Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real (Postcolonial Literatures)

Decolonising Gender

This innovative study challenges a possessive or colonising approach to questions of gender. Through an illuminating selection of cross-cultural readings from African and queer writing to a shamanistic Shakespeare, Decolonising Gender offers:  a way out of some of the current deadlocks of feminist theory  an anti-essentialist approach to gender in which both male and female readers may address a consciousness of the feminine  a platform for postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers to engage in a dialogue around the status of the performative in regard to the other  a new theory of poetic realism in both canonical and postcolonial literatures;  a re-reading of the Enlightenment legacy in terms of postcolonial liberation theory  a comparison of contemporary debates on the real across disciplines Negotiating a path between feminist theory’s common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism, Caroline Rooney argues convincingly that by rethinking our understanding of gender we might also equip ourselves to resist racism and totalitarianism more effectively. Caroline Rooney is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent. She is the author of African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and, with Vera Dieterich, of Book Unbinding: The Ontological Stain (Artworlds Press, 2005).

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonised areas, and will include material from nonanglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include:

1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper

8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939 ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ Evelyn O’Callaghan

2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

9 Postcolonial Pacific Writings Representations of the body Michelle Keown

3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain

10 Writing Woman, Writing Place Contemporary Australian and South African fiction Sue Kossew

4 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney

11 Literary Radicalism in India Gender, nation and the transition to independence Priyamvada Gopal

5 Caribbean–English Passages Intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition Tobias D-ring

12 Postcolonial Conrad Paradoxes of empire Terry Collits

6 Islands in History and Representation Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire Literature and culture in British India, 1822–1922 Anindyo Roy

13 American Pacificism Oceania in the U.S. imagination Paul Lyons 14 Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific Reading history and trauma in contemporary fiction Susan Y. Najita

15 Writing Sri Lanka Literature, resistance and the politics of place Minoli Salgado

18 English Writing and India, 1600-1920 Colonizing aesthetics Pramod K. Nayar

16 Literature of the Indian Diaspora Theorizing the diasporic imaginary Vijay Mishra

19 Decolonising Gender Literature and a poetics of the real Caroline Rooney

17 Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel National and cosmopolitan narratives in English Neelam Srivastava

20 Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography David Huddart 21 Contemporary Arab Women Writers Anastasia Valassopoulos

Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies A materialist critique Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper

The Postcolonial Jane Austen You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain

Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris Andrew Bundy

Decolonising Gender Literature and a poetics of the real

Caroline Rooney

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business # 2007 Caroline Rooney All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rooney, Caroline. Decolonising gender : literature, enlightenment, and the feminine real / Caroline Rooney. p. cm. – (Postcolonial literatures ; 19) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. African literature (English)–Women authors–History and criticism. 2. English literature–History and criticism. 3. Femininity (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. Realism in literature. 6. Feminist theory. 7. Performative (Philosophy) 8. Postcolonialism in literature. 9. Postmodernism (Literature) I. Title. PR9340.5.R66 2007 820.9’9287–dc22 2007018404

ISBN 0-203-93359-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 978-0-415-42418-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-203-93359-6 (ebk)

For Maurice Granville Brook Rooney

Contents

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

1

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

13

2

What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment?

44

3

Radiance or brilliance

75

4

The other of the confession: the philosophical type

93

5

The other of the confession: women of Zimbabwe

126

6

Shakespeare the shaman

162

7

Sisters of Marx: a conclusion

190

Notes

218

Index

234

Acknowledgements

Chapter one began as a collaborative project with Andrew Bennett, Geoffrey Bennington, Timothy Clark, Peggy Kamuf and Nicholas Royle, and an earlier version of it appeared in The Oxford Literary Review, 23, Special issue on Monstrism (2001). A few sections of Chapter four have been developed from parts of the following two earlier articles: ‘Reservations . . . Concerning Libido Theory and the Afterlife of Psychoanalysis’ in Angelaki, 9: 1, Special issue on Hotel Psychoanalysis, ed. Sarah Wood (April 2004); and ‘The Scriptless Script’, with Vera Dieterich, in art-omma, 11, Special issue on Art and Text, ed. Jaspar JosephLester and Sharon Kivland (2006). My thanks to Vera Dieterich for permission to print the still from her film that appears in Chapter four. This film was originally screened at our presentation ‘The Word Divides the Hand from the Hand’ hosted by Sheffield Hallam University and the Site Gallery in 2005, and I am indebted to Vera Dieterich for the inspiration afforded by her work and for the opportunities to collaborate on it. These occasions have been fruitfully enabled by Sharon Kivland. I much appreciate her productive initiatives and on-going leads. The photograph that appears at the end of Chapter one was taken by Spencer Scott and I thank him for the care he took over it. For permission to quote from Miriam Thali’s Between Two Worlds, I would like to thank Broadview Press. For permission to quote from Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, I would like to thank University of California Press. The friendly and prompt assistance of my editors at Routledge, Polly Dodson and Liz Thompson, together with their team, has made it a pleasure to work with them on the production of this book. In the writing of it, I have benefited from stimulating connections with and much valued support from a number of friends and colleagues. In particular, my warm thanks go to: Maggie Awadalla, Ouamar Azerradj, Jennie Batchelor, Karoly and Vessela Borossa, Glenn Bowman; Becky and David Clarke, Jo Collins, Elizabeth Cowie, Rana Dayoub, Rod Edmond, Mary Evans, Neil Gascoigne, Mary Golubeva, Ben Grant, Catherine Grant, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Herd, Lyn Innes, Gerald MacLean, Victoria, Tats, Achilles and Alexander Mavros, Martin McQuillan, Jan Montefiore, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Forbes Morlock, Joke Murray, Kaori Nagai, Hania Nashef, Susheila Nasta, Marion O’Connor, Benita Parry, Ranka Primorac, Sirish Rao, Dave Reason, Felicity Rooney, Nicholas Royle, Clemency

xii

Acknowledgements

Schofield, Angela Smith, Helena Torres, Scarlett Thomas, Dennis Walder, Sarah Wood, and Anastasia Valassopoulos. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Donna Landry for her finely attuned and attentive readings of four of the work’s chapters, and for her sustaining advice and encouragement throughout the work’s progress. Finally, I am really grateful to Julia Borossa for the generosity, harmony and counterpoint of her listening and responding, as well as for getting me to listen. This book is dedicated to my father with my deep love and deep respect. He was the first one to understand what I was trying to say in it.

Introduction

Recent feminist theory has been much concerned with the Scylla of constructivism and the Charybdis of essentialism. In the former position, the reality of the feminine tends to be denied or disavowed, being considered as but the projection of cultural ideologies that are performatively acted out. In the latter position, the reality of femininity tends to be affirmed reactively or retrospectively, as the reified negation of its negation. This book aims to consider how both positions may be seen as perhaps compromised by too literalising a logic. In the case of constructivism, ideas, ideals and norms of the feminine are literalised in their performative enactment. And, in the case of essentialism, the signification of femininity is taken to equate literally or in a constative manner with what is signified. This work will offer both a critique of theories of the performative and detailed readings of literary texts, particularly in terms of a poetics of the real, in order to explore how we may move beyond the difficulties that have just been outlined. In Western culture and beyond, the real has often been designated by the feminine. This pertains both to the materiality of nature, land, the body, and so on, and to the real in a more mystical sense as may be found in certain Lacanian accounts of femininity and strands of feminism concerned with the feminine divine.1 This work maintains the view that it is because the real is ultimately an undivided totality that this material/spiritual dichotomy arises on a cultural level. What is explored in relation to literary texts is how figures of the feminine are repeatedly used to point to or show up the real but without this amounting to a determinable identity. In particular, what literary texts render uncertain is whether the feminine figures in question serve to refer to the real as something beyond them or whether the real is perceived as, in part, feminine. While it is a matter of interpretation without closure as to whether the feminine real is read literally, metaphorically or metonymically, this work will propose, reveal and explore an ostensive designation of the feminine real beyond the already widely considered performative modes of femininity. In order to address what is at stake in this ostensive gesture, it is necessary to confront the resistance towards the positing of a reality of the feminine. Conventionally, when not a signifier of the real, ‘woman’ has often been the signifier of loss, lack, absence and death. However, it may be said that this formulation

2

Introduction

serves to universalise and even make absolute what may be, more narrowly, specific instances of loss or lack. That is, it could be maintained that those who posit the non-being of the feminine are perhaps positing the non-being of the feminine for themselves. Here, the supposed non-being of the feminine could pertain to a masculinist structure of disavowal or entail forms of repression of the other so that, with such conditions, the emphasis then comes to fall on femininity as a fabrication, construction or fantasy of some kind. Ironically, it could be masculine lack that leads to the construction of femininity in terms of lack and groundlessness in accordance with an ideological inversion of the reality. It does, for instance, seem obvious or evident that some femininity is lost at male puberty, whilst femininity may be also culturally repressed. What is more enigmatic is the question of knowing what this femininity may be. If men traditionally have accorded themselves a paradoxically privileged position in discourses that attempt to define the feminine, this would seem to be because they might be able to claim a certain retrospective, even if uncertain, knowledge of what may have been lost whereas those who do not undergo loss of the feminine could find it difficult to specify what of themselves, what of their overall state of being, is feminine as such. Lacanian psychoanalysis tends to define the feminine in terms of jouissance which is taken to mean feminine sexuality. From a study of literary texts, it seems more apt to speak of a less specific joy-in-being and a freedom of spirit that may or may not be eroticised. To an extent, for I will also qualify this, a position emerges in which the masculine know of the feminine what they cannot know in the present (a consideration implied by deconstruction) while the feminine ‘know’ femininity without knowing what they know, as Lacan asserts.2 This would make femininity slip elusively between the cracks of sexual difference as it were: however, this position should be modified for it does not adequately account for what we may know of the feminine, as will be explained further on. Given that femininity arguably entails a certain capacity for joy-in-being, it may also give rise to covert forms of envy and resentment. This possibility of envy is something that is also registered by Lacanian psychoanalysis, as discussed in the first chapter of this book. In my view, this particular envy of another’s joy-in-being can help to explain the psychosomatic aetiology of misogyny, together with aspects of homophobia and racism (given the perception or stereotypes of gays as indeed gay, and other races as more feminine or childlike, irrespective of what may actually be the case). Eric Gans in Originary Thinking proposes that appropriative envy or resentment is a primary definitive trait of humanity where he tacitly equates humanity with a certain masculinity. Gans’s thesis strikes me as a highly reductive one, however, the reason that I draw attention to Gans’s work is because he maintains that an ostensive use of language arises in relation to this envy. He writes the following of the appropriative will and its forestalling: in violation of the dominance hierarchy, all hands reach out for the object; but at the same time each is deterred from appropriating it by the sight of

Introduction

3

all the others reaching in the same direction [ . . . ] The center of the circle appears to possess a repellent, that prevents its occupation by the members of the group, that converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign.3 The ostensive gesture concerns a use of language that attends to an awareness of a reality beyond the linguistic utterance. In this, it exceeds the performative whilst also not functioning in a descriptive manner. Gans gives the example of the cry of ‘Fire!’ in the present immediacy of a fire.4 Such a use of language is to alert us to what really is immediately the case without attempting to contain that reality within the linguistic formulation or assertion. It is precisely important that language in such instances be understood as pointing to an awareness or consciousness of what unavoidably or undeniably is beyond the utterance. Gans argues that this ostensive use of language arises for humans so that they can warn each other of dangers and the particular danger that Gans is preoccupied with, as already indicated, pertains to objects of envy or appropriative desire. For Gans, such objects are potentially prey and have to be screened off from or, as it were, ‘pre-sacrificed’ by the group for its harmony in order to minimise predatory behaviour. However, if we need to foreclose here, should it not be a case of condemning predatory behaviour rather than of excluding those that may be the objects of predatory behaviour? It could be said that the cross-cultural taboos against incest and cannibalism specifically concern the foreclosure of the predator as one who preys on his or her own kind. Furthermore, what is especially reductive in Gans’s theory is that he does not consider how admiration can be the effective antidote to envy and that an ostensive use of language may be used in other ways, for example, to point out something beautiful, striking or in some way noteworthy that the group may wish to appreciate together or exercise curiosity towards rather than appropriate in violent competition. What does interest me is the use of language to express a consciousness of what it does not contain. An ostensive use of language may be compared with the Levinasian usage of the grammatical form: il y a.5 According to Arthur Cools, for Levinas the il y a pertains to what precedes writing and, for Levinas, this is ‘the existential density of the void itself ’.6 It could be said that Levinas may thus be concerned with a presenting/absenting of absence that has some significance as regards a femininity posited in terms of absence. Regarding the question of femininity, it would not be a case of saying what a woman is or of performing, theatricalising, ritualising femininity but of admitting ‘there is femininity’: not as a generalisation but according to the specific eventful occasion of awareness. In addition, Heidegger’s notion of aletheia or unconcealment may be of relevance to the disclosure of reality at stake.7 However here, and with Gans’s thesis in mind, Levinas is aptly perplexed by Heidegger’s desire to cast ontological authenticity in terms of mineness.8 My book strongly resists the conflation of authenticity with mineness for political reasons as well as philosophically. Being certainly cannot be made a possession of the self. Whilst I note these possible

4

Introduction

tangents, they remain provisional and peripheral in that Heidegger and Levinas tend not to engage with questions of sexual difference. In this book I do affirm the feminine real, however, my argument aims to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism. My assumption is that you do not have to be a woman to be conscious of the feminine and that a consciousness of the feminine can itself be feminising for either sex. A real consciousness or awareness of the feminine may itself be considered to constitute a feminine consciousness or awareness. Rather than positing the feminine as an object of study (structurally, a rather masculinist enterprise), this book engages with a ‘consciousness of the feminine’, maintaining that double genitive, as a question of other-consciousness distinct from masculine or Hegelian self-consciousness. This is important, for I think that to be conscious of the reality of femininity in yourself is to turn round on yourself in a directing inwards of desire that could occasion madness. With respect to earlier points, the masculine blind spot may be said to be the study of the feminine through lack as an objectified thing whilst the feminine blind spot may be considered to be an inability to locate the feminine in oneself. A way around these aporias is thus to attend to a consciousness of femininity as a matter of conscious of the other, other-consciousness. The feminine may be conscious of the feminine-other if not of a femininity ‘in’ the self (and there is a rather queer inflection to this that the third chapter will entertain). In addition, an exploratory consideration that runs through this work is that the feminine pertains not to inwardness so much as to a laterality of inter-connection. So, this is what ‘decolonising gender’ may be said to be about: a non-possessive, non-self-conscious capacity to notice or be aware of the feminine and of the real more widely. This book investigates how a consciousness of the feminine may arguably be a matter of a less repressed consciousness than is usual for self-centred and individualistic middle class subjects, as could be a question of freedom of spirit. As already indicated, it also sets in play the notion that this awareness may be a matter precisely of our connection to others and to a reality that is fluid and uncontainable. Kelly Oliver’s orientation in The Colonization of Psychic Space is an important one, namely: ‘We need a theory that operates between the psyche and the social, through which the very terms of psychoanalysis are transformed into social concepts.’9 Oliver also aptly states: ‘We are not born with feelings of self-governance. Rather, they are the effect of sublimation and idealization.’10 However, I tend to disagree with Oliver’s argument that this individualising sublimation and idealisation is the clear antidote to depression where she maintains: ‘The inability to sublimate leads to depression and silence.’11 Whilst there may well be instances where this would be valid, it is also possible to consider depression conversely as a matter of excessive individuation, sublimation and idealisation as accompanies the loss of the feminine real, the loss of connectedness to the other, the excessive separation from collective being and being in the world, and the inability to love. I think Hamlet may be seen to treat of depression or melancholia precisely in terms of a loss of connection with the real, and will unfold this understanding in the sixth chapter of this book. Oliver treats of an alienated Western (American) society in which depression is highly

Introduction

5

pervasive. She also engages with Fanon’s work in terms of a melancholia that arises through colonial oppression. However, for Fanon the way out of colonially inflicted pathologies was not through sublimation but through socialist and grassroots liberation struggles. Moreover, it can be suggested that the dominant affect of Black Skin, White Masks is not so much one of melancholia as one of rebellious or protesting anger. ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’. This is one of the famous slogans of the student and worker revolution of May ’68 in Paris. This slogan captures the movement’s spirit of the rejection of the sacrifice of existence to the excessive work demands of capitalism together with a desire for connection with the real, ‘the beach’. I allude to May ’68 because I wish to address Roland Barthes’s famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ which he wrote in the moment just prior to the student and worker uprising. It is important to emphasise that Barthes’s essay precedes the moment of May ’68 because it would be a mistake to see this text as automatically symptomatic of or as partaking of the ’68 ethos. I would even go so far as to maintain that, if anything, this text could be part of what the students may have been reacting against as regards the hyper-imperative of a capitalist performativity felt to be claustrophobic and suffocating. The reason that I wish to consider this essay by Barthes is because it may be proposed that this essay is the one that serves to introduce J.L. Austin’s philosophy of the performative into French theory which in turn has had its considerable impact on the popular uptake of the performative within the American theoretical humanities. What Barthes writes is: The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered – something like the I declare of kings or I sing of very ancient poets . . . [For the modern scriptor] the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.12 That the ‘rare verbal form’ of the performative has become so disseminated testifies to the persuasive influence of Barthes’s essay. Yet have we been somewhat misled? This question is raised because the apparent strong appeal of Barthes’s position is the dispensing with authority when it could be contrarily argued that Barthes’s advocacy of the performative may well serve to enable an authoritarian logic, even if unintentionally so (as is most likely to be the case). Let us, then, deconstruct. In the above, Barthes emphasises a sovereignty of language, especially of the first person, the transcendental ‘I’. The sovereign here is not this or that human

6

Introduction

being but a faceless, impersonal position of authority. This could constitute a bureaucratisation and managerialisation of linguistic utterance where the ‘I’ acts as the bearer of an authority rendered untraceably enigmatic. Authority, generalised, becomes unlocatable. In addition, language is given an institutional power in that it institutes or inaugurates that of which it speaks. Barthes wants to say that this is anti-theological but I am not so sure. The order ‘light’ is given, and then there is light? Or, less magically, there is a ‘because I say so’ effect. That is, there is something logocentric at stake in this if the logos is given as the originating word or sign of origin. According language a precedence over reality can indeed foster an omnipotence of word and thought, one that can seek to literalise itself in an authoritarian manner. Barthes not only transfers an authorisation become groundless the linguistic medium but he also transfers a certain presence to language in that he maintains that the tense of the performative is the simple present. The fact that Barthes uses the simple present as a formula – ‘I declare’ rather than the present continuous ‘I am declaring’ – has certain implications. Language is thus cut off from the moment and process of its utterance in an idealisation of presence that can infer an ontologising of language itself. This is something that Adorno associates with the rise of authoritarianism in fascism, as I will consider in the fourth chapter.13 The word becomes habitual or eternal: now and forever, like a logo or brand of endless originality. In fact, Barthes’s theory could be subjected to a Marxist critique for it constitutes a certain commodification and fetishising of language. For Barthes, works of art are like commodities in that they appear mysteriously on the stage and appear to speak all by themselves owing nothing to productive processes outside them such as the labour of their historical authors. Barthes fails to address the difference between the author as a creative practitioner and authority figures. With this, he does not take into account in his essay the fact that creative writers have often written to contest the dogmas of authority and tradition. It may be said in Barthes’s favour that he was trying to work against the authoritarianism of a naturalisation of the ideological. The performative may serve to critique a constative essentialism in significant ways but it is not thereby necessarily emancipatory. As I have begun to indicate, the performative can be used to facilitate auto-legitimations that are beyond challenge and to promote ‘conformativity’. And, simply speaking, a writer who may work to idealise nature – or to give form to soma and affect – is not the same thing as an authority figure who tries to naturalise ideals. What is interesting about the way in which ‘The Death of the Author’ privileges a performative theory of writing is that this is done so as to foreclose the mentionability of a reality of the feminine. Barthes begins his essay by citing Balzac as follows: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instictive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’14 Barthes wants to say that this statement cannot be accorded any source. It could be said that any seemingly essentialist statement could have served Barthes’s purpose but I think it is telling that he chooses this very one. He seems to use

Introduction

7

the self-referentiality of the performative to deny not only the voice of the writer but a consciousness of the feminine, of the other, of the real. If he is indirectly seeking to make a case for a performativity of gender available to all, as well as a case for the critic as artist, I have no objection to such strategies which could be welcomed as democratising. What would be problematic, however, would be the attempt to render this performativity absolute through censoring any awareness of the feminine. This would imply a resentful attitude towards the existence of the feminine whereas the attitude in Balzac’s literary statement seems conversely a rather admiring one. Moreover, this statement about ‘woman herself ’ actually turns out to be about a paradoxical lack of essentiality given that the feminine is designated as unpredictable, variable, ungraspable: non-conformist. When Barthes has the critic or reader usurp the place of the creative writer, this could be seen as a retrospective colonisation of the origin, colonisation being such a belated claim to possession. That said, another possibility presents itself, and it is one that I would prefer to credit. It may be said that a so-called author is a receiver – witness, listener, reader and so on – to begin with. The ‘author’ may be thought of as a receiver of the signatures of all manner of beings. Here, the signature of the writer would be not a mark of ownership but an acknowledgement of receipt. This is a consideration attended to in a number of chapters of this work. Anti-colonial liberation theory and postcolonial theory have widely registered the significance of the political power of the performative. For instance, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Albert Memmi, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said have all significantly broached the performative formations of identity in colonial theatres of power. However, postcolonial theory has extensively treated this as a matter of critique rather than an occasion for celebration given material inequalities and questions of power. It may be said, generally speaking, that what enables such a critique is a sense of the gap between lived realities and performative enactments. Edward Said’s deliberate distancing of himself from post-structuralist thinking is something that he has explained in terms of his reluctance to give up on the author and on the real. Thus, for Said, the fact that the Orient is a construction with performative effects does not mean there are no Middle Eastern realities that we would be capable of noticing and the fabrication of the Orient cannot simply be attributed to the authorless workings and internalised legitimations of language. Said, in the context of affirming Derrida’s philosophical brilliance with some reservations, goes on to state: ‘a text is a process not a thing; this is one of the main arguments of Beginnings, especially as I was also trying to demonstrate the connection between a text’s materiality (as process) and the human effort expended on its behalf [ . . . ] our great failing as critics today is that we never seem to be able to reconnect, rejoin our analyses, our critefacts as I call them, to the society, agencies, or lives that produced them.’15 Said also states: ‘in Orientalism, I never talk about discourse the way that Foucault does in The Archeology of Knowledge, for example, as something that has its own life and can be discussed

8

Introduction

separately from the realm of the real [ . . . ] I try to make discourse go hand in hand with an account of conquest, the creation of instruments of domination, and techniques of surveillance that were rooted not in theory but in actual territory.’16 Thus, a performative politics that would admit to no reality beyond itself could serve to screen the fact that inadmissible motivations may be at stake, for instance, appropriation of the life sources or material resources of others. Albert Einstein, in his ‘Why War?’ correspondence with Freud, raises the question that war might be explained not in terms of the irrationality of the uncultured masses but in terms of the educated middle class’s loss of awareness of reality. He writes: ‘Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘‘Intelligentzia’’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form – upon the printed page.’17 This claim resonates strongly with Adorno’s claim that it was the intellectual classes that paved the way for fascism.18 War cannot simply be explained by aggression for its militarism is thoroughly programmed and its operation takes the form of tele-technoperformativity. What Jean-Luc Godard’s footage of war in his anti-war film Notre Musique makes strikingly evident in visual terms is that war consists of a split between ‘heads’ or leaders issuing commands and a mechanically performative and ritualistically programmed body of soldiers carrying out those orders.19 The leaders are thereby ‘absolved’ of the violence in not carrying it out themselves whilst the soldiers are absolved of responsibility in that they are merely performing orders. Godard’s film also serves to offer a critique of the self-referential postmodernist image as that which may actually serve to singularise history in the denial of the living histories of others. What further seems to be at stake in the alienation from reality that Einstein speaks of is the hypocritical attempt to justify the war machine through what Adorno refers to as a ‘jargon of authenticity’ and what Srinivas Aravamundan speaks of as a ‘theolinguistic supplement’.20 The theologising of language and of techno-performativity seems to serve as a would-be subliming operation or transcendence set up against the realities of life, death and violence. In her study of Palestinian literature, Clemency Schofield shows how women writers tend to position themselves against certain strands of the masculine nationalist discourses of idealism and saviour-heroism through more realistic and down-toearth approaches to the national struggle. Quoting Hanan Ashrawi, Schofield states: ‘Women’s insistence on ‘‘the preservation of life and rights’’ supplies a vital counterbalance to masculine war myths, myths that are inclined to overlook the damage war inflicts on vulnerable bodies and to subsume individual rights under national imperatives.’21 In this book, the emphasis is on how writing may direct our attention to questions of the real without affecting either to produce or to serve as representative of the reality in question. Regarding this, I am interested in certain aspects of Romantic and Modernist writing that have been somewhat eclipsed.22 I am more widely concerned with identifying a particular aesthetic, one that I call

Introduction

9

‘poetic realism’. This term is used to refer to literature that attempts to address the real not so much in an objectifying, representational way but in a manner that accords particular significance to states of consciousness. In keeping with the epistemic upheavals that have been introduced by quantum physics, what is at stake is not so much a case of adequate models of reality as quite radical insights into how it is that questions of the real are inseparable from consciousness. Thus, physicists such as Erwin Schro¨dinger and David Bohm came to develop a particular interest in consciousness – as might seem surprising for the hard sciences – with respect to a creative approach to the real.23 I am interested in the expressions of poetic realism because these offer suitable instances for an enquiry into the idea of reality as consciousness of reality (distinct from selfconsciousness). Whilst in constructivist terms, Judith Butler posits her logic of the performative in terms of the deformation of already given norms and forms, there is an aspect of literature, particularly of poetry, that is conversely prospective. Grigorio Agamben argues for the literary significance of potentiality as well as impotentiality in his Potentialities, and David Bohm affirms that the potential is the real.24 Here, potentialities that have no pre-existing or established form may be realised in moments of consciousness. Reality may be realisation, although in psychoanalytic literature this experience is also called ‘de-realisation’ because it is a disruption of the expected or of habitual consciousness. Freud’s experience of the Acropolis as unexpectedly and startlingly ‘for real’ is a classic example of this.25 The significance of this consciousness of reality is that it challenges the overly formalist or formulaic aspects of the performative as regards a literalisation of speech acts. Although this book offers a critique of the performative, this certainly does not amount to anything like a rejection of performativity but only to a contestation over the extent of its domain and an enquiry into its de-humanising and authoritarian dimensions. There are aspects of the performative that I much welcome and, with respect to this, it seems important to distinguish between the mechanically conformative and forms of the performative that may be considered to be theatrical and ironic.26 It may be said that what makes for this distinction is that in the former case there is no reality acknowledged outside the performative formula as non-event whereas ironic and theatrical forms of performativity depend on precisely a sense of the gap between performance and reality: the performance is understood to be merely a performance because there is an awareness and acknowledgement of a reality that it does not encapsulate. In the fourth chapter of this work, poetic realism is drawn on in an attempt to deconstruct deconstruction’s advocacy of the mechanically performative whilst in the last chapter I endorse Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Specters of Marx. I should point out that this by no means constitutes my overall approach to deconstruction, if there could be such a thing. Rather, I merely wish to tackle some of what I have found to be the more questionable aspects of Derrida’s generalisations of the spectral and the performative, in the hope of contributing to the debates he has initiated, and also to confront some of the more reductive deployments of a techno-performative deconstruction that may be said to ignore what in Derrida’s

10

Introduction

work actually seeks to resist closure. Beyond this, there is a more dynamic approach to deconstruction to be noted that I am not adequately able to engage with in this work due to the constraints of its selected lines of questioning.27 These lines of questioning involve the consideration that even though Derrida tends to posit diffe´rance as groundless, diffe´rance and deconstruction can perhaps only operate in deferred relation to a holism of the real. In this respect, I would not see diffe´rance in terms of, say, a single substance differing from itself but in terms of the rendering explicate of an implicate potential. In addition, it is worth noting in passing that in ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ Derrida entertains the notion that the journey of deconstruction could surprisingly be understood in terms of a desire to return to reality or in terms of a non-transcendental resurrection that is a touching down, a coming to land.28 This is presented in terms of the hatching of moths from cocoons, amongst other motifs, and so may further imply the fortuitous timing of worldly reunions. This work is also concerned with a critique of the Western Enlightenment as serving to foster an illusory ideal of individual autonomy that is at odds with postcolonial emphases on collective emancipation that attend to both gender and class in recognition of our differential interdependencies. Deniz Kandiyoti in ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and Nation’ has persuasively written of how nationalisms manipulate women as boundarymarkers and also serve to configure woman in terms of backwardness (be this reviled or celebrated).29 Two counter-strategies may be proposed here. First, if femininity is a matter of liminality and thereby also connection for either sex, femininity may be deployed in a cross-border manner to contest delineations of the proper and property. Second, the masculinist positing of an explicitly or implicitly feminine authenticity as a matter of backwardness may be said to be an utter illusion or quite irrational. The feminine real cannot be said to be in the past: it is only ever that which may or may not accompany us. So, it is impossible to locate this reality in the past and there is, therefore, no authenticity to return to. What is at stake can but be a matter of what abides, even in an eclipsed or invisible way, in never becoming past. In the contestation of backward-looking nationalisms, what needs to be affirmed instead is the possibility of lateral, crossborder ties for the sake of unpredictable futures. It is important to point out and stress from the outset that the collective cannot be singularised and that attempts to do so are often destructive. I am not convinced by arguments that maintain that the singular does not refer to the single in that the desire to cling on to the very terminology of singularity seems suspect. If we want to refer to the creative or to the unique, why substitute another term? What is so compelling about ‘singularity’? The philosophical heritage of the term would seem to concern a monadism or monism of substance (being) that could be traced back to Leibniz in his attempt to negotiate the non-duality of Spinoza’s thinking. The singularity of the monad as single substance is not to be confused with non-duality. Non-duality pertains not to oneness as singular but rather to what is not yet separate and thus entails a potential for duality, plurality and difference. This is what I mean by a holism (rather than monism) underlying

Introduction

11

the advent of difference: I see the term diffe´rance as pertaining not only to an economy of traces but to the flickering, fluid underlying connections between what is spaced apart. The history of Enlightenment thinking is comprised of both its rational humanist and mystical strands. Regarding this, so-called humanism and socalled mysticism could be thought of as two sides of the same coin or sheet: the recto and the verso. Given such a perspective, it would be futile to deny one or the other side. It would also be futile to attempt to bring them onto the same plane for such a would-be totalisation would be a structural impossibility. This recognition constitutes a logic of complementarity that is explicitly addressed in the final chapter of this book, although there with respect to the Marxist attempt to invert Hegelian idealism. Perhaps it is necessary to accept that the real and the ideal operate in an inverse relation to each other without seeking to finalise any given over-turning. Apart from emphasising the inter-dependence of the collective against individualist illusions of autonomy, the trajectory of this book is to work past resistances to avowals of the feminine and the real in order to address the distinction between what works/performs as a woman and the woman who works. This is more generally a case of the distinction between labour as a commodity and labour as a matter of real lives. Positing labour as just a commodity in denial of realities serves to relegate real lives, especially feminine lives, to the status of the expendable. And, obviously, ecological considerations are pertinent here too. Whilst my main sources and influences may be specified in terms of literature, critical theory and postcolonial discourse, this work shares some tangents with the school of critical realism that takes off from the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar.30 These tangents include: an affirmation of the inter-connectedness of the ontological that firmly rejects a position of ontological monovalence; an affirmation of the reality of potentiality; and a concern with an ethics and politics of emancipation. I regard these positions inter-implicated. In feminist terms, both Carrie Hull and Catherine Belsey critique constructivist feminism through an appeal to the real, and my work may thus be considered as part of a wider impetus. Hull offers a persuasive account of the affinities that a constructivist feminism has with nominalism, regarding a categorical distrust of categories, and of the affinities that performative theories have with the conditionings and ritualism of behaviourism.31 However, in accusing Butler of nominalism and behaviourism, she overlooks Butler’s engagements with Hegelian self-consciousness and the psychoanalytic unconscious. Hull’s approach is deliberately generalised, as it argues for the efficacy of sexual categorisation. However, I still think we have to maintain the gap between epistemological categories (as indeed constructions) and the ontological, as well as to take on objections to objectifications. Awareness of being cannot just be given in an objective form. Regarding the above, my own work is concerned with the need for the close engagement of readings. In her critique of constructivist feminism, Belsey maintains:

12

Introduction In Judith Butler’s case, what looked at first like the dream of freedom turned out in practice to be a form of determinism [ . . . ] Cultural constructivism reckons without the real, however, and the something missing in culture itself which makes thought go on endlessly. The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition.32

I tend to agree with this broad assessment as my first chapter will hopefully substantiate with further attention to questions of resistance. Regarding a feminist approach to questions of the real, this book pays particular attention to the work of Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. As implied by Belsey’s statement, reality cannot be adequately defined inasmuch as it constantly upsets the definitive. It pertains to an elusive creativity beyond us and yet in which we may partake, and it is this that perhaps serves to both dissolve our knowledges and permit new coalescences, concresences and constellations. I will end this brief introduction with two quotations. The first is from J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and is a statement made by Susan, the colonial female subject, with reference to the colonised subject. The second is from Fadwa Tuqan’s autobiography and concerns the conditioning of her upbringing against which she had to rebel in order to emancipate herself as both a woman and a poet. ‘I say he’s a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal. I say he’s a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman.’33 The woman had to forget the word ‘no’ existed in the language, except when she repeated, ‘There is no God but God’, in her ablutions and prayers. ‘Yes’ was the parroted word instilled in her from infancy, to become embedded in her consciousness for the rest of her life.34 So, let us get going.

1

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece. Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’1 Freud placed in the forefront of ethical enquiry the simple relation between man and woman. Strangely enough, things have not been able to move beyond that point. The question of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping, at the centre of our desire. I would say – you will forgive the play on words – that we need to know what we can do to transform this dam[n]-age into our ‘dame’ in the archaic French sense, our lady. Jacques Lacan, Se´minar VII2

The episteme is out of joint. This work begins with such a fracture. In Twilight of the Clockwork God, John David Ebert makes the point that the Jains who continue to survive in modern India today maintain an ancient cosmology that in its beginnings is contemporary with Minoan Crete. He likens the views of the Jains to the mythopoeic image of Gaia upheld by today’s scientists, including Brian Swimme, and he writes: ‘Both the Jains’ image of the cosmos as a Goddess and Swimme’s autopoeic universe are quite different from the clocks and steam engines of classical physics, for they envision a universe that is alive and sentient, bursting with creativity [ . . . ] In the mechanistic universe, there is nothing new under the sun and no real creativity ever takes place.’3 Ebert’s book documents the ending of the mechanistic episteme and constitutes a platform for the ideas of contemporary groundbreaking thinkers across a range of disciplines including mathematics, biology, cosmology, medicine and psychology. In his introduction to the book, the physicist F. David Peat writes: John David Eberts’s Twilight of the Clockwork God is a valediction, a funeral oration to a dream that died [ . . . ] This part-dream part-nightmare should have been laid to rest by the great scientific revolutions of the early twentieth century, culminating in the current explosion of interest in Chaos Theory. Today we are no longer passive observers of a cosmos created by a Clockwork God but full members of a participatory universe. Our abilities

14

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud to predict and control the world are strictly limited. And we know that only those systems which are open and responsive to their environments will, in the long run, survive. [ . . . ] Yet in other areas of life, the mechanical universe keeps ticking on. Its ticks can be heard in our schools, hospitals, legislatures and seats of government. (p. ix–x)

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault delineates the anthropocentric episteme of late modernity in terms of the figure of man as a self-positing empiricotranscendental doublet within a deterministic analytic of finitude.4 He further dramatically predicts that this episteme, with its privileged configurations of, we could say, techno-scientific humanism, is nearing its end. While this work of Foucault’s created a stir at the time of its publication, the humanities seem not to have quite registered how pertinent Foucault’s words may be from the point of view of the sciences, as disseminated by Ebert, Peat and others. Rather, it is in the theoretical humanities that a certain ideology of techno-humanism has seemed to flourish or at least maintain itself, both overtly as well as in not so obvious ways. What I wish to do in this chapter is first to explore how the widespread performative theory of gender depends on a pervasive logic of anthropocentric techno-rationality, a position that serves to generate a certain Calibanisation, or rendering monstrous, of racial difference. I also wish to address the possible ontological reality of the feminine, that which is beyond the performative, in terms of an ethics of the collective, that is, in terms of friendship, loyalty, solidarity: sumud.

The episteme is out of joint: the idealist-literalist continuum Signatures of all things I am here to read James Joyce, Ulysses5 De Signatura Rerum [The Signature of All Things] Jacob Boehme6 Peut-on-aimer la sculpture Shona? La sculpture Shona n’existe pas. Pierre-Laurent Sanner, Revue Noir, 287

I will begin with some anecdotes concerning what I wish to refer to as ‘the idealist-literalist continuum’. Some years ago, I had a conversation with an art restorer from England about Shona sculpture. He confessed to me that this sculpture made him feel queasy because he saw it as monstrous. This surprised and puzzled me because I do not myself see Shona sculpture in this way, and it had never occurred to me that it could be seen in such a way. Some years later, I had another conversation about Shona sculpture, this time with a European sculptress. She, too,

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

15

said she found this sculpture unsettling because she, she too, saw it as monstrous. ‘How so?’ I queried, and went on to suggest: ‘Surely you are looking at it far too literally?’ The perception of monstrosity may be said to be an effect of a certain literalism. This literalism is not merely an emphasis on or belief in a literal reality, but that which either attempts to literalise or materialise an ideal or, else, seeks to idealise what is seen as a literal reality. This idealising-literalising logic can be explained with reference to the figure of the double, the do¨ppelganger. ‘Qui parmi nous n’est pas un homo duplex?’8 writes Baudelaire. Who, amongst us, is not a double? If we are all doubles, this is obviously not literally the case, but only true in a manner of speaking. However, in a literature of the double the duplicity of the self is bizarrely actualised: Jekyll and Hyde.9 Moreover, the way in which this literalisation occurs is often through the expression of a wish or desire that comes true whereby dreamy words turn into nightmarish realities. For example, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, speaking of his and man’s duality, wishes that he could attain a perfect singularity of being where this wish gives rise to the deformed form of Hyde. Or, in the case of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Dorian wishes that he might remain forever young and change place with his portrait. His magical speech act is all that is needed to effect the deed. What is desired in these instances would seem to be an invariance of form, a perfect permanence, a permanent perfection, which in realising itself brings about a deformed other ‘self ’ but a ‘self ’ that is neither an other nor a self. Although what effects this is an act of speech, a magical omnipotence of thought, it is also the strange case that doubles are often presented to us as botched scientific experiments. Dorian Gray is said to constitute a scientific experiment, first on the part of Lord Henry while he comes to take himself as an experiment, as Hyde is for Jekyll. Desiring perfect self-identity, desiring to be the origin of himself, scientific man experiments on himself to produce a monstrous clone. ‘Qui parmi nous n’est pas un homo duplex?’ writes Baudelaire. Who is not a double man, a male duplex? Who: amongst us? My hypocrite, my twin, my brother? A literature of the double is a bachelor literature, a literature of the same-sexed who wish to remain single. The double is, at once, father and son. In H.G. Wells’s ‘The Story of the Late Mr Evlesham’10 (sham self/selves), a young man aspires to become the fatherly figure he worships, a famous scientist. Expressing this wish, he is then drugged to wake up to find himself trapped in the aged body of the illustrious scientist, while the father-figure then appropriates the youthful self. Father as son, son as father, word made flesh. The desire for self-immortalisation in these fictions of the double reveals itself to be a death drive. Doubles commit suicide. This unintended effect of an intended permanent perfection, perfect permanence, shows that what man takes to be ‘mortal nature’ is not, is not mortal nature, that is. The inverted lesson of the double is that what is taken to be merely dead or deadly is in truth what makes for life. A literature of the double is not only a fiction. In fact, that is what it says: this is no fiction. There is a scientific literature of the double to be found in a certain discourse of genetic technology, to which we can now turn.

16

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

Genetic research, in some ways, relies on a logic of the double. The presence of the absence of a gene (say, Hyde) can give rise to a mutation that serves to establish the normativity of its presence (say, Jekyll). Or, as Enrico Coen writes: It’s like learning a language backwards, removing words and seeing which objects disappear. If I breed a lot of normal red-flowered Antirrhinum (snapdragon) plants and find a mutant with white flowers, I can say a gene signifying red has been altered. If I find a bald mutant mouse, I might conclude that a gene signifying hairs has been altered. In all these cases, the effect is the opposite of what the gene normally signifies because it reflects a defect in the gene.11 Simply, the norm is established by means of its mutant opposite, its abnormal double. Matt Ridley in his ambitious book, Genome, wishing to tell the story of various genes, finds that he is repeatedly dependent on telling us the stories of diseases, which is something that seems to frustrate him. Much as he wishes to separate the healthy from the defective, the defective returns to plague the normal and healthy. (It is not unlike Freud’s self-defeating attempts to separate the death drive from the pleasure principle, in a work which also recapitulates a scientific fiction of the double.) Ridley maintains that his own capital rule is (a rule given in capital letters): ‘GENES ARE NOT THERE TO CAUSE DISEASES’.12 It is a rule that Ridley repeatedly finds himself compelled to repeat: ‘Remember: GENES ARE NOT THERE TO CAUSE DISEASES’ (p. 263). But what if, following the warnings of a literature of the double, the desire for perfect health revealed itself to be a death drive? What Ridley wants to say is that: ‘Genes R us’. Not only this, the cover of his book features the cut-out shapes of chromosomes so that pinkish and orangey shades from the page beneath the cut-outs show through. When the cover is turned, we see that the pinkish and orangey chromosome blobs turn into the photograph of the face of the author, Ridley himself. This might be: ‘Genes are me’. The subtitle of the book is The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. While the approach is clearly intended to be jokey, Ridley seems, rather narcissistically, to find himself elected to be the one human being to write the autobiography of the human being, the word of DNA made flesh. In the opening chapter, he states: Among six thousand million people on the planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word [DNA] was discovered. In all of the earth’s history, biology and geography, I was born just five years after the moment when, and two miles from the place where, two members of my own species discovered the structure of DNA and hence discovered the greatest, simplest and most surprising secret in the universe. Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can convince you of the immense fascination of the word. (pp. 11–12)

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

17

DNA, then, is or appears as the logos, original word of creation, and although Ridley speaks of himself as a zealous materialist, his approach to DNA is yet a highly onto-theological one, that is, specifically with respect to the patriarchal interpretations of religion. DNA, that chemical word, would seem to be both a literalisation of the original logos or godhead and a literality to be worshipped as such. Since there is not the time to explore Ridley’s literalism in any detail, just a few indications of it will be given. Whilst Ridley admits that to think of DNA as a blueprint, an architectural plan, would be ‘too literal’ and too technological (in his words, ‘blueprints are too literal for genetics, because each part of a blueprint makes an equivalent part of a machine’, p. 7), he nonetheless goes on to state the following: Entering the new world of genetic embryology sometimes feels like a Tolkien novel; it requires you to learn a massive vocabulary. But – and here is the wonder of it – you do not need to learn a new way of thinking. There is no fancy physics, no chaos theory or quantum dynamics, no novelties. Like the discovery of the genetic code itself, what seemed initially to be a problem that could only be solved with new concepts turns out to be a simple, literal and easily understood sequence of events. (p. 184, my emphasis) With this deterministic literalism, what is bracketed off here, foreclosed, are questions of creativity – the existence of such a thing and what it might be – that both quantum physics and literature might serve to give us novel ways of thinking about. Ridley’s fixation on the idealist-literalism of the word could be thought of as logo-centric, where ‘logo’ would translate in the capitalist sense of the brand and branding. Throughout his book, a book intended to inform the general public, Ridley speaks of DNA as a recipe, a set of instructions or an instruction manual, a digital programme which gives rise to a step-by-step process of mechanical selfassembly.13 Enrico Coen, who is not a science journalist like Ridley but an actual scientist in the field of genetic research, devotes his book, The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves, to explaining how such popular metaphors are misleading. Coen states: When someone is being creative there need be no separation between plan and execution. We can have an intuitive notion of someone painting a picture or composing a poem without following a defined plan. Yet the outcomes of such creative processes – the painting or the poem – are not random but highly structured. In this respect, I want to suggest that human creativity comes much closer to the process of development [of organisms] than the notion of manufacture according to a set of instructions, or the running of a computer programme. (p. 13) Although Ridley admits that there is no central authority (‘dictator’ it could be said) in the making of organisms (p. 175), unlike Coen, he yet subscribes to the

18

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

notion that DNA constitutes a preformed word or text that serves to instruct the mechanical reproduction of organisms. This logo-centric conception is implicitly a phallogocentric one too, problematically since of course both maternal and paternal DNA combine in the making of organisms. (At one point, Ridley tries to persuade us that paternal genes work to colonise the female body for paternal reproduction, omitting to explain at this point how and why it is that the maternal egg and maternal genes serve to start the development of the organism: that is, if it were just a matter of the male colonising the female for his auto-reproduction, why would the maternal genes start up the growth of the embryo, which is what they are said to do?)14 Ridley cites Richard Dawkins as follows: ‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment’ (p. 123). From Coen’s point of view, this is a falsification, one that well might fill us with astonishment. Coen writes: We naturally equate development with someone consistently following instructions. But in my view this is misleading . . . The process of development is much more like making an original than manufacturing copies, in the sense that the final product, the adult, is not there from the beginning but gradually emerges through a highly interactive process in which each step builds on and reacts to what went before . . . [T]he fertilised egg has no detailed sense of what the final picture will look like. (p. 179) So, instead of a process of mechanical self-assembly, we have a creative autoresponding process in which form as form is not pre-given for the ‘original form’ is the emergence of the creative process and is original inasmuch as there is this process. For what is to follow, it needs to be pointed out that creativity is capable of accommodating reproducibility, necessarily so, but that reproducibility as merely reproducibility is not creative although errors in the copying process can always occur. In the publishing world, these errors are aptly called literals. It could also be noted that non-mechanistic reproducibility, that which engages the attention of contemporary science, is holographic in nature, the whole being mirrored in the parts. I wish now to turn to a consideration of how what has been raised so far might be considered in terms of the ways in which an idealising-literalising logic continues to replicate itself in the philosophical inheritances of the theoretical humanities, with further respect to questions of self-authorisation and what, in tandem with self-authorisation, is said to be unspeakable. Here, the unspeakable may be a category used to subsume those unentitled or unauthorised to speak.

