit/ can mean "wit" as well as "soul"? If I shear it of
those additional meanings by choosing "spirit," what do I mean by
"additional"? To me, they are additional, because in English,
/wit/, /mind/, and /spirit/ are quite distinct. However, I am not
so /laissez-faire/ about "ignore," which can be translated into
French as /ne tenir aucun compte de/ (pay no attention to), /
faire semblant de ne pas s'apercevoir de/ (pretend not to notice),
/ faire semblant de ne pas reconnaître/ (pretend not to
recognize), /ne pas répondre à / (not answer), /ne pas respecter/
(not respect), and so forth, depending on the thing that is being
ignored. This does not constitute a list of signifieds, but the
full and unitary signified of /ignore. / "I ignore Derrida": /je
ne tiens aucun compte de Derrida/ (I pay no attention to Derrida),
/je fais semblant de ne pas reconnaître Derrida/ (I pretend not to
recognize Derrida), or /je ne respecte pas Derrida/ (I don't
respect Derrida)? None of these is sufficient to my meaning.
25. Two linguistic phenomena are at work here: signifiers that inform
each other through physical resemblance, and signifiers that
permit a greater range of meaning than can be matched by
signifiers in the target language. In each case, corporality gets
in the way of the spirit. It is words themselves (corporeal
signifiers) that prevent us from believing in pure translatable
meaning.
26. If we killed the word, what would survive? "Without language,
thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing
ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language"
(Saussure/Baskin 112). If the Saussurian view of language is
right, then translation is not possible. We cannot ever achieve
"the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential
vehicle of any signifier whatsoever" (Derrida/Venuti, "What" 195)
because there is no such thing as the intact signified before the
signifier, and once embodied in a signifier the physical
resemblances and ranges of meaning come into play in all their
untranslatability.
27. This linguistic atheism obtains if I am coming from the direction
of the signifier, the body. What if I were to do what certain
religious people advise one to do, take a leap of faith, and first
of all believe in the /meaning/ and then try to find the word? "No
one shall come to the Father except by Me," said Jesus: this is
said to be the spirit and not the letter. Alongside Derrida, "I
insist on the Christian dimension . . . the travail of mourning
also describes, through the Passion, through a memory haunted by
the body lost yet preserved in its grave, the resurrection of the
ghost or of the glorious body that rises, rises again [/se
relève/]--and walks" (199-200).
28. I cannot yet mourn meaning; I still hope that meaning is more than
a product of language, because if it is not /I shall never speak
to Derrida/ and my love of his meaning is not even a doomed love
but a lie. I hope; I take a leap of faith: "hope, faith and love,
but the greatest of these is love." Let me start, then, with love,
another ghastly abstract noun that /means nothing/ until I have
answered "From whom? To whom? When and how?" There is nothing
without context, but this context is above all private: I say, "I
love you." And this lover of words is inarticulate with love,
cannot count the ways (quantification), and is disgusted with the
poverty of the signifiers "I love you" that fail to signify the
least part of my meaning. When I was a more devout
poststructuralist, I thought like a devout poststructuralist, I
reasoned like a devout poststructuralist. I explained the poverty
of this word, "love," by arguing that it had been used in so many
different contexts (respecting the network of signifiers), many of
them quite contradictory, that, unable to mean everything
simultaneously, it subsided into near emptiness. "Ce signe
pur--vide, presque--il est impossible de la fuir, /parce qu'il
veut tout dire/" (Barthes, 1383; French in the original).[3
<#foot3>] Now I have read more and loved more, both quantitatively
and qualitatively. "I love you," rather than being overloaded with
meaning and descending into hopeless ambiguity, cannot even begin
to translate what I feel. "The oath passes /through/ language, but
it passes beyond human language. This would be the truth of
translation" (Derrida, "What" 185).
29. I say "to translate": I have accomplished my leap of faith if I
say that (did you leap with me, or are you my Critical Reader,
churning out ghost-texts?), for to translate assumes a
pre-existent language and yet the language from which I am
translating is the language of feelings. I use a linguistic
metaphor, but I could offer others: the word cannot "bear the
weight" (feeling as a physical load), it cannot "explain" (feeling
as a mystery resisting logic). If I attempt to say, instead of "I
love you," a litany of these loving feelings--admiration,
security, lust, fascination, protectiveness--I am equally
disappointed in the words, the finitude of their meaning, and the
finitude of the list. Hence "words cannot convey" and all those
other helpless linguistic gestures towards what is not linguistic
in nature. I cannot explain this love to you in words--but you
know what I mean. That is, I have /faith/ that you know what I
mean, that you have experienced love; that is, that you have
experienced what we designate as "love" without it being the
identical experience--apart from the feeling of uniqueness in
love, you have not loved /my/ love, and those who have, have not
been me loving him.