The unspeakable speaks: ‘ . . . ’ Would that be a marvel, a fright, an impudence, a cry in the night, an incredibility, a stroke of inspiration, an unwelcome interruption, a surprise conception, a moment of utter self-doubt? Do you hear it? How do you hear it?

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

19

It is specifically Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone that is to be engaged with in this section, where it could be pointed out that in the play, Antigone, Antigone is referred to by the chorus as the monstrous, raw, cannibalistic,15 as in European racist discourses Africans sometimes are so designated. Butler also considers Antigone in terms of the unspeakable. At this outset, I should state that, having written on ‘Postcolonial Antigones’ with reference to the Lacanian and Hegelian readings of Antigone, I came to approach Butler’s use of Antigone with some curiosity as to whether it would reflect or accord with an anti-colonial logic or site of resistance as regards the anti-colonial significance that has been strangely accorded to this literary figure.16 As Nelson Mandela states: ‘It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle.’17 Moreover, as mentioned by Elisabeth Roudinesco, underlying Lacan’s reading of Antigone is the fact that he happened to be partially addressing his step-daughter, Laurence Bataille, whilst she was in prison for her activism in support of the FLN during the Algerian liberation struggle.18 Thus, what is to follow is inflected with these anti-colonial concerns in mind. At the outset of Antigone’s Claim, Butler states that in coming to engage with Antigone with the displaced political status of Antigone in mind, she found herself surprised then to find how canonical readings of Antigone do not attribute a political significance to her figure but rather tend to treat her as a ‘prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it’19 (p. 2, emphasis in text), and this is to be Butler’s emphasis. In brief, Butler attends to what she calls ‘kinship trouble’, regarding, I think, a governing capitalist logic of a politics of the ‘same kind’ or abstract equality. Towards the end of this chapter, I will re-configure this question in terms of an ethical condition of the potential for the co-existence of what cannot be standardised. Antigone’s Claim begins with what sounds like an emphatic claiming of Antigone. In less than two pages we get: ‘I began to think about Antigone, as I wondered . . . ’, ‘It seemed to me that Antigone . . . ’, ‘But who is this ‘‘Antigone’’ that I sought to use . . . ?’, ‘As I hope to show . . . ’, ‘But let me recount my steps for you’, ‘I am no classicist . . . ’, ‘I began to read Antigone . . . ’, ‘I found something different . . . what I had anticipated’, ‘What struck me first . . . ’. What follows is that Antigone is somewhat made over into Butler’s own image as she is turned into a heroine – or, as it turns out to be, hero – of the performative speech act and emerges as something of an alibi for queer families or non-normative familial social arrangements. As will be seen, my concern with this is that Antigone may pertain to what cannot be personalised or privatised, a broad question of collective existence. Butler begins her exploration of Antigone through attending to what she calls ‘Antigone’s claim’. While Antigone breaks the law in burying her outlaw brother, what especially interests Butler is that Antigone claims to have done this deed, she lays some kind of possessive claim to it. Significantly, the word ‘claim’ conflates an act of speech with an originating moment of ownership. Butler’s argument serves to suggest that the unpublished work cannot really be said to have an author, and that authorship is established through publication in the arena of

20

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

the law. She writes: ‘In fact, the deed seems to wander throughout the play, threatening to become attached to some doers, who could not have done it, disowned by others who might have done it. The act is everywhere delivered through speech acts [ . . . ] The only way that the doer is attached to the deed is through the linguistic assertion of the connection’ (p. 7, my emphasis). Is that so? Or might it be that when we write we cannot help signing selves, idioms, existences, the impression of others on us, irrespective of any claims to copyright? Butler also writes of Antigone’s claim: ‘she answers a question that is posed to her from another authority [ . . . ] what I [she] will not deny is my [her] deed – a deed that becomes possessive, a grammatical possession [ . . . ] another deed in the very act of claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture [ . . . ]’ (p. 8). What is to be noted for further consideration is that authorship is firmly conflated in the above with official authorisation: the performative speech act specifically has the function of authorisation, the rendering authoritative of authoring. Origination thus becomes a matter of making a retrospective and possessive claim to originality (‘a new criminal venture’, an originary injustice, an origin of injustice). This laying of a retrospective claim to the origin is very much a colonising, capitalising move, one that serves – in the moment it is made – to disentitle the possible co-originality of others or to thwart a potential sharing of sources. Antigone’s supposed claim would seem to be an officialising speech act that linguistically – through ‘grammatical possession’ – actualises ownership, possibly an adoptive process. Contentious as this colonising Antigone may be, for Butler the fascination with Antigone seems to lie in the criminal or defective replication of a patriarchal and logo-centric claim to originality, one itself that could be considered criminal and defective. She writes: ‘Interestingly enough, both Antigone’s act of burial and her verbal defiance become the occasions on which she is called ‘‘manly’’ by the chorus, Creon and the messengers’ (p. 8). Thus, Butler perceives a claim to originality as manly, where the further issue is that while the possessive rhetorical claim may well be manly (the Joycean issue of paternity as a legal fiction), the actuality of creativity may well be beyond this. In the play itself, when Ismene says she will claim to have done the deed too, Antigone explicitly rejects this as mere performative rhetoric as opposed to committed, albeit unpublicised, activism: ‘Who did the work? . . . / I have no love for a friend who loves in words alone’ (lines 610–12, my emphasis). It is thus a case of someone claiming to have participated in a work, an act of labour, political or otherwise, after the event, when they at the time of urgency or emergence they did nothing. Or, vaguely, it could relate to the fetishisation of the radical as after-image, icon, fashion. What could be added to Butler’s above observations is that Antigone is also contradictorily perceived to be too much of a woman by the manly Creon. If she is seen as manly in her behaviour by some, this presumes that to deny authority is the same thing as to usurp it. Although this can be the case, it is not necessarily so, for instance, when it is a matter of acknowledging the gap between credited truth and reality. For example, I may say I doubt the truth of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but I would not

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

21

thereby be constructing another truth so much as raising the question of the adequation of said truth to reality. In the contortions over ‘Antigone’s claim’, what Butler seems to be eager to do is to give the rhetorical speech act precedence over an action that would otherwise precede it so that the speech act appears to be the originating phenomenon. This is a matter of attempting to defend the logo-centric theory of performativity, together with the theory of gender as performativity, from the ways in which Antigone and Antigone might occasion a call for a re-thinking of such theories. When Antigone acts to bury her brother, she acts to affirm his existence, his having existed, and with this her own existence in that the brother and the sister are conjoined, co-conjured, interdependent, similar but not identical beings. This simple and double affirmation of existence just is, or unavoidably arises, because Creon’s edict against any recognition of Polynices’ death serves to deny that he ever existed: it is as if he never existed. Shifting this to another context briefly, the concerns might be made more intelligible through opening them out onto the Argentinian situation of the Disappeared and their relatives (los desaparecidos, and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Mothers of the May Square) where this essay has, in particular, the work of Catherine Grant in mind.20 This historical occurrence is being drawn on to make two points. First, it is often women who come to the fore to protest against such disappearances, erasures or disavowals of being. Second, with respect to the photographs of the Disappeared, offered as proof of the existence of those photographed, while they are haunting they cannot be treated as if they were merely phantasmatic representations: the point is that they are not mere representations or copies for they show the undeniable reality of one who has uniquely come into existence. In the play, Antigone, there is much emphasis on undeniability to be noted. These are some of the striking instances: ‘He’s my brother – deny it as you will – / Your brother too’ (lines 55–6); ‘She’s the one – she did it single-handed’ (l.425); ‘She’s the one. With my own eyes I saw her.’ (l. 447); ‘There is that plain and clear’ (l. 449); ‘She stood up to it all, denied nothing’ (l. 484); ‘I did it. I don’t deny a thing’ (l. 501). Butler goes on to consider the readings of Antigone offered by Hegel and Lacan. As she observes, Lacan associates Antigone with an ineffaceable what is, while (as Antigone’s Claim does not seem to take up), Hegel associates her justice with a difficult ‘just is-ness’, so to speak, that his reading works to reject. Butler writes: But consider that, pace Lacan, Antigone in standing for Polynices, and for her love of Polynices, does not simply stand for the ineffaceable character of what is. First of all, it is the exposed body of her brother that she seeks to cover, if not to efface, by her burial of dust. Second, it seems that one reason that standing for her brother implicates her in a death in life is that it abrogates precisely the kinship relations that articulate the Lacanian symbolic, the intelligible conditions for life (p. 53).

22

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

In place of the double affirmation, double avowal, we are given a double negation, double disavowal, where the ineffaceable or undeniable is inverted into what is not and what is not: here, it is the sister (not symbolic father) who is said to efface or erase the outlaw brother, and the symbolic father who then presents himself to effect the absence of the sister, the feminine becoming ‘death in life’. It is also said twice in Antigone’s Claim, that Antigone’s act is one of rivalrous competition with her brother. It is said that she ‘replaces’ and ‘territorializes’ the brother, usurping masculinity as she ‘idealizes’ it, with her act appearing to ‘establish her rivalry and superiority to Polynices’, in that Antigone sees a glory in her act (p. 11); and it is further said ‘Antigone assumes Creon’s sovereignty, even claims the glory destined for her brother’ (p. 23). First of all, it is rather difficult to see the fate of Polynices, the absolute outcast, as a glorious one. Second, this reading implies that Antigone is only opportunistically and callously faking compassion for the brother, outcast, exile, refugee (if he is more truly her rival whom she wishes to efface) for the sake of the glorification of her own reputation in sovereign terms. So, a rivalrous, territorialising, capitalising Antigone emerges. Butler is hardly going along with the play as Sophocles wrote it, if the play is about the love between brother and sister, as most would accept as being the case, but her greater concern is to play off Hegel and Lacan against each other. She explains that there are aspects of each of their readings that she wishes to refute and aspects of each that she wishes to retain and re-work. Schematically, for the sake of brevity, what could be said to emerge is the following: 1 What Butler wishes to reject of Hegel’s reading is his alignment of Antigone with the feminine (e.g. p. 36), and what Butler wishes to retain of his reading is his confinement of Antigone to the sphere of the family (not the political sphere but that of ‘the prepolitical subject’, p. 35). 2 What Butler wishes to reject of Lacan’s theoretical framework is his privileging of the symbolic over the social (p. 19), and what she wishes to retain of it is Lacan’s notion of inheritance in terms of the compulsion to repeat an ‘aberrant signifying chain’ (p. 58). Condensing this yet further, putting this together, what is possibly being put forward, as the text could be drawn on further to support, is that a masculinised daughter-figure is to take the place of the father, patriarchal origin, serving to institute socially her own aberrant signifying chain. This ‘manly daughter’ is one who will not merely take the symbolic position of the father (whereby presumably nothing would change) but be capable of becoming (something like?) a father in social actuality: hence, possibly, Butler’s semi-identification of Antigone with lesbian families. Maybe it is that, for the first time in history, women will be fathers, actually so. Butler disdains what she considers to be a liberal position of empty formalism: [C]onsider the liberal gesture in which one maintains that the place of the father and the place of the mother are necessary, but hey, anyone of any

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

23

gender can fill them. The structure is purely formal, its defenders say, but note how its very formalism secures the structure against critical challenge. (p. 71) What thus seems to be sought is something more literal than this formalism. It would be something more than merely acting out the position of ‘mother’ or ‘father’, but – in this context of gay and lesbian families – what? A transsexual surgery of phallic mother and enwombed father? Is the desire to do away with gendered roles or gendered roles, or even both? Leaving aside these questions of disavowal for the moment, on the one hand, what seems to be at stake is the desire for social recognition of gay families, beyond legal formalities: well and good, this deserves support, but how extending that institution of private property to gay families will end the Western logic of the family and bring about wider social transformations begs a number of questions. And then, there is the gay family and the gay family, recalling the irrepressible refrain of an old gay anthem: ‘We are family! All my sisters – and me!’ If this were to be a more constructive engagement and less of a critique, I would have liked to pursue inversions of the private and the public, though it could briefly be said that we all leave our original families in the desire to discover others, familiar-unfamiliar associations beyond ‘the family’, sympathetic strangers of various kinds. On the other hand, or on another level, there seems to be some bid in Butler’s work on the family towards becoming the aberrant heir of the Western (or at least Hegelian) philosophical tradition. It will be necessary to look more closely, albeit selectively, at the unfoldings of Butler’s somewhat puzzling claims. Butler notices that Lacan protests against Hegel’s inability to read the poetic (p. 46). It seems true that Hegel is inept in this regard, deaf to the poetic. Hegel serves to refuse the poetic logic of the play – as relies on understanding the actual significance of the brother-sister relationship – in favour of his own ideological stakes. Put another way, Hegel’s reading of the play concerns the endorsement of an intellectual authority at the expense of the workings of creative intelligence. The quantum physicists, David Bohm and David Peat, formulate an astute and very helpful distinction between the intellect and intelligence as follows: The word intelligence is often used in a general and fairly loose way today, but some of its original force can be found in the Latin root intelligere, which carries the sense of ‘to gather in between.’ [ . . . ] In this sense, intelligence is the mind’s ability to perceive what lies ‘in between’ and to create new categories. This notion of intelligence, which acts as the key creative factor in the formation of new categories, can be contrasted with the intellect. The past participle of intelligere is in fact intellect, which could then be thought of as ‘what has been gathered’. Intellect, therefore, is relatively fixed, for it is based primarily on an already existing scheme of categories. While the intelligence is a dynamic and creative act of perception through the mind, the intellect is something more limited and static.21

24

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

The free play of the creative intelligence is said to be capable of generating and dissolving categories, while the intellect fixes categories into, thus, their reproducibility. What I should like to stress is the temporal distinction: the intellect is belated or retrospective in relation to the intelligence which depends on a capacity for conjoining and synchronicity. What this is thus pointing towards is that the brother-sister relationship concerns a synchronicity that is displaced by a privileged logic of inheritance in the name of paternity. Butler and other commentators on Antigone puzzle over the unique significance that Antigone accords to her brother when she says that while she could get another husband, she could not find another brother. Whilst this is often treated as a social, ethical and familial question, I think it could be understood on a poetic level. Where the diachronic axis of signification concerns substitution, the synchronic maintains a resistance to substitution through an intuition of ‘the all-at-once’. If Polynices were a signifier, he would be the word that stands for the value of each word and thus all words and their possibilities of combination beyond the logic of substitution as governed by exchange value and successive, singular linearity. Butler aptly picks up on instances where Hegel’s reading clearly departs from Sophocles’ play: the play itself is not being read. It would even be possible to go so far as to suggest that Hegel manages completely to invert the original Antigone in forcing Antigone to become the representative of family values, that is, family in the domestic sense, where Hegel requires an opposition between family and state, private sphere and public sphere. What Butler does not point out with respect to Hegel’s reading of Antigone in the Phenomenology is that the moment at which Hegel feels it necessary to turn to a reading of Antigone is when he is thinking about individual and universal proprietorship, implicitly an ethics of capitalism. Hegel introduces the question as follows: ‘Suppose the question is: Ought it to be an absolute law that there should be property?’22 Just ‘Suppose’? His discussion of absolute laws, the conflict between the authoritarian Creon and the rebellious Antigone being over the absolutism of the law, follows on from this. In short, it could be proposed that Antigone needs to be entirely re-written in order to erase the opposition to the bourgeois family of man, man’s definition of himself in terms of ownership, and the generalisation of this to the proprietorship of the Western family of Man. What could be at stake in Hegel’s ideology is a rather violent self-contradiction: what becomes proper to man, his property, his attribute attributable to him, is . . . the feminine. Thus, Hegel refutes the play by explicitly trying to make of Antigone a kind of interiorised goddess, goddess of the domestic or a domestic goddess, that favoured trope of a certain right. It could be added that what a partial internalisation of or intersection with the feminine may more accurately produce is a form of self-irony, as will be explained in the next chapter, with respect to Foucault’s re-working of Kant. As indicated, where Butler takes issue with Hegel is not really over his alignment of Antigone with the family (the private sphere of the family, whatever its variable social organisations might be, or more broadly an economy of the domestic, the economic as the domestic) but over his treating of her as a woman. Throughout her own reading, Butler is at pains to emphasise and maximise a

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

25

certain masculinisation of Antigone. Here are some of the many instances: ‘Antigone is to love no man . . . but in some senses she is also a man’ (p. 61, as in the sense of ‘butch’ or what others? And what, then, of Antigone’s feelings for Haemon, as well as for her brothers and father?); ‘Antigone is the brother, the brother is the father’ (p. 67); ‘she leads him’ (p. 61, the daughter comes before the father); ‘She has thus taken the place of nearly every man in her family. Is this the effect of the words that are upon her?’ (p. 62, well, it is, at least, the effect of Butler’s words upon her). That said, what this reveals is the impasse of Hegel’s position: a masculine attempt to co-opt the feminine merely converts the feminine into more of the masculine. That is to say, the dialectic of this possessiveness inevitably fails. Moreover, this could also indicate that there is something possibly feminine about freedom of spirit: not just for women but for everyone. Or, that which we could call ‘feminine’ here is that which escapes colonisation by the properly masculine. Equally, it would be possible to conduct this debate in non-gendered terms through just referring to Antigone as a signifier for freedom of spirit. Regarding Butler’s attempt to masculinise Antigone, you could possibly call Antigone androgynous – and, in this, resistant to androcentric determinations of sexual difference – but not really manly, the two things not being the same: where the former affirms the existence of the feminine, together with the masculine, the latter emerges as the will-to-negate this. A quick way of illustrating this difference would be to refer to the distinction between Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). In Hall’s text the heroine as hero is a woman called Stephen Gordon who, believing in the superiority of the masculine, identifies herself with the male sex and affects male drag. She literalises herself as a man through performance: ‘I say I’m a man, claim this sex, and – lo and behold – I am as good as being a man’ (the only drawback being, [s]he discovers, that she cannot father children). Woolf ’s Orlando is conversely a lad who turns into a lady who is flirtatiously feminine whilst retaining her former laddishness. This, in a text written to challenge patrilineal inheritance, is accomplished through a mockery of masculine auto-generation: ‘Truth! Truth! Truth! . . . he was a woman.’23 The difference between these two texts can also be explained with reference to their styles. Hall’s text is very earnest in style and deeply pious: the serious, filial style of virtuous man or the virtually true man, although the text also fails in its being serious and thus becomes amusingly camp or unwittingly parodic. Woolf ’s text is written in the style that we call ‘literary’, among other things: it is playful, punning, witty, irreverent, spirited. Whereas the deforming of the norm in Hall’s text is the uncontrollable side-effect of a will-to-conform, in Woolf ’s text, the tricksterism or subversive mimicry is the disobedient realisation of the non-coincidence between official truths, authoritative stances, and realities. The third lecture of Antigone’s Claim is entitled ‘Promiscuous Obedience’. It would seem that Butler conceives of this much more according to the manner of Hall’s text rather than that of Woolf ’s. What could clarify this question of obedience is that there is a distinction to be made between a logo-centric performativity and creative performance. Logo-centric

26

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

performativity is precisely the performativity of a repetition compulsion, a capitalist, bureaucratic performativity or a techno-performativity such as we find in those Teaching Quality and other such assessment exercises that express themselves in a rhetoric of effectivity and efficiency: ‘say what you do; do what you say you do’. This performativity is obviously (surely?) not the same as creativity. Yet Butler tends precisely to conflate these two things which is to the detriment of creativity, as well as a peaceful rebelliousness, hence her repeated and emphatic insistence on the ineluctability of the compulsion to repeat and her struggle with the reduction of the potential for transformation to deformative mutations of the norm. In Gender Trouble it is written: ‘The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside constructed identities . . . The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition . . . ’24 In Antigone’s Claim, it is written: ‘the norm has a temporality that opens it to a subversion from within’ (p. 21); and ‘[T]he father’s words are surely upon Antigone . . . She transmits those words in aberrant form . . . ’ (p. 58) Whatever happened to Woolf ’s ‘Society of Outsiders’? It is here with us still, less to come than what abides, as will be explained further on.25 Earlier it was pointed out that Butler’s discussion of ‘Antigone’s claim’ serves to conflate authorship with authority or an officialisation of origination. Further on in the text, Butler writes: Within the theatre the word is acted, the word as deed takes on a specific meaning; the acute performativity of words in this play has everything to do with the words taking place within a play, as acted, as acted out. There are, of course, other contexts in which words become indissociable from deeds, such as department meetings or family gatherings. (p. 65) You can thus see that Butler brings together, as if she were talking about essentially the same thing in different contexts, creative performance and the logocentric officiating speech act, within literalising rituals. Everything would therefore seem to occur within a scene of representation with no creative sources, no being outside an ineluctable script of prescriptions. Although Butler concedes that Antigone problematises this, she keeps re-subjecting Antigone to an economy of representation as repetition compulsion. Butler immediately goes on to state: ‘The particular force of the word as deed within the family or, more generally, as it circuits within kinship, is enforced as law (nomos). But this enforcement does not happen without a reiteration – a wayward temporal echo – that also puts the law at risk of going off course’ (p. 65). A logic of the double, do¨ppelganger, seems to be dictating this. Indeed, that is just how Butler reads Antigone in relation to Creon, for she states that Antigone is not merely Creon’s opposite but also that which mirrors him (p. 10), replicates him but in a deformed way. I think that Butler is forced to construe Antigone as a sort of Hyde figure in relation to Creon as a Jekyll figure inasmuch as she assumes a manly Antigone who – just like Hyde – can but be a deformation of the human norm instituted by the idealisation of man. She writes: ‘Antigone represents not kinship in its

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

27

ideal form but its deformation’ (p. 24), which as in the case of the double constitutes something of a crisis of representation, deformed other selves (Dorian’s portrait de-composes and Hyde is described as deformed). If you take the ideal form as your premise and starting-point all you can do is to de-form it. But this has a long history, thinking of Aquinas wondering of God why he created the feminine as the defective counterpart of the masculine.26 It is also the case that the dynamic of the double is one of a will-to-conform to ideals (Jekyll) that gives rise to the assertion of a negated will (Hyde), producing another effort at conformity producing another struggle to escape this (and so on), where this rational and idealistic desire to be rid of self-contradiction only leads to selfdefeat: in fact, it is the very fixation on ideality that produces the contradiction in the first place. Man’s cloning of himself brings about a double-headed monstrosity, or so it is said in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf states: [W]e may all join in that pious hope [expressed by Mussolini that eminent men, industry, finance and Fascist corporations are to foster a creative writer to come], but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion . . . Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.27 It is here that Woolf introduces, as antidote, her theory of creativity as androgynous: sometimes misread by those who do not see that Woolf is talking about creativity – be it the creation of poems or new life – and not about socially constructed sex-conscious identities. The figure of the androgyne may be said to offer us the co-existence of a dual and indeed multiple potential, this infinite or open actuality of potentiality, neither bounded plenitude of being nor sheer void, as opposed to the literalised virtuality and impossible would-be singularity of the double. The performativity that Butler addresses conveys a logic of the mechanical. In Antigone’s Claim, drawing on a formulation from David Schneider, it is suggested of Antigone’s act as ‘aberrant repetition of the norm’ that it constitutes ‘not a form of being but a form of doing’ (p. 58). This form of doing without form of being – doing without being? – would in terms of the predominant logic of Antigone’s Claim be mechanical motion: the inanimate as ex-animated. And Antigone’s Claim speaks of theatrical performance in these terms: ‘In the theater we watch those who are buried alive in a tomb, we watch the dead move, we watch with fascination as the inanimate is animated’ (my emphases, p. 49). The theatre as no longer what is called live performance, the quick slip in the sentence itself from the buried ‘alive’ to ‘the dead’, dying before our eyes? Without realising it, Butler is here coming up with – to speak of creative performance – the very terms in which Marx speaks of the commodity and capital: animation of the inanimate and/or inanimation of the animate, where the distinction is important to this debate. Animation of the inanimate, the dance of a thing by remote control,

28

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

could be somewhat uncanny, or an entertainment, and, yes, there is that pervasive virtuality. But, rendering or treating the animate as inanimate is something else. It is to treat life as if it were death and the living as if they were dead. I do not think that Marx is simply freaked or repelled by the commodity, as Derrida implies – as if he were an innocent seeing the performance of an electric gadget for the first time, ooh, demonic magic – but that he considers that it is inhumane, monstrous now as in cruel (as opposed to crude, raw), to treat things as if they were of more worth than human beings, to treat commodities as if they literally were beloved children or lovers, and living beings as if they were merely machines or things. I will return to this reading in my later consideration of Specters of Marx in the final chapter. This is the opening sentence of Capital – and I am grateful to Forbes Morlock for this cutting and for the following cuttings: ‘The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense [ungeheure, monstrous] accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity.’28 A little further on capital is referred to as an animated monster [beseeltes Ungeheurer], (CW, 28, 398) and it is stated that: ‘Through the incorporation of living labour-capacity into the objective components of capital, the latter becomes a monster endowed with life [belebten Ungeheurer], and begins to function ‘‘as though it had love in its bosom’’’ (CW, 34, 415). This monstrosity of capital and the commodity is that of the economy, and Butler attributes to Antigone both this monstrosity of the animated-inanimate, the performing automaton, the child-clone, and that of the paternal double, the self-replicating genius. In contradistinction to this capitalist logic of a class of the ideally normal and a class of the monstrous, the following two positions could be maintained. You could say that inasmuch as we are not clones, every normal human being is a monster as unprecedented. And you could say that the commodity-clone, as opposed to natural beings, is the only monstrosity as the deformative difference of a single origin. After I had published this critique of Antigone’s Claim in its initial version, Butler produced a work entitled: Undoing Gender.29 Is that intended as something of a retraction of the ‘doing gender’ or ‘performing gender’ that her work has hitherto argued for? Unperforming gender? Is not gender both a question of live performances and certain realities? That we are spirited biological-technological hybrids means that we are irreducible to the machine, the ‘survival machines’ of Ridley and Dawkins. What this ‘survival machine’ implies is the inflexible subjection of the potentialities of being to the survival of the machine or: God-the-Machine. Bohm and Peat, rejecting a ‘generally mechanistic and reductionist worldview of science’, distinguish between creative intelligence and what they see as the misnamed artificial ‘intelligence’: ‘Very probably it will be possible to simulate an unlimited number of aspects of the intellect, which is after all a relatively mechanical crystallization of the intelligence. In this sense, the proper description of these studies should be called artificial intellect’ (emphasis in text, pp. 220–1). Even if this were not scientifically the case, for Bohm and Peat are not dogmatic given all that remains uncertain and even unknowable in such debates, it remains possible to identify a

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

29

discourse in which disavowals of creativity can be seen to be symptomatically linked to the idealisations of a technological permanence or transcendence as a means of sublating or sublimating fears of mortality. What needs to be allowed to be said is that there is a generative capacity outside the order of representation and of iterability thought of in terms of a repetition compulsion. The logos, here, is not a willed ‘let there be’ but a willing ‘let be’. What Butler’s ‘theatre of representations’ has trouble with is the fact or act of composition or the processes of emergence, which could also be thought of in terms of conception and growth, gestation. Where Lacan aptly speaks of ‘Being itself ’ and ‘the ineffaceable character of what is’ in his discussion of Antigone, considerations of the act or process of composition or emergence could also be introduced. The act of composition could be said to be writing. Or dancing. Or weaving. It is not writing as the written or spoken word, it is prior to that, it is the forming of the word. Now this act of composition can be witnessed in the text even as the act of composition is also outside the text. Thus, there is something outside the text, a being-in-the-act-of-writing, writing as a verb before the hypostatisation of the noun, before the ‘text’. Instead of ‘a form of doing’ without ‘a form of being’, this is: a being in the act of forming, or being in the act of forming anew, a being in the act of creating. I would agree with the attention to the verb form that Butler effects but the verb surely pertains to the ontological? To respond, to co-respond, to dance, for instance? This coming into existence is what can be seen in Shona sculpture, explication of an invisible implicate potential. What you thus see are spirits. Well, I or some of us do.30 Moreover, this sculpture may be said to offer an affective response to all manner of being and beings: a reception of the signatures of all things. Aristotle interestingly points out of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that the deed of patricide is a´ koco&, ‘alogos’, that is, it takes place ‘outside the piece’, outside representation and prior to the staged actions.31 Moving away from Aristotle’s positing of this in terms of the impossible or irrational, this could be understood to point to a gnostic truth, namely, that prior to or outside the paternal logos, written word of creation, there is no paternal origin or single transcendental origin but despite this absence of man (in his isolation) at the origin, there is yet originality or creativity, a being of writing, a writing of being, a writing being or beings. Antigone’s deed, that of burying her brother, is also ‘alogos’, occurring outside the piece. There would thus seem to be an a-logical or unauthorisable link between the denial of paternal origin and the affirmation of the brothersister bond of co-origin or non-duality. In literary history, the brother-sister relationship does signify a poetic creativity or it symbolises a synchronicity that cannot itself be formalised or objectified within a staged/spaced scene of representation. Romantic poets are rather preoccupied with this. Goethe said of Byron’s incestuous love for his sister that it could not be more poetical.32 What is poetical is not a literal incest so much as a feeling of universal sympathy associated with the sister that Byron writes of in his ‘Epistle to Augusta’.33 And, of course, the poetic significance of the brothersister relationship is treated by Wordsworth.

30

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud Some silent laws our hearts will make, Which they shall long obey: We for the year to come may take Our temper from to-day. And from the blessed power that rolls About, below, above, We’ll frame the measure of our souls: They shall be turned to love. Then come, my Sister! come, I pray, Wordsworth, ‘To my Sister’34

And Antigone speaks of such implicit or unwritten laws, affirming too: ‘I was born to join in love’. (Presumably this does not oblige us to say that the above poem comes from the effect of Sophocles’ words upon Wordsworth, leading to his aberrant repetition of them.) What I wish to note about this statement, ‘I was born to join in love’, is that Sophocles seems possibly to be saying something about the feminine aspect of the real that calls for consideration. It is that whilst the masculine may be suggested to be an impetus towards self-separation, the feminine comes into being as that which conjoins: ‘I was born to join in love’. I wish to consider the possibility that whilst there is a reality of the feminine, it cannot be separated out into an essence in that its essential non-essence is a question of communality or conjoining or yoking. The feminine would not thus constitute some alternative Absolute but that which offers access to an ‘infinite totality’. The ethical significance of this will be returned to in this chapter. Tiresias, another androgyne, accuses Creon of committing a double symmetrical violation of the sacred: ‘[you] ruthlessly lodged a living soul within the grave / then you’ve robbed the gods below the earth / keeping a dead body here in the bright air, / unburied’ (l. 1187–90). For there to be new life, the dead must be buried within and by the living, not the living buried within death or what is deadly. Butler points out that Antigone’s name can be construed of as Anti-Generation, and this could be considered to be the nature of her fate for Creon in that he denies being as conjoint in putting Antigone to death which leads to him losing both his wife and child. However, this self-sterilisation on the part of Creon is because Antigone guards a generativity upon which the temporal paternal principle of generation depends: a sort of Ante-generation. Moreover, the acknowledgement of the generative order is bound up with an acknowledgement of death and an insistence on mourning, as is the case with Antigone, in contradistinction to the will to self-permanence. Acceptance of individual mortality pertains to the value of the whole. Butler also wonders about the obscure paternal curse that runs through The Theban Trilogy. Let us give it another go, not as a question of the performative this time, but as a question of the shamanistic facts of life, so to speak. It begins with Laius and his resistance to mortality: he wanted no son to succeed him. He wanted all life for himself so his curse was against new life,

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

31

against the newborn. Thus Oedipus had no option but to kill the unyielding man opposed to his very existence. However, the famous case of Oedipus is more cryptic than that, where it is necessary to depart a little from the way in which Freud interprets the play. Is not Oedipus a young man who does not wish to grow up? In this, he would yet recapitulate his father’s resistance to temporality and ageing. The killing of the father could be seen as a rejection of mature manhood and the crossroads in the play may be understood as the crossroads of male puberty: Freud ignores the fact that Oedipus is not a child. In this reading, Oedipus’ desire for his mother would pertain to a taboo desire to retain or remain on the side of the femininity of boyhood. Although Oedipus cannot but become a man, there is a sense in which he is reluctant to ‘cross over’ and thus castration would be what he invites upon himself. He tries to defy the reality of sexual difference which is what the Sphinx’s riddle is probably about. As a riddle, the legs at stake are not literal. Rather, the ‘four’ of youth signifies the androgyny of the co-existence of masculine and feminine. The ‘two’ of adulthood signifies the post-pubertal divergence of the sexes. The ‘three’ of later life concerns a mitigation of the polarities of sexual difference with age. That said, the brother-sister ethos of Antigone serves to supplement the temporal linearity of the riddle. As will be shown further on, this concerns a synchronicity that may never be surpassed. So, the gay family? If Antigone points to the sacredness of fertility or generativity both natural and mysterious, how can gay parents claim this for themselves? Unmentioned in Antigone’s Claim, poignantly so, is that gay couples as gay couples are infertile (sharing thus something of a constituency with other couples who are infertile as couples, more than with the families of AfricanAmericans with whom Butler prefers to associate them). Whilst Antigone’s Claim wishes to erase the divide between the symbolic and the social, Butler invokes the new familial social formation in terms of the same-sexed and singleparented/parenting (pp. 69–73). This is precisely the Hegelian idealist logic of the family, same-sexed, single-parented immaculate conception, but the difference is that it is now to be literalised as a social actuality. Butler wishes to challenge ‘a heterosexual organisation of parenting at the psychic level’ (p. 69), but it is the straight mind that is ‘homosexual’ or monosexual in its conceptions, as Derrida’s Glas shows in its own reading of Hegel on the family, concept of the family, and of conceptuality as familiality, alongside the ‘poetic queer’ or ‘queer poetic’. Ironically then, queer thinking might need to be precisely a thinking of inversion, a ‘heterosexualisation’ of the psyche or psyche and soma – that is, Woolf ’s theory of creativity – as that which idealist philosophy represses. Moreover, the law of the father or an idealisation of paternity in terms of the proper, the logo, ownership, can do nothing about the unwritten laws of fertility, upon which paternity, and maternity, would depend. Butler’s use of Antigone does genuinely and importantly try to engage with social ostracism: the treating of certain lives as if they were unliveable. However, it is politically confusing, in many ways, to conflate the cause of the (assumedly) middle class Euro-American gay family with African-American families of a

32

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

possibly more marginal status and, further, with the predicaments of migrants, exiles and refugees, where the point of conflation seems to presume that these others will be or will want to be single-parenting or somehow same-sexed families.35 Antigone’s Claim touches on the fact that the families of slaves had their own children denied to them (p. 73). However, it is one thing to have the children you give birth to taken away from you as if you were not their mother or father (problematically, Butler objects to Orlando Patterson’s protest against the denial of natural paternity to African-American men as the wrong way to literalise parenthood, p. 73), and another to be in the situation of wanting to adopt a child. There is also the danger of a slip here into treating the slaves or the African-Americans as if they too were infertile as couples. Moreover, one reason for the homophobia expressed within some African-American communities and some African societies is that African-American and African men protest, probably confusedly, at the way a conservative Western-European psyche persistently not only criminalises them but homosexualises them. There are also differences to be observed between the needs and requirements of raising a family and working for wider radical social transformations or working for the greater common good: not that Butler would not concede this, just that these differences are not brought up in her discussion of under-privileged families yoked with unconventional families as a basis for social transformation. What is missing in this is an analysis of class, and given Butler’s reference to migrant and refugee families, what is also missing is a consideration of foreign policies, cross-border politics, international politics, anti-capitalist movements, the vague and blurred kinship between the African-American family, the migrant family and the gay family seeming to be based on a putatively mutual desire for social acceptance by a conservative America. At the same time, the ethnicisation of the gay family seems to be a way of rescuing it from the suspicion of its wanting to be ‘normal’. Imagining a contemporary American Antigone, I see her asking the awkward ‘impossible’ or repeatedly censored questions about America’s criminalised or outlawed brothers and sisters (beyond an African-American scene). When I first wrote this, I particularly had the Palestinians in mind. However, since then, it has become a wider matter of ‘the Arabs’, ‘rogue nations’ and ‘fascist Islam’: the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iranians. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler concerns herself with the construction of ‘unliveable lives’. But does not the epistemological privilege derive from a denial of the ontological: a denial of real lives? This has certainly been an on-going concern of liberation theory and postcolonial theory, namely, that lives are real lives and not, after all, constructions, Orientalist or otherwise.

Sumud For Lacan contra Hegel, Antigone’s significance is indeed ontological, a matter of the reality of life, of both being and non-being. Unlike Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, in her reading of the play, does acknowledge that Antigone has to do

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

33

with the real beyond the performative. However, Copjec, in a chapter entitled ‘The Tomb of Perserverance’ in a book entitled Imagine There’s No Woman, yet seems to be in favour of deliberately burying/transcending at least some of the reality in question. The reality in question concerns Antigone in terms of her affective yoking capacity: ‘I was born to join in love’. In contradistinction to this, Copjec sees Antigone as autonomous and unconcerned with the other, stating: ‘She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority.’36 There is a certain resonance to this interpretation but it begs the question of Antigone’s loyalty since it would be problematic, as we shall see, to think of her as merely loyal to herself. Copjec has the following observation to offer: [A]lthough Antigone and Creon may be equally stubborn in the performance of their duties, this stubbornness, according to which fantasy structure it enters, admits of a fundamental distinction that Lacan will use to ruin the symmetry that Hegel so carefully constructs. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud warns us not to conflate Fixierbareit, which is an inexplicable fixation that persists despite every external attempt to dislodge it, with Haftbarkeit, ‘which is perhaps best translated by ‘‘perserverance’’ but has a curious resonance in German, since it also means ‘‘responsibility’’, ‘‘commitment’’’. It is this distinction introduced by Freud that lies behind and undergirds Lacan’s insistence that Antigone, and she alone, is the heroine of Sophocles’ play; her perseverance in carrying out the burial of her brother is ethically different from Creon’s fixation on enforcing the statist prohibition against his burial (emphases in text, p. 16). This quality of perserverance that Lacan admires may well be seen in terms of commitment and loyalty. We could speak of it as solidarity. That is its ethical and political significance. After all, that is what Lacan was covertly addressing in angling his Se´minar VII at his step-daughter with her support for the FLN. And what I think this solidarity pertains to is the realisation that our lives are conjoined, as I began to touch on earlier. Copjec, however, uses Freud to reject such a notion, as follows: ‘There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others, toward ‘‘vital association’’, which would allow ‘‘the community of [subjects to] survive even if individual [subjects] have to die’’; a notion Freud dismisses as the ‘‘Eros of the poets and philosophers’’’ (p. 32). Well, this is admittedly the Eros that interests me, while it is an Eros irreducible to sexuality. The ontological includes but is irreducible to sexuality as such in spite of a certain Freudian shrinking of the ontological. This Eros has a collective affective and ethical significance that I wish to explicate shortly, but I would first like to present it in terms of its more erotic aspects through a consideration of what it feels like to fall in love. Well then, what does it feel like to fall in love? All of a sudden, you feel incredibly present. Being in love, aptly termed, makes you feel incredibly and undeniably present. And is it not the presence of

34

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

the exciting other that makes you feel so present, so alive? Whilst a sceptical attitude towards presence seems to have prevailed for some time in the theoretical humanities, what of this sadly forgotten experience of falling in love? Do we not feel an immediacy, a glorious aliveness, an undeniability? Moreover, it enables us to understand that presence may always be a matter of co-presence. When the lover is absent, this feels like a rupture, a painful absence where you might want to sing ‘every time you go away, I die a little’.37 Or, as Cleopatra says: ‘Give me to drink mandragora [ . . . ] That I might sleep out this great gap of time / My Anthony is away’.38 This gap in time is also the gap of time which can evaporate when the other returns and co-presence continues. Together, it feels like eternity. ‘Eternity was in our lips, and eyes’,39 in the words of Cleopatra. The poets are well aware of this Eros. As for the philosophers, the Symposium says it all.40 Aristophanes in his myth of the androgyne gives us to understand love as the yearning for an original co-presence. Socrates and Diotima take this further by having us understand that this is a yearning for the immortal, for a being beyond or outside time, a being not subject to time. This needs be understood to be not a question of self-immortalisation but of a being beyond the inevitable mortality of the self, such as we might hear in the poetic declaration: ‘the love I feel for you cannot die.’ Forever Eros. Having dismissed the Eros of the poets, Copjec, drawing on Badiou, argues that we have yet to find a way to secularise the infinite. However, there’s always been love poetry, as well as poetry and music more generally. For Freud and Copjec, it seems that there is only a sex-death drive, with the emphasis on death, Copjec maintaining at one point: ‘death, and only death, is the aim of every drive’ (p. 32). What Freud terms Haftbarkeit is in Spinoza’s terms conatus. Conatus is not a drive towards self-preservation as it is sometimes misunderstood to be, and less a drive than a drive-resistant perserverance in being. It concerns that which never goes away, a very gentle, humble persistence. Think, for instance, of what the River Wye is for Wordsworth. Although this is not tangible in an objectively concrete sense, it is certainly something that we can feel and if it is experienced, adherence to it and others who feel it is automatic. There is nothing we can do about it. The erotic dimension of the ontological opens out onto something wider here concerning other forms of tender, abiding, dedicated allegiance. Forbes Morlock writes of this non-solid solidity in the cinema of Claire Denis.41 What has been spoken of as perserverance, loyalty, solidarity pertains to what the Palestinians call sumud. Helena Schulz has drawn attention to the importance of sumud for the Palestinians as has the pro-Palestinian Israeli activist Jeff Halper, whilst it is quite widely evident in Palestinian literature, notably in the poetry of Darwish, as explored by Clemency Schofield.42 Liana Badr, speaking of a story of a Palestinian refugee camp, states: ‘In the story of Tal el-Zataar I found another face, one contrasting with the horrors of war, one radiating spontaneity, solidarity and steadfastness, the roots of collective sentiments with which the Palestinians held on to their memory and identity.’43 This may be

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

35

juxtaposed with the conclusion to a recent re-telling of Antigone by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao, one done from the visionary perspective of Tiresias and that is striking for the terms in which Antigone’s significance is summed up: Perhaps Antigone’s death was not wholly in vain. For in holding steadfast to her beliefs, did she not question powers far greater than herself ? And in going to her death unafraid, she bore the consequences of her actions willingly, is this not a triumph of freedom?44 Furthermore, in southern Africa, this ethos of sumud pertains to what is called unhu. In The Book of Not, Tsitsi Dangarembga writes: Unhu, that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and how to preserve and accentuate life’s eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now call ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also.45 It is for this quality that Mandela, speaking of compassion, fellow feeling, found Antigone significant for the South African liberation struggle. The basic point is that when humanity tries to make outcasts of certain people, maintaining an ontological monovalence, that is when the community of being counter-asserts itself. It does this not so much in a voluntaristic way but automatically since it is a reality that cannot be altered or denied by any human mandate or law. Does Copjec seriously wish to consign this perserverance to the tomb? I am not sure if that is her meaning, but if so, all I can say is that it is ultimately beyond her mandate: how efface the ineffaceable character of what is? Less dramatically, it could be said that sumud concerns an ethics of radicalism and liberation rather than an ethics of the capitalist middle classes. Sumud in a middle class context would be drastically inauthentic, but that case scenario should not be the basis for universalising a middle class ethics. It can be pointed out that Freud is not quite so dismissive of a poetic Eros after all. This is what he writes to his friend Romain Rolland, the writer, peace activist and musicologist: I revered you as an artist and as an apostle of love for mankind many years before I saw you. I myself have always advocated the love of mankind not out of sentimentality or idealism but for sober, economic reasons: because in the face of our instinctual drives and the world as it is I was compelled to consider this love as indispensable for the preservation of the human species as, say, technology.46 Whilst Freud allows for differing ethical horizons, the ethics that the Lacanians, including Copjec, tend to promote is an ethics of sublimation. Philippe Van Haute in ‘Death and Sublimation in Lacan’s Reading of Antigone’ argues that Lacan aims to replace an ethics of ‘the sovereign good’ with ‘an ethics of sublimation’,

36

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

and that Lacan’s deployment of Antigone is directed to this end.47 For Van Haute, Antigone is accorded the significance of what for psychoanalysis is ‘the Thing’, the supposedly horrifying Thing. This sounds rather like Kant become science fiction: the Thing, the Blob, the Alien, the Matrix. Drucilla Cornell’s account of the Thing in Lacanian thought provides some useful insights.48 From Cornell’s overview, it would seem that man suffers from a primordial lack, a non-relation to the primordial Thing, the thing itself or what presents itself of the real for thought. According to Cornell, the Thing is not so much the real but what of the real that male desire aims at in trying to think or signify the real. And Van Haute says that Antigone has the status of the Thing aimed at. Can’t we then just say that she’s beautiful and desirable? But, no, we can’t for this positive existence of the feminine is said by the theorists not to be: she/it isn’t. Regarding man’s primordial lack in relation to the Thing, this is given as a hole in his being. This Lacanian manque-a`-l’eˆtre is what the feminine comes to signify, to letter as opposed to ˆetre: she takes on the significance of his hole, gap, slash, etcetera. It also seems that this hole in being has the capacity to become what Cornell, following Lacan, calls an ‘internal cesspool’. (Don’t you sometimes just want to laugh?) Just as the hole is accorded a feminine significance, so is the internal cesspool. Sublimation occurs in relation to this situation whilst there are different versions of what it entails. One version is that the idealisation of women serves to cover up the horrible hole and the cesspool that femininity would otherwise signify rather than be. Another version is that sublimation is what makes up for the lack in being through the drive to symbolise the real on a cerebral level: imagine there’s no woman. In terms of such analyses, Antigone would seem to be placed on a cusp between abstract idealisation and non-being: gone the reality either way. Van Haute begins to broach an alternative very fleetingly when he speaks of Antigone in terms of ‘dignity’ – not the intellectualising or idealising of desire but the ‘raising’ of it in terms of according it dignity: as could be a question of love? He writes: ‘In the image of Antigone, we know, one comes into contact with the Thing [ . . . ] Tragedy elevates the object to the dignity of the Thing.’49 He does not develop this, but I hope to take it further in later chapters, exploring how this dignity may be a question of affirming the other’s desire (or lack of it) and thus their freedom. I think that Lacan may be more radical than some of his Lacanian followers and that his ethics may be trying not to be so much a recapitulation of misogyny – feminine holes, cesspools, Madonna-ideals or abject refuse dumps – as the start of an anti-misogyny where Lacan attempts with all his audacity to return projections to their masculine senders. Thus, the feminine would not be non-being and absence so much as the male sex’s own felt lack of femininity: as Cornell points out, how can you lack something that utterly is not, is just nothing? Moreover, the internal cesspool would seem to concern a particularly masculine sense of shame and degradation that should not be projected onto women. One thing that the Lacanian commentators on Lacanian ethics ignore, somewhat routinely and strangely, is that Lacan angles his whole Ethics (Se´ VII)

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

37

against what he calls Lebensneid. Cornell, however, pays attention to how Lacan’s ethical concerns are strongly bound up with questions of covetousness, quoting Lacan; of which the following is an excerpt: ‘[T]he thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment [Thou shalt not covet it], for without the law the thing is dead.’50 For Lacan, Lebensneid is implied to be an envy of another’s perserverance in being, an envy of what Copjec speaks of via Freud as a suspect vital association. Lacan writes: ‘Lebensneid is not an ordinary jealousy, it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality, that the subject perceives as something he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements.’51 For Lacan, those who lack this freedom of spirit may resort to sadistic violence in an attempt to appropriate it from others or, it could be said, resentfully destroy it. Lacan is not simply against ‘the good’, as some of his followers are, but rather he correctly understands it cannot be a sovereign/ kingly/phallic principle. In fact, part of Lacan’s audacity is that he associates the good with the feminine (for men or women) in his work on mystical jouissance. It would seem to be for this reason that Lacan unfolds his ethics in relation to the alternatives signified by de Sade and Kant alongside Antigone who represents therefore not the drive but the target of the drive: be this a target of possession or of renunciation. It is as if we are faced with a rather extreme schematism of the dangers of predatory sadism versus a Kantian renunciation or sublimation. In the rejection of violent sadism, the ethics of psychoanalysis would seem to emerge as an ethics of acceptance of what cannot be changed, a bio-ethics of endurance, one way or another. Whilst there is certainly something to be said for this acceptance of reality, an acceptance of both what is possible and what is not possible, I think that the schematism of such an ethics is rather too stark and ignores further possibilities of both natural and social desire. We can still appreciate and even participate in what we cannot own? My own views on these ethical questions will unfold across this book with more hopeful and less sexually divisive elaborations whilst I wish now to draw on a couple of further instances of the Eros of the philosophers and poets in order to go on maintaining the affirmation of such. Is not reality beautiful? I do not think this is an idealisation. This is just how it does manifest itself in the most mundane and everyday of ways. In this respect, some lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish called ‘On this Earth’, will be offered. Darwish writes: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread, at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh, and the invaders’ fear of memories. [ ... ]

38

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends.52

Some Lacanians might want to say that the Lady in the poem constitutes an idealisation or sublimation that serves to cope with the horror of the Thing or cover up an internal cesspool, and so on, but others would not see it that way at all. Reality is not some Thing out there. We are in it, it is all around us and it is quite earthily lovely. If you see it as it is – as it is – you do just see it that way. The real is not some object so much as a consciousness of reality. Moreover, I do not think there is a significant difference between the words in Darwish’s poem and the reality they refer to. If the aroma of bread is given as good, maybe that’s just the case: it is a good aroma if your nose tells you so. Regarding the epigraph from Lacan at the opening of this chapter, the ‘dam-age’ or ‘damn age’, may be transformed not into ‘Our Lady’, as the idealised pure woman, but through certain feminine realisations which would enable us to see beauty on this Earth without needing to possess it. Darwish’s poem does go on to address the desire for a Palestine that would presumably be owned but we might see it instead as: liberated or allowed to be. When Darwish talks about ‘My Lady’, as he does in the poem, and the Lacanians about the ‘Thing’, and to quote Cornell’s reprise of the discourse, it is ‘the yucky Thing’, you know it is the same thing or being they address: only in terms of different consciousnesses. It concerns an anamorphotic or pharmakonical twist. Antigone: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ (line 697) Macbeth: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (I.i.1). The point now to be established is that the techno-idealist vision of the world is basically the chiasmatic inversion of a poetic realist vision. Van Haute gives us to understand that those who posit the Thing are those who are ego-bound, stating: ‘In the experience of the beautiful, we are for a moment, as it were, cut loose from this world. The self-absorbed ego is here confronted with its own outside.’53 What this reveals is that for some (I stress this because Van Haute tries to universalise his position) the world is usually the self and the self ’s projections. Techno-idealism projects mental sublimations onto the world and either does not see it for real or else sees reality as foul, as the repressed or abjected, apart from the possible moments of aesthetic shock that Van Haute broaches. The poetic realist is in the world and does not think its reality so much as respond consciously to it. The latter is a question of engagement with others, all manner of other beings, and the environment or surroundings. It is perhaps obvious that this book favours a poetic realist approach to a Lacanian ethics of the real, although the latter is not simply to be dismissed for there’s more than one ethics, as well as more than one way of reading Lacan. If ‘woman’ is for the idealist a signifier of the foul, for the poetic realist the figure of the feminine may both function as a signifier of the real in general, though in the affirmation/admiration of it, and specifically ostend or point to an avowed reality of the feminine, depending on the context. Antigone does not signify ‘woman’ but either a feminine consciousness of the real or a real

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

39

consciousness of the feminine: as available to both men and women. She signifies a state of awareness, other-consciousness, rather than a thing. If an ethics of psychoanalysis differs from or supplements a philosophical ethics, this is broadly because an ethics of psychoanalysis is a rather gloomy one of resigning us to our discontents, as would sometimes be necessary or would be necessary for some, rather than a matter of the pursuit of happiness and the good. Aristotle’s ethics, oriented towards human happiness, pertains to friendship, as discussed by Derrida in The Politics of Friendship. I want to suggest that here again we have an emphasis on loyalty, steadfastness, solidarity, commitment, sumud. In fact, Aristotle emphasises loyalty – be´baios – as a defining quality of friendship, translated by Derrida as fidence, a confident fidelity. Since my discussion of Derrida’s reading of Aristotle needs be brief, it will restrict itself to the most salient points in relation to those raised by Antigone. The following selection from Derrida’s commentary on or paraphrase of Aristotle is surely pertinent: I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death [ . . . ] I feel myself – and in advance, before any contract – borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus that I feel myself loving.54 That is more or less what Antigone says, where ‘born’ and ‘borne’ chime usefully, and it is significant in the above that this requires no prescription, no contract, no performative measure or, as Derrida might say, it is an unconditional condition. In fact, what he does say is that it is a matter of: ‘the limit as the absence of limit.’ (p. 12) Derrida further notes: ‘This philı´a, [love] this psukhe´ [animate life] between friends sur-vives’ (p. 13) Derrida, wanting to temporalise the synthesis or the synchronicity of love or co-presence, maintains that this survival is temporal or in time for it survives the ‘living present’. However, you could also say that the living present is that which goes on being without submitting itself to the passage of time. Nonetheless, what matters one way or another is what goes on being, be this interpreted in terms of an axis of temporal continuity (being after being) or a horizontal axis of synchronous continuity (an on-going being with being). In the following commentary, Derrida allows for both possibilities, writing: In primary friendship, such a faith must be stable [ . . . ] it must endure the test of time. But at the same time [ . . . ] it is this faith which, dominating time by eluding it, taking and giving time in contretemps, opens the experience of time. There is no reliable friendship without [ . . . ] the confirmed steadfastness of this repeated act of faith. Plato, too, associated philı´a with the same constancy and steadfastness. The Symposium recalls a few faithful examples. A friendship that has become steadfast, constant or faithful (be´baios) can even defy or destroy tyrannical power (p. 15). Similarly, the steadfastness of Antigone could be seen as pitted against tyrannical power.

40

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

This pertains further to two aspects of a yoke effect. Derrida speaks of a being under the yoke: a question of submission, we could say, of being to time. The yoke effect could also, however, pertain to a being yoked to the being of the other beyond time: a non-duality that resists temporal severances. First, what I should like to state again of this steadfastness is that it is to be contrasted with the performative. As a way of illustrating this yet further it can be pointed out that a character similar to that of Antigone is that of Cordelia in King Lear where both characters serve to symbolise the quality of steadfastness in opposition to performative obedience, this obedience not only to the paternal word but to the paternity (original authority) of the word. Cordelia, as is well known, refuses to perform in accordance with the paternal demand, that which would seek to command love, whilst it is she who turns out to be the loyal daughter, in fact, precisely because she refuses to perform. Her sisters, Goneril and Reagan, performatively and ritualistically engage in speech acts of love and fidelity and pretend to act this out when in reality it soon transpires that they feel very little if anything. They love in words and they perform for the sake of their own personal advancement, which is precisely what Butler sees Antigone as doing rather than understanding that she could well be the very antithesis of this. Derrida notes how Aristotle contrasts true friendship with what we would today consider in terms of bourgeois values, writing: ‘Why are the mean, the malevolent, the ill-intentioned (phauloi) not, by definition, good friends? [ . . . ] Because they prefer things [pra´gmata] to friends. They stock friends among things, they class friends at best among possessions, among good things’ (p. 19). Second, what could be said of the steadfastness in question is that it is not only an ethical precondition but that which requires a certain realisation. I think that this is clearer in Aristotle than in Derrida’s reading of him. For Aristotle, ethics are bound up with their realisation in political praxis: ethics constitute the condition (e´xis) for politics and the political serves to make good the ethical. A contemporary instance of this activism will be suggested. I am thinking of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, the two activists who lost their lives in their support for the Palestinian struggle. Corrie interposed herself between an Israeli caterpillar bulldozer and a Palestinian home targeted for demolition and was crushed to death for this. Hurndall interposed himself between an Israeli bullet and a Palestinian child, saving the child’s life but losing his own. They did not simply affirm their support in words alone but made good their steadfastness in moments of extreme crisis. Whilst Derrida speaks of a friendship that proves itself in time, this implies that time itself is the proof. In the cases of Corrie and Hurndall, the enduring loyalty was not so much persisting in an ethical stance over time but a matter of commitment to the present in the present that yet eternalised their solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. This eventuality helps to explain the significance of Antigone’s deed as a commitment beyond words, beyond words that would take themselves as sufficient proof or as enactments of themselves. So does Butler father or re-author a feminised Hegel? In a way she does. This is her conclusion, which I wish to print out substituting ‘the African’ for where

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

41

Butler writes ‘Antigone’ (especially since Butler considers that Antigone constitutes a scandalous substitution, passim). The following is given to point to the difference between an anti-colonial Antigone (‘It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle’) and one sifted through the legacies of a colonial logic. So, here is Butler’s conclusion, with a scandalous substitution: Who then is [the African] within such a scene, and what are we to make of her words, words that become dramatic events, performative acts? [The African] is not of the human but speaks in its language. Prohibited from action, she nonetheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm. And in acting, as one who has no right to act, [the African] upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us of what those preconditions must really be. [The African] speaks within the language of entitlement from which she is excluded, participating in the language of claim with which no final identification is possible. If [the African] is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage (p. 82). It is scandalous, where this kinship trouble has its wayward temporal echoes within colonial discourse: although Butler’s stance is basically one of sympathy for the ‘not of the human’. Nonetheless, it remains a little patronising. What is proposed is ‘a new field of the human . . . when the less than human speaks as human’ (p. 82) So, what is this new humanism to be that takes ‘the less than human’ as its premise? It is as if Antigone is a monkey to whom Butler generously wishes to extend human status, within humanity as an uber-species, rather than Antigone being already a human animal in a world of kindred species. And who is the ‘we’ referred to above? Who arrogates to themselves the authority to formulate the human, and why is it that ‘we’ need to do this? And how can there be some deemed to own human language with others obliged to borrow from these owners of it? Who has patented the language? What I finally wish to draw attention to regarding the above substitution is that if you disavow the feminine in favour of a masculinist monovalence of being, this can produce a Calibanisation or rendering monstrous of other races. If you posit the human as the masculine in an attempt to disavow the feminine, the fact the feminine exists in its inevitable differential co-positing with the masculine, means its return is assured, but in this exclusivity of the human, it can only return as that which does not belong to the human race: it returns in the guise of the foreign race/species. It is the disavowal of the feminine that serves performatively to divide humanity into alleged sub-species. And it is perhaps the disavowal of the feminine that serves to pit man against man, as man seeks either to finally incorporate or finally expel the feminine in a drive towards a singular time of self-continuity. Moreover, a humanist or species monovalence of being serves to suppress our lateral connections not only across races but with other species and with our surroundings. Then, much less sweepingly, the predicament of Antigone’s Claim could be understood to be the predicament of academic feminism

42

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

in general. That is, the female intellectual is accorded a privileged masculine status that places her at a remove from subaltern others for whom she then tries to account.55 And does not this become a matter of deconstructing idealist philosophy in favour of new realisms, anti-capitalism and a hoped for postcolonialism? For Butler, Antigone constitutes a surprising case of the unspeakable speaking. The unspeakable speaking could be heard in two ways, at least. It could be the unspeakable as the unprounceable, YHWH, so: God speaks! Or breathes? YH, in-breath, WH, out-breath. Such a reading could be a matter of expressions of the sacred, barely pronounceable if at all, but it would be difficult to construe this in terms of man’s lesser self or his belated aberrant copy, although it may yet be that which questions his auto-idealisations. Perhaps you just have to laugh. The unspeakable speaks: bourgeois theory, a matter of those who are not supposed to speak, or supposed not to speak, but they do. An excerpt from Miriam Tlali’s Between Two Worlds (a novel that was first censored from publication and then published as Muriel at the Metropolitan) provides a suitable cheeky retort regarding rebellious unspeakables who cannot be shut up. It would be unfair to angle the following excerpt against Antigone’s Claim given its concerns over social ostracism and social death, whilst Antigone’s Claim bears all the hallmarks of a liberal discourse: that is, given the pervasive tension in it between the compulsion to conform and genuine questions of conscience. The excerpt below concerns the times at which it becomes necessary to speak defiantly; the novel being about coming to reject complicity with what you realise you do have to, given unavoidable circumstances, finally oppose. The following edited extract from the novel concerns a scene in an office in which Muriel, a black South African who works alongside two white South African women, together with her friend Adam, gets into a quarrel with the white South Africans.56 Hear, here goes: Mrs. Kuhn shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Shut up, you two!’ Then turning to Mrs. Stein, she said, ‘I can’t stand those voices . . . those baboons there, sitting and talking.’ ‘But we are not making any noise, Mrs. Kuhn. Adam was just telling me . . .’ I tried to explain. ‘Shut up,’ she said! ‘I don’t care what he’s telling you. And don’t you dare answer me back!’ ‘I’m just trying to explain that . . . ’ ‘What are you, after all?’ [ . . . ] ‘What do you mean, what am I? I’m a human being, of course,’ I said [ . . . ] Mr. Bloch tried to take control. ‘Adam, shut up, man. You talk too much!’ ‘Yes, that’s her fault. She makes him cheeky like that.’ [ . . . ] I sat there listening to Mrs. Kuhn’s ravings. ‘Just because she knows a bit of English, she thinks she can say just anything.’ I replied, coolly, ‘Thank God I did not have to pick up my English in your kitchen or your backyard!’ [ . . . ]

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

43

Mrs Kuhn turned to Mrs Stein and said, ‘She thinks she’s like us, you know.’ I answered, ‘That’s an insult, Mrs. Kuhn,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think I’m like you. I don’t want to be like you. I’m very proud of what I am. You’re too small, too full of hatred. You are always occupied with issues that don’t matter!’ It was almost quiet now. [ . . . ] Any moment now I shall have my pass-book signed off and with that – unless I find another job within a short time – will go my ‘right to be in the magisterial district of Johannesburg for more than seventy-two hours’ [ . . . ] I remembered what my husband had once said to me, ‘They are omnipotent; they have the power of life and death over us.’57 And what you see or are about to see below is not a reproduction. See if you can be a seer.

Figure 1 The Beginning (sculpted by Juliette Mapuranga)

2

What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment?

This chapter will concern itself with a re-evaluation of Kant’s essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Kant’s essay is itself not so much the opening up of a new impetus for thought but, rather, a pause for reflection on the implications of the drive towards increasing rationalisation and secularisation that had been unfolding from the Renaissance onwards in accordance with the establishment of modern science. The reason that I wish to draw attention to this essay is that it serves to define emancipation against what we would today speak of in terms of the performative. Therefore, Kant’s concerns in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ remain of relevance, even if controversially, as registered in Foucault’s unsubversively ironic ‘What is Enlightenment?’ written in 1984, two centuries after Kant’s essay. Finally, whilst Kant and Foucault interpret enlightenment only in terms of a Western modernity, this chapter will open up the question yet again through introducing a more cosmopolitan and feminine approach to it with particular reference to the interventions of Asada Akira, a thinker as influential in the Japan of the 1980s as Foucault has been in the postmodernist West.

What is enlightenment today? The eighteenth century from Spinoza to Foucault Let us begin with a recapitulation of Kant’s main points. Kant opens his essay with a highly economic and succinctly elegant definition, given to us in italics: ‘Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.’1 The rest of the essay may be read as an explanation of that opening statement. Before we move on, what could be noted of Kant’s compressed definition is that enlightenment is given to us in humanist terms – the human being’s – where the minority, immaturity or childhood, of the human being is given to us as not natural but as something we have committed ourselves to; it would seem that the human being has infantilised itself. Kant goes on to specify the self-incurred minority or lack of maturity in terms of submission to the direction of leaders, authorities, and experts of various kinds. It would seem that the hegemony of what Kant terms ‘guardians’ does not so much impose itself on the minors but that the minors (actually a majority)

What is enlightenment?

45

invite domination out of passivity and laziness. Kant writes with a note of irony or even sarcasm: It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides on a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if I can only pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step towards majority not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. (p. 17) Minors seem to be both dependent on the maternal – nurture, care – and the paternal – leadership – whilst these timid, passive beings are characterised in conventionally feminine terms. This domesticated state is one that comprises not only all of the female sex but some of the male sex, so whilst it is a feminised condition it is so only in a manner of speaking. As already noted, it appears that the domestication of the human animal is an infantilisation of itself. I once saw a documentary about the taming of animals, in particular, wolves, which showed that humans tame animals by preventing them from growing up: the young animal is forced into a condition of dependency from which it cannot emerge and thus it fails to develop the extent of the mature animal’s capacity to fend for itself. Kant further depicts the process of domestication in terms of a certain mechanistic reliance that prevents freedom of movement, stating Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. And anyone who did throw them off would still only make an uncertain leap over even the narrowest ditch, since he would not be accustomed to free movement of this kind. (p. 17) For Kant, we impose a mechanistic dependency on ourselves that we need to free ourselves from for the sake of a greater fluidity and flexibility. Strikingly, our technological progress is seen to be bound up with what today we speak of in terms of the performative – the enactment of precepts and formulas – and Kant gives us to understand that the ritualistic obedience of this performativity is, unsurprisingly, proto-authoritarian. Kant goes on to formulate – only he wishes to escape the formula – an antidote to our immature enslavement in terms of a free use of reason, ‘public reason’, as opposed to a technological and technocratic one, ‘private reason’. This has already been suggested in the opening paragraph: ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus

46

What is enlightenment?

the motto of enlightenment’ (p. 17). This audacious use of reason is what is contrasted with a limited techno-bureaucratic performativity, Kant commenting: ‘Now, for many affairs conducted in the interest of a commonwealth a certain mechanism is necessary [ . . . ] Here, it is, certainly, impermissible to argue; instead one must obey’ (p. 18). For Kant, there is thus the partial practical necessity of a mere acting out: it is potentially a sanctioned hypocrisy for you do not have to believe in what you do, you just have to do it.2 How familiar. Nonetheless, it has to be said that we cannot escape a degree of the conformative-performative. What is stranger to us is Kant’s usage of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’, as Foucault notes, speaking of the distinction that Kant makes as ‘surprising’, and commenting that ‘term for term’ the private/public distinction is ‘the opposite of what is ordinarily termed freedom of conscience’.3 That is, whereas we would normally consider freedom of conscience to be a private and individual matter, and term our participation in the socio-economic sphere as ‘public’, Kant reverses this terminology, or we have reversed it. Thus, again as Foucault observes, ‘freedom of conscience’ is not to be thought of as a personal matter. Rather, it becomes a matter of something like access to a collective, possibly cosmopolitan, forum of intellectual exchange that will serve to enlarge our cognitions. Freedom cannot thus be assumed to be a matter of voluntarism or individual autonomy but emerges as something more co-operative; with the previous chapter in mind, we might consider it in terms of an emancipation through a politics of friendship. Kant’s conclusion is worth reflecting on: A greater degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s freedom of spirit and nevertheless puts up insurmountable barriers to it; a lesser degree of the former, on the other hand, provides a space for the latter to expand to its full capacity. Thus when nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell, the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the calling and propensity to think freely, the latter gradually works back on the mentality of a people (which thereby becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with his dignity. (emphases in text, p. 22) First of all, Kant here proposes a ratio, as does Plato in his indication of the importance of dialectical reasoning. Whereas for Plato the ratio is between intellection and opinion, for Kant it is between freedom of spirit and civil obedience. For Kant, more of the latter yields more of the former. It is paradoxical, as he implies, yet this seeming paradox underlies a widely assumed contract. That is, it is a democratic assumption that as long as we are not behaving in an antisocial manner, we should be allowed to express ourselves critically and creatively. Of course, there would be some difficulties with this. For example, can we repress ourselves and yet be free? Can we live in one way and think in another, given that Marxism assumes that our consciousness is determined by

What is enlightenment?

47

the way we live? At any rate, what does seem to be at stake is maintaining a certain reservation, perhaps like that of the Marranos in Spain. What exactly is the ‘hard shell’ Kant refers to? It would, post-Freud, seem to be the superego or the shell of our obedience to civil or manmade law which may be distinct from what we might otherwise truly or ‘inwardly’ think or feel. (The term ‘inwardly’ is problematic in that, as indicated, the freedom in question may be an inter-subjective matter, as will be discussed further.) In Hamlet, the paternal ghost is/appears as precisely a hard shell: a mechanical suit of armour. At any rate, this hard shell is what is said to mask or guard or defend a living seed of nature, where nature is given to us by Kant in the feminine and associated with care and tenderness. Nurturing this germinal nature is to be our means of resisting our reduction to being treated as no more than machines or as cogs in a machine. However, this germinal nature is what Kant wishes to equate with freedom of thought begging the question of its naturality, as regards the conditions of culture: although why not think of thinking as a natural activity? Ferenczi sees that as soon as a creature begins to reckon with its environment, it begins, albeit primitively, to think.4 Kant’s analytical structure is clear but what remains rather blurred is the vaguely implied yet unarticulated question of gender in the engenderment of reason or the thinking sap. Moreover, Kant’s essay seems to depend on and yet breeze over the question of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Is maturity a matter of achieving manhood/authorial status or is it a case of reserving something from paternal imperatives that may be overly demanding or censoring? Although Kant implies that the immature state is feminised, being one of passivity, it is yet man’s domestication or enslavement of himself as man: a feminising masculinisation. In this, man may be said to give rise to himself as a double, producing himself at once as dominating master and submissive slave. Then, in mitigation of this, we have this ‘seed’ that is at once seminal (masculine), potentially child (of either gender), and given to us on the side of an explicitly feminine nature and yet a seed of mind to be reserved from this feminising masculinisation. What to make of this mixture? Given that we are supposed to accommodate ourselves to a masculine social order, the audacious Kantian message could be that we ought not fully and truly surrender our undomesticated or freely feminine or, perhaps better, androgynous, nature but secretly retain some of it. Is there therefore some cryptic reservation, some nature reserve at stake? Moreover, Kant’s rhetorical blending of nature and mind is suggestive of a non-separation that evades the law even as we may need to fake obedience to its injunction to repress ourselves. I will return to further considerations of gender and enlightenment after a reading of Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ However, what is perhaps useful about Kant’s essay is its very indeterminacy, one that would allow for both those wishing to leave childhood behind and those who have their daring or rebellious reservations about what it means to be grown up. Foucault’s essay begins with a slight contextualisation of Kant’s where he briefly reflects on the missed encounter between Kant and the Jewish philosopher

48

What is enlightenment?

Mendelssohn who also replied to the question, as first posed in a newspaper, and whose publication was only noticed by Kant at the time of his own work going to press. Foucault makes an observation regarding this missed encounter that I am rather at a loss to interpret. It is: With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift, the German Aufkla¨rung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny – we now know to what drama that was to lead. (p. 33) The attempt to bring German thought and Jewish thought together leads to the holocaust? Since I do not know exactly what is meant by Foucault here, even as he thinks it so obvious as not to require an explanation, I will offer a diversion instead towards a speculative response further on. Kant’s article evades the historicity of the concept of enlightenment. It would be impossible to enter into a presentation of the intellectual history of the European Enlightenment that precedes Kant here; nonetheless a slight indication of what this could entail can be given. Mendelssohn, whilst a philosopher with a commitment to revealed religion, was all the same, according to Jonathan I. Israel in his book, Radical Enlightenment, an admirer of Spinoza, Mendelssohn maintaining that without Spinoza ‘philosophy would not have been able to extend its borders so far’.5 And it is said that ‘Mendelssohn depicts Spinoza as the strategic precursor of Leibniz and Wolff, the real inventor of key concepts vital to the Leibnizian–Wolffian system, which he then considered the definitive answer to both British empiricism and French freethinking and the supreme manifestation of German depth and genius in philosophy’ (p. 658). What Israel’s work shows very convincingly is that it was Spinoza – whose works were disseminated within Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – who was the philosopher treated as the most audacious and controversial of Enlightenment thinkers in the latter part of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century in Germany and beyond. It is Spinoza and his German adherents who provoke outcries against free-thinking and scared denunciations, leading to censorships and even public book-burning rituals. This backlash can be seen in the following commentaries from Israel’s detailed historical study: Long judged one of the most acute of Spinoza’s early adversaries, Musaeus agreed with those who thought Germany was confronting a new and deadly peril, an insurrection of philosophical ‘fanatics’, sworn to enthrone Naturalismus in place of the sacred faith of Christ. Both community and State were gravely imperilled by the ‘great siege engine of irreligious philosophy’ introduced by the Tractatus [Spinoza’s], a form of sedition which attacks faith, undermines social stability, perverts law into licentiousness, and subverts the state by means of ‘freedom of thought’ (p. 631).

What is enlightenment?

49

Loescher judges Spinoza uniquely harmful and disruptive because he alone among modern writers provides an ostensibly coherent, philosophical framework for amalgamating body and soul and identifying matter with spirit, daring to call Nature ‘God’, thereby assembling in an integrated system elements found in the rest only incoherently and fragmentarily. (p. 633) And so on. Israel also comments that: ‘A curious feature of the early penetration of Spinozism in Germany was its linkage to a discussion of traditional Jewish mysticism, or cabbala’ (p. 645). That is, the significance of Spinoza lies in the combination of rationality aimed against dogma with a mysticism, or nondualist philosophy, distinct from mainstream religious authority and orthodoxy. Perhaps, it could be said that the European Enlightenment begins in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Catholic Spain, followed by the expulsion of the Moors in 1505. Of this, Frances Yates comments: Thus two whole populations, embodying two great civilisations, were cut adrift from their homeland to wander as exiles [ . . . ] Thus, as so often, Europe took a wrong turning and wasted the spiritual resources which might have been used constructively. For of all the countries of Europe, Spain was the best placed for making a liberal approach to the three great closely related religions.6 This said, what Frances Yates’ own acclaimed research reveals is that this exilic culture of Jews and Moors, leads to the spread of a potent mixture of mysticism and science, magical thinking and mathematics, in particular, as regards the dissemination of the Jewish Cabala leading to the formation of a Christian Cabala in Renaissance Italy and beyond. Yates shows too how the Christian Cabbala fuses with the Rosicrucian Enlightenment to produce what she terms ‘the occult philosophy’ of the Elizabethan age, of crucial significance to Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon and the development of Puritanism, where this Rosicrucian and occult philosophy also flourishes in Germany. This might seem rather removed from Kant’s attempt to answer the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ but the point is that the free-thinking in question concerns not only the development of a scientific culture but also the attempts on the part of those in power to censor an occult, rather mystical philosophy associated with the very development of science. The point is also that there is an exilic consciousness to be reckoned with. We can bring this back to Kant via Spinoza. Spinoza was ex-communicated from the orthodox Jewish religious community in Amsterdam because of his mystically inspired yet atheistic and scientific philosophy. In Enlightenment and Action from Descartes to Kant, Michael Losonsky states: The defense of freedom of speech is not new to Kant. Spinoza already defended it in his Theologico-Political Treatise, and his defense is not based in law or morality, but in his metaphysics and psychology. Inner conviction cannot be controlled, and inner conviction and speech are bound tightly together.7

50

What is enlightenment?

For Losonsky, what differentiates Spinoza from Kant is how this inner conviction is arrived at where ‘freedom of speech’ can mean different things. Losonsky cites from a letter written by the English Quaker William Ames to Margaret Fell in 1657, concerning a meeting with Spinoza, as follows: Theare is a Jew at amsterdam that by the Jews is Cast out (as he himself and others sayeth) because he owneth no other teacher but the light and he sent for me and I spoke toe him and he was pretty tender and doth owne all that is spoken; and he sayde that to read of moses and the prophets without was nothing tow him except he came toe know it within: . . . I gave order that one of the duch Copyes of thy book should be given toe him and he sent me word he would come toe oure meeting but in the mean time I was Imprisoned. (p. 132) As Losonsky explains with further evidence, for Spinoza, the so-called inner light of subjective conviction is crucial to knowledge of the truth. This is surely an accurate reading of Spinoza, despite possible hesitation over the term ‘inner’, and I agree with Losonsky that for Spinoza this conviction is arrived at through inspiration and that Spinoza’s theory of the mind is thus part of the tradition of enthusiasm. Losonsky writes: What separates Spinoza from Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke is the nature of this inner conviction. While for Descartes, Hobbes and Locke voluntary deliberation and decision could lead to the inner conviction needed for proper understanding [ . . . ] for Spinoza the inner conviction needed for proper understanding involves the renunciation of will and the reliance on the automatic activity of our intellects. (p. 133) Spinoza writes: ‘it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.’8 What I wish to suggest is that the conviction in question could be related to the quality of steadfastness, perseverance, sumud, discussed in the previous chapter. It is not therefore something individualistic but potentially a matter of friendship or communality and thus to posit it as ‘inner’ is insufficient. In fact, it may be that it can only be said to become ‘inner’ when denied expression. Moreover, it is my speculation that this conviction or resoluteness may well pertain to the exilic consciousness of the Jewish community that Spinoza was part of even as he was ostracised for his anti-authoritarian non-conformity to written scripture or the letter of the law. In trying to broach the suggestion made by Foucault concerning the fateful convergence of Jewish and German philosophical traditions, the above speculation will be developed a little further. If the Jews have posited themselves as a chosen race, this would seem to be bound up with their exilic condition. That is, as outcasts, the Jews could have assumed the role of being the bearers of the denied universality of being, our being in common. Today, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish addresses, it is the Palestinian people who are being

What is enlightenment?

51

put in this position. Those without a home are obliged to become a spiritual people of the outside, yet they symbolise therefore a true unity of being beyond any notion of the proper or what can be owned or privatised. Regarding the Nazi Germans, it could be speculated that, envious of the Jewish community in its very community ethos, they sought to usurp the Jews as a chosen race and a spiritual people. The Nazis theologised the political in an insane and inauthentic way, as discussed by Adorno at length, and it could be said that this is because they adopted an authoritarian and highly possessive stance towards what in itself would be a freedom of spirit.9 They tried to include the cosmic in the national, or in Kantian terms they tried to privatise the public. The freedom of spirit in question thus needs to be international and utopian. It has to be for everyone: it cannot eventually be located and nationalised. Whilst this constitutes a broad speculation, it concerns a historically recognisable phenomenon that repeats itself. For example, as I have explored in some detail elsewhere, whilst the anti-colonial struggle for Zimbabwe was in the spirit of a wider universality, when Mugabe and ZANU came to power, the ruling party tried to colonise for itself the spirit of anti-colonial resistance, that is, to colonise liberation in tandem with a spiritualising of ethnic politics.10 Something similar could be said to have been happening in Israel where the Israelis see themselves as waging an endless war of emancipation but in the exclusive name of Israel. It is as if the Israelis still cannot register that they are no longer the universal exception, God’s people: it is as if they are trying to include this permanently exceptional status that comes of exilic consciousness within the borders and ethos/ethnos of national property. While this argument would require further historical substantiation, the basic philosophical point is that liberation is not something that can be owned and unity of being cannot be logo-centrically singularised. Jacqueline Rose importantly addresses the differing strands of Zionist ideology, including a problematic strand of, say, cosmic nationalism, in The Question of Zion.11 Israel in his lengthy study of the reception of Spinoza as the most radical philosopher of the Enlightenment tries hard to play down the mystical Spinoza in favour of an atheistic and naturalistic Spinoza. He wants to construct Spinoza as a hard-line or mechanistic materialist, a considerable bending of the text as can happen in readings of Spinoza that emerge from such a bias. It is quite plausible to see Spinoza as an atheist in that he does not believe in a personal God. In contemporary terminology, I think that Spinoza’s God-as-Nature is certainly not a transcendental subject but yet a creative intelligence that pervades nature and that we can gain an understanding of through our own natural being. Israel’s Spinoza is in danger of being re-written in the more Newtonian terms of the positing of a merely mechanistic nature but without this even being set in motion by Newton’s ‘clockwork God’. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri turn from a brief consideration of Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ to a fleeting consideration of Spinoza, interestingly, since there’s no mention of Spinoza in Foucault’s essay (or Kant’s). They say:

52

What is enlightenment? The fifth part of Spinoza’s Ethics is perhaps the highest development of the modern critique of modernity [ . . . ] Never before had philosophical thought so radically undermined the traditional dualisms of European metaphysics, and never before, consequently, had it so powerfully challenged the political practices of transcendence and domination. Every ontology that does not bear the stamp of human creativity is cast aside. [ . . . ] At times, setting out from this high level of development, Spinoza’s thought does attempt to confront reality, but the ascetic proposal halts, stumbles, and disappears in the mystical attempt to reconcile the language of reality and divinity. Finally, in Spinoza as in the other great modern critics of modernity, the search for an outside seems to run aground and propose merely phantasms of mysticism, negative intuitions of the absolute.12

I share the enthusiasm of Hardt and Negri for Spinoza but some of the terminology in the above is quite misleading or at least very questionable. First, to speak of the rejection of ontologies that do not bear the stamp of human creativity is problematic in two respects. I would say that Spinoza engages with a creativity that very explicitly goes beyond the human which is precisely why he equates God with Nature: this is neither a religion nor a humanism. Then, to speak of the ‘stamp’ of human creativity is to suggest an imprinting mechanism as if creativity consisted of pre-established human-based designs, an implicitly idealist and technical – indeed dualist – way of considering things. Further, Hardt and Negri’s positing of a language of divinity and a language of reality is problematic in a reading of Spinoza since for him the divine or mystical is the real, although it is the case that Spinoza eventually gives up on the attempt to express this, perhaps realising that what is at stake is something too elusive and yielding to be fixed in concepts, precepts, formulae. For Hardt and Negri, the mystical is merely the phantasmatic but this would not be Spinozist. According to Spinoza, humans impose their imaginations and fictions on nature, where the task is instead to try and understand or at least accept the reality of nature’s workings both through a more scientific approach and through attending to states of human consciousness and affect. This is a reason for Spinoza’s on-going relevance in a philosophy of physics (Einstein)13 as well as of neurobiology (Damasio),14 whilst Spinoza has also been regarded as a precursor of psychoanalysis (Salome´ and Freud).15 Moreover, Spinoza is routinely denounced for ‘his perverse denial of spirits, ghosts, spectres, and apparitions’.16 It is not that Spinoza is lost in the phantasmatic but that there is a difficulty in the communication of his sense of the ontologically real. It is also for this reason that Kant’s emphasis on ‘freethinking’ as a matter of a public not private discourse becomes significant. Losonsky observes: While Hobbes enslaves the citizen to a human sovereign at the expense of one’s service to inner conviction, Spinoza frees the citizen from bondage to human sovereigns by enslaving him to the divinely inspired voice of inner conviction. Unfortunately, Spinoza’s liberty is limited to those with resolute

What is enlightenment?

53

minds, and it appears he has nothing to say for those that have little or no inner conviction. (p. 157) With respect to this, Kant’s emphasis on public reason serves to suggest that the sharing of ideas might possibly help us towards the discovery of not so much an inner than a dialectically arrived at conviction. Nonetheless, there would remain a possible impasse between the critical intellect addressed by Kant and the inspirational access to a creative intelligence as required by Spinoza. This is a genuine dilemma; nonetheless, Losonsky’s objection problematically implies that knowledge has to favour certain psychological or psychosomatic dispositions over others in order to be treated as authoritative. Against the possible bias of this stance, it is questionable to assume that reason is simply cut off from experience with the latter as merely dubious: rather, different ways of participating in the world entail different ways of thinking about it. Thus, no one has a complete knowledge and there are always limits to the extent to which we can be forced to think in the other’s terms – certainly for a Spinoza as much as a Hobbes – even as we may try to extend our capacities. Ethically speaking, it may be said that freedom depends on the recognition of a reality principle that would mitigate against the coercive, even violent, production of an homogenised subject. Such a reality principle would give recognition to the differences and deferrals of states of being and desire as affect the way we think and so entail deference. The reason that Spinoza may be said to be a significant precursor for both Freud and Damasio lies in the fact that he does not divorce the mind from soma, desire and feeling. Foucault’s essay will now be returned to. Foucault maintains that ‘the Enlightenment is the age of the critique’ and that Kant’s ‘little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise’ (p. 38). Kant is usually seen as striking a tacit bargain with King Frederick II, the Great, promising obedience in exchange for freedom of speech. Given Foucault’s endorsement of a politically canny and historically aware Kant, it is strange that his own essay does not really address its own historicopolitical moment of the mid-1980s. Rather Foucault, drawing attention to Kant’s sense of the contemporary, almost seems to position himself as Kant’s contemporary. He does this through the following gesture: ‘Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history’ (p. 39). Thus, as modernity becomes an attitude or, as Foucault also suggests, an ethos, it acquires a degree of transcendence over the historical. Foucault proposes, as regards a modern consciousness, that Baudelaire is the most exemplary of . . . well, what? . . . of thinkers? of poets? That is to say, Foucault’s casual and unexplained elision of the poetic and the philosophical calls for attention. It is of Baudelaire’s essays that Foucault treats; nonetheless it is important to bear in mind that they are the essays of a practising artist in the elaboration of a creative attitude. Foucault pays particular attention to Baudelaire’s essay on the artist Constantin Guys, and he says that for Baudelaire:

54

What is enlightenment?