30. What shall I say now, about this signifier "love"? Love, lover,
loving, lovable, lovage, beloved, in love, make love, lovely:
"love" and "lovage," one of those all-important linguistic
accidents, adds nothing to the meaning of /love./ Its usage, in
certain parts of Britain, as a form of address ("Here you are,
love," says the shopkeeper) adds no facet to my declaration, "I
love you." Its meaning is before, above, and beyond all words.
/But you know what I mean./ If "I love you" has meaning, it does
not come from the words. We poststructuralists have been
accustomed to regarding anything prior to the symbolic order as
unspeakable: "an insurmountable problem for discourse: once it has
been named, that functioning, even if it is presymbolic, is
brought back into a symbolic position." (Kristeva, 24n16).
Derrida, whom I love (differently and specifically; love is
nothing if it is not specific), will loose me from these shackles
of language with the prelinguistic mark, declaring with Derridean
authority that
writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there
claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And
there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning
of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the
vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the
plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it
nevertheless only /supplements./ (Of Grammatology 144)
Whence this Derridean authority to which I appeal and which I
challenge, alternately? It is vested in him, not by him but by
/us/, collectively: this is also the model of language which says
the meaning is vested in the word, collectively. Academic
mechanisms have created the word "Derridean"; is the authority
ours, to attribute and withdraw, collectively, and did we then
create it? Somewhere, once upon a time, there was a student whose
writing was judged worthy not as marks upon a page but in its
function as meaning; then there was a young academic, whose peers
reviewed his articles and found the meaning interesting,
important, violating previous understandings and instituting new
meanings for new words. The creation of "Derridean" was
collective; the creations of Derrida were singular, and his own;
both rely on /his meaning/, however imperfectly or perfectly
understood by us. "Writing is dangerous from the moment that
representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the
thing itself"--Derrida is only a name, pointing at a man who
writes articles and signs them, who questions the signature but
not his legal right over that which he has signed, /in whatever
language it may appear./ Words point at meanings, without
encompassing them; shall we then say that there is a secret here?
What could escape this sacrificial verification and so secure
the very space of /this very discourse, for example/? No
question, no response, no responsibility. Let us say that
there is a secret here. (23)
31. I read "response" as "answer" and as "répondre," in my expotential
countertexts, and I answer back: "Why? 'Let us say . . . ' /You/
have said it, I did not and hardly agree." Now I must /make sense
of/ page after page about this secret, in whose existence and
theoretical necessity I do not believe. Derrida writes, Wood
translates, that this secret of his (I took no part in declaring
it, although he repeatedly invited me--I declined the invitation,
as an invitation permits one to do) is not numinous. I was not
invited to define the secret; in fact, he denied an infinite
number of definitions when he said "it remains foreign to speech"
(27) and refuted every claim he made for it with contradiction,
except the claim that it is /secret./ I make sense of it, for
myself; I institute meaning, using what I am told /and/
disbelieving, according to my own mind. I declare in the margins
that I have met such beasts before; that contradiction-in-stasis
belongs to mystical writing, to the Gnostic pleroma, to /khôra/.
Like a Gnostic, I want to know and to understand, I refuse to
accept mystification; rather, I demand, "From what position of
knowledge does he so firmly declare that this secret is
unknowable?" As well as his declarative contradictions, his saying
all of this is a performative contradiction. I know his secret; I
/will/ give it a name: meaning.
32. The above paragraph is full of "I": whose meaning am I reading,
Derrida's or my own? There is a pragmatics of meaning, in the
matters of salt-passing, legal documents, even academic discourse
(you are engaging this pragmatics to read this): the word does not
fully encompass the meaning, it /points at it/, but we have a
pragmatic understanding which will do. Mere information can be
passed, like salt. Passions: An Obscure Offering is not mere
information, nor is Shakespeare, nor is this article:
/responsiveness/ and /responsibility/, /seasons/, and /ignore/
must all be allowed their full range and resonance without being
cut down to mere information. This is the quality of the literary:
a range of meanings, of expotential readings, among which the
reader can choose.