‘being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting [ . . . ] perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it’ (p. 39). Are we back to the poetic or mystical apprehension of being or ‘the thing itself ’? How does this fit with Kant’s scepticism? Incidentally, Baudelaire features in an encyclopaedia of mysticism associated with a stance of nonduality, as follows: French poet, and the primary creative force behind modern French poetry [ . . . ] Baudelaire’s great importance lies in his sense that the exploration of the world outside and of the inner world are one and the same thing. In his sonnet ‘Correspondences’ he writes of the interrelatedness of all things, the universal symbolism, the interaction of all the senses with one another and with the spirit. So the artist’s task is to express and clarify the consciousness which acts within the material world, but at the same time transcends time and space. Baudelaire was fascinated by the occult, and by the effect of drugs, and wrote a work called ‘The Poem of Hashish’.17 Immediately after this entry on Baudelaire, Charles, comes an entry on: ‘Bauls. A movement in Bengal, independent of Hinduism and Islam, mainly among the lower castes. The word means ‘‘madcap’’. The aim is freedom, sometimes expressed through the Sufi concept of FANA, dying-to-self.’ It continues with: That is why, brother, I became a madcap Baul. No master I obey, nor injunctions, canons, or custom. Man-made distinctions have no hold on me now. I rejoice in the gladness of the love that wells out of my own being, In love there is no separation, but a meeting of hearts forever. So I rejoice in song and I dance with each and all That is why, brother, I became a madcap Baul.18 I feel almost certain that Spinoza would have rather liked these madcap Bauls who share with him a rejection of external religious observances and the affirmation of love of being. And Foucault? Whilst Foucault steers us in the direction of a certain poetic mysticism with Baudelaire, he almost immediately, after a dangerous moment, veers away from this. This is the dangerous moment: ‘Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘‘heroize’’ the present’ (p. 40). The danger is that, as touched on earlier, the desire to conflate non-self-centred freedom of spirit with heroism as a centralising idealisation of the self, the proper, could have fascist or irrational implications. Luckily, this danger is averted by Foucault, not that he registers it, as he goes on to explain that this heroism is not for real in that it is ironic. He writes: ‘This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain it or to

What is enlightenment?

55

perpetuate it’ (p. 40). Foucault goes on to propose: ‘For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it as otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is’ (p. 41). I am not exactly sure how this works, whilst I remain open to the suggestion, but it seems that we are to be moved away from an actual experience of the present to a more imaginative recollection of it and with this move towards the imaginative we also are taken in the direction of narcissism. Foucault does not use the term ‘narcissism’ but I think it is appropriate for what he says in the following: To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme [ . . . ] the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and his passions, his very existence, a work of art. [ . . . ] This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself. (pp. 41–2) Whilst there is certainly an appeal to this self-preoccupied dandysme or artful and imaginative narcissism, you cannot really say that it is the same thing as inspiration, as Foucault implies. In fact, what is important to what is being set out here is the sense and proposition that there is a certain ratio to be maintained between creativity, of the somatic or inspired sort, and narcissism. The more creative, the less narcissistic; the more narcissistic, the less creative. If we take the madcap Bauls, their inspired creativity is reliant on a dying-to-self, or a self-abandonment. What is implied by Foucault is that the dandy lets go of or represses some of this ‘freedom of spirit’ whereby the dandy would have a certain fetishistic relation to inspiration. The problem is that Foucault wants to avoid this in that he both maintains that he is not talking about ‘fashion’ in talking about the modern attitude to the contemporary and that the dandy is other than the flaˆneur or, we could say, commodity-seduced browser. However, let us take an example of a dandy, Oscar Wilde’s imagining of Dorian Gray.19 It is Dorian Gray’s destiny precisely to become a work of art and to treat of himself as an experiment. Moreover, Dorian Gray is fetishistically obsessed with creativity even as he himself is not an artist. In Wilde’s story, it is the modest and unassuming Basil Hallward who is the artist, lacking in ego, like the Keatsian poet and unlike the more theatrical dandies. The one significant difference regarding Foucault’s re-formulation of the dandy to be mentioned is that Dorian Gray is a hedonist whilst Foucault’s dandy is an ascetic. There is an intense poignancy in reflecting on Foucault’s essay with its muted sense of its own times, the period when the gay community was being ravaged by illness and death, and with the threat of mortality hanging over Foucault himself. It gives a different charge to the desire to seize something eternal out of the fleeting present that the essay expresses, or to the haunting question of becoming image, becoming ghost.

56

What is enlightenment?

In referring to the dandy as the characteristic figure of enlightenment, Foucault is referring to work of his that he carries out elsewhere in his late attempts to re-think the ethical, in particular, the work that informs The Care of the Self.20 The trajectory of Foucault’s own work does rather beg the question of ethics, and in his late turning towards ethics he adopts a conciliatory stance toward Kant that is somewhat surprising given Foucault’s more rebellious anti-humanist critiques of Man. What transpires in Foucault’s re-reading and re-writing of Kant is a strange blending of himself and Kant: Foucault as Kant and Kant as Foucault. Foucault maintains, reasonably enough, that one does not have to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ (the European) Enlightenment (as the simplistic would have us be). Foucault says this is a blackmail that we should refuse, rightly so, especially given that Kant defines his enlightenment in terms of the maintaining of a critical or flexible attitude beyond the obligation to be obedient. Foucault then extends this question to whether the Enlightenment needs be a humanist project, and Foucault considers that the two exist in a tension with each other. But there seems to be a certain amount of special pleading in this part of his essay; it is certainly not argued through and Foucault rather shrugs the irksome question off. What I would like to suggest is that Foucault offers us what is implicitly a different kind of performativity to the rather authoritarian techno-performativity objected to by Kant. Foucault’s performativity is a theatrical self-fashioning, an art of the self, and ironic or rather Camp in sensibility thereby making clearer what is somewhat indeterminate in Kant’s position. It seems to me that theatrical performativity differs from techno-performativity in that the latter literalises an ideal or pre-given sign whilst the former mimics the real or plays with the gap between image and reality. This explains Foucault’s emphasis on a transformation of the present. Similarly, irony depends on a sense of a gap between appearance and reality. What becomes flamboyantly visible here is the sense of reservation that I was trying to draw attention to in Kant. Let me then make a blatant suggestion. A feminine freedom or frivolity is not just given up in a transition to serious, dutiful, manly maturity but lightly maintained. In fact, it may be that through some repression its renounced expression creates an inwardness but an inwardness that produces something of a comic mask or an act. By way of examples, it could be said that this ironic persistence of the feminine is to be found in ‘the attitude of modernity’ of Byron and Jane Austen, who have a similar theatrical sense to that of Wilde. In contradistinction to techno-performativity, theatrical performativity has something lively about it showing it to have some kind of relation to both nature and the real. My point is that there is no theatrical performativity without the real. In fact, it is the disappearance of the real within postmodernist culture that has resulted in there being no means of keeping theatrical performativity distinct from technoperformativity: postmodernist theory conflates the two in its rather generalised deployment of the performative. I would say that this conflation possibly constitutes one of the reasons that the left has drifted towards the centre and the right, the conformative.

What is enlightenment?

57

What Byron, Austen and Wilde could be said to share is a strong sense of the gap between awareness of social norms, rituals, manners, etiquette, conditioning, and so on, and awareness of fluid and fleeting real life as irreducible to any of these formulations. What Susan Sontag theorises in her aesthetics of Camp is relevant to these writers as well as to Foucault. Sontag writes that: ‘not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.’21 It thus relies on a certain combining or inter-qualification of artificiality and authenticity. Whilst Camp is mocking and playful, Sontag also maintains: ‘Camp is a tender feeling’ (p. 119). Sontag both maintains that ‘Camp is the modern dandyism’, (p. 116) whilst situating its origin in the eighteenth century. This delightful, ironic and theatrical Camp sensibility may also be said to have its political variants in twentieth-century liberation struggles where a humorous, sometimes painfully humorous, gap is opened between colonial officialdom and lived experience. This sensibility, comparable to a Camp one, can be found in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Emile Habiby’s Saeed the Pessoptimist, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not.22 I will offer a reading of Dangarembga’s novel in a later chapter. My above comments constitute an attempt to tease Foucault out. What Foucault goes on to propose, very deftly, is that whilst Kant had to determine the necessary limits for the renunciation of transgression, his heirs are then faced with the question of determining the limits that can be transgressed. He states: ‘The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’ (p. 45). It is a very clever move because with this Foucault is able to have us see that his own project of the transgressions of or challenges to given limits is not an over-turning of the Kantian one but its logical development. Foucault writes: ‘I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (p. 47). With this Foucault becomes himself Kant’s audacious philosopher. But are we still talking philosophy, do you think? I am thinking of the selfexperimenting Dorian Gray (in the text it is explicit how his project is to take himself as an experiment), and I am thinking of how, for example, the adventurous experiment with things such as drugs, sex, parachuting and scuba-diving as a means of pushing the limits of themselves. However, I think that through engineering a continuity between himself and a contemporary Kant, Foucault also rather loses sight of the late twentieth century and what it would mean to pose Kant’s question today. So let us re-open it.

What is enlightenment today? Delirium in Japan Let us begin with the question of maturity posed by Kant. Foucault maintains: ‘I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood’ (p. 49). What is the nature of this potential impossibility? Is it because there is no such thing as

58

What is enlightenment?

mature adulthood? Is it because there will always be minors, indeed with each new generation, or because there is no longer any difference between the mature and immature? Could it even be that the mature do not really wish to mature, mature finally, as long as they live? In order to reflect on aspects of such questions, this will now take an essay by Asada Akira into account. As a means of introducing Asada, I will make extended use of an essay by Marilyn Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan’.23 Ivy begins by considering a controversial speech by Nakasone Yashuhiro, leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic party, in which Nakasone makes a case in the mid-1980s for Japanese superiority on the basis of the Japanese nation’s speedy dissemination of an abundance of information which he claims makes of Japan: ‘a very intelligent society – much more so than America’ (p. 23). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Ivy sees Nakasone’s speech as symptomatic of a ‘paranoiac delirium’ as it sweepingly tries to sketch out a world historical glory for the Japanese race. Ivy sees that Nakasone treats information and intelligence as ‘Nature itself ’, presumably inducing a hallucinatory conflation of the phantasmatic with the real. With this alarming start, Ivy proceeds to the Japanese educational scene, with its postmodernist ‘problem of knowledge as an informational commodity’ (p. 25). She then goes on to state: I want to focus neither exclusively on Lyotard’s knowledge as learning nor on knowledge as discourse, but rather on a more limited conception of knowledge: on knowledge as chi, the Japanese word that indicates knowledge as acquired through intellectual cultivation, but which has recently come to designate something akin, I think, to ‘theory’ in American literary-critical circles. (p. 25) Now I have to intervene here for, within and in spite of cultural limitations, I understand something different by ch’i. And I would like to assure you that the one thing ch’i is not is theory. But I am not a Japanologist and it may be that in postmodern Japan ch’i has oddly come to assume the American meaning of ‘theory’. This aside, it seems to me that it is the Chinese notion of ch’i that is at stake, with the historical influence of Chinese philosophy on Japanese culture. Ch’i may be defined as follows: ‘Ch’i. The Chinese word ch’i literally means ‘‘air’’, ‘‘power’’, ‘‘motion’’, ‘‘energy’’ or ‘‘life’’. According to T’ai Ch’i theory, the correct meaning of ch’i is ‘‘intrinsic energy’’, ‘‘internal energy’’, or original, eternal and ultimate energy’.24 It is capable of changing from one formation to another: Yin Ch’i or Yang Ch’i. However, it is also maintained that the translation of ch’i as energy should be thought not so much in terms of substance as in terms of rhythmically flowing movement. The medical anthropologist Margaret Lock explains it to the physicist Fritjof Capra, as follows: ‘The word literally means ‘‘vapor’’ and was used in ancient China to describe the vital breath, or energy, animating the cosmos. The flow and fluctuation of ch’i keep a person alive, and there are definite pathways of ch’i, the well-known meridians, along which lie the acupuncture points.’25 And Capra writes:

What is enlightenment?

59

Ch’i is not a substance, nor does it have the purely quantative meaning of our scientific concept of energy. It is used in Chinese medicine in a very subtle way to describe the patterns of flow and fluctuation in the human organism, as well as the continual exchanges between organism and environment.26 It is this ch’i knowledge – however you wish to translate it – that Ivy sees becoming commodified in the work of Asada Akira. The thought of it being equated with critical theory is actually rather funny, in that, if anything, it would be the undoing of critical theory, theory’s repression-subliming of energies for the sake of conceptual thinking. Or, theory would have to become dancing or yoga or t’ai ch’i or other means of ‘going with the flow’. Or, it would need to make of itself a very slinky, inky, fluid writing. In 1983, the year before Foucault wrote his ‘What is Enlightenment?’Asada published a book entitled Ko-zo- to chikara (Structure and Power), that without prior publicity sold about 80,000 copies within a few weeks bringing fame and acclaim to its author, newspapers heralding a ‘new academism’. Ivy writes: ‘Office workers, university students, artists, musicians – everyone bought the book’ (p. 26). According to Ivy, the book offers an exposition of post-structuralist thought concentrating on Lacan, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, with Nietzsche and Spinoza in the background, and it is said: ‘Deleuze and Guattari [ . . . ] have influenced him more directly than Derrida’ (p. 27). I think this is more than circumstantial, as I will return to. Structure and Power has a preface published separately in 1981 in a special edition of Chu-o- ko-ron (Central Review), dedicated to discussing the status of the university today. Ivy writes: ‘The preface is really an inquiry into the possibility of the university, and into the nature of knowledge’ (p. 27). It – Asada’s project – can thus be identified as very much an enlightenment enquiry. Asada addresses the kind of students who study obediently for the sake of their private lives (career ladder, and so on), offering a challenge to them. In Kantian terms we could say that the university has thus become a place of merely private reason. Asada speaks of two modes of knowledge that dominate the university today, knowledge as an object, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or knowledge as a means: what the Frankfurt school would see as instrumental knowledge. Ivy glosses the argument as follows: ‘Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, however, often arrogates to itself the status of religion, clearly revealed by the sciences today. On the other hand, knowledge as a means degenerates into a bourgeois tool for advancement, as a mere route for success as bureaucrat or doctor, in order to live an upper-middle class life. It is an impoverished choice’ (p. 28). Indeed, it is, although I should like to keep apart the equation of ‘doctor’ and ‘bureaucrat’. Asada’s attitude regarding questions of enlightenment strikes me as far more contemporary and daring than Foucault’s, the work under consideration by the two of them being written at the same time, where Kant maintains that public reason ought to be cosmopolitan in its reach. Whereas Foucault looks back to Baudelaire’s reaction to nineteenth-century capitalist society, as do so many

60

What is enlightenment?

others, Asada looks, with a cross-cultural perspective, at the state of the university around him. And with this we can see how Kant’s expectations have not only been unfulfilled but even utterly eroded. For a start, what Kant terms private reason, that is, technological reason, has not been minimised as Kant had hoped but has been massively maximised, progressively colonising the space to be reserved for public reason. Increasingly, education becomes a matter of obedient performativity, and the one place supposed to guarantee freedom of thought and its expression becomes increasingly managerialised and privatised. Then, it is also the case that ‘objective knowledge’ is treated like a religion, especially by the scientist-guardians, and hence Latour is right to protest at his being ‘gagged’ in the wars over who is allowed to speak of science. Scientific research is not, as Einstein argued, cleanly divorced from a sense of the religious inasmuch as it deals with creation and life. However, the issue is other than this. It is that scientific authority is often used to promote clandestine values as being objectively the case. For example, whilst Richard Dawkins rails obsessively against religion, for him biology becomes a kind of disguised religion in that his thinking of the genome is imprinted with a patriarchal logocentrism: the kind of logic treated in the previous chapter. Much more widely, Donna Haraway offers a critique of the authoritarian religious attitude offering itself as pure science in her book, Modest_Witness.27 The stir caused by Asada’s work is that it tries to offer something of an exit, a way out, this being the term – Ausgang – Kant uses: for Kant, enlightenment concerns finding a way out of both obedience to theological authority and technologised reason. And this, says Ivy, is where ch’i comes in, although it really concerns the outside. Ivy writes: ‘The text from that point on is a defence of knowledge as ‘‘play’’ (tawamure; yu-gi) [ . . . ] and a ceaseless turn to the ‘‘outside’’ (gaibu)’ (p. 29). It seems that what is envisaged is the allowance for creativity. Ivy says that: ‘The rhetoric is emancipatory’ (p. 29). This recalls Kant’s appeal to a freedom of spirit, although Kant is not really a playful writer or a thinker turned towards the outside, but nonetheless, an admirable, sober thinker of the inside. Asada finds his precursors in Spinoza, in Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom or gay science and in Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal nomadic thought. I am deliberately following Ivy’s discussion of Asada since I am interested in the way that she presents him; a more direct reading of Asada will be offered further on. It should also be pointed that there is little of Asada’s work available in translation, a neglect including, unfortunately, Structure and Power. Ivy tries to account for the book’s immensely popular appeal by maintaining that the book’s ‘perceived difficulty’ was linked with ‘the youth and verve of its author’ (Asada being only twenty-five when he wrote it), thus in Kantian terminology, maturity combining with immaturity as youthful energy. Ivy sees this in terms of ‘the myth of the tensai, the ‘‘genius’’’ being built up around Asada, where he is interviewed for a magazine series called ‘Gods of the Young’ (p. 30). Asada is revealed to have no books in his apartment but, being a musical prodigy, a piano. Ivy comments: ‘The genius is a figure of knowledge without effort, of productivity without labour [ . . . ] There is thus a magical circuit which collapses

What is enlightenment?

61

production and consumption in an effortless generation of language’ (p. 30). Are we to understand this as: capitalism is under threat? With this freedom of creativity, with this auto-generativity of the young, with this self-renewing expenditure of language, capitalism is under threat: collapse of labour and consumer in this. That is part of its unintentional yet moralising subtext since what is objected to is the undermining of honest, sweated (only it is here cerebral), labour. However, to be fair, Ivy is attempting to deploy an anti-capitalist or Marxist argument. Closer to Ivy’s argument is that Asada is the opium for the labouring masses: he offers them the illusory dream of creativity replacing labour. There is a point to this, but some might maintain the truth about capitalism is that workers must surrender their creativity for the sake of supervised, mechanical labour, according to production plan, so that commodities, as opposed to works of art, can be produced. However, what Ivy writes is: ‘If all commodities are fetishes, then Structure and Power is a particularly fantastic one, and what it fetishistically replaces is intellectual labor’ (p. 31). That is to say, she equates the ‘magically’ (inspirationally) produced book with the ‘magically’ (appropriatively) produced commodity. In this equation, it seems that for Ivy there can be no inspired/inspiring ‘work’, only work that is really work: the implication is that either Asada’s intelligent playfulness is faking work or that it is faking play. Ivy goes on to speak disapprovingly of Asada’s reading habits: Asada has compared the new technique of reading to eating hors d’oeuvres or snacks. Reading, eating, and consuming here become conflated – it’s all a matter of incorporating something, but incorporating it lightly, without undue investment [ . . . ] As we have seen reading can be replaced by an ‘encounter’ with a book, which sends out ‘signals’; one ‘picks up’ the book. In place of reading one need only take the book to bed. (p. 31) Well, that describes my reading habits quite plausibly. Not being a Japanologist nor a philosopher, how else can I account for the morsels of Kant, Foucault and Japanese postmodernist thought I have snacked on: yes, they winked at me from the shelves and I just fell for them in passing. And then, all those unread books by the pillow that I and you dream of reading and so find in our dreams. It must be a generational thing, these dilettantish reading habits. Ivy goes on to cite from Frigga Haug’s ‘corrosive expose of commodity aesthetics’: ‘Thus a whole range of commodities can be seen casting flirtatious glances at the buyers, in an exact imitation of or even surpassing the buyers’ own glances, which they use in courting their human objects of affection’ (p. 31). But surely it is too easy to produce a simple equivalence here, no question-mark. I might fall in love with an elegant pair of shoes, and you could ridicule me for doing so, but if I were to confess a love of the beauty of Baudelaire’s poems or to being excited by the spirit of Asada’s critique, would this be as ridiculous, in need of corrosive exposition? Hopefully not. The implication of the above is that Asada’s readers have only a narcissistic interest in giving themselves the aura of young intellectuals by cruisily ‘picking up’ his book, but even that is not

62

What is enlightenment?

so bad. Imagine Deleuze selling a hundred thousand copies in a week and all the commuters on the tube snacking for a while on Le pli instead of Harry Potter . . . but before this gets too delirious, let us hear what Asada has to say. Asada’s essay ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale’ is partially a response to Ivy’s reading of him.28 Excusing himself for not being a Japanologist, being the object of such a study, he offers to give a parodic and schematic (Ivy describes Structure and Power as very schematic) sketch of his own analysis of Japanese capitalism. Asada begins: When Marilyn Ivy discussed Nakasone Yashuhiro’s transhistorical delirium, I recalled an almost equally delirious discussion, I had with Fe´lix Guattari during his visit to Japan. We talked about capitalism’s global trajectory: elderly capitalism, adult capitalism, and infantile capitalism. (p. 274) It is a delightful essay. Elderly capitalism concerns old Europe, found in countries ‘which developed an early mercantile capitalism, countries where a transcendental value system like Catholicism still remains. Such a value system is a vertically centralized system, supported by the Subject, with a capital S’ (p. 274). And this delivers the familiar series: God, the King, the father, or in economics, gold. Industrial ‘adult’ capitalism is given to us as a more dynamic system and is associated with Britain and America, where relative competition replaces fixed positions and roles. In adult capitalism, ‘everyone competes with his neighbor as the model/rival’ where this is internalised so that the subject begins to compete with himself. Asada says that this internalisation of, we could say, ego ideal and the consequent formation of the superego, gives us Foucault’s empirico-transcendental doublet. Actually, this figure of the double begins to emerge in late eighteenth- and in nineteenthcentury Gothic literature as precisely the beginnings of a kind of fictional critique of the humanist Enlightenment. Foucault’s formulation of the empiricotranscendental doublet draws on the background of this literature. Thus, this humanist subject of finitude is a Jekyll and Hyde, the subject ‘which, internalizing paternal instance through ‘‘Oedipalization’’, has come to make itself its own colony’ (p. 275). What could be added to Asada and Guattari’s observations is that the double is at once ‘father’ and ‘son’, the adult as this contradictory collision of the elderly and infantile. Moreover, neither can escape each other: the rebellious son cannot escape the punitive father while the would-be serious father cannot escape the embarrassing would-be son. In literature, this ends in suicide, so it may be a kind of death drive capitalism that Asada addresses, as Marx maintained of the ultimately self-destructive dynamic of capitalism. Asada writes: ‘If we call this subject the adult, modernization is precisely a process of maturation’ (p. 275). But what could make maturity impossible, Foucault being sceptical about the attainment of this maturity, is that the father-self would be bedoubled with its son-self. Is not to want to get rid of the son-self, girlish-boyish self, either to want to get rid of liveliness or of the unconscious? Asada goes on to argue that Japan was modernised without maturing: ‘Japan did not at all mature. Far from it’ (p. 275). In Japan:

What is enlightenment?

63

there are neither tradition-oriented old people adhering to transcendental values nor inner-oriented adults who have internalized their values; instead, the nearly purely relative (or relativistic) competition exhibited by otheroriented children provides the powerful driving force for capitalism. (p. 275) Without patriarchal logocentricism, without the no-of-the-father, there would be no repression, thus endless play and youthful creativity. It sounds utopian; Asada: ‘Is this utopian [ . . . ]?’ (p. 275) What it is is hilarious for it leads to a parody of Hegel’s culmination of world historical spirit revealing itself as our absolute infantilisation. Asada writes: ‘Is this the goal of capitalism’s history as a process of infantilization which might as well be called a parody of Hegelian world history? Of course, it can never be anything like that: but this very negation must be uttered with a burst of laughter. And, we might add, after laughing, that it is a playful utopia and at the same time a terrible ‘‘dystopia’’’. (p. 276) Asada explains that: In fact, children can play ‘freely’ only when there is some kind of protection [ . . . ] And this protected area is precisely the core of the Japanese ideological mechanism – however thinly diffused a core. It is not a ‘hard’ ruling structure which is vertically centralized (whether transcendental or internalized), but ‘soft’ subsumption by a seemingly horizontal, centreless ‘place’. Here we can recall, as ideological expressions of the Japanese ideology, various stereotyped theories about the Japanese people. Despite frequent argument about Confucian patriarchy, the Japanese family is an essentially maternal arena of ‘amae’, indulgence, and both the father and the children are softly wrapped in it (in other words, the mother is forced to provide that kind of care). (p. 276) What is interesting is that it is proposed that there is the allowance of a generationless, playful creativity as long as it unfolds within a prescribed socioeconomic order of domestication, which would still beg the question of a freedom of spirit. And this is what Asada, in effect, further attends to. He goes on to propose: While European kings and nations, based on the principle of ‘yu,’ presence, contain conflict between individuals and the whole, and have no other choice to repeat collision through striving to expand the self in space, the imperial household as the place of nothingness contains Japan like an empty cylinder which pierces time; and inside of this, on the basis of zettai mujunteki jiko doitsu (absolute contradictory self-identity) which exists between atomism and holism, individuals will each find a place and participate in ‘holonic’ as opposed to holistic, harmony. (p. 277) In other words, the formerly holistic unity with being as no-thingness, ‘unthingly’, is replaced by an identification with the machinic as the cosmic. Or absolute thingness becomes absolute through the usurpation of no-thingness. Thus, creativity

64

What is enlightenment?

would be totally walled into the mechanical with no relation to the outside, and Asada does state that in Japanese society creativity exists solely for the sake of the electronic and technological. The dystopia of this infantile capitalism is that humans become totally enslaved by the technological totality which they live and die for, existing only to keep the Japanese imperial machine going. In contradistinction with these frenzied and techno-tamed children, the infantilisation of American capitalism remains more self-centred, more adult-adolescent. Marilyn Ivy in her essay on Asada also devotes attention to the phenomenon of Japanese creative types making advertisements that are completely detached from the products they are supposedly advertising being instead just autonomous works of art. This is an inversion of what tends to happen in late capitalist Western culture. That is to say, in Western culture, art and advertisement tend to fuse on the level of the iconic or narcissistic image, the level of the commodity fetish, as in the work of Andy Warhol, whereas in the situation described by both Ivy and Asada, the making of art can flourish in the marketplace by merely pretending to be logo-centric: or, condensing this, in the West non-art pretends fetishistically to be art, whilst in Japan, art pretends to be non-art by offering itself in place of and in the milieu of the advertisement or designer thing. The slippery point is that capitalism itself is thus here totally faked, given a non-logocentric culture just pretending to go along with the logo-centric structure of capital. With the Kantian pact in mind, as long as you are instrumentally obedient, you can express yourself as you please, but it is Asada’s point that this does not amount to freedom of spirit in that there is no longer any true sense of an outside or of the real. In maintaining that Japanese society is not logocentric in that it presumes no transcendental presence or originating Being, no authorial Subject, Asada and other Japanese intellectuals such as Karatani Ko-jin, have argued that it does not stand in need of deconstruction in that it is, in a sense, already deconstructed. On a visit to Japan in 1984, Derrida, in conversation with Asada and others, makes the point that Japan in absorbing Western culture is likely to have absorbed and internalised – Derrida’s term is ‘integrated’ – some of its structures, and he also remarks: ‘I have my doubts about whether we can say that deconstruction is a direct element in Japanese-type thought. Certainly, Japanese often say that Buddhist thought or the Zen of Do-gen was already a kind of deconstruction, but I wonder if that is so.’29 Indeed, it is not so, and, amongst other things, this is because deconstruction is rather more narcissistically orientated30 and reliant on the subject than Buddhism with Buddhist enlightenment being a matter of a certain egolessness or non-containment. Suzuki puts this very starkly: ‘The individual ego asserts itself strongly in the West. In the East, there is no ego. The ego is non-existent, and, therefore, there is no ego to be crucified’31 (p. 113), or, less dramatically, no ideal ego to be deconstructed. Derrida goes on to state: ‘If that phenomenon of Asada were nothing more than a repetition of deconstructive elements already found within Japanese thought, then it shouldn’t have called down such an enormous response in contemporary Japan.’32 This, it could be pointed out, is a rather narcissistic statement on

What is enlightenment?

65

Derrida’s part since Asada’s success is being attributed to a deconstruction that comes from the West not the East, that is to say, to Derrida’s own work. But, as pointed out by Ivy, Asada is not drawing on Derrida so much as Deleuze and Guattari together with Nietzschean and Spinozist strands of Western thought. It could be that Asada’s appeal lies in his combining of elements of Western and Eastern philosophy in a non-deconstructive way. This returns us to the significance of ch’i where ch’i is not reducible to Western theory. It is the case that, loosely speaking, there could be said to be deconstructive elements in Asada’s work. He treats of the undoing of binary oppositions but does so, in Ivy’s terms, through attending to ‘relations of exchange’ rather than with ‘language itself in its rhetorical twists and turns’ (p. 26). I think what could be at stake are different approaches to the ontological. Derrida works with an understanding of the ontological that is based on the opposition of presence and absence where he tries to deconstruct this opposition in favour of the virtual and the spectral. Asada, working with the notion of ch’i, is assuming an understanding of the ontological in terms of flows of energy – this being the ‘power’ of Structure and Power – implying too, the transformations or relations of exchange between Yin and Yang as conjoined complements not discrete opposites. Since this is conjectural, I will offer, in the manner of Asada, a fairy-tale approach to the difference at stake. Let us take the following set of oppositions: being: true man

non-being: false woman

A deconstruction of them would challenge the masculine as the sign of presence, as nothing but the rhetorical ‘sign’ of presence, turning true or virtuous man into virtual man. There would be no further appeal to presence so that this virtual man would remain on a par with artificial woman; both would be derivative and there would be no origin, the origin having been deconstructed. The difference between the virtual and artificial would also be somewhat blurred. However, from the point of view of ch’i, or in Taoist terms, anything that you do to ‘true man’ would immediately transform ‘false woman’ because they are not really spaced apart but pertain to non-duality or shared substance. Thus, if you render ‘true man’ as ‘virtual man’ this would transform ‘false woman’ into something else. Let us say that the partial diminution of presence – signified by ‘true man’ – as spirit or energy would at once give us something like ‘spirited woman’. metaphysical opposition: true man~~~~~~~~~~false woman deconstruction: virtual (false) man~~~false (artificial) woman complementarity: virtual (spectralised) man~~~spirited (de-spectralised) woman Deconstruction halts at what would be indeed a phantasmatic spacing for a dialectic of complementarity, or for Buddhism or Taoism, where in a more dynamic view any movement on one side would be at once accompanied by a

66

What is enlightenment?

movement on the other in, perhaps, a rhythm of being and exchange, its energy dance. What I am producing here is a fairy-tale, not so much an unreal as a sort of magical, improvised non-analysis, but it can be argued more seriously as this work will eventually come to do in a reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx in a later chapter. Asada ends his fairy-tale in the following way: Can this be the absolutely contradictory self-identity between the ‘old’ and the ‘infantile’ which is achieved at the end of world history? Naturally, of course, such a vision is nothing but an extreme form of idealist perversion. At this point, the idiocy of it all is already evident. Or should I say, so that this vision will collapse by itself, I have purposely continued to engage in a grotesque parody. What remains to be done is to dismantle this perversion thoroughly, and from there to produce a realistic analysis. That work, however, is something I would like to undertake together with you, who know Japan better than I do, in future discussions. Can you hear me laughing? (p. 278) Yes, and you laugh. Asada’s short critique is one of the funniest I have read and you can hear and feel the tremors of its laughter all the way through its unfolding. The humour is partly due to the delirious twist given to Hegel and to the whole ethos of Western maturity. However, it is also a Joycean–Foucauldian type of laughter, that is to say, it is the self-deflating laughter of a brilliance of mind at its own audacity. And, furthermore, what is funny about Asada’s piece is that it is not exactly a work of dutiful critical labour. It is more truly the inspired and disinhibited expression of one operating a bit more lightly than the serious and laborious critic (without any hostility towards the latter). And now, let us urgently attend to the disappearing outside and the possibility of more realistic engagements.

The wilderness or counter-history Hardt and Negri aptly note: ‘In the end, Foucault’s philosophical critique of the Enlightenment returns to the same Enlightenment standpoint. In this ebb and flow between inside and outside, the critique of modernity does not finally go beyond its terms and limits, but rather stands poised on its boundaries’ (p. 184). They go on to state: ‘The process of modernization, in all these varied contexts, is the internalization of the outside, that is, the civilization of nature’ and they cite Jameson maintaining that postmodernism ‘‘‘is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’’’ (p. 187). This is how Hegel would have wished it, seeing it as humanity’s task to replace nature with a ‘second nature’, in effect, the completely holonic, technologised, domesticated late capitalism described by Asada (only for Hegel, it would be a more authoritarian, more masculinist, more logocentric version). In accordance with this extreme loss of the outside, Hardt and Negri consider that the racism of our times, the imperial racism of globalisation, is one that operates in accordance with a strategy of inclusion rather than exclusion. It

What is enlightenment?

67

could be said that inclusion may well be the ideology, but it is certainly not always the practice. Moreover, and this pertains to the former point, it seems absurd to proclaim that there is no more nature, that it has gone for good, and that humans can dispense with it. Can the postmodernists not feel the sun or the rain on their skin? Are there no more wolves? Whatever happened to the beach, the beach beneath the paving stones? Multitudes are in touch with nature and, of course, the natural world, cultivated or not, continues to exist. Indeed, why would there be so much fighting over natural resources if all we have is nonnature? Asada is careful to offer his dystopian holonic world as a fairy-tale towards a more realistic analysis. It seems to me that Hardt and Negri are using a ‘nature gone for good’ as a screen for a partial predicament, possibly that of Western intellectual urbanites somewhat out of touch with the real. Why not address this crisis as such? Hardt and Negri’s concerns are with the inclusion of postcolonial subjects, that is, with a pervasive Westernisation through institutionalisation. They argue, as I myself have elsewhere (also following a Deleuzian-Guattarian line of thinking), that the Oedipal family is now everywhere in the Western world.33 In Kantian terms, there is the intensification and increase of private reason and the shrinking of freedom of spirit. Hardt and Negri argue that with this, let us say, omni-domestication, subjectification is a constant project of the social construction of identities accompanied by the sense of an on-going crisis in terms of the breakdowns of institutions: with this, identities and institutions constantly have to be reinforced. They write: One should not think that the crisis of the nuclear family has brought a decline in the forces of patriarchy. On the contrary, discourses and practices of ‘family values’ seem to be everywhere across the social field. The old feminist slogan ‘The personal is the political’ has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries between public and private have fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the ‘intimate public sphere’. (p. 197) Thus, an irresolvable dialectic of constantly renewed subjectification and its breakdown, its ‘corruption’ in Hardt and Negri’s terms, is produced. Butler’s theory of gender trouble would I think fit into this model, and more generally, theories of techno-performativity and its perversions. Hardt and Negri end their chapter on imperial inclusion with an epilogue entitled ‘Refusal’, what this chapter has less extremely considered in terms of ‘reservation’, choosing as exemplary figures here Melville’s Bartleby and Coetzee’s Michael K.34 Of Bartleby they state: His refusal is so absolute that Bartleby appears completely blank, a man without qualities or, as Renaissance philosophers would say, homo tantum, mere man and nothing more. Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. (p. 203)

68

What is enlightenment?

Everyone likes to have a go at interpreting the enigmatic Bartleby, and, it being my turn: is not Bartleby rather a sort of death drive? First, he is, as mindless copyist, one compelled merely to repeat, the kind of technologised labour that Kant characterises in terms of man stripped of his dignity. I think it is astute of Hardt and Negri to frame their chapter with Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ for this reason. Then, second, Bartleby’s becoming despirited machinic labour deprives him not simply of the will to work but of the will to live: and he just dies autonomously as the only possible remaining expression of his dignity, that is, autonomy. This ‘homo tantum’, this isolating and reductive singularisation of man within capitalism, with no way out of its imprisoning structures, is the negated inversion of the unstoppable Spinozist desire-to-be. All that remains of this desire-to-be is the choice of death. Of Coetzee’s Michael K, Hardt and Negri write: ‘Michael K. [ . . . ] is also a figure of absolute refusal. But whereas Bartleby is immobile, almost petrified in his pure passivity, K is always on his feet, always moving’ (p. 203). Michael K’s refusal is indeed different from that of Bartleby’s since he refuses to be brought into the domesticated enclosures of colonised labour. He is like a nomad of the desert. The narrator he encounters within the story, however, considers that Michael K must give up his ties with the maternal and with the land in order to be brought into history, so he is faced with the Hegelian injunction to enter the master-slave dialectic of Empire for the supposed sake of his historical progress towards maturity. What is rather fantastic or phantasmatic about Michael K is that he is a character that seems to derive from a Kafkaesque or Beckettian absurdist tradition as signified by his name (and ‘Bartleby’ is a precursor of such a tradition), who is yet implicitly a rural African or, more broadly, native. What is possibly being a bit mixed up here by Coetzee is the hyper-domesticated absurdist man with the ‘wild-child’, gentle nomad. Nonetheless, it is the case that Michael K is an outsider with some freedom of movement in contradistinction to the death-tending paralysis of Bartleby. In terms of South African literature, his precursor could be said to be Olive Schreiner’s Waldo from The Story of an African Farm who is a rural labourer as well as itinerant worker but who also has a Bartleby side in that he just dies spontaneously where, unsaid, the intolerable situation that he is imprisoned in is that of a deeply racist and sexist society.35 In Waldo’s case, the only way open to him of bettering himself is one of enslaving himself to an inhumane society which he refuses to do. It is interesting to compare these figures of ‘Refusal’ as conceived by Western writers with their putative counterparts in African literature. For example, in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, after an ethnic conflict, two characters become exilic nomads of the African bush and can be seen as exemplifying a freedom of movement prior to the colonisation of African labour.36 What Plaatje shows us is instructive for what his text reveals is a brother-sister relationship or an equal partnership between its two free-spirited male and female protagonists. In Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, the pre-colonial nomadic hero rescues a woman from her enslavement to a narcissistic character that personifies Death and in this novel too free-spiritedness and freedom of movement are given to us in terms of

What is enlightenment?

69

an equal partnership between the masculine and the feminine.37 It is not, however, only in African literature that you can discover this rendition of the horizontally mobile, far from it. Pauline Melville treats of this nomadic brothersister relationship in terms of a refusal of and flight from both monotheism and colonialism in The Ventriloquist’s Tale.38 Other examples would be possible. The point is: dare to think or think to dare, it looks as if freedom of spirit, freedom of movement, have something feminine or androgynous about them, for either sex. In Globalization: The Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman persuasively argues that capital becomes ever more spectral and virtual in its speedy techno-mobility where this exempts the shifty elites from their responsibility to the earthbound locals and their localities. Bauman writes of the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distance: ‘It emancipates certain humans from territorial constraints and renders certain community-generating meanings exterritorial – while denuding the territory, to which other people go on being confined.’39 It is also said: The global travels of financial resources are perhaps as immaterial as the electronic network they travel – but the local traces of their journeys are painfully tangible and real: ‘qualitative depopulation’, destruction of local economies once capable of sustaining their inhabitants, the exclusion of the millions incapable of being absorbed by the new global economy. (p. 75) Thus, this hyper-techno-mobility is indissociable from the destructiveness that affects the excluded locals and their environments even as the elites go on trying to dissociate themselves from their responsibility for the terrible predicaments they not only neglect but bring about through neglect. Hardt and Negri want to emphasise rather how Empire forces mobility on labour. This is true for some, where Bauman’s analysis is: Vagabonds are travellers refused the right to turn into tourists. They are allowed to neither stay put [ . . . ] nor search for a better place to be. Once emancipated from space, capital no longer needs itinerant labour [ . . . ] And so the pressure to pull down the last remaining barriers to the free movement of money and money-making commodities and information goes hand in hand with the pressure to dig new moats and erect new walls (variously called ‘immigration’ or ‘nationality’ laws) barring the movement of those who are uprooted, spiritually or bodily, as a result. (p. 93) So the vagabonds end up immobilised in camps and prisons. Thus, freedom of movement as cosmopolitan free-spiritedness recedes more and more as movement becomes more and more technologised. Capital manifests itself as the mere performative techno-mimicry of spirited mobility whilst labour is either increasingly subjected to technologisation or paralysed. Hardt and Negri state: ‘Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community.

70

What is enlightenment?

This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community’ (p. 204). Yes, indeed, regarding the general sentiment, but, as I have been indicating, the lines of Hardt and Negri’s arguments fail to engage sufficiently with what might be necessary in the analysis towards this. Whilst they dismissively regard postcolonial studies, together presumably with its feminist concerns, as simply part of the assimilation they address, they fail to explain what would mobilise the above sentiment. How do you square humanity? How does man multiply with man? Would ‘homohomo’ then turn out to be yet another instance of the Western male double? Carla Hesse in addressing Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ rewriting of Kant points out: ‘while Kant had many eighteenth-century interlocutors, to my knowledge the first person to define her philosophical project as a rewriting of Kant was Isabelle de Charrie`re Belle Van Zuylen.’40 Charrie`re’s novel or philosophical tale, Trois femmes, Three Women, is a response to Kant’s ‘On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory But is of No Practical Use’, and Hesse sees it as a feminist critique of modern subjectivity and the categorical moral imperative. Kant, in his essay, excludes two categories of individuals from the originating contract, these being women and servants, on the grounds that women and servants – by nature? – lack the capacity for maturity or autonomous self-determination. Charrie`re’s response is to imagine three women thus excluded from the self-regulating moral community being faced with a series of ethical dilemmas where they have to act in ways that clandestinely transgress man-made regulations and values, which they have no real obligation to in that they are excluded, indeed foreclosed, from their constitution. Hesse comments: In the end Charrie`re’s story becomes a story of how these three women constitute their ethical life beyond the laws of men. Trois femmes, as scandalized readers recognized at the time, was the story of a band of outlaws; a story of the ethical life of women beyond the laws of propertied men. Charrie`re’s three women band together through self-election and form an outlaw community based upon the ethical principle of total sacrifice to one another, and a reservation of the right to bend rules that they had no part in creating. (p. 94) Hesse observes that whilst Foucault positions himself as ironic author in relation to Kant there is this yet more radical feminine position of the outsider. It is also noted that whilst Charrie`re considers the question of the possible assimilation of the outsider, the turning of women and servants into masculine insiders, it is a position she rejects. There is actually a tradition of this alternative outsider ethics amongst women writers and thinkers. For example, Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas is a work very close to Three Women in its position. Woolf, addressing an educated man’s antiwar fund-raising requests of her, proposes an Outsiders Society.41 When Jacques Derrida proposes a new international in Specters of Marx, it is noticeably along the same lines as Woolf ’s Outsiders Society, not that Derrida is necessarily

What is enlightenment?

71

aware of this. That is, Derrida imagines a non-nationalistic, non-institutional association of the anonymous.42 Woolf eschews any glorification and mesmerisation by the media, ‘the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity’, proposing: ‘we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private. Those experiments will not merely be critical but creative’ (p. 130). Woolf ’s demography is problematic because her analysis is predicated more along gender lines than class and she clearly fails to challenge the private/public demarcation. With this, her position is implicitly a middle class one that remains oblivious to working class or subaltern needs for empowerment in the struggle for survival. Ipshita Chanda in ‘Feminist Theory in Perspective’ treats of the need for material empowerment in postcolonial contexts whilst also maintaining a critical stance towards the liberal notion of the self-empowerment of the individual. She states: ‘Empowerment consisting of elements of self-confidence, inner strength, the ability to control life inside and outside the home, seems to assume a self-contained individual whose social location and context has no effect on her.’43 It may be said that this notion of ‘the self-contained individual’ is, in its formation, both a middle class and a masculinist one. Where Kant sees guardians as desired by a female population – the entire female sex, he says – too passive to think for themselves, Woolf gives us to understand that guardians are those who thwart the feminine out of what she calls ‘an infantile fixation’ (p. 150). This especially concerns self-appointed guardians who possessively and pathologically curtail the freedom of women, seemingly out of envy and jealousy of the feminine. Moreover, the paradox that Woolf indirectly reveals is that what the guardians are actually trying to guard is something like femininity of their own, femininity that they supposedly and secretly own and that women are supposed not to have any idea of being alienated from themselves. In this light, or resentful gloom, suppression and control of freedom of spirit would be posited as ‘democratic’ in that everyone would be equally handicapped. But at what cost? The cost would be a pathological society: call it ‘paranoid democracy’. And, Woolf is indeed addressing the racist and sexist paranoias of war-mongering modern societies. The recent film, Hidden (Cache´), addresses this question of a modern politics of paranoia.44 In brief, the racist paranoia of a middle class Frenchman is traced back to his Oedipal rivalry with a young Algerian boy who had claimed his mother’s affections. This situation is juxtaposed with that of the man’s son who is going through puberty. The son is paranoid in imagining that his mother is having an affair. The loss of femininity entailed in the process of puberty leads to the paranoia that a ‘foreign man’, a fantasy enemy, is stealing a femininity that properly belongs to the self. That is the psychic structure of this misogyny and racism as it reflects a hidden psychosomatic condition. In contradistinction to this, what I am trying to argue is that the femininity in question does not belong to a self. It is not something anyone owns and it can perhaps only be experienced as a question of freedom. In a strange article entitled, ‘ . . . and pomegranates’, Derrida partially blames war-mongering and rape on the over-valuation of an intact, pure,

72

What is enlightenment?

sacred femininity.45 I do not quite go along with the logic of this argument: women are violated because they are valued as sacred? However, it is the very irrationality of this that the essay engages with, given that Derrida notes that there are those who, in claiming to defend the sacredness of life, are willing to violate life. And, because this holy intactness is seen to provoke male violence, which I think is rather a matter of resenting the otherness of the other, Derrida’s strategy seems to be to deconstruct it with a degree of scorn. What I wish to argue here is that the assumption of femininity as some kind of intact kernel or inner sanctum, internal possession, may be based on a certain unaddressed misunderstanding in the first place. Like so many, Derrida focuses his critique on the question of femininity as sacred, and on the sacred more generally, rather than on the problem of positing this sacredness as an inner possession. Instead, my suggestion is that whilst there is femininity, be it seen as sacred or not, it is not to be located in a you or a me, but rather between us. It could, for instance, be my recognition of your freedom, or yours of mine. Freedom of spirit always recoils from or reserves itself from over-possessiveness: it is not for the grasping. Nonetheless, it is this delusion of an inner kernel – that Zˇizˇek posits as an illusory kernel of the real46 – that does appear to be operative in torture and rape where the assumption is precisely that the ‘inner’ feminine freedom of spirit can be yielded up to a thus deified masculine omnipotence. Now, can you tell me, did Kant do his own grocery shopping, cooking and washing up? I am trying to picture it. Did he do his own laundry? Or, did he, like a child, rely on mere minors, women and servants (the ‘lazy’ he calls them) to do these things for him? Did he independently depend on them so that he could devote himself to thinking – not for women, servants, natives, if he is not to be one of those patronising, all-advising guardians who think for others too ‘passively’ servile to think for themselves – but devote himself to thinking unlazily, industriously, for himself ? All right, my hypocrite reader, I am playing facetiously. Now seriously, there is beyond Foucault’s ethics of ‘the care of the self ’, an ethics of the care of the other, of life not your own: the care of children; the care of the ill and injured; the care of the elderly; the care of animals; the care of the environment; the care of the poor; the care of the friend and of the stranger and migrant. This is obviously not about self-focused self-development, Kantian or Foucauldian. And yet such an ethics of care in practice is not without enlightenment. Kant’s emphasis on maintaining a critical relation to a techno-performative society remains significant as does Foucault’s attention to the theatrical cultivation of the self. However, the modernity of Modernism goes beyond the ironic Campness, so to speak, of the modern attitude of the eighteenth century. What Baudelaire foresees in his appreciation of Guys could be said to be Modernism’s rediscovery of the real, of duration, of stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps the significance of the real consists in our being conscious and solicitous of the being of the other? It may be proposed that the critical spirit that Kant addresses comes about through repression and suppression of the feminine where the paradox that

What is enlightenment?

73

arises from this is that the critical spirit then objects to the condition of its emergence in the form of a general protest against general servitude. Kant protests against such a servitude whilst bypassing the whole question of labour and his own reliance on it, even as his essay presumes a split between the valued work of reason and despised menial work. Foucault does go beyond Kant in that the feminine would actually be less suppressed in the figure of the dandy and this seems to give rise to the scope not just for speaking one’s mind but for daring, transgressive and experimental behaviour and lifestyles. Such would allow for gay liberation whilst the freedom of spirit in question could extend to political activism of various kinds. Foucault does not address the question of the servitude of others in his essay, although he was of course himself a political activist. Where in this emancipation discourse, actually this discourse of selfemancipation, is there any consideration of socialism? And what would occur if the feminine were yet more liberated than in Foucault’s version? Would this be the next step or steppe in this counter-history, the one that is running counter to capitalism? I would like here to refer to Donna Landry’s article, ‘Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History’, an article that explores the possibilities of peasant socialism on the Russian steppe as revealed in the work of Platonov. Here, Kant’s much stressed ‘freedom of movement’ is more than a metaphor as it concerns a real movement in which semi-nomadic horsemen are engaged in the restless seeking out of a collective spirit, one that might itself be thought of in terms of a joyous free-wheeling movement. Of this movement, Landry writes: ‘there is an abandoned energy in this display of directionless forward-goingness.’47 Regarding this, if labour seeks liberation, it perhaps seeks liberation from the tyranny of time and such a liberation is a question of non-directed, non-commanded movement. In later chapters, I hope to explore what may be called a ‘synchromatic’ movement in its difference from the performative. As to the question of servitude, Landry proposes an alternative, one ignored by the self-focused liberations of Kant and Foucault. Commenting on a passage from John Milton’s A Brief History of Moscovia, Landry writes: The horse ‘stands all this while in the open Field,’ an image of brutal exposure, yet remains not only healthy enough to be serviceable, but apparently does his job willingly and obediently: ‘yet does his service.’ The horse does not ‘serve’ the rider as a mere instrument, but ‘does his service,’ a neatly courteous expression [ . . . ] The equestrian partnership is a dignified relation between non-identical but similar beings bound together by mutual feeling, by attachment – each becomes a metonymy of the other.48 So, this being of service to the other is able to free itself from the indignity of the master-slave relation – a relation anti-colonial thinkers such as Albert Memmi insist is an indignity for the master at least as much as it is for the slave – through fellow feeling. We find our dignity – the dignity Kant seems to seek

74

What is enlightenment?

against the instrumentalising of ourselves – in being willingly of service to others and we can only be willingly of service to others if they are not going to exploit, deceive or abuse us. Whereas the freedom that Kant treats is the exercise of criticism at conformist techno-performativity, a self-criticism, and whereas the freedom Foucault treats of is the theatrically performative, a self-fashioning, Landry’s attention to both freedom of movement and freedom of service in Platonov’s work may be said to go beyond this towards questions of fellow-feeling and co-operation, an alter-autonomy. Ultimately, there’s no such thing as selfemancipation. There’s only socialism. This is not to say that a degree of assumed individual autonomy is not desirable, for obviously it is, but that we should remember and insist on its eventual illusoriness in doing justice to the interdependence of our ineluctably different yet also similar existences. In her conclusion to the impressive set of essays collected in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Kate Soper comments: ‘on the issue of autonomy, the objection is not that Enlightenment culture placed objects in the way of women attaining independence, but that it made a fetish of the idea itself, promoting in the process an ideology through which all individuals were encouraged to overlook their actual ties or dependency on others, and men, in particular enabled to justify their detachment from the sphere of domesticity and reproduction.’49 Soper also interestingly points out that it is the women of the period who are often to be found challenging the ‘yes-men’ of their society, ‘daring to think’ and advancing ‘public spiritedness’ against conservative familial sentimentality.50 Therefore, the freedom of thought advocated by both Spinoza and Kant – be the source of this thought inspiration or reason (and surely both are desirable in their different ways) – is not just for self-realisation but for necessarily collective movements of emancipation.

3

Radiance or brilliance

This chapter consists of an experiment. It began when I was given an invitation to write on ‘the blind short story’, something I had never contemplated before. In searching out short stories that had to do with blindness, I encountered a certain fascination with radiance: either a blinding radiance or a blindness to radiance. I became interested in this treatment of radiance, as a complement to brilliance, in terms of how literary texts might try to approach or gesture towards forms of enlightenment. One of the things that presents itself as a difficulty here is that radiance is unamenable to theorisation or criticism. It is at once evident and mysterious, indefinable yet recognisable. Regarding a poetics of the real, these stories pose a challenge in terms of their knowing naivete´, their naive consciousness, and offer an opportunity to explore the workings of an ostensive mode of writing. What is at stake in this mode of writing are the ways in which a text might give us a consciousness of ‘what is’ – or ‘what may be’ – in its non-definability, nonformality, non-conceptuality. In the words of Yves Bonnefoy, this consciousness may be a case of what you see when you ‘lift your eyes from the page’.1 The resistance to conceptualisation and formalisation that this chapter seeks to confront is furthermore an evasion of generalisation and genre, and so the literature in question is quite queer. This queer writing transgresses the generic but less by means of the performative (or enactments of the iterable) than the ostensive (or encounters with the off-page or off-stage). Can literature be revelatory in a non-metaphysical or non-theological way? Related to this, what an affirmation of radiance and brilliance serves to question is the pervasiveness of spectrality. This is not an epistemic question. You cannot say what radiance or brilliance is for nothing presents itself. That is the interesting point. Nothing presents itself. Clearly. Audaciously, riskily, experimentally.

The blind short story If you give me radiance, I’ll give you brilliance

The blind short story . . . what’s that? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a go. So, I’m in the dark, I’m in this darkened room. Oh, I know where I am, because I’ve been here before, with Aristotle. He says that when we’re in the

76

Radiance or brilliance

dark, sitting still, we sense something, a movement, beyond the senses, and that what this is is time.2 But that’s not going to get us very far, for everyone knows that stories, narratives, have to do with time. Still, hold on, sensing without the senses, there’s something to pause over in that. And with his head over his shoulder turn’d He seemed to find his way without his eyes. (Hamlet, II.i.97–8) This is Ophelia observing Hamlet seeing but not seeing her, sight without sight. Such phrasings recall Blanchot’s aphorism, generically, the x sans x.3 Blanchot has a short story about strangely wounded vision; you could see this coming, some will have thought of it, ‘La folie du jour’, ‘The Madness of the Day’.4 You’d be hard-pressed to paraphrase this text, which is given to us as a story-less story, but it concerns a narrator, one who is completely and wonderfully affirming of life in all that it gives us to enjoy and to suffer, who then has an intimation of the end beginning and an experience of glass being crushed into his eyes. This fatalising but not fatal accident leads to a film being placed under his eyelids: ‘they slipped a thin film under my eyelids’ (p. 11), whereas prior to the accident he says of his joy in life: ‘All that was real: take note.’ (p. 11). A clear reality, and we should take note, is thus followed by a vision questionably rendered filmic. With this, the narrator both begins to die and finds himself attached to or accompanied by a daughter. This daughter is called the law where this law is distinguished from paternal law: ‘Behind their backs I saw the silhouette of the law. Not the law everyone knows, which is severe and hardly agreeable; this law was different’ (p. 14). I agree. But when, if ever, will others see? (The silhouette, by the way, is a silhouette of light behind those who eclipse it.)5 The daughter is desirous of the narrator’s glory, although he could lead to ‘discord, murder, destruction’ (p. 16) and although he seems to give himself over to destitution and feels unable to use the boundless talents being accorded to him. The male authorities in the ‘story’ keep insisting he explain or render an account of his experience to them but he knows it is useless and resigns himself with: ‘A story? No. No stories, never again’ (p. 18). The madness of the day is not something you can narrativise, even though you can testify to it: ‘I was face to face with the madness of the day’ (p. 11). We can’t think this madness or folly, but does it yet have a genre? In the masculine, it would seem to be serious, psychosis; in the feminine, it would seem to be folly, light-headedness, silliness, daffiness, absurdity. The madness or the folly could be partly a question of the imposition in which the narrator is accorded brilliance and adulation without having done anything to deserve this: no Odyssean story of heroism here. On the one hand, it is, as Foucault suggests, ‘madness as the absence of the work’.6 There’s more to this psychotic side, but let it wait. On the other hand, there’s something a little ridiculous in such a situation. It is like those bosses whose companies are failing and yet who are awarded or award themselves vast salaries for no reason but just because, in the approximate words of a

Radiance or brilliance

77

shampoo advertisement, they’re worth it. ‘Just because I’m worth it!’ – funny or tragic? We will come back to ‘La folie du jour’, but after a detour. King Lear. Lear asks his daughters for their unconditional adoration. Goneril and Reagan promptly and obediently comply. Cordelia, the impossible one, thinks there is something inappropriate in Lear’s request. She says to her father: You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? (King Lear, I.i.98–102). So, she hints that there is something wrongly incestuous in the nature of this demand. Cordelia is then disinherited and exiled, ‘by the sacred radiance of the sun’ (I.i.111), Lear says. What follows is that Lear is cruelly treated by the daughters who so lavishly and slavishly praised him but who emerge as having sadistic sovereign ambitions of their own. With their crazed behaviour, tormented by it, Lear goes mad. Gloucester, the other father figure in the play – and King Lear must be one of the most harrowing plays ever written – has his eyes put out. How does the blind short story go with tragedy? Somehow, it does. I think it was Derrida’s Specters of Marx that made me think of that for there he superimposes Hamlet and, through the Freudian uncanny, ‘The Sandman’, and since this is convincing, apt, a new genre seems invented or successfully hybridised: the blind short story as tragedy, tragedy as the blind short story. Lacan said of tragedies that they begin as they are about to end.7 As soon as they get going, it’s all over. This puts me in mind of Beckettian melancholic wryness: one minute we’re here, and the next, gone . . . ooo . . . aaah, (yeah, little Ernst, fort/da). But I didn’t get to the end of re-narrating King Lear. (Sometimes I have offered the schoolmarmish advice of ‘don’t re-narrate the text’, but, eat my words, that advice is too sweeping, indeed too general, for there’s something to be got out of just taking texts as they come). The final tragedy is that Cordelia is killed and, with this, Lear can suffer no more, and he dies. There is nothing that can be done about this: it is unbearably sad. What increases the sadness in all the bleakness is how sweetly tender Lear and Cordelia are towards each other in their moments of reconciliation before it all ends. Here, for instance: Lear. Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? [ . . . ] For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. Cor. And so I am, I am. (King Lear, IV.vi.52–70) Walter Benjamin draws attention to the relation between tragedy and allegory.8 Freud says that daughter figures have a particular significance for man in his old

78

Radiance or brilliance

age.9 We could selectively put this together, in a ratio towards reason, and say that as the father equals ‘age’ the daughter equals ‘youth’. If so, the taboo against father/daughter incest that Lear might be unconsciously violating is that he is age seeking to appropriate, in the figures of his daughters, youth. It is as if he is trying to reverse time’s arrow, and so Cordelia’s protest against this in fact constitutes loyalty to the law of the father as a law of temporal succession. However, it is more than this necessity of temporality, if we are to get the tragic effect. This would also concern ‘The Madness of the Day’. Yet we will stay with temporality for the time being . . . ‘time being’, that’s a strange phrase. Hamlet in his derangement says to Polonius: ‘for yourself sir, should be as old as I am – if like a crab you / could go backward’ (Hamlet, II.ii.203–4). The time is running backwards? Age and youth reversed? Can this not try to enlighten a little? Perhaps, slowly. There is a brilliance you or we, humans, may achieve in time. But this brilliance is something that has to be deserved. It does not just fall into anyone’s lap. It is something that, as our fathers tell us, has to be worked for in time. You just can’t steal it, and if you’ve earned it, it will come, it will come. Kleist’s ‘The Marquise of O —’10 is rather other to Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’ regarding this sense of the just workings of time. In Kleist’s story, a handsome Count rescues the Marquise of O—, during a siege, and she blacks out at this moment, a blind one. It’s marked in the text in this manner: she faints. ‘And then –’ he calls the doctor. Some time later she finds she’s mysteriously pregnant. Now, what do you think happened? That’s right, we all think that, he must have. Just before she discovers her pregnancy, the hero ardently offers to marry her but she is reluctant, and when she knows she is with child she still strongly resists his attempts to woo her. We proceed through the story as the Marquise, exiled from her family, attempts to find the culprit or right wrongdoer through advertising her plight and asking the father to present himself. At this point, the Marquise is momentarily tricked by her mother into believing that a lowly stable-groom has offered himself as the father. The fact that she readily accepts the lie proves her innocence as ignorance in that the Count has confessed his culpability to the parents. Even then she violently resists the man. For the reader the mystery is why the obvious answer, the one that presented itself to us right at the start, is being so deferred. Why is the woman being so obstructive and unable to reach the most logical conclusion? The couple do marry though and live happily, and then one day the Count asks his wife why she had so evaded him as if he were a devil and seemed even prepared to accept the most vicious character rather than him. Her reply concludes the tale as follows: ‘she answered that she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting’ (p. 113). Up until the end, we have been following the story from a retrospective narrative perspective, let us say, a masculine one – ‘it must have been him’ – and then suddenly it ends as it begins but by now giving itself the elided or eclipsed feminine vision: all at once, in no time. At the end, we see for the first time what she saw for the first time, this being: radiance, radiance or original vision. And then, too, we perhaps understand: it could not be him.

Radiance or brilliance

79

Well, consider it through her eyes . . . what if her vision were of the daughter of ‘The Madness of the Day’, seeing or sensing her dazzling light? It would seem impossible that such a being could impregnate her. Actually, at the beginning when she first encounters the aristocratic soldier it is said: ‘To the Marquise he seemed an angel sent from heaven’ (p. 69). I think the initial inclination is to interpret this as meaning that he appears to her as a noble redeemer. However, Kleist’s story works also to accord a feminine significance to what it means to be an angel as the Marquise is repeatedly described in such terms. For instance, her mother says to her: ‘you are purer than an angel, you radiate such innocence that my corrupted soul could not believe’ (p. 104). This radiance is also, however, elaborated erotically, although not in a phallic manner, when the Marquise is re-united with her father in a rather strange or transgressive scene, one that vaguely brushes on aspects of King Lear. The mother comes upon the father with the daughter in his arms, lying with her eyes shut as if she’s passed out, and he is said to be ‘pressing long, ardent, avid kisses on to her mouth, just like a lover!’ The passage continues: His daughter said nothing. He said nothing; he sat with his face bowed over her, as if she were the first girl he has ever loved; he sat there holding her mouth near his and kissing her. Her mother felt quite transported with delight; standing unseen behind his chair, she hesitated to interrupt this blissful scene of reconciliation which had brought such joy back to her house. Finally, she approached her husband, and just as he was again stroking and kissing his daughter’s mouth in indescribable ecstasy, she leaned round the side of the chair and looked at him. (p. 107) In this scene, both mother and daughter feign unconsciousness. The daughter’s eyes are said to be ‘tightly shut’, indicating an effort, while the mother is behind the father’s back, unbeknownst to him and yet rapt in observation. The feminine constitutes the unconscious of man, that which the subject usually represses, but here the repression is being faked in order that it may be lifted so that the father can fleetingly experience something that is otherwise withheld from him. That is why despite the eroticism, it is not a phallic occurrence, and why all the characters can share in it whereby joy is brought back to her house. If this were happening in his house, you can imagine it would be a gothic scene of demonic vampirism and frighteningly uncanny. The mother, looking on, does not censor the occurrence but gladly participates. However, when her gaze is upon his, the spell breaks: when he sees that she sees him. It is said that while her gaze is not cross, his becomes ‘cross’, cross at being crossed. He is, quite simply, interrupted and thus brought back into time, yes. Back into time? I’m afraid I think I do mean that. The epiphanic opening ellipsis in the narrative, ‘And then –’, also suggests a radiance outside time. And, it might be that the mutual silence of father and daughter, as given in the extract, is tantamount to the non-narrativisable ‘no stories’ of ‘The Madness of the Day’. In the story, numerous possibilities of desire are in play, including whether either the Marquise or the Count may be a bit queer. Once the marriage has

80

Radiance or brilliance

taken place, however, the Count is said then to set about wooing the Marquise properly, which is what finally wins her over. That is, he has to earn her love or strive for it in some way whereby she then can admire him for his proven brilliance. Previously, he just kept presenting himself to her in a rather ‘just because I’m worth it’ way. As for Kleist, he has to work brilliantly at giving us a narrative that might convince us of his original vision of radiance whereby the text just evaporates into the air. Brilliance is spectral, the art of resurrection. The Count keeps returning like a ghost, like a real ghost. After rumours of his death, it is said: ‘Count we shall certainly go on thinking you are a ghost, until you have explained to us how you rose again from the grave’ (p. 75). Ghost upon ghost. ‘Finally, towards nightfall, the Count reappeared’. (p. 81) There are many of these countless count effects, regarding whether you can count on the count or he on you, regarding a count me in or a count me out, of the accountable or unaccountable, of what counts or may be counted. Aristotle says numbers count but that it is time which is counted.11 In a scene where mother and daughter are sharing female secrets (as both sexes have their secret-sharing), it is written: Her mother remarked with a laugh that she would no doubt be giving birth to the god of Fantasy. The Marquise replied in an equally jesting tone that at any rate Morpheus, or one of his attendant dreams, must be the father. But the colonel returned to the room and the conversation was broken off, and since a few days later the Marquise felt quite herself again, the whole subject was forgotten. (p. 74) So? Men, or those in a subject position, father unconsciously or from the unconscious, in a ghostly manner. But what they do not know is that the unconscious – as feminine – is yet conscious whilst men dream, that is the joke. For Lacan the unconscious is often this trickster. What seems implied is that whereas the subject might be absent from the scene of conception, and can but begin by returning like the count, as Derrida says of spectres, women . . . women. . . . shall I go on? This scene between the women is not really ghostly but supposed to be rather funny, that is, if you are a woman, and probably as irritating as stifled women’s titters if you are not, the colonel returning. Who is the Marquise when she is not quite herself ? Who in this interval between women? Radiance, angel, radiance? And being unconscious of radiance is what gives birth to fantasy and stories. It is a funny thing this lesbian conception. . . . And then – well, you can read it either way. You can read it as masculine immaculate conception, man conceiving the child without the woman (she as unconscious), fantastically or phantasmatically, and you can read it in terms of a certain feminine conception without the man (or a principle of knowing selfhood), amusingly. It is amusing in that this deflates, through showing up, the theatricality of our egos. Kleist allows for the story to be inverted, possibly depending on what it means for a woman to be not quite herself or a man to be

Radiance or brilliance

81

not quite himself. I think, uncertainly, the emphases might be as follows: not quite herself; not quite himself. At least, it can be said that the feminine Kleist plays with the androgyny of writing, and that the original epiphany is of the angel as androgyne. The ellipses in the text must especially reflect the difficulty of representing angelic radiance, rather than being a case of an inability to represent the sexual act. Speaking of queerness, there is a minor, perhaps quite specialist, tributary of blind short story, the Sapphic blind very short story, a narrative blindness regarding radiance. Rene´e Vivien in ‘Prince Charming’ tells a brief story about a brother and sister, ‘copper blond’ Bela and ‘reddish blond’ Terka.12 Bela, the brother, woos and weds the silvery Sarolta and it is said: ‘The candles brightened the red highlights in Bela’s blond hair. The incense curled towards him, and the thunder of the organs exalted and glorified him. For the first time since the beginning of the world, the Groom was as beautiful as the bride’ (p. 23). What gets more Kleist-like is that the narrative begins to not say at this point with a whole lot of airy elliptical dots: ‘his blond hair . . . ’; ‘Here the story becomes a little difficult to relate . . . Several months later, the real Bela Szechney appeared . . . He was not Prince Charming, alas! He was only a handsome boy’; ‘He furiously sought the identity of the young usurper . . . And he learned that the usurper in question was his own sister, Terka . . . Sarolta and Prince Charming have never returned to Hungary’ (p. 23, all these ellipses are in the text). So the radiance escapes, maddeningly or not. Of course it is elusive, or so we think – rather, and so we think. Katherine Mansfield has a Sapphic very short blind short story, less than two pages, called ‘Leves Amores’.13 Rather, it is ambiguous given that the sex of the narrator is not specified; either way, in its reception it tends to be treated as a queer story. In it the narrator goes to collect a woman for a date from a shabby and drab hotel room. It is observed: A dull grey light hovered over everything [ . . . ] she, too, looked dull grey and tired. And I sat on the bed and thought: ‘Come this old age. I have forgotten passion, I have been left behind in the beautiful golden procession of Youth. Now I am seeing life in the dressing-room of the theatre. (p. 25, my ellipsis) The two go off to the Opera and then return to the hotel, where the possibly unspoken thoughts of the narrator are rendered as: ‘Was Youth dead? . . . Was Youth dead?’ (p. 25, ellipsis in text). Yet again, the question of radiant being lies in the interval, the interval between was and was. Back in the room, the woman says she is glad the night has come and it is said: ‘I did not ask why. I was glad too. It seemed a secret between us’ (p. 25). Again, it may be this question of a feminine secret, but one of a knowledge of non-knowledge: glad without reason. As the woman lights a little candle, the story ends with: The light filled the room with darkness. Like a sleepy child she slipped out of her frock and then, suddenly, turned to me and flung her arms round my

82

Radiance or brilliance neck. Every bird on the bulging frieze broke into song. Every rose upon the tattered paper budded and formed into blossom. Yes, even the green vine upon the bed curtains wreathed itself into strange chaplets and garlands, twined around us in a leafy embrace, held us with a thousand clinging tendrils. And Youth was not dead. (p. 25)

First, to say that the candlelight fills the room with darkness is rather striking. In one sense, it is visually exact because when you light a candle in a shadowy room it creates a concentrated pocket of light that thus seems to darken rather than lighten the surrounding gloom. Beyond this, what is suggested is an inversion of darkness and light – the light filling the room with darkness – which is what gives us the lifting of repression, as light turns to dark, dark turns to light: whereby the dark unconscious miraculously brightens to sheer radiance. It happens like that in life and in this story: in life and in this story. The repression lifts. The seemingly sleepy, seemingly childlike feminine drops its veil, is naked, and turns to full blooming radiance. With this, everything comes to life in an animistic way, animistic but not insane. It is difficult to convey this inexplicable happening, as Blanchot’s ‘narrator’ insists, but it can be given a go. In the above extract, you can see that representation is no longer seen as representation. Actually, an indirect route will be tried here. When you stand in front of a painting by Matisse, it may be that you cease to see it as a painting, a painting of something, a representation referring to an elsewhere. In the process of not trying to read it but just to receive it, you might find yourself beginning to see as Matisse saw in the very moment he was first painting what he was painting. Rather miraculously, Matisse is able to give his way of receiving to us, and with that it is possible to collapse the distance between you regarding the painting and Matisse in his studio before something to paint, the canvass evaporating. Objectively, the painting remains a painting, but subjectively you are transported into a way of experiencing the world. Thus, if you look away from a Matisse painting it is possible to find that the experience of it transfers itself to your surroundings of which you become hyper-conscious, hyper-aware. That is to say, certain art enlivens or rejuvenates us where this is not just a metaphor. It really happens. But for this to happen it seems you have to lose momentarily a sense of spectrality, a spectrality of sense. As opposed to a commonsensical sensing without the senses, which is what we do when we think, it would be a matter of sensing with the body. And yet, this somatic consciousness may be very nearly incorporeal as if you could feel the shimmering air in the shimmering air. It would be just an experience of being enlivened or maybe being unexpectedly seduced. Moreover, although this is subjectively experienced, and this is important, it is not an experience of the self as ego. It is rather the subjective experience of the subjectivity or being of another, or of a being beyond the ego; for Matisse too. Nobody owns this magic. It seems to be passed on in the intervals or lapses of the ‘I’ or egos. I am wondering if it might be the crypt illumined?

Radiance or brilliance

83

In Mansfield’s story, the hotel room is objectively the same room before and after the couple go to the Opera. What seems to happen at the end of the story is that the lifting of repression enlivens everything in the surroundings for the narrator in an ecstatic being-besides-self. Paradoxically, the narrator initially thinks of dwelling in the drab dressing-room of the theatre of life, when it is in this room as an undressing-room that life is given. Heidegger-the-obscure, is this the clearing?14 Finally, if you can bear this for just a bit longer, we can glance at one more Sapphic very short blind short story, before trying to make just a little sense, if that is at all possible, of what has been unfolding. This story is ‘Before Dark’ by Proust.15 In the story a woman who has suffered a gunshot wound, wishes to make a confession to a friend, Leslie, whose sex seems rendered deliberately ambiguous although there are hints that Leslie may be a gay man. The woman, Franc¸oise, maintains that although she may lose her reputation she ‘cannot suppress the need for truth’ (p. 3) and that concerning this truth she is yet ‘completely in the dark about it, luminous as the moment is’ (p. 4). It is this stupefying question of knowledge of non-knowledge. She goes on to confess her lesbianism saying: The cause of such love lies in a nervous alteration which is too exclusively nervous to involve a moral content. We cannot say because most people see things we call red as red that those who see them as violet are mistaken [ . . . ] In truly artistic natures, physical attraction or repulsion is modified by contemplation of the beautiful. Most people turn from jellyfish with disgust. Michelet, sensitive to their colours, gathered them with delight. (my ellipses, p.5) First, it is suggested that you cannot rule out the possibility of an experience that some may have simply on the grounds that it is not your experience or not a common experience. Second, it needs to be said that the artistic experience of radiance (a Michelet sensitive to the clear colours of the jellyfish) does not belong to any one form of being: you can encounter radiance in a Count, in a woman, in a jellyfish, in a blade of grass or in a pear tree. Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ ends with the narrator being blissfully transported by a shining pear tree.16 Third, this issue concerns the poetic real rather than the ethical; it is not in itself a question of what is right or wrong. However, inasmuch as it concerns a poetic apprehension of life, questions of the sacred might arise. Proust’s ‘Before Dark’ goes on to deliver a second confession. The wounded woman utters these deathbed last words: ‘It was I, in one of those moments of despair which are so natural to anyone who really lives, it was I who . . . shot myself ’ (p. 6 emphasis and ellipsis in text). Are emphases and ellipses inversions of each other? Is it a case of a pushing through the fabric of the text in one direction or another?17 At any rate, we rejoin the tragic aspect of the blind short story at this point. What ‘Before Dark’ indicates to us is that too much aliveness is . . . unendurable. It can hardly be sustained and it cannot last in our temporal existences. Duration: the unendurable.

84

Radiance or brilliance

With this suicidal confession that follows the earlier confession, too alive to live, Franc¸oise dies, but the death is given to us as both an ecstatic and intensely moving experience by the narrator: ‘And never had we so much pain, so much pleasure’ (p. 6). It reminds me a little of the powerful reconciliation scene of King Lear and of the narrator’s strangely ecstatic experience of dying in ‘The Madness of the Day’ and of Kleist’s bizarre father-daughter scene. In these scenes there seems to be a combination of grieving, often an outpouring of tears, and ecstasy. Moreover, it is a case of strangely shared deaths, combined death-ecstasies, or visions thereof, of male and female figures. A possible interpretation of this is that the I-narrators or usually male characters signify our egos and that the usually female characters signify life. It is fluid in this way, given the ambiguities of gender that have been pointed out on both sides. Nonetheless, what is significant here is the relation between the ego and life. This was the tragic effect that I wished to address beyond just the necessity of temporality: a happening in no time. And what happens in no time is: life. Such a realisation can but plunge us into feelings of awe and terror and pity. And, perhaps too, bewilderment, considering that the spatio-temporal is implied to not be a priori. Cordelia is Lear’s life, allegorically speaking. However, you cannot really say his life for he does not ultimately possess this life beyond the possibility of its loss. It is rather that which accompanies him to the bitter end, as the faithful Antigone does a blinded Oedipus. The ego may be blind to life, and as ego is blind or blinkered, but life is nonetheless always there beside it. This reading is of a somewhat gnostic nature, and if it does not seem too unintelligible, you will also see that the life that accompanies us, our egos, does not age or date. Finally, I think I see what the poets might mean by ‘the eternal feminine’. However, it yet remains also a question of androgyny. I say that because, tentatively, I think the feminine exists as attachment, possibly only as attachment. What could be at stake is a conjoining of consciousnesses in a non-duality. Moreover, it is also not just a question of the ego as blind but of what it may not be possible to see objectively. It should also be said that delightful radiance in itself is not tragic. It is rather our relation to it that is potentially so. And it seems that what renders the tragic event is either the closure of an attempt to appropriate radiance definitively or the closure of its utter renunciation. Don’t seize it; don’t give up on it; stay open to its possibilities. Beyond being a desire for radiance, it would be radiance as this desire: a desire that can neither be renounced nor satisfied by some object. As regards deconstruction, with its logic of spectrality, what might be said of this radiance? For a start, there would be Derrida’s own reading of ‘La folie du jour’, his essay, ‘The Law of Genre’.18 In this essay, Derrida explores a logic of invagination, what I have here been touching on in terms of inversion (bearing in mind that queers, in the discourse of sexology, used to be called ‘inverts’). Simply speaking, given a lack of time and for the sake of an observation, what Derrida does with Blanchot’s text is to turn it inside out and outside in, and inside out and outside in, regarding its enigmatic nature. It seems to me that one

Radiance or brilliance

85

of the questions that might be at stake in this is whether the feminine is to be located on the inside or outside the masculine. What is further at stake would be the question of whether radiance has a genre. In truth, while this survey is so oversimplified, nothing could be more persistently exercising than such questions. Returning to Blanchot’s text, initially the radiance seems to be within the doubly affirmative narrator, but with the accident it (or she) appears to him on the outside as a silhouette of light or a halo or an aura, a surroundings, a proverbial ‘silver lining’ to a cloud. What is strange about the accident is that although the narrator has been wounded in the eyes and despite the fact that doctors insert film over the eyes and bandage them, he continues to ‘see’ the day. How so? We want to ask like the doctors. I think a viable answer could be that he apprehends or experiences the day because he has been blinded. That is, normally sight is the privileged sense, as Plato maintains, in that it requires a separation of perceiving subject from perceived object.19 Thus, it or the eye corresponds with the ‘I’, with all that follows of the spectacle and the speculative. However, if sight is no longer the privileged sense, then it may be that the sense of separation from the world disappears with the feeling of contact with all that is around you. With respect to this, there is the account of the eye operation by He´le`ne Cixous that Derrida reads in ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’.20 There, the removal of myopia by laser treatment gives the experience of seeing the world for the first time but where this is offered in terms of a removal of a barrier between eye and world whereby the eye is said to touch the world. What is implied is a seeing by the body rather than the mind. It could be a case of a body consciousness as elaborated in the poetics of Cixous and Monique Wittig. Derrida treats of the law of genre in terms of it being inextricably bound up with the improper, excessiveness and non-belonging. I think this is a matter of the singularity of a law that in establishing itself as the proper also differs from itself and thus becomes improper: a perversion of the law. Derrida writes: ‘In mock-playing herself she recites; and she is born of the one for whom she becomes the law.’21 This would seem to be the case, while what also intrigues me about Blanchot’s text is the positing of two laws as distinct from each other, as cited earlier: ‘this law was different’ (p. 14). In the course of writing this, I came upon Spinoza stating the following: ‘The word law, taken absolutely, means that according to which each individual, or all or some members of the same species, act in one and the same determinate manner. This depends either on a necessity of nature or on a decision of men.’22 Spinoza goes on to affirm: ‘We see that this natural divine law does not require ceremonies [ . . . ] For the natural light requires nothing which that light itself does not reach [ . . . ] Those things which are good only by command and institution [ . . . ] cannot perfect our intellect and are nothing but empty forms.’23 The law of the daughter as life could be aligned with natural necessity as distinct from the ethical laws of human societies. There would thus be a law of the real and a law of the right (as in the duality of Antigone’s unwritten laws and Creon’s ethical law).

86

Radiance or brilliance

Coming back to Derrida, I would say that the other law, so-called law of the daughter, is still a question of the improper but where, in the considerations that I wish to raise, this would be a matter not so much of the perversion or contamination of the law (a perversion that this is not dismissing, where it is just introducing other considerations, ones of inversion), but rather of what cannot be owned or the inappropriable. Thus, as suggested earlier, radiance does not belong to any one form or genre; it has no proper genre, hence its evasion of formalisation. Actually, what I would like to entertain is that for the law of the proper to become improper in establishing itself, there needs be a prior or distinct law or necessity of the improper (a-proper), or non-belonging. However, to call this a ‘law’ is admittedly problematic for it would concern an unpredictable necessity. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx, there is a possible allusion to ‘The Madness of the Day’ in what follows: Hamlet curses the destiny that would have destined him to be the man of right, precisely [justement], as if he were cursing the right or the law itself that made him the righter of wrongs, the one who, like the right, can only come after the crime, or simply after [ . . . ] ‘The time is out of joint’: such would be the originary corruption of the day of today, or such would be, as well, the malediction of the dispenser of justice, the day I saw the light of day.24 Seeing the light of day here is a matter of being born into temporal disjunction, with ethical questions dependent upon this, as opposed to an encounter with radiance.25 Specters of Marx is obviously concerned with the economic, the domesticated, and the thought occurs that radiance cannot reasonably show itself there, that is, if radiance pertains in some way to undomesticated or unowned nature. Derrida aptly addresses the economic in terms of pervasive spectrality, of course, where the Freudian uncanny is enlisted and thereby Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’. In ‘The Sandman’, it is the character of Clara to whom radiance is clearly attributed. However, as Samuel Weber has observed of Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’, Clara is unobserved by Freud who thus recapitulates the failing of Nathanael to see her.26 The inability to see this radiance of being may be related to Hamlet’s cryptic inability to see Ophelia, as cited at the outset of this essay. In Hamlet, this is given to us in terms of Hamlet’s backward looking or retrospective gaze. Therefore, I now wish to offer a prospective reading of ‘The Sandman’, a feminine or androgynous one, before returning later to Hamlet. Freud reads Nathanael’s story from the retrospective perspective of the adult man, one who fears de-masculinisation. The letter that Clara receives from Nathanael in lieu of her brother allows Clara to follow Nathanael’s story from his early childhood to the present, a reading from a feminine perspective. With her, we learn that the child Nathanael’s first fears concerned the story of a birdman, for the Sandman is given to us as such, a bird-man who steals eyes from

Radiance or brilliance

87

children for the sake of his own children. The eyes in this reading do not signify the penis, as in Freud’s, but eggs. Visually, don’t eyes resemble eggs? Yolks/irises in the whites? This would make some sense of the story in that the Sandman as male bird needs to steal eggs, ova, if he wants children of his own. (But the Sandman as bird could indeed signify the phallus, as in Freudian symbology.) Thus, Nathanael fears some obscure theft of something feminine from him that is implied in the necessities of adult sexual reproduction. He fears becoming a man. The next stage of this unfolding concerns the appearance of Coppelius, the father’s shadowy friend, on the scene. Nathanael’s initial strong reaction to Coppelius is one of revulsion at his appearance where the detailed description of Coppelius is emphatic concerning the impression of ugliness given. Here, it might help to imagine the young Nathanael as having choirboy looks, an angelic or girlish beauty. We might then surmise that Nathanael experiences a frightened intimation that he could stand to loose his prettiness in turning into an adult man. As a loyal son, he sees no ugliness in his father and his fears concerning growing up into adult manhood are projected onto Coppelius. However much Nathanael might semi-consciously fear a puberty of which he yet knows nothing, it is not something he is capable of averting. He tries to hide from Coppelius but still Coppelius, or masculine maturity, literally seizes hold of him and convulsively shakes up his body in a traumatising manner. With this, Nathanael goes through puberty. It is hinted that Coppelius is in league with the father in a workshop of reproduction and this recapitulates the imperative of the Sandman: a virilisation necessary to sexual reproduction. Nathanael goes on to sublimate his former feminine narcissism or lost androgyny in his intellectual studies at which stage he is introduced to Spalanzani and Coppola, figures suggestive of a scientific metaphysics. Spalanzani works on producing an automaton, Olimpia, and while a veritable multiplicity of meanings can be given to Olimpia, all the manmade meanings you like, she could be specifically understood in terms of man’s idea of nature or our intellectual attempts to master the nature that otherwise uncontrollably seizes hold of us. Here, nature is reproduced in the form of a mechanical model, assembled from parts and set extrinsically in motion. She/it reminds me of the Newtonian concept of nature as a machine got going by a clockwork god. What this model of nature lacks, however brilliant it may be, is a sacred radiance, certainly from the point of view of the poets. Whilst Nathanael unconsciously feels that he has lost a youthful, androgynous radiance, Clara tries to reassure him, indicating to him that he paranoiacally exaggerates the virilising role of the shadowy father figures. Furthermore, she indicates that she – in effect, life – is right there with him, that is, she affirms that he has not really lost her and that she still has her eyes. Freud ignores this statement of hers, where it would sound odd for Clara to be heard as affirming that she has not lost her penis or penises. Nathanael’s fears, however, have some justification as the ending shows us, but first, this will attend to some of the import of Clara. I think that in this story Clara could well be the pharmakon. First, she is androgynous in that she is capable of taking her brother’s place, as in Vivien’s

88

Radiance or brilliance

sister-brother relationship. Second, her radiance is given to us as inspiring art: she is said to stimulate the painters. Like Michelet’s jellyfish in Proust’s story, her clear being illuminates colour and the pharmakon is, as Derrida observes in Plato, pigment or pictorial colour. This living translucent chromatism is what the mechanical formalism of Olimpia would seem to be without, together with a rhythmic flexibility: sap. H.D. in ‘The Wise Sappho’ reflects on the meaning of Sappho’s work being summed up as ‘Little, but all roses’, and she writes of this very short radiance: ‘‘‘Little but all roses’’ – true there is a tint of rich colour (invariably we find it), violets, purple woof of cloth, scarlet garments, dyed fastening of a sandal, the lurid, crushed and perished hyacinth, stains on cloth and flesh and parchment [ . . . ] I think of the words of Sappho as these colours, or states rather, transcending colour yet containing (as great heat the compass of the spectrum) all colour.’27 Does this version of ‘The Sandman’ have anything to do with Marx? I think it does. As far as Marx is concerned, there is more than one materialism. Without being able to discuss this adequately, in ‘The Materialist Conception of History 1844–47’, Marx rejects a reductive mechanical materialism and writes: The first and most important of the inherent qualities of matter is motion, not only mechanical and mathematical movement, but still more, vital lifespirit, tension, or, to use Jacob Bo¨hme’s expression, the throes of matter [ . . . ] Matter smiled at man with poetical sensuous brightness [ . . . ] In its further development materialism became one-sided [ . . . ] Sensuousness lost its bloom and became the abstract sensuousness of the geometrician [ . . . ] Science can only give a name to these phantoms.28 Since Hegel may well have been Marx’s source for his interest in Boehme,29 let us turn to him. Hegel considers Boehme to be the first German philosopher and, in considering Boehme’s apprehension of the source of being in terms of light and heat, cites him as follows: the light or the heart of the heat is in itself a pleasant, joyful glance or lustre, a power of life . . . and a source of the heavenly kingdom of joy. For it makes all things in this world living and moving; all flesh, trees, and grass grow in this world, as in the power of the light, and have their light therein, viz. in the good.30 Whilst Hegel admires and is indebted to Boehme, he rejects his pantheism, as well as that of Spinoza and that of the Romantics, basically in favour of selfconsciousness. Engels tries to reverse Hegel’s appropriation of the dialectic for Man with his Dialectics of Nature. Boehme’s intoxication with radiant light is everywhere to be found in mystical writings, whilst of course both Boehme and Spinoza were ex-communicated by institutionally orthodox religion. Freud, himself no mystic, writes in a note a year before his death: ‘Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.’31 This is

Radiance or brilliance

89

accurate in that it addresses the ecstactic ‘besides the self ’ or as Freud says ‘outside the ego’; it may be a perception by the self but it is not a perception of the self but of what is not the self. For Freud, this is ‘obscure’ – a term Hegel repeatedly uses of Boehme – but for others it is clearer as an experience of radiance. However, it remains questionable if the ‘besides self ’ may be merely reduced to the id or unconscious for it seems further to be an experience of nonobjectifiable and non-personal otherness (what I earlier attempted to speak of in terms of the subjectivity of the other). Hegel is critical of Boehme’s failure to clearly conceptualise the experience of clarity32 but this is not Boehme’s fault because ultimately this cannot be done for it is not that which can be conceptually contained. Hence, maybe, a Kantian leapfrog over Hegel. Returning to ‘The Sandman’, Clara is perceived by Nathanael to be a fiery circle. The birdlike Sandman is said to live on the moon. Thus, we can glimpse in the story the resources of worldwide brother-moon and sister-sun incest myths, where sometimes the sex is reversed into brother-sun and sister-moon, as Janet McCrickard has explored in detail.33 And there are the many Claras, Clares and Clarissas in literature. There is Isabel Allende’s mystical Clara in The House of Spirits; Nella Larsen’s Clare in ‘Passing’, associated with red and gold flame; Keri Hulme’s visionary child in The Bone People, Simon P, whose secret name turns out to be Clare; Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway who fears the loss of radiance with ageing, and so on. And then there are all those O’s, of eyes and eggs and female nothingness, phantom pregnancy or conception: being as void, void as being. All those clear rings, clearings, clear hearts. Marquise of O, Olimpia, Ophelia, Anna O. We draw rings around the nothing-to-see? But we feel it, the beautiful feeling, don’t we? And what to mark it with but the merest, most meagre, least telltale of letterings: o. Walter Benjamin writes: If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree, not in our brains but rather in the place we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as the birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety.34 Perhaps we are then all, all of us, divine blemishes, ontological stains or ruins of the divine, as would be in keeping with Benjamin’s theory of tragedy.35 Well, that is about it, although this has not been able to add to the theory of the short story, the theories of this genre as one of temporal narrative punctured by poetic epiphany. And yet, what perhaps emerges is that the blind short story is an especially literary genre, the story of stories, yes, I see at last. So, a theory? No theory. That is how to end this: no more theory, not ever again, no. However, there was something I learnt in the course of writing this, something

90

Radiance or brilliance

important, something that frightened me and that I have yet to convey. In the course of reading these stories, I sometimes imagined ‘brilliance’ and ‘radiance’ as two discs, where you could cross over from one to the other or cross them over. And at one point, in reading the ending of ‘The Sandman’ when the two discs were crossing, one over the other, I had a strange, fleeting sensation of vertigo, sensing a spiralling movement, even as the immediate impulse was to resist it, which I did and it went. This ‘drawn in’ moment of reading made me realise what the ending of ‘The Sandman’ could be about, Nathanael’s vertigo and fall, and all that stuff about spinning dolls. At the end of the story, the figure of Coppelius looms up and is aligned with the figure of Clara: there is a superimposition of brilliance and radiance. It is this super-imposition that creates a spiral, a spinning energy like water going down a drain. You intuit it could be a dangerous occurrence, one that failing resistance to it, could, I believe, go so far as to suck you into madness. Brilliance and radiance are not to be super-imposed. They are not to be conflated. It is this eventuality that might give us the Homeric danger of Charybdis: the whirlpool. So, look out for those whirlpools, spirals, spinning eddies, which crop up, or rather cave in, all over literature. There’d be Yeats’ fascination with spinning gyres, a fascination that Yeats claims was shared by Flaubert who, according to Yeats, at the time of his death was planning to write a story called ‘La spirale’.36 And it was Yeats who introduced Pound to ‘the vortex’, Pound going on to develop Vorticism (and consider what happened to the unfortunate Pound). Furthermore, Nietzsche, all too Dionysian, sings of those who are drawn to fling themselves into the whirlpool: ‘Suddenly and deeply to find themselves sink into a feeling as one would into a whirlpool! To allow the reins to be torn out of one’s hands and to look on as one is driven who knows where!’37 What could be further added to this series is Derrida’s observation that Foucault is enigmatically interested in a spiral of the duality of power/pleasure. Imagining what Foucault’s elaboration of this spiral (persistently emphasised in the original) would be, Derrida conjectures: The theme of the spiral would be that of a drive duality (power/pleasure) that is without principle. It is the spirit of this spiral that keeps one in suspense, holding one’s breath – and thus keeps one alive. The question would thus once again be given a new impetus: is not the duality in question, this spiralled duality, what Freud tried to oppose to all monisms by speaking of a dual drive and of a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery? And, thus, to what is most alive in life, to its very living on [survivance]? I am still trying to imagine Foucault’s response.38 If I may intervene, in what plays itself out between Foucault and Derrida over questions of madness, the spiral might be composed of two dynamic countercirclings that, if conflated, collapsed into one, would lead to destructive madness: the madness of a self ’s desire for itself ? However, there remain interminable

Radiance or brilliance

91

questions of terminology to be attended to – and, for a frisson, how about the dual helical structure of DNA? The folly of radiance is its unamenability to thought; but the serious madness would be getting sucked into the coincidence of radiance with brilliance. Therefore, I think that the relationship between the two needs to be a ratio: the more you have of one, the less of the other. This ratio might be what reason is. If so, you cannot bring the brilliant conceptual thing or machine that is Olimpia together with the radiant being that is Clara: this would be madness, in fact, it would be the madness of the day. Would this then constitute the point of an irreducible difference, beyond what may deconstructed, even as it would justify diffe´rance? What do you think? Since I am avoiding a theory, I will offer you a story instead. It’s called ‘The Hobgoblin’.39

The hobgoblin A hobgoblin was stalking Europe, or so the citizens of Europe thought. Some had claimed to catch sight of it prowling about on the fringes of the city. They described what they thought they saw: its talons like knives, its red teeth and dripping claws, its dreadful flowing greenish locks, its yellow flashing eyes. Though there were disputes over the this and the that of its horrid appearance, all were agreed it posed a deadly threat. So, the concerned city elders made plans for the building of a high-walled fortress. Civic funds and mandatory labour were channelled to this end. Quite soon, the city lay in the chill, deep shadows of grey, concrete ramparts. Still, the elders thought that these walls might fail to be enough. Some of the curious or stupidly reckless might sneak their way out through one the exits, failing to close the door behind. So it was decided networks of surveillance had to be set in place. And then, since those who had never seen the hobgoblin might grow airily sceptical, an industry of legends had to be got in motion, each to outdo the others in imagery and narratives of devastation. Thus, life in the metropolis became increasingly an affair of fear and gloom, overhung by the thought of the creature beyond. Then, one day, a troubled young man by the name of Jake Benedict fell to pondering the state they were in. ‘We can’t go on living like this,’ he thought. ‘It is too depressing. We’ve swathed ourselves in the cold dark, and the air that we breathe is stale and dank. Someone must free us from this demon. Someone must go out and slay it. Or, failing that, then someone must satisfy it with the bold sacrifice of their life.’ He soon considered that that ‘someone’ had to be himself. So, one night, with spiked alcohol, he drugged one of the guards by one of the exits and, just before dawn, he wriggled out into The Outside. Fingers of sun began to awaken the jewel-bright world. Birdsong burst out at the signs of radiance. ‘So this is ‘‘poetry’’’, laughed Jake, gulping in the cool fresh air. Just as he was about to completely forget his mission, out of the corners of his eyes, he caught a quick sight of IT. It dazzled and bristled – a tiger! Jake, ready with knives, pounced. It flexed and spiralled away – a snake! Jake rushed on after it.