When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless ad infinitum,
about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an
author . . . when it is the call [/appel/] of this secret,
however, which points back to the other or to something else,
when it is this itself which keeps our passions aroused, and
holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. (29)
Expotential readings among which the reader can choose do not
permit /all/ hypotheses, groundless /ad infinitum/: they spring
into being at the point of disagreements (which presuppose a
meaning in the text with which to disagree; else we are all
schizophrenics) and in the signifiers' multiple possibilities
which are legion but /not/ infinite. Pragmatism is not merely an
attitude we adopt to make sense of an infinitely meaningful
language; it is /language/ balking at further meaning, delimiting
sense. The secret is meaning, and the more potential meanings are
opened up, the more the secret impassions us, for that is the
point at which I can insert myself into the text:
Certainly, one could speak this meaning in other names,
whether one finds them or gives them to it. Moreover, this
happens at every instant. It remains meaning under all names
and it is its irreducibility to the very name which makes it
meaning, even when one makes the truth in its name [/fait la
verité à son sujet/] as Augustine put it so originally. The _m
^s _e ^e _a ^c _n ^r _i ^e _n ^t _g meeting is that one here
calls it a _m ^s _e ^e _a ^c _n ^r _i ^e _n ^t _g .
(countertexts 26)
33. I have said that words point at meanings: I do not equate meaning
with the signified for the signified /is/ that which is already in
language and delimited by a signifier. "I love you": call this
meaning love, /amour/, a chemical reaction, make a necklace of
substitutions--admiration, security, lust, fascination,
protectiveness--but it remains meaning under all names and it is
its irreducibility to the very name which makes it meaning. The
abstract nouns, which cannot be pointed out or demonstrated, which
seem the most likely candidates for the argument that meaning is a
product of language, point at something that /cannot/ be reduced
to the name: duty, love, passions. They cannot be codified and
left to language alone in the appearance of homogeneity, for then
they are dangerous, then they claim "to be presence and the sign
of the thing itself" and make us "forget the vicariousness of
[their] own function." (Of Grammatology 144). Like "its" and
"their," they are deitic and specific, meaningless until we have
answered each time "From whom? To whom? When and how?" qualified
by individual instances that proliferate into the future, defying
codification. Where do these instances come from, before the code,
if not out of meaning /in life/? The meaning makes the code
possible as well as (unable to press brain to brain) necessary.
34. Is a translation possible? The condition set down by Derrida is
"the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential
vehicle of any signifier whatsoever" ("What" 195). The signified
is already in language, that part of meaning generalized,
specified, delimited by its signifier. Signifiers have their own
corporeal lives and relationships, affecting the signified, but
they also have meaning which was never, in the first place, passed
into language in its full richness and resonance, but
pragmatically, like salt. In saying, "I love you," I have already
had to resign myself "to losing the effect, the economy, the
strategy (and this loss can be enormous) or to add a gloss, of the
translator's note sort, which always, even in the best of cases,
the case of the greatest relevance, confesses the impotence or
failure of the translation" ("What" 181), /but you still know what
I mean./ Meaning can be conveyed through inconsequential vehicles;
the signified cannot, for the vehicle is anything but
inconsequential to it. This is also the definition of the
literary: that the exact words matter.
35. L'Etre and the letter, meaning and the signified, are the soul and
body of the literary. Translation is possible as reincarnation; we
mourn the signified and erect monuments [thus] to it which only
those who knew it will appreciate. New words open new
possibilities in this new life, and the meaning lives on. I can
say, at last, I love Derrida's meaning, and I read Derrida's
Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation.
kerr.megan@gmail.com
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. The other has no square brackets.
2 <#ref2>. /Elle fait allusion à "Qu'est-ce qu'une traduction
'relevant'" (Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles
1998) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), 21-48), traduit en anglais comme/
"What is a 'Relevant' Translation?"
3 <#ref3>. Translator's note: "It's impossible to escape this
pure--almost empty--sign, because it means everything, it wants to
say everything."
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "Le Tour Eiffel." Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 1.
Normandie: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. 1383-1400.
Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. London: Abacus, 1994.
---. The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology. Cambridge: MIT P,
1996.
Derrida, Jacques. "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundations of
Authority.'" Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed.
Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson. New York:
Routledge, 1992. 3-67.
---. "/Khôra/." On the Name. Trans. Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1995. 89-127.
---. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.
---. "Passions: 'An Oblique Offering.'" On the Name. Trans. David
Wood. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 3-31.
---. "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber
and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-23.
---. "What is a 'Relevant' Translation?" Trans. Lawrence Venuti.
Critical Inquiry 27:2. (2001): 174-200.
Kristeva, Julia. Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, 1974.
Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge, 2003.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Rev. ed.
Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger.
Trans. Wade Baskin. Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1974.