92

Radiance or brilliance

It bunched and furred up like a cloud – a ram? Jake lounged again, and yet again, it sprung off and changed its shape. ‘What is this?’ cried Jake in frustration. ‘It’s a devil of many disguises. I’ll never, ever catch it!’ So our hero decided that the only thing he could do was to offer himself to it. He laid down his weapons and stood quite still: which was a hard thing to do as waves of adrenalin coursed through his body. Yet he stood his ground. And then, all of a sudden, he saw. He saw it. It was crystal clear and it flowed ceaselessly. It was crystal clear, flowed ceaselessly, and yet he could see it perfectly. It absorbed all of his attention, its lights sparkled with more subtle colours than he’d ever been aware of, and it filled him with a peaceful elation. Never had he seen anything more beautiful. He could have stood there forever, and perhaps would have, had not a bird flown over, casting its shadow on the crystal stream, so reminding Jake of other things in the world. Regretfully, he thought he had better return and dutifully report back home. He tried to scoop up a piece of hobgoblin to take back to show to his fellows, but on so doing, it gently slipped away through his fingers. ‘The uncatchable, indeed,’ noted Jake. Back he went, but as he tried to creep into the city, he was seen and seized by a guard who immediately set up the alarm of ‘Traitor!’ Now, this story has two endings and how it ends is up to the reader, each and every reader. First, the unhappy ending. Jake is hauled before the elders who are furious with him for jeopardising the safety of all, endangering the massively built-up haven into which they had poured so much. Jake’s attempts to speak of seeing the hobgoblin in its beauty are denounced as outrageously deceitful utterances designed to get himself off the hook. His excuses enrage the elders further who sentence him to death. He undergoes public execution, whereafter many cautionary tales grow up around ‘The Outlaw Benedict’. While in secret he becomes a counter-cultural hero for some, none ever dare to repeat his feat and evermore stringent security measures are devised against the hobgoblin. And that’s it. End of story. Now, the happy ending. Jake is hauled before the elders who are furious with him. He offers to do penance for his transgression, promising to tell his story if the punishment is not too drastic. The elders, admittedly curious, agree. Once the penance is over, Jake explains to the citizens that the hobgoblin is, relief, no danger at all. It is beautiful and it is peaceful; it does not want to come Inside, it wants to stay on the Outside, and it just cannot be caught anyway. So, they have nothing to fear. They can now pull down the ramparts and use the bricks to build new houses for the homeless and the poor. They can all get on with their lives, creating a city devoted to peace and art. Which ending, as said, is up to each reader. So, where was I? No more theory? Well, I’ve had my turn, now it’s your turn. Go on, dazzle me. If you give me brilliance, I’ll give you radiance

4

The other of the confession The philosophical type

I remember once giving a lecture about Derrida, and one of his disciples came up to me and said: ‘You made a mistake: you can’t use the word ‘‘reality’’ when you talk about Derrida.’ Edward Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life’1 It may be proposed that the way to deconstruct the performative is through a poetic realism. The performative is already supposed to be a deconstruction of the truth, and although I do not promise we can go beyond this, I hope that we can. This chapter will begin with a section, ‘The Other Side of Writing’, that serves not only as a prelude for it but as one for the sixth chapter’s attempt to address Hamlet as a scene of writing. In particular, what is broached is that writing does not only involve a ghostly temporality but a synchronicity of the real. The chapter will then move on to consider a few aspects of Derrida’s treatment of the performative and the confessional. I say ‘a few aspects’ since, given that so much of Derrida’s work concerns questions of the performative and the autobiographical, a thorough approach would be impossible. Since my reading is to be necessarily selective, its main impetus may be outlined in terms of a concern over the pervasiveness of the performative particularly as regards questions of power. More specifically, whilst the deployment of the performative often justifies itself in terms of a challenge to authority, the question is whether it may more covertly serve to preserve the ideological from critique. That is, might the promotion of a universalisation of the performative serve as a means of determining the sayable so that its assumed fictiveness may actually be a means of tacit authorisation and legitimation? And if authority is rendered fictive, does this then serve to silence those who would appeal to realities and questions of reality?

The other side of writing This section is to consider deconstruction’s assumption of the ghostliness of writing and visual representation through attending to what I am calling ‘the other side of writing’, a notion that is to be gradually elaborated in the course of this exposition.

94

The philosophical type

Bernard Stiegler introduces an interview with Derrida called ‘Spectographies’ through referring to Roland Barthes’ remarks on the photograph. Barthes is cited as writing in Camera Lucida: ‘[I]n photography, I can never deny the thing was there [ . . . ] From a real body that was there proceed radiations that come to touch me, I who am here. The duration of the transmission doesn‘t matter.’2 So, there is the fact of a real being, undeniably so, and the registering of this fact may be said to be like an angelic visitation or an experience of radiance in which time and space are annulled. Barthes says that the delay or deferral is of no import, and equally it could be added that the image as image disappears. This could be said to be a mini-enlightenment: the other arrives to touch me and I feel not their absence but suddenly their presence. Stiegler does not comment on what Barthes says. In fact, he seems to cite the words without taking them in, for he goes on to align Barthes’ remarks with statements made by Derrida in Ghostdance that are actually at odds with Barthes’ sense of miraculous immediacy. Derrida is quoted as saying: ‘To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what was has never lived in the present, to remember what, in essence, has never had the form of presence. Film is a ‘‘phantomachia’’.’3 Derrida, presented by Stiegler with his remarks and those of Barthes, immediately notices the discrepancy and he comments: ‘When Barthes grants such importance to touch in the photographic experience, it is insofar as the very thing one is deprived of [ . . . ] is indeed tactile sensitivity [ . . . ] The specter is first and foremost something visible [ . . . ] it is not tangible.’4 Derrida begs the question posed by Barthes, namely, how it is that the real presence – not the ghost – of another may touch us, even if we have not hitherto encountered this other being. Presumably, what would be at stake would not be the return of something but rather its endurance. I would say that I rather agree with Barthes. When, for instance, I read a letter, I don’t just see the words. The words have varying weights, tones, vibrations, and so on, and it is possible to genuinely feel these imprints, pressures, impressions in the course of reading. It is possible to actually feel the writing or the image as it grazes you, rains on you, indents you. As Barthes notes, there are real emanations that go from sender to receiver in no time. However, this does not mean that Derrida is wrong to insist on the spectre as not tangible; it would just mean that what we call representation is not purely a visual experience and that Derrida seems to concentrate, quite pervasively, on the visual. In the interview ‘Spectographies’, Derrida goes on to speak of the spectre in terms of the trace as that which has never been present. In common understanding, a trace would seem to be a trace of something and as such seem to have the status of a copy. Yet Derrida problematises this in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ by saying: ‘Life must be thought of as a trace before Being may be determined as presence.’5 He also writes; ‘It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic [ . . . ] in the first time of a contact between two forces, repetition has begun.’6 For Derrida, the trace would not be a trace of something prior to it and would thus, assumedly, be but the trace of itself. Well, physically tracing the word TRACE would just give you the word TRACE, and yet in the simultaneity of those letters we might glimpse another

The philosophical type

95

word, such as: CREATE (the anagram of ‘trace’). Create or trace, trace as create? I would like to refer here to a work by Vera Dieterich, an artist with whom I have collaborated on questions of trace-creation.7 The work in question is a film clip of the hands of two different people who are facing each other, both engaged in creating a joint script. Between them there is a glass page and each hand holds a pen. The two hands attempt to write together on either side of the sheet of glass and the movement of these two writing hands attempting to synchronise themselves is what is filmed. Below is a still from the film. In this clip, might we see something like a primal scene of writing? How might it even perhaps resonate with Michaelangelo’s famous creation scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Is it that the word as the act of writing is a movement in mid-air that would need to be registered by another, responded to as closely as possible, for a script to appear? Perhaps writing, in its inception, would be such a movement of synchronised correspondence. It might begin in gesture and dance, in the animated choreography of an improvisation. You’d mime, through a hesitating and precipitating anticipation, the unpredictable. Mime the unpredictable. In this clip of the hands writing, what we don’t see is the word, the gramma, the technical sign. We do not actually see the mark or trace. We see only the movement of writing. The movement of writing effaces the written writing. There is a gap, an elision. When Vera Dieterich first spoke to me of making this film, I tried to imagine the scene of writing in my mind. What I visually imagined was intriguingly different from what I eventually saw. That is, I imagined one hand writing from left to right, say, the word TRACE. I saw then the facing hand having to follow this movement from right to left. While one hand would write from West to East, the other hand would write from East to West: the difference, for instance, between writing in English or writing in Arabic whereby each direction would posit the other as writing backwards. Written backwards, the word TRACE gives us the French word E´CART which means ‘gap’ or ‘discard’, as in discarded cards. Every word or trace is a

Figure 2 Film still – image of hands (Vera Dieterich, 2006)

96

The philosophical type

vague gap or precise stencil of what it traces or effaces. Either you see the hand or hands writing or you see the written words, text: each is the trace or gap of the other through a chiasmatic inversion. The chiasmus at stake may be the crossing over from an animation, a feeling, to a visible form. For Merleau-Ponty, according to Luce Irigaray, ‘the look would be a variant of touch’,8 and this is a matter of chiasmatic inversions, inverted crossovers. Irigaray writes of Merleau-Ponty: ‘Indefinitely he has exchanged seer and visible, touching and tangible, ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘things’’ in an alternation, a fluctuation that would take place in a milieu that makes possible their passage from one or the ‘‘other side’’’ (p. 133). Irigaray reads Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible to explicate a progressive movement that serves to occlude, in her view, sexual difference. Beginning with the tangible, the tangible is said to be what we are immersed in like a bath or sea, and Irigaray likens this to an intra-uterine state: a sightless embrace within the womb. This state of being immersed in that which we cannot see is emerged from to allow for vision, and vision comes to envelope the seen. What Irigaray suggests is that in this account vision takes over the terms of the tactile whilst leaving the tactile behind. Irigaray writes: Reduction of the tactile into the visible . . . Fulfilment of the idea, of idealism, under its material or carnal aspects. A way of talking about the flesh that already cancels its most powerful components, moreover those that are creative in their power. (p. 146) This is considered to be a privileging of sight, but one that appropriates the tactile in its cancelling of the tactile: vision embraces instead of touch. For Irigaray, this displacement is recapitulated in what Merleau-Ponty says of language. She writes: Language, languages find themselves constituted like another ground, or rather like a circular matrix, with which the subject maintains permanent exchanges, from which he receives himself . . . Moreover he calls his language his ‘mother tongue’, which is the sign of a substitution rather than a reality. (p. 147) Thus, for Irigaray, a self-sufficient masculinised matrix of the visible and language or signification substitutes for and ideally replicates a maternal matrix of touch and symbiotic nourishment or exchange. The tactile is invisible for Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty, however, it could be suggested that sight and touch are not necessarily successive or competing senses. One may give a sense of the other. In the film that I have just referred to, one hand, one blind pen begins its writing movement from an inner impulse or else an impulse of seeking out the other. The other takes on the role of sight and attempts to trace its partner. One leads in blindness; the other sees without knowing where it is going. It may remind us of Antigone leading her blind father, Oedipus, the filial follower leading the leader. Jean-Luc Godard says of his film-making:

The philosophical type

97

Music expresses the spiritual, and it provides inspiration. When I’m blind music is my little Antigone; it helps to see the unbelievable . . . What interests me is to try to see music – to try to see what one is hearing and to hear what one is seeing.9 We may see as hearing, see as touching, touch as seeing, and so on. There may be two different instances of the ungraspable, ungraspable rather than intangible, to contend with here. One might be that of the text of abandoned, ghostly signifiers, a text without its moment of writing, its movement. The other would be that of a movement without imprisoning form, thus irreducible to any written text or image. The signifier may be severed from what it signifies, but what does the signifier write on or with if not some pool of immersion and emergence, some liquid skin or inky sap? In ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, Derrida sets up a certain opposition between the event or creativity and the machine stating: ‘It is difficult, however, to conceive of a living being to whom or through whom something happens without an affection getting inscribed in a sensible, aesthetic manner on some body or organic matter.’10 Thus, the supposition is that for there to be an event there must be a living consciousness that, by means of inscription, affects another living consciousness. However, Derrida sets this up in order to defy it for he wishes to maintain that the inanimate machine, with its programmed repetition, is not incompatible with the unforeseeable or creative event. He writes: And if one day, with one and the same concept, these two incompatible concepts, the event and the machine, were to be thought together you can bet that not only [ . . . ] will one have produced a new logic, an unheard-of conceptual form. In truth, against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster. (p. 73) But has not this monster of the future, one of mechanical creation, already been thought of in Frankenstein’s fantastic offspring? Derrida makes use of a typewriter metaphor. He cites de Man as follows: ‘The machine is like the grammar of the text . . . the merely formal element without which no text can be generated’ (p. 153, Derrida’s emphasis). What is machinic is that writing is conceived of as a formal ideal, an ideal of form, a design that is supposedly capable of generation. Thus, the formal letters of the typewriter imprint themselves in the text. However, it is the subtext of this that Derrida attends to in drawing attention to the inky or fluid typewriter ribbon. What Derrida implies is that the fluid ribbon – which he hints may be likened to a silky feminine skin – is made use of by ideal forms to mechanically imprint and materialise their images. The fluid ribbon or liquid life would be effaced as the trace traces only itself. Edmund White writes of a certain disagreement between Derrida and Jean Genet over writing. He says: ‘When Derrida once argued that the typewriter would become so familiar that it would not insert itself between the writer and

98

The philosophical type

the page, Genet resisted this idea and insisted that one could only truly write by hand.’11 He´le`ne Cixous also disagrees with Derrida over this, as we’ll come to, for she regards a writing by hand – as opposed to typewriting – as creatively enabling. A writing of the hand may obviously make use of instruments – a pen, a brush, a camera, scissors, and so on – but there is a certain difference that may be clarified. With a machinic writing the rhythms of the body are subject to the machine, whereas in creative practice the instruments are subject to the rhythms of the body. When you type you are obliged to separate each key, one by one, but when you play a piano you can make chords. For Bergson, mechanical movement is produced through a chopping up into bits as opposed to the flow of duration. Here then is a diagram of what is at stake. I THEORY (from concept or formal design to page) formality of the letter, type >>> moving stream, ribbon >>> materialised print II PRACTICE (chiasmus of the E´CART-TRACE) moving stream, hand writing >>> inscription <<< co-responding, moving stream In the first, the instance of theory, writing is idealised as a form of ghostly selfimmortalisation in the replica or trace. In the second, inscription is valued as a point of momentary contact between existences that would otherwise be separate and distant over space and time. This is the synchronicity of the real that I wish to draw attention to. Cixous has written an essay entitled ‘Writing Blind’, that is of relevance to what is being explored here. She states: ‘Eyes are the most delicate, most powerful hands, imponderably touching the other over-there’.12 And she asks: ‘Me is thus the meeting-place between my sighted soul and you?’ (p. 141). Furthermore, Cixous maintains: ‘I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of words’ (p. 146). And finally: It is in the contact with the sheet of paper that sentences emerge. As if coming with great wing-strokes from a nest hidden beneath the paper [ . . . ] It is not written in my head. There must be the contact between my hand and the paper. I am not an intellectual. I am a painter. No computers. You do not paint with a computer. I paint, I draw the sentences from the secret well. (p. 149) That is, the infinite inkwell, the potential of writing or its other side. In the sixth chapter, it will be shown how Hamlet brings about a striking moment of chiasmatic inversion that serves to open writing out onto its other side. For the moment, two notions of writing are being entertained: a philosophical one of a self-imprinting and a poetic one in which liquid being meets with liquid being as serves to produce an impression, a coalesence. In the light of this, whilst the philosopher imprints his/her self, the poet is a being impressed by some other being. With the latter, no impression occurs without an encounter

The philosophical type

99

between life and life and it is this encounter that makes for the impression all by itself. So, in a minimalist version of this event, ‘I’ do not write but may show the impression made on me like the revelation of a bruise. A poem may be thought of as a bruise or a scratch or the pollen from some flower or the echo of that voice, that one, or the ripples on a pond. And it is because the poet is wonderwounded that he or she can wonder-wound in turn. Returning to Barthes on the photograph, it may be that some would wish to object that the angelic visitation, the immediate encounter with the other, is illusory and wish to maintain that haunting effects caused by space and time are more convincing. John Gribbin, drawing on relativity theory, writes: ‘A photon, naturally, travels at the speed of light, and this means that for a photon time has no meaning. A photon that leaves a distant star and arrives at the earth may spend thousands of years on the journey, measured by clocks on earth, but takes no time at all as far as the photon is concerned.’13 When we see the radiance of the condemned man in the photograph that Barthes produces, it is the very radiance of the day it was taken, in spite of the intervening years and the fact that the man is now dead. It happens to us in no time. The fact that Steigler does not see this living radiance but only ghostliness suggests that he does not actually look at, that is, receive the beauty of the photographed man. Therefore, ghosts are probably what we see when we see with our minds, and they pertain to the techno-performative because the image takes precedence as image without living origin.

De-confessing Rousseau, or the type that writes Debates around the performative have constituted one of the significant meeting, as well as breaching, points for British-American and German-French philosophy. As Hillis Miller points out in his Speech Acts in Literature, amongst the critics and philosophers, apart from Austin, Derrida, Searle and de Man, who have addressed the performative we would find Sandy Petrey, Mary Louise Pratt, Soshanna Felman, Stanley Cavell, Stanley Fish, Barbara Johnson, and others.14 Hillis Miller strangely makes no mention of Judith Butler, nor of Roland Barthes. As pointed out in the introduction to this book, it is probably Roland Barthes who initiates a literary-theoretical use of Austin’s theory of performative speech acts in ‘The Death of the Author’. Barthes’ famous essay could well have been what prompted Derrida to take up Austin’s theory just a couple of years later in his ‘Signature Event Context’ where Derrida tries to deconstruct the opposition between the constative or descriptive statement and the performative utterance, and different kinds of performative utterance, in favour of an all-pervasive performativity. If the performative is a matter of denying an origin or creative source outside the speech act or text, with thus the text (in the broadest sense) as authoritative by default, it would seem that autobiographical writing could stand to be particularly troubled by this ‘textualism’, especially autobiographical writing that has a confessional aspect to it. This would be so in that a confession would seek to be the revelation of something that is the case

100

The philosophical type

rather than just offer itself as but a linguistic scene of utterance. In ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ Derrida brings the performative and the confessional together whereby confession becomes a performance. While there is something I would credit in this strategy, namely, the notion of self-projection as fictional, my concern with this move is that it begs the question of whether it is at all possible to distinguish between the ceremony of speech acts and the testimony of utterances that may be said to be genuine or for real. This concerns both Rousseau’s act of confession and de Man’s reading of Rousseau which Derrida scrutinises from the implicit point of view of de Man’s failure to confess his Nazi sympathies. I would like to attend further to this text but I would first like to consider Derrida’s earlier treatment of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. In Of Grammatology, Derrida seeks to contest what he sees as the privileging of speech and the voice over the written sign, that is, we could further observe, the visual sign. However, beyond this, the enquiry pertains to the whole enterprise of Western philosophy as a desire to reveal knowledge of the ontological. Regarding this, Derrida seems fascinated by the genre of the philosophical confession, in particular, by Plato’s letters and the confessions of St Augustine and Rousseau. With respect to this particular genre, the basic question to be confessed seems to be whether you are a mystic with first hand knowledge of the blissful or feminine experience of being or not. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Barthes seeks to deny the author over the very question of the existence of the feminine real which may also be a question of mystical jouissance. So the injunction could be: confess the nature of your libido, your soma, your desire, your experience of being. Derrida appears not a little sceptical of Rousseau, this Rousseau who testifies both to experiences of bliss and lust, this Rousseau who waxes lyrical and yet presents himself as a philosopher. In Of Grammatology, Derrida cites Rousseau on the voice, a brief excerpt being: ‘Man has three kinds of voice, the speaking or articulate voice, and the singing or melodious voice, and the pathetic or accented voice, which serves as the language of the passions, and gives life to song and speech.’15 Derrida comments: ‘Articulation, wherever one finds it, is indeed articulation: that of the members and the organs, differance (in the) (self-same) body’ (p. 248). There is thus spatio-temporal jointedness which is also, it seems, necessarily disjointedness (as in Hamlet’s ‘The time is out of joint’), if there is to be articulacy as such. That is, if something is to make sense, you cannot just run all the words together: there needs be separation and spacing. A little further on Derrida writes of Rousseau’s praise for the speaking and singing breath: With this exemplary model of a pure breath (pneuma) and of an intact life, of a song and an inarticulate language, of language, of speech without spacing, we have, even if it is placeless or utopian, a paradigm suitable to our measure. We can name and define it. It is the neume: pure vocalisation, form of an inarticulate song without speech, whose name means breath, which is inspired in us by God and may address only Him. The Dictionary of Music defines it as such:

The philosophical type

101

NEUME. s.f. A term in church music. The neume is a kind of short recapitulation of the air in a mode, which is made at the end of an antiphon, by a simple variety of sounds, and without adjoining them to any words [ . . . ] (p. 249) Derrida seems sceptically dismissive of the neume, expressive of a joy or bliss in being, which he interprets as ‘pure auto-affection’ with ‘no mortal difference, no negativity’, writing also: ‘The neume, the spell of self-presence, inarticulate experience of time, tantamount to saying: utopia’ (p. 251). It is necessary for me to query some of the terms of interpretation being put forward here, where it may be the case that what is questionable could be due to imprecisions that are possibly to be found in or suggested by the texts of Rousseau. First, I certainly would question whether the inspired, joyful state is one of auto-affection, being affected by oneself, or, as Derrida also speaks of in relation to Rousseau, a matter of ‘self-presence’. Rather, it seems to be a case of loss of self-presence but not of being, as upheld, for example, by the delightful madcap Bauls, as encountered in Chapter 2. You may recall that what is at stake is the Sufi notion of fana, dying-to-self in ecstactic co-existence. The one thing that would not be experienced is precisely the self as self and the affective state would be an experience of the being of or with the other. Derrida speaks of Rousseau’s practice of masturbation in terms of autoaffection and as a supplementary activity. It seems that it is for this reason that he is able to maintain, as he reads Rousseau, that there is a supplement (autoaffection) at the origin, writing: ‘Yet, if our hearts are pure enough for it, we live this almost impossible experience, that is almost alien to the constraints of supplementarity, already as a supplement, as a compensation [de´dommagement]’ (p. 250, emphasis in text). In the conflations of auto-affection and the supplement, what could be implied is a blurring of the distinction between masturbatory sexual pleasure and a bliss that is experienced in more spiritual or spirited terms. Derrida seems to want to maintain that the supposed supplement of self-stimulation is the original state of desire, begging the question of a more feminine libido that cannot be thought of in phallic terms. I am not sure how deliberate such a foreclosure is on Derrida’s part, whilst the consideration is that states of inspiration (bliss, enthusiasm), and states of sexual self-arousal concern really different kinds of experience, where the former are not affected or effected by the self although they may be automatic in the sense of what cannot be deliberately engineered. In brief, ‘auto’? Second, whilst Derrida speaks of an ‘experience of time’, it could be maintained that it is time that is precisely that which is not experienced. All sense of time is lost. As David Peat notes, the mystics can tell you nothing about time since all they speak of is the timeless: an experience of timelessness.16 If it is a case of being absorbed in a continuous present, there is no sense of a ‘before’ or ‘after’ or of time passing. It would be a case of surfing eternity, where this is a literal metaphor. The surfer, catching a wave, is both still (on the board) and part of the continuous motion of the wave: stillness in motion, or a moving

102

The philosophical type

stillness. Moreover, the sense of aliveness at stake concerns a subjective though not egoic sense of a potential for being; a sense of anticipation, rather than objectively realised being or presence as such. What is particularly pertinent in Derrida’s comments concerns the question of the articulation of the inarticulate, ‘inarticulate speech’. That is, whilst the kind of experience Rousseau has may be affirmed as a certain experience of heightened aliveness or being, the difficulty would remain of putting the experience into words. How would you put a feeling of the all-is-now into language as a spatio-temporal medium? You would be obliged to stagger it, stutter, stammer it, or, why not, to neume it. However, even as the song or poem staggers itself, in its beginning would be its end, and in its end its beginning. For instance, Mahmoud Darwish writes: Vanity, vanity of vanities . . . vanity! All that lives on earth is bound to pass. Northern are the winds. Southern are the winds. The sun rises from the sun. The sun sets into the sun. The greatest absurdity is that nothing is new, and time is past. The temples are high, and so are the ears of wheat. When the sky descends there is rain. When a country lifts itself up it withers. Everything that exceeds its limit one day turns into its opposite. Life on earth is the shadow of the unseen. Vanity, vanity of vanities . . . vanity! All that lives on earth is bound to pass.17 What appears is the half of it, but what does not appear is not simply absent, altogether absent, but what does not appear. The above is from Darwish’s ‘Mural’, and could stand as a poem within a poem. Whilst the ‘all’ of it may be staggered, the first utterance immediately calls forth the next, culmulatively, until the ‘all’ is said. The calling forth is immediate although the notation cannot be. It is a process of unfolding anticipation which completes itself in coming to utter a moment of initiation. If poetry is a dictation, as Derrida suggests, it is the allat-once, a holistic or synchronous potentiality, that dictates. I would like to attend a little further to the work of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, in order to write of the connection between the poetic and the pneumatological. Darwish is a poet whose work is inspired and his prose memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, is nonetheless poetry or it keeps falling into poetry as its translator observes. This work and other works of Darwish are written in or address conditions of siege, and in the face of possible extinction they exhibit a heightened sense of what it is to be alive. Memory for Forgetfulness, which is about one day during the siege of Beirut in 1982, takes place in a timeless present: all is now; now is all. At one point, the poet visits another poet, Y, asking: ‘Who can sleep with these packs of fighter jets above? I’m curious to know how a poet can write, how he can find the words for this language.’18

The philosophical type

103

What is appropriate to the state of siege is a poetry of stammerings, stutterings, sobs, gasps, even hiccups. A little further on it is said: Our great friend F comes over to help me lift the poet [Y] out of a phrase he’s fallen into: ‘Brother, this is impossible. Impossible. Brother, this is absolutely impossible.’ He’s come to blows with the expression, choked and piled on top of it. Help me, F, Help me free the expression from Y’s stammering. We burst out laughing. (p. 57) The poet Darwish is then asked what he is writing and he replies: ‘I am stammering out a scream’, a scream he also says he’s trying to swallow, and the scream is stammered out as follows: ‘Our stumps, our names; our names, our stumps / Block your blockade with madness / With madness / And with madness / They have gone, the ones you love. Gone’ (p. 59). The poem comes out in gasps, a vocalisation inseparable from the undeniably living being, an undeniability that will be present whenever it is read against all historical disavowals and amnesias. It is a poetry written as you try to breathe in, not out, which can result in pneumatological spasms. (Try speak on an in-breath.) Towards the end of the memoir there comes an exchange between Darwish and another: —Is the sea in poetry the same as the sea in the sea? —Yes. The sea is the sea – in poetry, in prose, and at land’s end [ . . . ] The fighter is amazed by the poet’s inability to explain his poetry. Perhaps he’s amazed by poetry’s simplicity, so long as the sea is the sea. Or perhaps he’s amazed that plain facts have the right to speak. (p. 180) To say that the sea of words is the sea is to surf eternity. There’s no aesthetic or intellectual distance in this, and here being and poetry are one. Darwish’s book ends with: The sea drops from the sky and comes into the room. Blue, white, foam, waves. I don’t like the sea. I don’t want the sea, because I don’t see a shore, or a dove. I see in the sea nothing but the sea. (p. 182) Denied historicity, and without land, you can but keep going in an eternal present, that is, a movement without objectified body. By the end of the book, you feel that Darwish would sacrifice some of his poetic sea for some rest and some distance of land. What is to be noted with regard to the above is that the ontological is not non-existent in being ‘utopian’, placeless, homeless, without settlement; the ontological is rather that which is historically and politically disavowed. That said, I would also maintain, seriously, that the ontological is ultimately utopian. What that would mean among other things is that it is beyond Derrida’s

104

The philosophical type

favoured topological trope of diffe´rance: what for him is an ineluctable spacing and deferral within a spatio-temporal logic. The ontological is the sea in being an incessant movement that yet goes nowhere as it endures. Moreover, it may be said that the poetic text bears the impress of being in the way that it breathes and in its rhythms. The poet is affected and the work that bears this allows for the reader to be similarly affected in turn. When you read a poem, you can share the living feeling of its moment of composition. In this, the poem partakes of the moving sea of existence: there’s no difference, in a certain sense, between the sea that is and poetry. In Arabic, al-baHr is the word for both the sea and poetic measure.19 In the postmodernist West, the literary is considered to be a writing that enacts itself. In contradistinction with the above, it is seen to collapse the word and what the word refers to in ‘realising’ itself, in an auto-enactment, that of language. Considering Austin’s examples of the performative, of doing things with words, they can be actually quite ritualistic, ceremonial, bureaucratic – although, as this chapter will come to address, he approaches some of the implications of this. For the moment, it can be pointed out that when a priest conducts a wedding ceremony or a monarch names a ship, words assume a sovereign power. Would it not be something of a mistake to accord literature or writing this sovereign power? Would there not be the danger of transferring something godlike to the text, the word, a matter of the falsity of the sublime or pseudoauthenticity? Would it not be a matter of according creative power to the signifier, the vehicle, the instrument, the ‘mechanical body’? Hillis Miller touches on such a question in his reading of de Man on the performative in de Man’s ‘Hegel and the Sublime’. He notes that both de Man and Heidegger assert that: ‘Language speaks.’ He quotes de Man’s explanation that this is not a matter of ‘anthropomorphizing language’ but ‘grammatizing the self ’.20 Hillis Miller remains dubious though, stating: ‘It is difficult, however, perhaps impossible, to resist the beguiling enchantment of a prosopopoeia’ (p. 153). The instrumentalisation of the being of the self in language may be accompanied by a temptation to attribute creativity to language, as opposed to seeing that if writing de-ontologises then the ontological is beyond writing (the sea as the uncontainable). It would be necessary to guard against a theologising of the grammatological, in a word: authoritarianism. Adorno addresses this in The Jargon of Authenticity, his critique of authoritarianism, writing: The reciprocity of the personal and apersonal in the jargon: the apparent humanization of the thingly; the actual turning of man into a thing: all this is the luminous copy of that administrative situation in which both abstract justice and objective procedural orders appear under the guise of face-toface orders.21 Thus, a dehumanising administrative performativity, one that treats people as things, is disguised through according mechanical procedures some kind of living aura.

The philosophical type

105

This question brings us back to ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, where Derrida seems keen to bring together the creative reality of the event and textual mechanics. The subtitle of the essay ‘Limited Ink (2)’ suggests he is seeking to return to and defend the position he advanced in his earlier text Limited Inc, his response to Searle’s critique of ‘Signature Event Context’, Derrida’s initial critique of Austin.22 In ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, Derrida also, as mentioned, re-visits Rousseau and de Man, together with St Augustine. Thus, this palimpsest of texts would seem to concern a grafting of the British-American theory of the performative onto a European confessional tradition. Regarding this juncture of lineages, it has to be said that Derrida appears to perform a deliberate bypassing of the work of Stanley Cavell, in particular, Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises.23 In this work, Cavell offers a critique of Derrida on Austin and Searle, arguing that Austin, together with Wittgenstein, seeks to reject the metaphysical voice of philosophy not because it disparages writing through its valuation of the innerness of thought as may be expressed in the self-presence of speech but because it suffocates the ordinary voice. There is a certain taken-for-grantedness with this term, ‘the ordinary voice’, but Cavell’s contention is that ‘The irony of Derrida’s work is that it contributes to this suffocation of the ordinary’ (p. viii). Cavell ends his book with a study of voice in opera, while he presents his project as follows: ‘A formative idea in planning these lectures was to pose the question whether, or how, philosophy’s arrogance is linked to its ambivalence toward the autobiographical, as if something internal to the importance of philosophy tempts it to self-importance’ (p. 3). He mentions how philosophers both flamboyantly brag of their special gifts at the same time that they want to claim to be speaking universally. He says that ‘philosophers have left us a trail of images of themselves preparing for philosophy or recovering from it’, singling out ‘the instances of Augustine’s forbidden pears and Rousseau’s unconfessed ribbon’ (p. 3). Regarding the anecdotal nature of philosophy, Cavell offers us an anecdote, confiding: ‘My father was of that school of story-telling that never introduced a story as entertainment, but unfailingly also as morally pertinent to some turn in conversation. ‘‘Apropos’’ was my father’s favorite high-class term for this requirement’ (p. 20). In ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, Derrida dwells at length on Augustine’s pears and Rousseau’s ribbon and he makes much of this very word ‘apropos’ (in French, a` propos), this not so ordinary word of the ordinary. For Cavell, ‘apropos’ concerns a morality of the anecdote, and we may recall that the word ‘anecdote’ derives from the Greek for ‘unpublished things’, as might suggest a distinction between ‘unauthorised’ stories and publicly recognised ones: a possible question of the passage of event to history. For Derrida, ‘a` propos’ concerns how seemingly chance events may not be random but have a significance that reveals itself over time: a possible question of the historical or temporal determination of events. I should like to add that what may be at stake is a wrestling with the strangeness of coincidence or co-incidence, of the at-once and the suddenly at-one. Let us begin with the type that writes. As touched on earlier, there is for de Man’s Derrida and Derrida’s de Man, the notion of a formal element – be it the

106

The philosophical type

grammar or type of a text – that serves as the generator/motor of the textmachine. This idea has a certain appeal. It could make us think of fractals or of mosaics: a basic form repeating-proliferating itself. How, though, does it pertain to the rise of the philosopher? May we refer to the philosopher also as ‘the type that writes’, especially if he – ‘he’ as a type – is not an extra-textual element, not some outside source? At the outset of ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ Derrida considers there to be something both extraordinary and typical in the deferred coincidence, so to speak, of Augustine and Rousseau. He writes: Both of them are sixteen years old. Several centuries, more than a millenium apart. Both of them happened, later, to confess their respective misdeed, the theft committed when each was sixteen. In the course of both the theft and the confession, there was at work what we would call in Greek a me-khane-, at once an ingenious theatrical machine or a war machine, thus a machine and a machination, something both mechanical and strategic. As if I, as if someone saying I got around to addressing you to say, and you would still be hearing it today: ‘Here is the most unjustifiable, if not the most unjust, thing that I ever happened to do [ . . . ] because of it, I was able finally to say and sign I.’ (p. 71) What is repeated here is a theft whose repetition-confession in writing enables the writer to appropriate the ‘I’ of language in such a way as to impress himself on others down the centuries. Further on, Derrida writes of ‘originary injustice’ in the following terms: The violence of this deception [originary injustice] is a theft, a theft in language of a word, the abusive appropriation of the meaning of a word [ . . . ] It is the absolute substitution, the theft of the subject, more precisely of the word chacun, ‘each one,’ inasmuch as it says at once the ‘I’, the singularity and generality of every ‘I’. (p. 124) What this implies is the philosopher-thief comes to represent every other – every human, or might it be every ‘war machine’ or every monster? – through an act of appropriative self-establishment, as could further insinuate that self-ness is the typical trait of the . . . is it, human? The human, the philosopher? Whether or not these are possible quandries, Derrida seems impressed by the act of appropriation that enables the philosopher’s signature to stand for ‘each one’. For Cavell, this sort of assumption is something he considers problematically typical of philosophy. He explains: ‘When I [ . . . ] characterize philosophy in terms of the claim to speak for the human – hence in terms of a certain universalizing use of the voice – I call this claim arrogation’ (p. vii). In what was cited above, Derrida speaks of a ‘war machine’ which is the same term that he uses in Specters of Marx for the paternal ghost in Hamlet. Since the ghost is or appears as a suit of armour, could we think of this as the mechanical body or vehicle that is the ‘I’ of written language, in fact, writing’s ‘I’, writerliness

The philosophical type

107

as the self-referentiality and self-conveyance of language without ‘content’, as it is said, or tenor (or singing voice?): as the ghostly suit of armour may be without ‘content’ or life? Derrida wants to say of this mechanical materialisation of writing that its materialism is not very material. It is not a matter of signifiers you could stroke or bite or chew but of something more hallucinatory than that. The mechanical for Derrida or Derrida’s de Man would seem possibly to concern something like a pure model, an originary design, not a model of something. In fact, the term ‘model’ is useful since it suggests something that is at once exemplary/perfect and common. What is suggested is a certain ‘mark me’ (the first words of the ghost in Hamlet), ‘copy me’ or ‘clone me’ effect, a commodity effect, but also a ‘notice me and cite me’ effect. ‘Limited inc.’, this term tells us that it may be a corporate, economic affair, as if we were dealing with a company called ‘Wisdom & sons’. Derrida places much repeated emphasis on the fact that Augustine and Rousseau are sixteen at the time that they commit their respective yet similar thefts, as in the earlier citation but in a number of other places too (p. 80, p. 82, p. 83, p. 84). The heavy hint would seem to be that boys becoming men are prone to theft: it is typical behaviour for them, even somehow (but how?) ‘programmed’. Derrida also emphasises the fact that both Rousseau and Augustine state that they do not steal out of need. Thus, it is suggested that the obscure compulsion is to be explained not by the use value of the stolen object but by its exchange value and its fetishistic significance. What do certain fruit and ribbons have in common? At the time when beards appear, could this possibly entail a certain desire for the smooth-skinned? Whereas de Man would like to see the ribbon as a free signifier, Derrida objects that ‘it has at least the sexualizable signification of ornament and fetish’ (p. 115). Derrida goes on to indicate that this assumed fetishistic value of the ribbon has for him to do with its material texture (but I don’t think this is just a case of materiality), more precisely, its silkiness. He writes: [B]and of silk, velvet, or satin [ . . . ] The silk ribbon [ . . . ] that will never have been the self ’s own ribbon [ . . . ] De Man has little interest in the material of the ribbon [ . . . ] for he takes the thing ‘ribbon’ to be a free signifier. (p. 121, my emphasis) The self and the ribbon-as-fetish arise together, out of the loss or non-ownership of the ‘ribbon’ as a fluidity or slipperiness of the real beyond the nets of language. Derrida has himself a quasi-confessional or circumfessional discourse of silk/ skin fetishism. In Circumfession, where he pastes into his own text lengthy citations from Augustine’s Confessions, he addresses his circumcision, in terms of an operation in which the mother is suggested to be responsible for depriving the son of some tender (fore)skin.24 In ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, another autobiographical text, he writes of his boyhood fascination with silkworms, those secretive secreters and weavers, and of how his silk tallith acquires a fetishistic significance for him as regards his inscription within a male genealogy, where presumably the shawl

108

The philosophical type

stands in for the lost silken skin.25 The ribbon, it should be pointed out, is not only silky but fluid. It may also be sweet: sweet as honey and bland as milk. What place does the inked ribbon play in Derrida’s ‘model (of) writing’? The male type, or the type that writes, imprints the ribbon and materialises itself but the ribbon is merely that which facilitates the transfer and perpetuation of the male type. Whereas it might be possible to think of the ribbon as a radiant stream of milk and honey, it is here inkjet-darkened, eclipsed, rendered somewhat unconscious. It also, in Derrida’s account, undergoes a bit of a sex change in that its ink is said by him to be attributable to fertilising semen (p. 122–3). The ribbon becomes but the conveyor of semen? Should we take it then that the feminine cannot be philosophers or writing types, although this is not necessarily a complaint: it could be something to be rather relieved about. Well, the ribbon as stream of being/affective consciousness is what you just cannot get into print as print although it nonetheless bubbles and even babbles on. The ribbon as object is the feminine turned into a fetish which is to say it has actually become a feminine type, a sign of the feminine, that is, a counterpart to the masculine type. Derrida wonders why Rousseau fails to see Marion, the woman Rousseau falsely accuses of the theft of the ribbon, as a marionette: a mechanical doll. In his insistence on the female automaton (a figure we re-encounter in Specters of Marx), Derrida appears keen to see women as types, perhaps heterosexually, as one might say ‘she’s just my type’. Or, it may be a democratic matter of positing female types as counterparts to male types. Derrida implies that the whole situation is really not to be helped. He maintains that it is a situation that happens to Augustine, to Rousseau, to himself. He quotes Hamlet saying to Gertrude: ‘Forgive me this my virtue’ (p. 88). So, ‘excuse me, but what’s wrong with my vir-tue, my tekhne-, my vir-tuality, my virilization’? It is no sin . . . Women, but women are not to be blamed either. Derrida dwells on the mortality of Rousseau’s beloved Mme. de Vercellis, underscoring her dying through breast cancer. He dwells too on the manner of her death with much made of her farting, not so spiritual a departure of soul (p. 95). Derrida also upbraids de Man for excising the fact that Mlle. Pontal’s pink and silver ribbon is ‘already old’, an old, probably softly crinkled, skin (p. 116). In Circumfession, where Derrida confesses his own masculinity, there is also a harrowing attention given to his mother’s dying. In fact, there is a kind of ruthless exposure of her naked, sore-ridden body and failing mind. I do not know what to say about all of this other than to agree that women are not, in fact, immortal. It is the case that women do age, women do die. Yet, what this semi-confessional discourse seems to reveal is that the loss of femininity at male puberty can lead to a kind of resentment directed against women. Is it that it is this loss that is felt to be an ‘originary injustice’, to re-deploy Derrida’s term, one more originary than the consequent theft of the ‘I’ of language. If so, might this feeling of injustice throw some light on the aetiology of misogyny? What some of us might find strange is that male puberty is presented to us as a kind of secret, as something clandestine prompting a scene of confession. Is it

The philosophical type

109

something that can be hidden, cache´? Is it that the performative, in an unorthodox psychoanalytic light, serves to bolster a consoling (even helpful) fiction of masculine self-sufficiency in response to a pubertal loss of femininity? It is not my intention to pursue this here, however, it is something that will be considered in the later reading of Hamlet. The question of relevance at this point is one of why the performative and the confessional are bound up with each other for Derrida. This conjunction would seem to have to do with the fictive claiming of originality and authority on two mutually reinforcing fronts: first, we are given the inauguration of the masculine self as fictive origin of itself; second, language is given as a site of fictive selforigination. The performative would therefore seem to depend on this collusion and corroboration of fictive self-origination and authority. It would further seem that within the universality of this performativity, you could not address the origin of the fictive origin or fiction of self-origination. Although Derrida points to an onto-genesis of the performative masculine subject, pertaining to a reality of sexual difference, such a beginning would have to be retrospectively included within the general domain of the performative if the fictiveness of the performative is to be authoritatively upheld. What I think this presupposes philosophically is that there is no ontological reality outside a retrospective temporality. Derrida, like Kant (together with much of Western philosophy), treats time as a priori across his work: at least, predominantly so. However, in other cultures and philosophies, the ontological or the real is not just spectrally presenced within the temporal and thus temporal determination is not ineluctable. Wilson Harris may be said to offer us a poetics of the real in resistance to histories of violent repetition. Moreover, he turns to Sophocles’ Antigone to challenge a politics of the performative or ritualistic in ways that serve to confound temporal determination. Harris writes: Sophocles, it seems to me, has addressed the blindness of his society, its circumscription by ritual habit, its restrictive or restricted vision, in a peculiar and uncertain way [ . . . ] There comes a moment when Antigone abandons her traditional or ritual plea. She concentrates with extraordinary and irrational exclusivity upon her brother’s plight. It is almost as if he is occultly alive and she is pleading for his life [ . . . ] I see such lines as ‘intuitive clues’ [ . . . ] I interpret ‘intuitive clue’ as implying that the visible text of the play runs in concert with an invisible text that secretes a corridor into the future, a future where the burden of classical blindness – as in the instance of Sophocles’s Antigone – needs to be taken up and treated differently. That corridor for me, runs into the dawn of the Christian age.26 What Harris goes on to suggest is that the Gospels offer the phenomenon of a ‘resurrection-body’, an unrecognisable event that demands of us a new way of reading. Harris states:

110

The philosophical type [T]he resurrection-body does not conform to a story-line upon which everything is clear and comfortable to a ruling pattern. The tautology of the story-line is fractured in favour of a mysterious continuity that defies absolute models, absolute formula [ . . . T]he models we have enshrined [ . . . ] are partial, and if we invest in them absolutely then alas the abyss into which our civilisation is slipping has nothing to offer but an ultimate divorce from the mystery and genesis of consciousness, ultimate divorce from reality, ultimate loss.27

Thus, whilst the performative and the ritualistic serve to exclude the real or aspects of the real, the denied reality comes to challenge all established models and given historical possibilities in a surprising, unforeseeable manner. Here, the event is not circumscribed by the performative but that which challenges its establishment. In order to elaborate on this, it can be noted that Harris’s notion of an unfinished genesis of creative consciousness has a strong bearing on ‘the problem of time’ for quantum physics. David Bohm explains the following in a letter to Charles Biederman: Each moment traces its past and projects its future in a unique way. At each moment there is an infinity of possibilities, which (we both agree) have, in some sense, a real existence [ . . . ] The past is not by itself fully determinate, but is ambiguous as to what it is (or was). The future helps to determine what the past really was. Thus, the past does not fully determine the future. (If only because in some measure, the future partly determines the past.)28 What is said to be the past is not fixed and thus determinate and determining, but part of the unfinished genesis of a continuous reality. What we may take to be the story at any one point may thus be radically altered at a future point. This understanding of potential for historical change is one that Ashis Nandy maintains was the basis of Gandhi’s anti-colonial resistance.29 What this further directs us to is the question of synchronous collective spirit that I have been pursuing in this work. This unfinished genesis is not something that can be subsumed within a spatio-temporal logic for it presumes what Bohm calls an ‘infinite totality’, and it is this that keeps all the stories and histories open to revision. The implications of the above are that the event, as Harris explicitly argues, would not be what he aptly calls the ‘tautology of the story’ but a disruption of the story, say, a moment of living realisation and reawakened sense of potential. In literary terms, it is possible to draw a distinction between a writing that begins as writing (with a consciousness of writing as writing), and a writing that begins with a consciousness of a living potentiality that is not yet writing, not yet articulate, but that which may be experienced as a musical sense of affect, mood, tone. It is the latter writing that I am calling ‘poetic realism’. On the whole, I think that Derrida tends to approach Augustine and Rousseau from a late capitalist perspective which begs the question of whether he

The philosophical type

111

sees capitalism as reflective of a certain masculinity. Here, it might be more interesting to consider whether it is capitalism that serves to foster a performative masculinity, an homogenising singularisation of the individual who thus lacks a sense of collective existence. In addition, what of the differences between the sexuality of Augustine and that of Rousseau?30 Beyond this, there would be the question of cultural and ethnic identity to consider, where Bart MooreGilbert explores how the autobiographical discourse of Augustine and Rousseau relies on a self/other distinction in the service of the consolidation of racial identities.31 As in the analyses of Said, the production of a self is bound up with both the phantasms and possessive investments of nationality. Whilst Derrida draws attention to his Jewish identity in his circumfessional writing, there is the further question of how the heated philosophical tug-of-war debates over the performative might imply a degree of philosophical national competitiveness. So much for confessions. Let us now move on to questions of how what has been set out so far pertains to key aspects of the theory of the performative.

Iterability and intentionality In ‘Performative Utterances’, Austin sets up a distinction between performative events that are serious or felicitous and performative events that are non-serious or infelicitous. For Austin, performative utterances cannot be said to be true or false in the manner of statements but they can misfire or fail to be operative or effective depending, for instance, on whether the utterance has the appropriate authorisation or not or on whether it occurs in the appropriate context or not. For example, an actor in a play may perform a marriage ceremony but this would not be the same as a priest performing an actual marriage ceremony. Against this, in ‘Signature Event Context’, Derrida seeks to argue that common to all performative utterances is an irreducible citationality, as if everything is said in quotation marks, regardless of authorship or context, and with this he questions the seriousness of any utterance. In brief, I would agree with Derrida that all performative utterances are citational. The priest performing a marriage is reciting a script as much as the actor in a play, and by this we can see that the curious thing called ‘marriage’ may be a kind of play-acting. What Austin writes is: ‘we could be issuing any of these utterances, as we can issue an utterance of any kind whatsoever, in the course, for example, of acting a play or making a joke or writing a poem – in which case it would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say we seriously performed the act concerned.’32 Whilst Derrida concentrates on the artificiality of the supposedly serious event or ceremony, a further distinction could be introduced with respect to a deconstruction of Austin’s statement. A supposedly fictional event could be more seriously or really life-transforming than, say, a marriage ceremony. A poem just might be a serious, non-fictional occurrence. I could, for example, decide to get married for the sake of a passport and thus go through the ritual – which would be legally binding – non-seriously or intentionally without good intention. There is nothing inherently sacred about

112

The philosophical type

the ritual of marriage which, following Joyce, could be said to be a fiction that is a legal fiction. On the other hand, I may go to the theatre or a concert and experience the event in a sacred or shamanistic way, quite authentically, even though it is just supposedly ‘theatre’. Both Derrida and Austin rather bracket off the experiential, which is why it is being introduced here. They do so for good reasons, namely, I would say a distrust of imputing authenticity to the inner self, but questions attendant on the experiential are not to be left behind altogether. Austin, interestingly, it should be stressed, does not seek to locate the sincerity or authenticity of a performative event in whether it is inwardly meant and intended, genuine in that sense. It is worth citing him at some length over this: The words have to be said in the appropriate context [ . . . ] But the one thing we must not suppose is that what is needed in addition to the saying of the words in such cases is the performance of some internal spiritual act, of which the words have to be the report [ . . . ] There is the case of Euripides’ Hippolytus, who said ‘My tongue swore to, but my heart did not’ – perhaps it should be ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ rather than ‘heart’, but at any rate some kind of backstage artiste. Now it is clear from this sort of example that, if we slip into thinking that such utterances are reports, true or false, we open a loophole to perjurers and welshers and bigamists and so on, so there are disadvantages in being excessively solemn in this way. It is better, perhaps, to stick to the old saying that our word is our bond.33 Derrida, as Cavell points out, oddly ignores this passage, as seems to lead to a mis-reading on Derrida’s part. What Derrida writes is: Through the values of ‘conventional procedure,’ ‘correctness,’ and ‘completeness,’ which occur in the definition, we necessarily find once more those of an exhaustively definable context, of a free consciousness present to the totality of the operation, and of absolutely meaningful speech [vouloirdire] master of itself: the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing centre remains intention.34 Derrida seems to be putting words into Austin’s mouth that Austin did not intend or author. Given the above citation from Austin, you can see that he explicitly argues against insisting on the inner intention of the author of a speech act. Austin seems rather to be proposing that there are contractual and linguistic obligations and responsibilities to others socially outside us, regardless of what we might privately or inwardly intend or not intend. It is the opposite of the simple voluntarism and will-to-mastery that Derrida accuses him of. The passage Derrida cites to back up his reading is one of Austin maintaining that only certain people are authorised to carry out serious, that is, legitimate performances. However, Austin is not talking about free intentional authorship but institutional authorisation. It seems to me that Austin points to what Foucault, and following him, Said were later to address, namely, that performative speech acts are bound up with

The philosophical type

113

structures of legitimacy and institutional power. With Foucault and Said in mind, what I wish to say is that the performative, with all its citationality, does not constitute an alternative to authority – as Derrida implies with his emphasis on the fictive – but is thoroughly bound up with questions of what counts as authoritative. In fact, when something is cited it often has a legitimating and authoritative force, and history shows us the extent to which authoritarian regimes or dictatorial instances rely on the performative: the threat of that thoroughly citational ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’, for example. Citationality is not simply repetition, as Derrida indeed points out to Searle in speaking of the iterable. What Derrida does not reflect on, however, as far as I can see in this debate, is that the citational is the mentionable. The confession raises the whole question of mentionability. And, as soon as you start to reckon with what you can or cannot mention you find yourself faced with questions of censorship, of the power and force associated with the recognition and accreditation of certain utterances. Indeed, you are faced with questions of the whole enlightenment discourse concerning freedom of speech from a political point of view. In Derrida’s exchange with Searle, there comes to be some agreement that the intentional may be aligned with the iterable. However, what ruptures this possibility of agreement is Derrida’s on-going need to presume himself in battle with some freely intentional living being that threatens his strong investment in performativity as an affair of techno-performativity. In ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, he states the following, where I need to quote at some length: One may say of a machine that it is productive, active, efficient, or, as one says in French, performante. But a machine as such, however performante it may be, could never, according to the strict Austinian orthodoxy of speech acts, produce an event of the performative type. Performativity will never be reduced to technical performance. Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once, spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplaceable. Performativity, therefore, includes in principle, in its own moment, any machinelike [machinale] technicity. It is even the name given to this intentional exclusion. The foreclosure of the machine answers to the intentionality of intention itself. It is intentionality. Intentionality forecloses the machine [ . . . ] Here, again, to think both the machine and the performative event together remains a monstrosity to come, an impossible event. Therefore the only possible event. (p. 74) Again, I think this is unfair to Austin. Austin refers to a performativity that works as intended/as legitimated or else misfires. This works-as-meant is not ‘free’ and ‘spontaneous’ for Austin but determined by rules. As Derrida indeed quotes of Austin (given earlier), this performativity is precisely a matter of conventions, and as already elaborated, of authorisation, legitimacy, institutions and protocols.

114

The philosophical type

To be clear, let me quote Derrida again: ‘Intentionality forecloses the machine.’ However, is that really so? I myself would say surely not. As I argued at length in my critique of the techno-performative in the first chapter, the machination of the machine is thoroughly intentional. The machinic relies on a plan, a design, a blueprint, a programme, thus, on intentionality. So, Derrida is arguing here that the machine forecloses the machine. How does that work exactly? Or, what might Derrida understand by a machine devoid of intentionality, programme, design, and so on? Derrida seems to equate intention with freedom and automaticity with the machine and I wish to propose the contrary for I think that he has perhaps got things the inverted way round. Intention comes about through repression and therefore it is not ‘free’. It is freedom that is automatic rather than the machine. As discussed in the second chapter, freedom of movement is directionless. The head does not take precedence over the body, hence there is automatic movement, rather than forced, commanded, directed movement. Machines are not automatic. They may appear so, like commodities, but in fact we know this is not the case. Part of the problem here, afflicting us all, is over terminology, in particular, the term ‘automatic’. That is because ‘auto’ implies what comes from the self and is thus ‘I’-directed. A term that would suit my own purposes much better would be ‘synchromatic’: a movement of going with, of letting be. As I will attend to in the next chapter at a more opportune moment, Derrida equates the machine, performativity and god in terms of a logic of what is given as self-causing, origin of itself. But this auto-generativity is the Capital fiction, is it not? Or, it would possibly be a case of what Judith Butler aptly calls the ‘illusory autonomy’ of the masculine subject.35 We would all probably agree that this autonomy is a fiction, but what if this fiction insists on itself as an unchallengeable one with the unmentionability of any reality beyond it? Derrida says he wants to think the performative-as-creative event together with the machine as he says constitutes a monstrous impossibility. Well, it may just be a contravention of reality that we would have to accept. When I first read ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, my alarmed response was: is Derrida asking me, or us, to go mad? For if you seriously try to jam the technological and the creative together, if you try to think them together, it does lead to psychosis. I think that a text that reveals this convincingly, and thus frighteningly, is Robert Pirsig’s autobiographical Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance.36 How serious is Derrida about this endeavour? He could possibly be having us on since he keeps up a refrain of ‘as if ’, as if it were a case of playing Frankenstein in a Gothic novel. Whilst Derrida may be said to hold or explore various positions in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, they do seem to involve dismissals of a non-mechanistic reality. Surely Derrida, who would have been aware of the fact that scientists such as Bohm and Peat maintain that life is ultimately not mechanistic, does not think that he can override such arguments just by saying that he pronounces otherwise. As touched on in the first chapter, aside from Bohm and Peat, many other contemporary scientists have rejected the mechanistic world view. Would not the arguments here need to be taken into account? Roger Penrose, for instance,

The philosophical type

115

affirms both the real and rejects its ultimate mechanisation in his densely argued The Emperor’s New Mind, agreeing with Searle’s rejection of artificial intelligence whilst refining his arguments. Penrose writes: ‘In this book I have presented many arguments intending to show the untenability of the viewpoint – apparently rather prevalent in current philosophizing – that our thinking is basically the same as the action of some very complicated computer’.37 Arkady Plotnitsky attempts to argue that de Man’s mechanistic grammatology is similar to what he (Plotnitsky) sees as the supposed radical formalism of quantum physics. What Plotnitsky does, however, is to take the unreality of the groundless, what for Derrida would be iterability, as everything. Bohm, however, provides the suitable corrective to such a view when he writes to Biederman: ‘You insist (quite rightly in my opinion) that opposites are never separated, always interwoven from the very beginning, and that they are only introduced to help us analyse nature (not actually existing in nature). However, I maintained that there is something in nature that these opposites are reflecting, and you seem to be denying this.’38 In other words, the non-duality (not singularity) of the real is what both allows for and erases a dualistic thinking which is not just a textual deconstruction. I would now like to take up Cavell’s thought-provoking critique of the iterable. First, Cavell questions the importance given to the visual spatialisation of language. He states: ‘A way of putting the thought here is to say that the particularity of words does not consist in their material or spatial integrity’ (p. 71). Cavell thus seems to want to say that words are not just things, as Derrida seems also to indicate. Cavell, however, resists the notion that this is because they are universals or generalisable forms (ghostly). Explicitly taking up Derrida’s identification of the signifying form as iterability, he writes: the iteration necessary to language comes from elsewhere – Wittgenstein pictures it rather as a continuation, or discrete continuability, knowing or seeing how to go on, but as if something is always over. The step creates the path as it relinquishes the path. The ‘recognition of recurrence,’ the form, comes from the place of the other, as it were from his or (surely) her resistance to and containing of the voice. (p. 74) We are back to the trace-erase-create as opposed to the typewriter. I would like to improvise a little with Cavell’s suggestion in the light of the former discussion. Thus, iteration is not only owed to the ‘narcissistic’ selfreferentiality of the sign, but to the non-spaced and momentary point of contact between consciousnesses. This point or line of contact is not just iteration but also that which keeps undoing and erasing the ‘itselfness’ of the sign due to what is greater than language, or any and every trace, and thus yields or desists from inscription. For every attempt at spatial fixing, there is in poetic writing an erasure, an automatic erasure of fixity towards freedom, a somatic-spirited washing away, a line of flight away from what enters time, so that the signs are also constantly ostending – gesturing at – what they cannot contain: flashes of the infinite in this

116

The philosophical type

or that creature, or ultimately the sea of being. In my view, poems do not want, so to speak, to be set down, to settle. They want to uproot every setting. They want to be brigand waves tearing away from us, vagabonds on the run. In the terms of this chapter, the poem does not wish to perform the theatricalisation of the self but give way to the voice of the other. Authenticity is therefore not to be sought in the interiority of the performative ‘I’ for the ‘I’ is an autobiographical fiction. But that does not mean that there is no authenticity to speak of. What that means is that you can only confess the other. Or, confession may be opened out onto bearing witness in a non-performative but ostensive manner. ‘I love you’. Those words are often said. But are they thereby citational? Are they a performance of self-enactment in which you or I theatrically constitute ourselves as ones who love, irrespective of whether we really mean this? Alternatively, when we say those words in an authentic way are we not revealing or confessing to the other not our inner beings, what comes from us, but the effect that the other has on us? It should be: ‘you, I love’; ‘you, so I love’. As such, the words would signify no one’s intention but point to an event beyond themselves. Love happens. It cannot be helped. I do not intend falling in love; and it is not the other forcing this situation either. And so, the words ‘I love you’ may announce an event they do not bring about. They but testify to or ostend it. The reality of the other may call forth our words, as that which is therefore not a performative event, for the performative event is one in which priority is given to the actualisation of the word. I had introduced the utterance ‘I love you’ into this consideration of the performative before reading Hillis Miller’s account of how Derrida devotes two unpublished seminars to the notion of ‘I love you’ or ‘Je t’aime’ as a performative utterance. Thus, it would seem that it is the utterance to attend to as potentially troubling for a universal declaration of the performative. Hillis Miller writes: ‘Derrida explores the phrase ‘‘Je t’aime’’ (‘‘I love you’’) as an exemplification of the speech-act theory he wants to put in place of Austin’s or Searle’s [ . . . ] The center of Derrida’s argument is the claim that ‘‘Je t’aime’’ is a performative’ (p. 134). Hillis Miller goes on to state that this claim rests on three suppositions. The first is that: ‘Though I have direct access to what I am thinking or feeling [ . . . ] no one else does. The presumption of the isolation of the separate ego is fundamental here’ (my emphasis, p. 135). Thus, the inner or private state of being in love cannot be revealed without a speech act. However, I have questioned if it is this kind of experience that is at stake, since it does not simply arise within us but comes to us by means of another. It may be that you or I find that, try as we might, we cannot hide the reality of being in love with someone precisely because it is not something happening behind the closed door of a separate ego. Second, Hillis Miller states that this secrecy of the ego brings with it the possibility: ‘that I may be lying or joking or citing someone else’ (p. 136). This assumes that ‘I love you’ is a voluntary act staged by the self and so could always be a mere act. That it can be this mere act does not mean that it always is given as such.

The philosophical type

117

Hillis Miller goes on to write: ‘Third presupposition: Like the Declaration of Independence, ‘‘Je t’aime’’ creates the event it names. What Derrida means here sounds quite scandalous: You do not fall in love until you say ‘‘Je t’aime’’’ (p. 137). He quotes Derrida, as follows: ‘‘‘Je t’aime’’ is not a description; it is the production of an event by means of which [ . . . ] I tend to affect the other [ . . . ]’ (p.137). My disagreement, as already indicated, is that the words ‘I love you’ may announce that which they do not bring about and constitute a confession of the other. It is not that speech acts cannot give rise to feelings but feelings are certainly not dependent on the priority of speech acts. Moreover, just saying ‘I love you’ might not create any feelings at all if no reality obtains. If the performative works to bracket off the ontological, how do you have feelings? And what has sexual difference to do with the ways in which ‘I love you’ might be said? What strikes me as interesting in Derrida’s approach to the amatory utterance as given by Hillis Miller is that, in contradistinction to my approach, he places emphasis on an ‘I’ staging an event to affect a ‘you’. Is there some ‘automatic’ or instinctive sexual difference in this? Derrida says: ‘I tend to affect the other’. Is intend slipped in here or not? Is this masculine in contradistinction to an emphasis on being impressed by the other? Would this be a felicitous complementarity? Earlier, I spoke of difficulties over terminology, specifically over the ‘automatic’. The term ‘intention’ also poses difficulties because it elides the difference between calculated intent and really meaning something in an affective sense. Austin bypasses the issue in dismissing the ‘backstage artiste’ of a consciousness behind the speech act, tellingly substituting ‘mind’ for ‘heart’ here. In speaking of ‘I love you’, Derrida states: ‘the enunciation is not effective in what is strictly speaking the enunciation, in a purely discursive manifestation [ . . . ] the body, intonation, and gesture are necessary, were it a breath [ . . . ] in any case something singular’ (p. 138). So, for authenticity’s sake, living consciousness is actually required: the very thing Derrida keeps denying in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ to discount what he sees as Austin’s failing. I am reading Derrida here through Hillis Miller’s presentation of his seminars on ‘Je t’aime’, and I am more generally troubled by Hillis Miller’s championing of Derrida’s exceptional status as regards the performative. Whilst I regard Hillis Miller as a highly astute reader of literary texts, his political reading of the performative seems to me to be a problematic one. What is disturbing about Hillis Miller’s approach is the way in which he admires a ‘forcefulness’ (p. 90) on the part of Derrida – stressed as ‘violent’ (pp. 68–9) – that he sees bound up with the ‘mystery of performative language’ (p. 90) to which Derrida has some strangely privileged access. (The reason that it is a ‘mystery’ is precisely because the performative brackets off reality, so how account for reality?) Here, Derrida is repeatedly praised for his ‘radically inaugural’ qualities which make his said ‘appropriation’ from Austin of the performative awesomely original, so much so as even to usher in a new historical epoch. Hillis Miller seems unaware of the arguments that Adorno puts forward in The Jargon of Authenticity concerning: the granting of a mystique to the technoperformative or instrumental and administrative power; the poeticising of the

118

The philosophical type

political; and the bestowing of an authoritative aura on language itself. In brief, Adorno sees fascism as inaugurated by the German intellectuals who were trying to imbue the inauthenticity of technologised, capitalist existence with a kind of mysterious – forceful, poetic – authenticity. Moreover, in Negative Dialectics he associates Heidegger with a transference of authenticity to language, stating: ‘Heidegger’s procedure [ . . . ] is a ‘‘Teutonizing cabbalism,’’ in Scholem’s phrase. He treats historic languages as if they were those of Being.’39 Hillis Miller repeatedly bemoans Austin’s beholdeness to the law, the police, legality and legitimacy. While it is possible that Austin’s emphasis on law and order is rather old-fashioned, there are serious questions at stake where Cavell believes that Austin’s work is informed by his resistance to fascism. Historically speaking, it can be terrifying when the law fails to operate effectively as the law. For instance, in apartheid South Africa the police would beat up Africans where, helplessly, there was no police to be called on against this. In contradistinction to Austin’s interest in the effectiveness of the law, what Hillis Miller praises in Derrida’s own deployment of the performative is that Derrida knows how to be a law unto himself. This is what Hillis Miller writes: Derrida’s concept of the radically inaugural quality of performatives, discussed in detail below, means that for him each performative utterance to some degree creates its own new conditions and laws [ . . . The] wholly other authorizes and endorses the performatives that Derrida utters. (p. 96) So, the absolute mystery of the wholly (holy?) other speaks through Derrida, him especially we are to understand, so as to authorise his ability to make the law performatively without being beholden to the kind of socially conventional law and order that Austin tediously insists on? But, seriously, is that not authoritarianism as defined by Adorno? Hillis Miller writes: ‘Far from separating poetry from history, politics and social life, as the New Criticism is said to do, Derrida, as I shall show, sees in the force iterability has to enter history the chance for a new ethics and a new politics’ (p. 106). Hillis Miller also writes: ‘Derrida’s new conception of politics and ethics depends on a reversal of speech-act theory whereby the performative utterance creates the conventions it needs in order to be efficacious, rather than depending on their prior existence for their felicity’ (p. 112). That is, this form of performativity makes the law without being subject to the law. Hillis Miller discusses Derrida’s lecture ‘Declarations of Independence’. The Declaration of Independence is said to be ‘radically inaugural’ and ‘radically initiatory’ where independence is riskily declared to found an autonomy. Hillis Miller refers to this ‘self-generating act’ as ‘magical’ and he states the following of the American Declaration of Independence: The Declaration of Independence creates the law by which it acts rather than depending on preexisting rules [ . . . ] From Austin’s perspective the Declaration of Independence is hideously infelicitous, like naming a great

The philosophical type

119

new British war ship the Joseph Stalin. It ought not to have worked but it did. (pp. 125–6) However, how would this sound if instead of referring to the American Declaration of Independence we were to refer to the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. Regarding this event, Ian Smith, the right wing Prime Minster, declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain in order to reject historical progression to majority rule and to maintain a politics of racism that fuelled a civil war. Everything that Hillis Miller says about the American and Derridean Declarations of Independence would apply to Smith’s Declaration of Independence where Smith’s political party instituted its radical autonomy, becoming a law unto itself. Because Hillis Miller denies any context outside the performative he, unlike Austin, would have no way of discriminating between felicitous and infelicitous declarations of independence. Are there not possibilities of agreement over what would constitute justice concerning various declarations of independence beyond the self-validating event? What distinguishes the American Declaration from the Rhodesian Declaration concerns rather differing appeals to the ontological, namely, equality or nonequality and liberty or non-liberty of beings. Leaving aside a critique of the limitations of the American appeal to equality and liberty in its historical context, I, and presumably others, would want to say that the Rhodesian Declaration based itself on the wrong construction, one of assumed inequality between races with respect to freedom, where such a construction could not be taken as self-validating precisely because of its wrongness, however effective as a performative act. A performative construction of inequality and a performative construction of equality would function in just the same way as self-actualising performatives, but we would still need to question whether they are true to our sense of a reality outside the performative act of auto-legitimacy. In addition, and perhaps more pertinently, the assertion of Rhodesian independence on a European racial basis can be seen at odds with the reality of dependence on African labour. Hillis Miller does refer to apartheid as something we may wish to protest against unconditionally, precisely as regards its violation of something that may be more universal than just this or that performative. Where the American Declaration appeals to a God of Nature for validation, as mocked by Hillis Miller as a construction, he substitutes what he calls ‘the unconditional’. How does the unconditional differ from the rejected appeals to the real or the ontological exactly? Drawing on Derrida, Hillis Miller speaks of the unconditional in terms of the ‘wholly other’, ‘the outside the inside’ and in terms of ‘the light of day’, as given in Blanchot’s ‘La folie du jour’ and that I discussed in the previous chapter in terms of radiance. What troubles me in Hillis Miller’s reading is that the special kind of performativity he associates with Derrida is accorded a sacred and creative aura as the real is included within the performative as opposed to there being an acknowledgement of the real beyond the performative. This leads to ‘the immense accretion of force, the immense jouissance, that would result’ (p. 103).

120

The philosophical type

Whilst I think that Adorno is much too extreme in his rejection of the poetic per se, what I would draw attention to, as I have been doing so, is his critique of the inauthenticity of a fetishising of language itself – what he calls a metaphysics of language – as would accord language a mysterious self-authoring power. Adorno writes: ‘Once the original theological image has fallen, transcendence, which in the great religions is separated from the likeness by powerful taboos – thou shalt have no graven images of me – is shifted to the likeness. The image is then said to be full of wonder, since wonders no longer exist.’40 Whilst Hillis Miller’s arguments may work in favour of a Derrida whose risks might not frighten us but impress us, how would they guard against, say, the appeals of others to a divine sense of the unconditional in accordance with a performative power of breaking with existing laws to create a law/war machine that would be its own condition? Even if our answers remain perplexed and uncertain, we need to go on asking what legitimates a performative politics and to do this with reference to a collective existence that is always beyond the scope of the performative. In spite of Hillis Miller’s reading, I remain rather uncertain of the extent to which Derrida does seek to combine a creative jouissance (of the real) with the performative (spectral and machinic) for the latter sometimes seems to be set up against the former. With the above observation, there are two further texts by Derrida that it would be particularly useful to take some note of before concluding. First, Derrida has a brief essay on the poetic that serves to take up the question of the heartfelt in relation to the iterable, ‘Che cos’e` la poesia?’41 It is written: ‘I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning’ (p. 223). With this, Derrida allows for two, at least two, nonetheless two possibly incompatible meanings of a learning by heart. The poem is that which may be learnt by heart, mechanically, and it is that which may convey itself to the heart or affective consciousness. The mechanical and the affective, or even sacred, are either co-allowed or they are implied to be at one. What is striking is that the poem appears much stressed as a visual phenomenon, ‘right before your eyes’ beseeching ‘look at me’, being the track of sound rather than sound, and ‘the photograph’. It is as if the dictation is a writing down, a setting down, with the ghostly effects of the wake and mourning. What is strangely not explicitly addressed is the relation of poetry to the oral and to the musical. This difficulty may be broached through Derrida’s collaboration with the architect, Eiseman on Choral Work, where Eisenman felt a frustration over finding Derrida’s approach to be highly writerly and visual rather than non-verbal and musical. Derrida’s subtle response is: I perceive myself as writing in a discursive form which is analagous to the architecture of which I dream, an architecture that has been both repressed and forbidden. How can I begin to describe this architecture which I know

The philosophical type

121

of, but do not yet know? At least I can say that within it architecture and music agree. That is why I was particularly happy that Peter and I were able to work together under the sign of ‘choral work’ and further that he accepted my desire for the musical instrument, the lyre, to become emblematic.42 For the writerly consciousness, music may be the repressed, as Walter Benjamin also gives us to understand in his treatment of lyric poetry.43 The writerly form might then act as the liar to the lyre, the music of which would be ever fleeing and fleeting. The same sound would be heard from two different forms, ‘liar’ and ‘lyre’, thus not locatable in either. What interests me is that with regard to this Derrida does, in this particular instance, posit this elusive music as beyond every trace and yet as ‘not nothing’. Derrida goes on to address the poem as a hedgehog, rolled up into a ball, beside itself, at once exposed, defensive and secretive; a mysterious yet very humble creature, close to the earth. Here, the poem is that which in its exposure would also seem not to like to be looked at; it bristles at being looked at? It would appear like both a martyred scapegoat, spears stuck into it from all sides, and that which detracts from itself by sending out its lines, its signposts, in every direction away from its threatened existence. Derrida places his hedgehog-poem on an autoroute. Is this strictly necessary? He wants it to be on a voyage, a road between nature and nature: the earth we come from and the earth we are going to. Could this not be a path or pavement, if it cannot just be wandering wildly; does it have to be a roadway? As the riddle has it: why did the hedgehog cross the road? To see its flatmate . . . What I want to know, therefore, is does the hedgehog-poem survive and in what way does it survive? Is iteration its survival or its death? Does it survive as a wake, as tracks, as run over by some mechanical drive; does it survive as a compressed form? Is it a virtual hedgehog, a cartoon hedgehog: splat! Or, does it survive through evading all this? Does it survive because it goes from heart to heart without any mediatory traces, any such stepping stones or drawbridges being destroyed as soon as the crossover occurs, like Wittgenstein’s discarded ladder? Derrida speaks of the poem in both respects – as visual tracks and as something in retreat. The poem would seem to welcome quite antithetical receptions of it. It could make us think of Schro¨dinger’s cat, the cat in his famous thought experiment that is both dead and alive. In other words, the poem partakes of a rather mystical condition of non-duality. Yet in Schro¨dinger’s experiment, it is precisely mechanical measurement that would determine the cat as either dead or as alive. Its combination of being and non-being, this potentiality, would precede the machine. Whilst there are certain points to be affirmed in what is said about the poetic in Derrida’s essay, my pressing question is: how mechanical is the poem? It is true that poetry can rely on a certain mechanical measure as aids memorisation or a learning by heart. ‘Thirty days has September, April, June and November.’ But is it not also that we distrust a poetry that is too mechanical, too regularised, that marches to a standardised beat. This can come across as bad, jingle-like

122

The philosophical type

poetry, as political slogans – ‘oh no, we won’t go / we won’t fight for Texaco’ – or as a frightening incitement to pounding force. The metre and rhyme of Blake’s ‘Tyger’ is very regular in keeping with the striped symmetry of the tiger-poem. Yet Blake is clearly troubled by this. Hear the misgivings in the following stanza: What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?44 The mechanical regularisation of the beat produces something that is very close to a forceful beating. What is frightening and disturbing about this stanza is how Blake infuses it with the thumping violence of a bludgeoning rhythm that suggests the possibility of murder or rape. Blake uses the mechanising of energy to produce directional force in order to ask us if the potential violence of this is compatible with creativity. Although Blake writes mechanically in this poem, it is because that is his poetic subject on this occasion not because he implies that poetry is mechanical. The opening stanza of ‘London’ is very different, as can be heard. I wander through each chartered street Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.45 I selected this stanza for the attention given to the mark and the iterable. In spite of that, the rhythm of the poem is incredibly fluid and yielding. It flows sweetly through you beneath any possible mark, beat or trace. Blake manages to sustain something precious in the voice or music that can never be visually captured: it flows from what he loves to those who hear – and it has to be hear – the poem’s liquid, limpid moving music. It is as if the over-insistent marks and charters are a violation of the sacredness of the lives of the oppressed, of the unbroken stream that flows through all of us. Derrida’s mnemotechnic of a learning by heart is actually taken from Plato, as not cited or unmentioned by him. Forget Plato? Well, it comes from Plato’s Second Letter where Plato writes: ‘It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed.’46 This would seem to concern a mystical knowledge. Presumably, the minute you try to set it down in written form, this becomes a double betrayal: a formalisation that allows for it to be appropriated and possibly faked. Plato asks that his letter be burnt. We will never know if Plato really meant this or not although we know that Plato was ascetically wary of poetic impostures, even (Adorno-like), of poetry as imposture. There is much that may be considered pertinent in Derrida’s treatment of the hedgehog-poem. I do think it pertains to a certain non-duality, for instance, of

The philosophical type

123

that which is both exposed to view and unreadable, of that which is vulnerable yet invulnerable; of that which is lowly and earthly yet mysterious and sacred; of that which is heartfelt, at the heart, without the heart being at the heart, the inner centre. Yet, I continue to have reservations about the mechanising of life and certainly over the notion of the mechanical as sacred. My feeling is that non-duality really does not extend to this and that we need to be sceptical about this. The attempt to bring together the mechanical and the real risks a violent forcing together of the incompatible. The other text by Derrida that I would like to refer to briefly is ‘Racism’s Last Word.’47 In this essay, written to accompany an art exhibition mounted as an anti-apartheid protest, Derrida does take seriously the capacity of art to bear witness, to be a testimony, or, as considered in this chapter, to be a confession of the other. The whole point of the exhibition is that event of apartheid is not framed by the art works but stands outside them as a reality beyond them. Thus, the works point to an event that is irreducible to its mentionability or iterability: it is both something that has to be mentioned and is unspeakable in its reality. Derrida appears in fact to seek to divest the very word ‘apartheid’ of its iterability, since he seeks to posit it as an eventually unrepeatable word. However, here, Derrida falls into a performative turn that, in Austin’s terms, we could possibly call infelicitous. He starts to play with the term ‘apartheid’. Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon wrote an impassioned critique of Derrida’s essay, seeing him as a textualist philosopher failing to take into account the historicity of the term ‘apartheid’ together with South African history.48 Derrida responded with an equally impassioned defence of his position.49 Without going into all the detailed arguments offered on both sides, I do not think that this debate perhaps quite got to the crux of the matter. While McClintock and Nixon register an offence over Derrida’s supposed lack of historical engagement, I think the real offence may lie in the wrong pitch of the philosophical voice on the occasion in question, that is to say, a failure of tone not of historical commitment. Derrida writes: ‘APARTHEID – may that remain the name from now on, the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many’, and he goes on to draw out the various resonances of ‘last’ and ‘apartheid’.50 To some, the appeal to take ‘apartheid’ as the ‘last word’ in racism could come across as perplexing as it would be to hear of the Holocaust spoken of as the ‘dernier cri in holocausts’, the most ‘burning all of holocausts’. That is, there are some things we should hesitate to engage with in that overly mannered manner. It is not that Derrida lacks seriousness as regards South African history but that the flamboyance of his approach on the occasion in question is a bit at odds with the horror he clearly registers and opposes. What is unfortunate is that the excitement around Derrida’s twirling deployment of the word ‘apartheid’ leads to the neglect of what is genuinely useful for postcolonial criticism in the essay, the emphasis on the ostensive dimension of the art work together with the notion that art can constitute a rallying cry. And, regarding the performative, what McClintock and Nixon fail to address in their historical approach to apartheid is that apartheid is that which instituted itself precisely through performative

124

The philosophical type

measures. The social process of apartheid instituted and legitimated itself through a whole series of laws – the Natives Land Act, the Bantu Education Act, the Immorality Amendment Act, the Group Areas Act, and so on – where these linguistic acts performatively realised themselves to achieve a racist society. Derrida points out this thoroughly juridical construction of apartheid society, and so the further remark could be: a most seriously infelicitous use of the performative? In Rogues, written towards the end of his career, Derrida offers a brief and unexplained retraction of his previous widespread insistence on the performative event. He states: ‘Now, just like the constative, it seems to me, the performative cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce.’51 This volte face, if so, is said to be due to the performative as involving ‘a calculable mastery’: intentionality, therefore? Machination as not so automatic after all? However, could Derrida adequately account for the difference between his tacitly revised view of the performative and the event without actually admitting to what deconstruction seems often to bracket off: not least, the real or the other side of writing? Herman Rapaport offers a significant opening in his essay ‘Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Jacques Derrida’. He argues that Trinh’s Zen-like work allows for: ‘something to come in the wake of deconstruction that others have not seen, namely, a certain return of metaphysics on the hither side of deconstruction’s dismantlings.’52 This concerns not the deconstruction of masculine presence but the voices of maternal ancestors that manage to persist as present. This persistence constitutes: ‘the Other of deconstruction but also of that constructivist, antiessentialist mentality whereby one negotiates or performs one’s identity within a heterogenous social body.’53 Rapaport’s apt understanding of the otherness of Trinh is that it concerns a ‘letting go’ and a sense of the collective. The next chapter will take such considerations further. Since Austin has got rather left behind in all this, even as so much is owed to him, I will end with a fairy-tale letter, though one not unmeant for being that. Dear Austin Austin – your surname sounds as if it could be a first name so it feels like a friendly intimacy to address you in this way whilst retaining respect. I am writing to you because I have been reading with some interest the squabbles over your philosophical legacy. The funny thing is that there does not seem to be much substance to the disagreements. The disagreements are a bit manufactured, produced, as if the heirs want to fight for fighting’s sake. I do not think it is a father-son thing. I do not think you are the king to be deposed. No, there is too much of a familiar kind of excitement in their clashes. As a woman, I sort of recognise it – the tone and pitch of guys fighting each other over a would-be love object. It’s you, Austin. I think they all want to marry you. I don’t mean literally, of course, no offence. I think that the Frenchman wants to marry you for French thought, the Englishman for

The philosophical type English thought and the American for American thought. It sounds like a joke without a punchline. Actually it is possibly a secret joke, wink. I mean, I have to ask you this, confidentially, in a low voice: were you just playing at being a philosopher? After all, as I know, a person has got to make a living somehow. It seems to me that you’re the sort of fellow who would rather be sitting in a cafe´ watching the world go by. You are, I find, so observant of the quotidian details of life, ordinary life. You notice all the odd things that we say on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes you seem quirky because you notice all our quirks. Yet, you’re a regular guy with a manner at once so casual and so precise. Apropos of this, and apropos of that, with a wave of the hand. I’d love to go strolling around my town with you. You’d make me stop and see the things I pass by everyday, not really seeing them because I take them for granted. You’d make the world come back to me. Well, you see, that’s your magic. You just show us what we take so much for granted; we suddenly see the familiar not as unfamiliar, not as strange, but precisely as familiar. Ah, it’s you, family! And with this we silly humans become so beloved in our foibles, in the difficulties we have meaning what we say, saying what we mean, doing what we say, saying what we’re doing. We slip up all the time and sometimes you frown but you don’t scold. You know we can’t help it. And in spite of all these slips, you’re so precise. You know, Austin, now that I feel at ease with you, I think I can tell you that you sometimes remind me of a donkey I once knew. Yes, Austin, you and donkeys. I am very fond of these creatures and this donkey that I mention was one that I rode down a rocky Greek hillside one moonlit night. I was mesmerised by this donkey’s concentrated and unfailing precision that was somehow both entirely automatic and entirely knowing at once. It knew exactly where to place its firm neat hooves, as if everything were pre-arranged and quite spontaneous at once. It was the most deliberate and nonchalent of steppings, beguiling, I’d call it. This donkey made me feel very connected and safe. We were in the world together and although the ground was quite rocky and steep it was unquestionably solid. So we shouldn’t be fighting over you, mate. You’re our chance for some crossChannel, trans-Atlantic solidarity. But, perhaps we’d need to say, if you don’t mind, that philosophy stops being philosophy when you’re around. It becomes instead a newborn curiosity in this oh-so-familiar world. So, what I really wanted to say to you was thanks for writing. I think we love you. From a member of the Marxist-feminist writing collective.

125

5

The other of the confession Women of Zimbabwe

Oh, was I ever going to function in the new Zimbabwe, if I couldn’t go to the necessary lengths, stop letting people put their names to what in the end was mine! Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not1 It is as though the ontology of the world were very feminine, an ontology of permissivity, an ontology of possibility. Francisco Varela, ‘Le cerveau n’est pas un ordinateur’2

Poor Marion. Marion? The servant, of course, whom Rousseau wronged. She is the real other of the confession. She was not able to pass her story on in any way that reached us, and yet – sooner or later – the stories of the oppressed may find their way into print. Such a disclosure is not a matter of a deferred and rather machine-like determinism, as Derrida implies with respect to the philosophical confession, but of what may perserveringly find a way of evading the technologies of a colonising dialectic, a dialectic of ‘genre-lisation’ or generalisation. What has been proposed so far concerning an ethics of non-appropriation needs to be re-addressed. An ethics of the feminine may differ from an ethics of the masculine. An ethics of the colonised may differ from an ethics of the coloniser. This is what is to be explored in this chapter by means of a reading of novels by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera. As indicated in the first chapter, an affirmation of collective spirit becomes farcically inauthentic or redundant in certain situations. A capitalist might say to a labourer, ‘let us call your labour not mine as your boss, but ours, ours, in a socialist spirit.’ It would obviously be ridiculous. The coloniser might say to the colonised, ‘this is our land’, as would be empty performative rhetoric without it being a lived reality. A plagiarist might try to persuade the one plagiarised from, ‘you think I appropriated your work, but there’s no such thing as an author, it’s all ours, our work now.’ My general point is the ethics of the owners may significantly differ from the ethics of the dispossessed. Interestingly, the very act of theft often establishes, inaugurates something as the other’s – not the thief ’s – possession. For instance, the appropriation of land that constituted the country ‘Rhodesia’ was instantaneously the very act that constituted a ‘Zimbabwe’ for Zimbabweans. Possessiveness or colonisation of the other is automatically

Women of Zimbabwe

127

accompanied by its instantaneous redoublement: re-possessiveness of the dispossessed. It creates an oppositional politics unintentionally, unavoidably and perhaps uncontrollably. Of this too, you can say it happens. It happens suddenly, at once. And it just might blow up in your face. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s work serves to address a number of the questions introduced above. I wish to concentrate on her recent novel, The Book of Not, with respect to questions of both theatrical or ironic performativity and questions of reality.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not It just might blow up in your face without any warning. That is how it starts. The first line of The Book of Not is: ‘Up, up, up, the leg spun’ (p. 3). You are seeing something that you should never see, namely: ‘A piece of person, up there in the sky’ (p. 3). You do not know why this is happening just that it is happening. The leg lands in a tree. A girl lies bleeding on the ground. We learn that the leg is the leg of Netsai, the sister of the novel’s narrator, Tambudzai Sigauke. The novel is set during the war of liberation, and it begins with a meeting in the bush between villagers and comrades, Vakoma, the guerrillas involved in propagating the revolution through politicising campaigns. This particular meeting has been called for the disciplining of Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, who has been deemed a sell out due to his role as a headmaster in the Rhodesian educational system. Babamukuru is the benefactor of Tambu whom he has been supporting in her quest for a European education. The comrades, presumably illiterate or semiliterate, regard education as a form of Europhile assimilation and thus as symptomatic of complicity with the oppressor. Whilst that is how education presents itself on an ideological level, there are other factors to consider. There is the factor of envy, as Tambu notes of her downtrodden and illiterate mother who both desires and resents the economic support of Babamukuru. There is also the question of psychological inferiorisation. A short story, ‘That Special Place’ by the Zimbabwean writer, Freedom Nyamubaya, reveals how a university educated female comrade is abused and raped by an illiterate male colleague in a guerrilla training camp.3 We realise that the reason for this fighter’s resentful, vengeful behaviour is his secret sense of inferiority in the face of the formally educated. The Book of Not is the sequel to Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. A reader of the earlier novel already understands how formal education is everything to both Babamukuru and Tambu since it constitutes a liberation from a life of rural toil and a means of entering into a world ripe in potential for self-realisation within a self-enlarging cosmopolitan arena. Tambu watches her uncle being brutally beaten by the comrades for being considered, nonetheless mistakenly, a sell out. Then she witnesses her sister, who has joined the comrades, arrive at the meeting to have her leg blown off, just like that. Why though? Who knows? It is, after all, war time. These things happen. You could always step on a mine. All the reader is told is that Netsai, Tambu’s sister, steps on the earth and there is an explosion. Then, just after this night of terrible but not uncommon violence, Tambu goes back to school to resume her educational quest.

128

Women of Zimbabwe

Most of the novel concerns Tambu’s adolescent years at the ‘multi-racial’, although mainly European, private school, Sacred Heart, to which she has won a scholarship. Sacred Heart seems to constitute a kind of safe haven from the war, which nonetheless sustains a constant reminder of itself in the background. Although the idyll of Sacred Heart is not without blemish, all Tambu’s yearnings and desires are concentrated on her goal of excelling in her educational progress. In this respect, the novel offers us a detailed observation of technologies of the self that are played out in a specific institutional context. When I first read Nervous Conditions, it struck me as something of a Foucauldian novel in its attention to the middle class performativity of the self,4 and The Book of Not seems to me perhaps even more Foucauldian in certain of its affinities, particularly in the context of this book with the attention that has been given to Foucault’s approach to enlightenment in the second chapter. As addressed, Tambu does not join the ranks of the oppressed, the comrades, alongside her sister, with the battle lines clearly drawn up between African and European. Foucault controversially jettisons the oppressor/oppressed model in favour of a micro-politics of power in which power is not merely seen as oppression but as a potential site of production. Part of Dangarembga’s novel occupies such a space whilst I would argue that it also goes beyond it through enabling a critique of the limitations of mobility within such confinements. Nonetheless, for the moment, the reader is given detailed observations of how Tambu endeavours to situate herself in a micro-political world in which she seeks to accommodate herself productively to its structures of discipline, legitimation and self-authorisation. Tambu’s main and intensive preoccupation may be said to be a highly self-conscious self-fashioning in tandem with an ever anxious monitoring of the expectations, regulations and conventions maintained by those overseers of her environment, namely, the teacher-nuns, the omnipresent matron and the veiled panoptic headmistress, with various more distant authorities behind them. In addition, Tambu actively regulates her behaviour in accordance with her fellow pupils who also set standards to compete with. For example, she reflects: Average simply did not apply; I had to be absolutely outstanding or nothing. So I worked hard from my very first year at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, devising exercises and strategies to make me good at paying attention, at remembering every word from teacher’s mouth, and not just the words but the inflections too, so that I knew what was important and reproduced each teacher’s peculiar inflection at examinations. [ . . . ] In order to encourage more hard work in myself, I set myself a goal. I then set my sights, as a sort of landmark on beating the girl before me, this Tracey Stevenson. (p. 26) Thus, whilst the scene of learning is highly ritualistic, Tambu participates in it in an active and self-aware manner. Since she is our heroine, and since she is so full of striving as well as an underdog in class-racial terms, the reader is placed

Women of Zimbabwe

129

in a position of willing her success as well. However, we become conscious of a certain fissuring in the narrative, increasingly alerted to the fact that, in spite of it being a first person narrative, the text does not simply take place within the consciousness of Tambu, our heroine. Various forms of ironic consciousness begin to obtrude as slips and failures disrupt the would-be effectiveness of the performative fac¸ade. For instance, when Tambu comes across A Grain of Wheat, she refers to it as by some ‘poor Bongo in the Congo, a starving Kenyan author’ (p. 117), where of course Dangarembga would mischievously be aware of the crudity of this ignorant dismissal of Ngˇugˇi in ways that Tambu is not. Moreover, earlier on in the novel, we are able to register a certain persistent disdain in Tambu’s attitude to her fellow African schoolmates. Here, she prides herself on her superior background when she muses: ‘Now, I had to be here when I had received proper training at my uncle’s! Oh, I felt another surge of dislike for the other girls in my dormitory!’ (p. 71). This ‘surge of dislike’ is, you can hear, tempered by a certain note of flouncing Campness although you are not sure if this comes from Tambu, the fictional character, or Dangarembga, the writer listening to her fictional creation. At the same time, it is possible to notice that some girls drop hints in Tambu’s presence such as Anastasia’s ‘our trouble is people who don’t know anything, who think they know everything, but when you look, you see there isn’t anything’ (p. 70). You begin to realise that Tambu’s sense of her perfectibility places her in a position of unpopularity with other girls. In addition, the reader is able to observe how the ever-conforming and self-controlling Tambu cannot help slipping up and getting into trouble, thus revealing a streak of unrepressed rebelliousness or real spirit that renders her at odds with herself. Tambu has her own ironic consciousness in that she is aware of her performance as precisely a performance, the manufacturing of a self calculated to win approval. However, as touched on, the narrative deploys different consciousnesses beyond this, not only those of other characters, but that of a writerly consciousness scrutinising Tambu as she scrutinises itself which adds further dimensions of irony. Whilst Foucault maintains that his self-producing dandy is not so much heroic as ironic, as considered in the second chapter, there is yet a sense that this figure remains suavely in control of any self-undercutting and the theatre of how the self is presented. You imagine the dandy is not particularly at risk from the vulnerability of being upstaged or decentred by the realities of others. Put another way, Foucault’s self-fashioning narcissist, of which Tambu is a certain kind of counterpart, does not seem threatened by the painful farcicality or absurdity of a world riven with contradictions and ‘nots’. In the context of The Book of Not, however hard you try to play the game all-knowingly as a game, sometimes you just cannot win. Tambu discovers that trying too hard to better herself is perceived to be her failure. When she receives her school report, whilst she has done very well academically, her overall performance meets with disapproval from the headmistress whose report states: Tambudzai has a complex. This makes it difficult for her to adapt to the spirit of the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart. She believes she is

130

Women of Zimbabwe above convent rules designed for the welfare of the pupils [ . . . ] If she is not happy here, perhaps it is best to remove her. Constantly she wears a supercilious expression. (p. 89)

In spite of the hints the reader has received in the narrative, it comes as something of a surprise to read so strong a statement. Tambu, the first person narrator on whom we depend, is certainly unprepared for the report’s harsh criticism of her. What, then, are these ‘convent rules’ that our generally ruleobserving Tambu has so badly transgressed? This question will be returned to. More immediately, Tambu reacts to this situation with a sense of shame and through reminding herself of a crucial African ethical philosophy known as unhu, one that encourages an ethos of how people should behave towards each other. As the glossary to the The Book of Not notes, there is no satisfactory translation of unhu that can be given. Not only is it one of those terms that you have to acquire a cultural feel for, it may be said to refer to precisely a non-iterable quality. That is, it is exactly that which cannot be reduced to any kind of moral precept, maxim or norm. Nonetheless, certain things can be said about it. I should like to propose that it might be considered to be a kind of dialectic within African philosophy that is distinctly different from Hegelian dialectic. Hegelian dialectic might be said to be the self-realisation of spirit through the driven and impossible attempt to assimilate otherness. As regards unhu, it is much closer to Buddhism and Taoism with respect to the question of facilitating an overall or holistic creativity through mindfulness or knowing how to respond to the other. It concerns not the singularity of spirit relentlessly turning the other into more of the selfsame, as Hardt and Negri present the dialectic of Empire, but the non-teleological call-and-response rhythms of collective spirit. Whereas Kant’s categorical imperative enjoins us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves, the imperative of unhu is to treat others how they might like to be treated. In fact, I think what underlies the philosophy is the sense that selfbased behaviour is what disrupts the harmony of the collective. You do not presume that the other will desire the same as you. Thus, there are no laws for this ethos for it depends on the ever-ready and responsive fine-tuning of yourself to the changing states of others. That is its dialectical agility. Shona greetings referred to at several places in the text convey this flexible adjustability that puts you in sympathy or in tune with others. For instance, we are offered the following: ‘‘‘How are you?’’ ‘‘I am well if you are well too!’’ That is how people with unhu greeted each other’ (p. 123). Ashis Nandy’s conclusion to The Intimate Enemy has some relevance for why Tambu directs her attention to African philosophy when she finds herself isolated by her European education. Nandy writes: The argument is that when psychological and cultural survival is at stake, polarities [ . . . ] do break down and become partially irrelevant, and the directness of the experience of suffering and spontaneous resistance to it come through at all planes. When this happens, there emerges in the victim

Women of Zimbabwe

131

of a system a vague awareness of the larger whole which transcends the system’s categories and/or stands them on their head. Thus, the victim may become aware that, under oppression, the parochial could protect some forms of universalism more successfully than does conventional universalism; that the spiritualism of the weak may articulate or keep alive the values of a non-oppressive world better than the ultra-materialism of those who live in vision-less worlds [ . . . ].5 Tambu, accused of egocentric exceptionalism thus turns to the antithesis of this in reminding herself of unhu. However, she is caught within a web of ideological contradictions, in particular, between the African ethos based on avowing the ontological whole and the over-determined colonial ethos of the School. On the one hand, the school is there to serve the highly competitive culture of exam results determined by examination boards in England, and here individual achievement is everything. On the other hand, the school is caught up in preparing future citizens for national belonging, and thus has the responsibility of inculcating a team spirit. It is in the latter respect that Tambu seems to displease the headmistress and this reveals that team spirit is considered to be a cultural priority. What I mean is that it has to be learnt before you try to excel at playing the game: it is a levelling precondition for playing the game. Team spirit in Western terms is not comparable to unhu but, if anything, a contracted and actually one-sided substitute for it. Western team spirit, so to speak, would seem to be based on a capitalist ‘democratic’ model of standardisation and abstract exchange value: you’re all the same (subjects/men) and so each one, ‘chacun’ (the term Derrida repeatedly draws attention to) can substitute for each one. In addition, the national belonging being prepared for (Rhodesian) may be considered on the model of an army, and this is not at all a random suggestion given that Tambu’s schooling is placed in close proximity to an ongoing war. The schoolchildren are indeed being prepared to take their place in a country at war. The structure of the army may be said to depend on a singularising homogenisation of being that is based on the principle of the defence of the general Self, the phantasmatic ‘I’. What I am trying to bring out, perhaps controversially, is this: what Derrida writes of in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ is implicitly militaristic. The philosophical confession is a self-defence of what is to survive in the general ‘I’ of the on-going ‘war machine’, as Derrida calls it. And, all this is a matter of ‘Limited Inc.’ You go to war not for collective harmony, of course, but for a company, for a battalion, for the profits of your economic investment, your future inheritance, and so on. The logic of what I have spoken of above plays itself out through the impasse upon impasse of the rest of the novel. This is part of the entire learning process of the novel as carefully signalled in the following reflection: Unhu, as we knew it required containing [from ‘furious emotions’], and even negotiating and renegotiating passion. So, little could be done in a situation where negotiation was not practicable. Then you came up against a pane,

132

Women of Zimbabwe as of glass, through which you saw unhu was dysfunctional. There was a reason for this dysfunctionality, obscure to me then, which was the key to the philosophy itself. In a phrase, this was the principle of reciprocity. Unhu did not function unless the other person was practising unhu also. Without reciprocation, unhu could not function. (p. 119)

Thus, it is useless to practise unhu in a world of competitive individualism based on an abstract logic of hierarchised sameness, or amongst those whom you cannot trust, or in relation to those who lack the necessary capacity for empathetic responsiveness to otherness. What is also significant in the above is that we are made aware that the co-operativeness of unhu is something that Tambu has to learn through her experiences. There is a temporal disjunction signified by the phrase ‘obscure to me then’. As in the case of Nervous Conditions, there is a discrepancy between a young Tambu with her forward moving trajectory and the perspective of a narration that has a retrospective understanding of the story. It is unusual for this gap to be foregrounded in the narrative, so the fact that it occurs in the above passage serves to alert the reader to the consideration that the novel is particularly concerned with the morality of the gradual coming to terms with unhu through lived experience. Sadly, mistakenly, Tambu tries to perpetuate her early affirmation of the spirit of unhu, in an environment not really suited to it. She shows her team spirit with or her solidarity for the Rhodesian war effort by taking up knitting for it. Ideally, collective spirit should extend to both sides but the irony is, of course, that war is definitely not a site for reciprocal sentiments. In fact, Tambu’s knitting for the Rhodesian war effort serves to counter unhu in that it provokes considerable anxiety amongst African pupils afraid that she will be seen as a sell out, with all the violence attendant on such a judgement. Tambu is thus caught between incompatible ethical possibilities. It is worth noting that the discrepancy between the self-centred and singularising ethos of the European community and the other-consciousness of the African community is similarly registered by Stanlake Samkange in his novel, The Mourned One (1968), a novel that also treats of European education in the years before Independence, although at a Rhodesian Mission school rather than private school. The novel’s protagonist reflects: There was something about the African community that I never detected in the European community in which I lived at Waddilove [ . . . ] a code of behaviour, an attitude to life and to other people; perhaps something embodied in the Shona ‘unhu’ or the Sindebele ‘ubuntu’, ‘humanness’ or ‘personness’. The same thing, I believe, which black men in America call ‘soul’.6 The two novels would thus seem to corroborate each other, and it may be further observed that they have similar implications as regards failures of accommodation. Tambu goes on to sit her ‘O’ level examinations, obtaining seven first class grades amounting to the best result in the school. She believes that this will secure her a triumph long dreamed of, namely, the winning of a silver trophy and the

Women of Zimbabwe

133

lasting recognition of the inscription of her name on the cup and in the school honours archives. However, when the prizes are announced, the prize for best results goes to a European pupil, Tracey, Tambu’s intellectual rival. It is thus revealed that school team spirit, as opposed to unhu, depends on implicit rules of standardisation and genre-lisation: you have to be European to compete and to win. The Book of Not serves to challenge, however, the version of the failure of colonial mimicry offered by Homi Bhabha. In the case analysed by Bhabha, the native fails and disturbs in being like the white man but not quite, as is clearly valid for certain situations.7 In Tambu’s case, however, she is indistinguishable from the cre`me de la cre`me of European pupils. Her exam scripts are marked anonymously in England and she emerges as not an inadequate or deformed copy of a European subject, thus disrupting the norm, but as culturally and intellectually no different from the highest performing European subjects. What is categorically withheld is the recognition of her own performance for reasons outside the performance, outside the text, and this constitutes a refusal of recognition that is so irrational that no explanation whatsoever is given or can plausibly be offered. This predicament reveals that the ideology of the performative, one of achievement or effectiveness, is not limited to the performance per se, as Austin indeed argues. There is always the further question of what validates the performance as effective, legitimate, felicitous, and so on. Here, it may be conjectured that unsaid ontological prejudices and anxieties may govern the epistemological performative sphere. The experience of this injustice is deeply demoralising as it affects Tambu’s capacity to strive as she once did. In addition, on taking science subjects at ‘A’ level she is assigned to a government school for tuition where, since the government school is not multi-racial, she is not allowed into the classroom but has to rely on the notes of others. She then ends up with a disappointing set of ‘A’ level results, all her talent, ambition and earlier application compromised as regards her hoped for scholarship to a university education in Europe. It is actually Tambu’s cousin, Nyasha, based at her father’s mission school, who does well and wins a scholarship to study abroad. This outcome is telling because it is Nyasha who has constantly reserved herself from the scene of techno-performativity, of calculated conformity and middle class self-production, that Tambu had conversely thought her own best bet of self-advancement. Nyasha turns out to be, at this juncture, something of a survivor since despite all the attempts to subdue her rebellious disbelief in ideological fictions, she manages to remain herself with her own sense of reality. Although we see her in the novel as certainly somewhat crushed and contained, Nyasha, in Lacanian terms, does not give up on her desire. When Tambu is asked by her aunt and uncle to explain her poor ‘A’ level results, the following intervention occurs: ‘Life!’ volunteered Nyasha levelly. ‘If you’re interested, Mum, life happened. It’s been happening to Tambu a lot, you know. Just like it happened to me.’ [ . . . ] ‘But since a lot of people live in missions and not the real world, they

134

Women of Zimbabwe probably would not understand that, or,’ she delivered the coup de grace with wry detachment that made you think of Mercutio slaying the Capulet, ‘be able to advise anyone about it.’ ‘Be quiet, child,’ snapped Maiguru. (p. 185)

What happens, the event, is life not the performative. The performative world of schooling is complicated by life happening, or beyond the epistemological there are the unspeakable ontological questions. The reality, socially and brutally, is war. The reality is the war between the fathers of clans for reasons that cannot be educationally addressed. The context in which the novel is set makes a mockery of the text, of all the set texts. Both the sounds and silences of the violence around the school disrupt its citational competences and glosses, its mastery of the mentionable. The above reference to ‘life happening’, together with the Shakespearean allusion, serve to recall an earlier episode in the novel. It occurs when Tambu is reciting lines from Shakespeare, having decided to ‘memorise it all’. She confronts Ntombizethu, who has just received a phone call, with one of her smart citations, to be met with an unexpected response, as given in the following extract: ‘Speak, what trade art thou!’ I proceeded, waiting for my classmate’s smile at the prodigiousness of my memory to provide me with the approbation that I required so ravenously. ‘Hm!’ Her breath came out harshly but she was still, and otherwise quiet, her eyes trained on the ground. ‘Hm!’ she grunted again, and now when the sound forced its way out, her chest heaved as though she were wrenched by convulsions. Finally Ntombi looked up, crossing her arms on her chest like a vice. ‘Tss! Ha!’ (p. 171) Tambu’s Shakespearean performance is met with these inarticulate yet expressed sounds that make a mockery of it because Ntombi has just learnt of the savage killing of certain members of her family, including a nine-month-old girl. This destruction is because the army suspected the family of harbouring terrorists. The account of the butchery is relayed whilst a pop song blares ‘Daddy’s gone to fight for the green and white!’ (p. 172) The tritely rhyming song, referring to the colours of the Rhodesian flag, is a performative encouragement to war, tinkling over the reality. Literature, however, is nonetheless able to provide a suitably truthful commentary, as emerges in the following: ‘Blood,’ repeated Ntombi inaudibly quietly, under the music, ‘and destruction shall be so in use, / And dreadful objects so familiar, / That mothers shall but smile when they behold / their infants quarter’d with the hands of war.’ Coming to the end of the quotation she asked, ‘Shall I go on?’ (p. 173). If the truth is that internecine war is the performative normality of so-called civilisation, or the other way round, how then do you go on reciting? Tambu recalls various images of war that are screened nightly on the television sets,

Women of Zimbabwe

135

noting, for example: ‘There were people on the television in cattle trucks, with their hands tied to the rail high above their heads in the gesture of praying hands [ . . . ]’ (p. 173). The religious imagery serves to suggest that although the convent education of the girls is apparently somewhat removed from all the butchery going on, there may be senses in which Sacred Heart is indeed at the heart of it all. While the nuns try to separate religion from politics, there are hints that the security forces may be fighting for nothing other than what you might find at Sacred Heart. This, then, is what a reader might find there: But we, the girls! Ah, we! Jubilant with youth and good fortune, when the chorus came, ‘This world was made for you and me!’ bellowed the school. ‘As I was walking, that ribbon of highway,’ came Bougainvillea’s lead. Our classmate had a voice like an opera singer when she could be bothered to use it. ‘I saw above me an endless skyway! And down below me . . . ’ she couldn’t keep a slightly cynical and bored look from her face, ‘ . . . a golden va-a-lleee!’ [ . . . ] ‘Neath fair Rhodesian skies!’ declared Bougainvillea, her eyes looking inward now, as though towards a truth hidden in the notes she rendered. ‘There I first saw my Sacred Heart, in stately beauty rise!’ ‘Sacred Heart! Sacred Heart!’ we all joined in. (p. 160) The ironic poignancy of the above is that the world is not made for ‘you and me’, that is, for ‘we, the girls!’ The girls may be full of youthful expectation, jubilation, and desire, but their freedom and future is not assured. Rather, their verve is to be conscripted for patriotic fervour in a war for possession of the beautiful land and its ‘sacred heart’. Bougainvillea is suitably bored at having to lend the loveliness of her voice, with its joyful neumes, to the inauthentic idealisations and pseudo-unity of the patriotic. Instead, the truth lies ‘hidden in the notes she rendered’: it is the feminine voice, the occult presence of the living feminine. The girls surprisingly show little interest in boys or men in the novel. (This may be considered unrealistic or it may be a matter of the environment they are in.) Instead, the emphasis is on their own exuberance and life desire apparently unencumbered by masculine demands for the duration of their schooling. Nonetheless, when Independence arrives, we are told that it is ‘with feverish passion, like the ecstasy of procreation’ (p. 196) and that ZANUPF has been victorious in its fight for ‘the fertile soil’ (p. 196), that is, Bougainvillea’s ‘golden va-a-lleee’. If the feminine is the fought over, what is to be the place of women in the new Zimbabwe? This is what the novel goes on to question. After some dispiriting years, Tambu eventually manages to get a degree from the local university and to secure employment in an advertising agency. She begins to discover an enjoyment in her work as she discovers she has a talent for it and she aspires for success as one of the firm’s copywriters. She muses: ‘Here

136

Women of Zimbabwe

was something I was good at! [ . . . ] It was wonderful to believe in my own prowess again, particularly without the burden of memorising hundreds of pages’ (p. 222). The company’s senior copywriter is the suspiciously named Dick Lawson. He is able to quote Camus, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Mann at great length but his prose is very verbose and convoluted. Thus Tambu is brought in to provide snappier, bouncier copy. This she does for a campaign on Afro-Shine, a hair product. Dick notices her work and is curiously animated by it, and so Tambu revels in her achievement, noting: ‘Doing what I was good at, I saw that I was appreciated. On the opposite table was the proof [ . . . ] we were an intriguing new Zimbabwean couple [ . . . ] I was about to become a jubilant woman’ (p. 234). However, this collaboration and jubilation is not to be, for Tambu soon understands that Dick has decided to appropriate her work for himself, to present it as his own copy. So this is what he does, resulting in a highly successful campaign for which he receives all the credit and the praise. What happens is something of a repetition of the non-recognition of Tambu’s ‘O’ level success, as she states: ‘My copy was not good enough; under someone else’s name, it was’ (p. 236). Dick, we are made to understand, is awkward, bumbling, lacking in creativity and even prematurely aged. He is compelled then to copy Tambu, the erstwhile coloniser copying the erstwhile colonised, but where this inconvenient dependency of his is rendered inadmissible. ‘His’ newfound creativity brings him much praise from colleagues, such as: ‘Old Dick! I never thought he had it in him’ (p. 237). And Tambu has to listen to him being feˆted as a ‘poet’ and a ‘wordsmith’, something he takes as his automatic right, and to witness him receive the ‘golden cock’ award for the Afro-Shine campaign, celebrated at a ‘happy evening’. It is not very subtle, but then life is not always subtle. It would seem that Dick claims Tambu’s creativity for himself because being or having a dick, because being the son of the law or a Lawson, it is his right to do so. His performativity is nothing but the power of appropriation, of self-authorisation, of self-legitimation. Without basis or content, this is performativity par excellence: the pure copy or enactment of a copy without citeable origin. Nonetheless, he signs the performative act of appropriation; he puts his name to ‘Afro-Shine’, or to, in Tambu’s words, that which is for ‘brilliant women’ (p. 234). How would we read Dick in terms of what Derrida ventures on the technoperformative as regards Rousseau’s and Augustine’s considered to be sexually motivated thefts in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’? I suppose we would be obliged to say that it happens: it happens to Dick that he has lost his creative ability and that he cannot be blamed for this. Would we, however, feel obliged to say that having lost his creativity, it happens to him that he has to prey upon the work of talented women; that this too he cannot help? Should we further be impressed by the fact that, thanks to the theft, Dick is able to claim the ‘I’ of the poet, the ‘I’ of the wordsmith, a theft now to be attributed to the nature of language usage itself as a groundless auto-legitimation that might be understood not as a mere personal affair but as an act on behalf of a company, a Limited Inc., or the advertising agency of Steers, D’Arcy and MacPedius?

Women of Zimbabwe

137

Such questions are to go unanswered along with others pertaining to a social norm of predatory behaviour or war. In the novel, intermittent attention is drawn to the sounds that the doves make when they coo. This sound is heard as ‘Ask father. Ask father’ (p. 51), ‘Ask father! Ask father!’ (p. 192). This is accurately noted because, as Zimbabweans would recognise, that is just how the doves do sound. At the same time, it serves as a wry refrain where you know that ‘father’ will never really give an answer to these cooing doves of peace. It may be said that the novel is not that harsh on Dick. He is given to us as just that sort of man, that is, the ‘automatically’ appropriative type, one who is quite affable, relatively decent and not really conscious of his wrong action. From his perspective, loss of the feminine voice may be constitutive of who he is whereby the feminine can only appear to him as what is owed to him and as that which owes itself to him: his copy. As a colonial subject, Dick is also one who would see the native or colonised as his belated copy, dependent on his precedent. In terms of a wider sense of the history that the novel addresses, he is the type of Rhodesian who, after Independence, believed that business could carry on as usual with little adjustment to the capitalist structures of ownership and appropriation. Would there be much point in expecting someone like Dick to account for himself ? In the terms of an essay by Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself ’, it would be an act of moral aggression to demand a confession of guilt and any self-accountability would be inevitably compromised by the inadequacy of its fictiveness and partiality, by the social norms in operation, and by the opacity of the unconscious.8 Nonetheless, Dangarembga’s story involves a confession of sorts, a confession of what Dick does not confess, on the part of Tambu and women like her. It is interestingly positioned in this respect. Tambu herself is in an impossible situation. She cannot act without becoming problematically possessive of her own creativity which would be a self-destructive position, a re-possessive jealousy of her own work. More generally Tambu may be said to be caught within the incompatible currents of her narcissism and her creativity, and this is one reason for the significance of the non-coincidence of the writer, Dangarembga, and her literary character, Tambu. It is perhaps worth lingering a little over the above point. There is sometimes a misapprehension that creative writing is autobiographical, confessional, a narcissistic self-fictioning. However, creative writing may be said to come from what the self is not conscious of, from what would be unconscious for it, but not thereby categorically unconscious. Here, a distinction may drawn between some of Derrida’s semiconfessional writing and Dangarembga’s novel. In The Post Card, Derrida offers an edited version of his own letters, letters mainly about himself and his intellectual pursuits, to an anonymous correspondent.9 He calls the work his ‘novel’ but it could be maintained that it is too personal and too self-absorbed for that. It reads more like a diary, the fiction of a confession. Conversely, creative writing may be said to pertain to other-consciousness, both a consciousness of the other, and a consciousness beyond the self. Here, the creative consciousness of Dangarembga’s novel is distinct from the narcissistic consciousness of her first person narrator.

138

Women of Zimbabwe

By the end of the novel, Tambu is desperately and pitifully isolated. She has turned her back on her own family, in particular, her mother and sister. This perhaps constitutes a problematic rejection of the feminine, one that suggests she may have somewhat absorbed a colonial and masculinist ideology in which femininity is equated with backwardness. She has also seemingly lost touch with her cousin, uncle and aunt. She distances herself from former schoolfriends and fails to make new friends. I think we are to understand that it is to an extent her proud and narcissistic desire for neo-colonial/postcolonial advancement that has placed her in such a position, whilst she finds that this has all been in vain. The novel ends with Tambu ejected from her lodgings and resigning from her job. Bleakly, it feels like a dead end. The novel ends with the following reflection: I had forgotten all the promises made to myself and providence while I was young concerning the carrying forward with me the good and the human, the unhu of my life. As it was, I had not considered unhu at all, only my own calamities, since the contested days at the convent. So this evening I walked emptily to the room I would soon vacate, wondering what future there was for me, a new Zimbabwean. (p. 246) Tambu has failed with unhu because she has attempted to persuade herself that it might be compatible with a bourgeois ethos. For example, she tries to convince herself at certain points that if she herself manages to gain material wealth then she will be able to spread unhu through this. Nonetheless, she is troubled by the material rapaciousness of the new Zimbabwe together with the emergence of new ethnocentrisms. The novel serves to suggest that new Zimbabweans find themselves in a complex situation. On the one hand, they cannot be accused of lack of enterprise and ambition. Contrary to the Western-media image, the economic failure of post-Independence Zimbabwe cannot be blamed on inherent ineptitude but needs to be understood in terms of how there are structures of colonial, neo-colonial and postcolonial privilege and entitlement in place that thwart the best efforts of those struggling to make their contribution to a new Zimbabwe. On the other hand, new Zimbabweans are faced with perverted versions of collective spirit and the ultimate alienation of such a notion. Somewhat obviously, neo-colonial capitalism, together with its international dimensions, is unable to meet the needs of a new Zimbabwe whilst new Zimbabweans fail to apply themselves to an alternative. The novel ends at a juncture that possibly points to the necessity of making the kind of break that Fanon indicates in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon writes: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry [ . . . ] the European game has finally ended; we must find something different’.10 Forget old Dick, forget old Europe? Yet there is a gendered dimension to this, that Fanon does not address. Tambu’s plight of immobilisation shows the nature of the difficulty, which may be said to be one of breaking with a capitalist or masculinist temporality, in Nietzchean terms, a resentment over ‘it was’, a resentment over original deprivation

Women of Zimbabwe

139

or deprived origins, and the endless desire for self-compensation. Tambu’s desire to have her originality recognised seems to have allegorical dimensions as regards a predicament in which the colonised are ‘originally deprived’, through external circumstances, and thus strive for a recognition of originality that is ever-deferred by a master-narrative of temporality itself as theft, as endurance through appropriation. Bhabha suggestively identifies the postcolonial predicament as one of ‘time lag’. He does this with reference to Foucault’s work on enlightenment where he objects to Foucault’s spatialisation of history.11 Yet Bhabha’s sense of a counter-history relies on the same appeal to performativity and groundless iterability that post-structuralist thinkers, including Foucault, propose anyway. As explored by means of The Book of Not, this turns out to be, for good or ill, no alternative to capitalist Westernisation: the colonised remain ‘ghosted’ by the ghostly colonising subject. Bhabha speaks of his sense of ‘time lag’ in terms of swiftness and slowness.12 What I want to suggest is that this is not so much a question of temporality, as Bhabha suggests, as one of tempo, rhythm and movement. That is, in Western terms, including capitalist terms, being is always rendered subject to the tyranny of time and it is this that proves immobilising. The question is whether it is possible to think of a mobility of being that would not be inclusively subject to time. Let us return briefly to the start of The Book of Not. It begins in a disturbingly inexplicable way with a woman losing her leg. Why does it begin in such a way, especially since we never re-encounter Netsai, the woman who has lost her leg? On a symbolic level, the temporal narrative begins with the feminine being deprived of movement. Symbolically, across literature, the feminine is very often rendered in the figure of the dancer. And I would like to make another sweeping literary connection. Ahab, in Moby Dick, is famously a character who has lost his leg. Ahab has lost his freedom of movement and his existence is dominated by a temporality of predatory resentment precisely with respect to the rhythmic sea of being and its freely moving creatures. When, towards the end of The Book of Not, Tambu rediscovers her feeling of creativity, it is very much in terms of movement. It is written: ‘I was beginning to think I could do it. ‘‘Fly higher than your dreams and further . . . with ZimAir – because with ZimAir, the sky is not the limit!’’ The phrases, practically of their own account, began forming’ (p. 218). Tambu also notes that you do so much with words if you don’t force them because with force ‘they would not dance’ (p. 220). Being gentle towards words, ‘the words leaped for you, streaked with healing powers from the depths, as it is said of dolphins’ (p. 220). She likes thus to ‘plunge into a pool of words’ (p. 220). Tambu also says of her enjoyment of writing: ‘When it happened, they would see how I could spin that tongue, how I could make the language leap and spin and dance, how like a soul in and out and round and round in rhythm I could twist it’ (p. 221). Prior to this there has just been a reference to wild Nyasha, and so the ‘When it happened’ suggests life happening. Tambu feels delivered from her learning by heart or by rote by this life happening that enables her to sport with words in a fluid rhythmic way. The imagery used – the spinning of language – connects strangely with the

140

Women of Zimbabwe

book’s opening sentence: ‘Up, up, up, the leg spun.’ What is perhaps suggested is the recovery of a feminine movement, a sensation of floating in the air prior to anything being set down and fixed. This is further conveyed by the following passage: Being so magnanimous towards Mrs May delivered me into a state of gracious peace. The night was thick with the sweet soporific odours of the garden’s flowering shrubs, an atmosphere in which I floated, oddly suspended between waking and sleep, feeling myself beatified and exalted, divinely, immaculately able to turn the other cheek, grandly exhibiting the supreme virtue of tolerance. That evening I felt for the first time, as I lay in bed, like a complete woman. (p. 231) Thus, Tambu is able to feel peace at the point at which she lets go of resentment, when she can ‘let be’. The sense of release and floating movement is that which is experienced as a non-amputated femininity, one that has a healing capacity. Dangarembga yet maintains the gentlest of Camp mockery in the tones of the above, ever aware of the gap between the real and the self. It is this healing femininity that Dick could have benefited from if he but knew it. At one point, Tambu is called a ‘loser’ for failing to exploit Dick, where she is uncertain to whom the epithet is being applied, but it is perhaps Dick who is really the loser (p. 218). The only times that Dick appears animated is through the presence of Tambu. When he reads her text aloud, he finds himself gyrating to it in a joyful fashion. Moreover, it is said that he likes to bounce ideas off Tambu who is able to bounce material back to him. What Dick fails to realise is that it is this co-operative dynamic that could be the very thing to rescue him from his over-wordy and over-cerebral sterility. However, Dick remains fixated on the written text, the copy, whilst Tambu’s sporting with words is said to occur before she comes to type anything up. (Here it is worth noting that, in an interview, Tsitsi Dangarembga speaks of how writing does not begin with writing for her but with a sense of being prior to that.)13 Regarding an ethics of sexual difference, it may be said that the feminine does seek to give of itself, to share itself. Tambu certainly seeks to give of herself but she cannot find a conducive environment for this desire. It is just not possible to give of yourself in a performative domain dominated by historical resentments and predatory self-compensations. Creativity and unhu are immobilised, paralysed, suffocated by such; they just cannot function in such a situation. The only thing you can do is walk away which is what Tambu eventually does. Finally, there can be no co-operative environment without an avowal of the feminine connection outside the iterable, the copy and the type. I will suspend this reading with one more statement from the novel. You craved relief when it was like that; a way out of the world Europeans wove in a pattern that was so exhausting, escape to a destination far from here, where people were benevolent and gracious, and by consensus everyone,

Women of Zimbabwe

141

women and teenagers too, were included. But a girl’s fantasies are ineffective. Days proceeded without many options. (p. 175) The relentless successiveness of time allows for no options. And so, may we have a breathing-space? For a breathing-space, what we require is an art of deceleration. This would be for the sake of a happening in no time. Art, some works of art – not all of them – may respond to or correspond with a happening in no time. Not a happening quickly, but a happening in no time. The suggestion is that some works of art are composed from a sense of being outside time, from a sense of what may be termed, say, a holomovement. For example, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf depicts Lily’s experience of creating in terms of a cosmic feeling, as follows: She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep . . . some common feeling which held the whole together . . . what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything.14 This corresponds with what has been explored in the writing of The Book of Not, a sense of the real that precedes writing, the ethical correlative of which could be unhu. Ranka Primorac in The Place of Tears, an indispensable study of postIndependence Zimbabwean novels, one that may be said to follow on from as well as reconfigure Flora Veit-Wild’s also indispensable study of Zimbabwean writing, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers, shows how contemporary Zimbabwean writing, especially the Bildungsroman, has devoted itself to an interrogation and subversion of ‘colonially-produced models of space-time’.15 Primorac considers both the postcolonial reinscription of previous chronotopes and the production of counter-spaces in the literature in question. It may be said what both motivates and enables the attempt to transform the chronotopes of patriotic nationalism and racist history could be some kind of access to a consciousness of the reality foreclosed by such. That is, the hegemonic spatio-temporal formation cannot ultimately be transformed from within for the resources for transformation cannot be found there. The Book of Not shows readers how this is the case. What the previous organisation immobilises has to be re-mobilised, as Primorac’s reading of the literature in question serves to indicate. Primorac stresses the incomplete, partial, non-triumphant nature of Zimbabwean narratives as work-in-progress. The immense task may be said to be a matter of what Wilson Harris regards as the unfinished genesis of the imagination. Regarding the stakes of what it might really take to effect an end to or curtailment of an on-going history of violence and trauma in Zimbabwe, although not only Zimbabwe, one of the boldest and most radical visions to emerge is that of Yvonne Vera.

142

Women of Zimbabwe

Revolution in the writing of Yvonne Vera In order to engage with Yvonne Vera’s work, it is necessary to slow down as much as you possibly can and much more than I am able to do in this chapter. As Primorac observes ‘Vera’s plots are always sparse’,16 and it is as if Vera’s fiction were written as close as it could be written to the floating or suspended space of anticipation before writing becomes writing. This is perhaps especially so with Butterfly Burning, the novel that I will be initially concentrating on.17 What occurs in Butterfly Burning is both momentous and not much at all. A man and a woman, Fumbatha and Phephelaphi, meet and begin a relationship. The woman falls pregnant and aborts herself. She does this because she has begun to train as a nurse and does not want to have to give up her chance to become what she hopes to become. She falls pregnant again, becomes estranged from Fumbatha, and then commits suicide. Apart from this thread of a storyline, the novel consists of slabs of poetic prose that juxtapose episodes of daily life in the present with episodes from an unresolved and violent past. This is done in such a way as to give the impression that the so-called ‘past’ continues in or with the present. The past is not a memory but, more traumatically, what does not become a memory: it continues in the present as present and as unremembered. The novel may be said to maintain a sense of synchronicity that may be said to give rise to an understanding of the present as being nothing other than the unmet yearnings, unrequited desires, ongoing injustices, unfinished genesis and sustained hopes of the ‘so-called’ past. This is how Butterfly Burning begins: ‘There is a pause. An expectation’ (p. 1). The whole novel may be said to be this very pause, this expectation. It begins with a scene in which men are cutting long grass. They are reapers and they are also the reaped, as they take on properties of the grass, for example: ‘The palms are bleeding with liquid from freshly squeezed grass’ (p. 1). Whilst the workers seize the grass to cut it, they too are seized. It is said: ‘The time is not theirs: it is seized’ (p. 2). The music that accompanies their work-dance is kwela, and I want to suggest that Butterfly Burning is the equivalent of kwela in words. What, then, is kwela? This, the novel tells us: This is Kwela. Embracing choices that are already decided. [ . . . ] Kwela means to climb into the waiting police jeeps. This word alone has been adapted to do marvellous things. It can carry so much more than a word should be asked to carry: rejection, distaste, surrender, envy. And full desire. [ . . . ] Bulawayo is this kind of city and inside is Makokoba Township where Kwela seeks strand after strand of each harsh illusion and makes it new [ . . . ] We do it together [ . . . ] The distinctions always unclear, the boundaries perpetually widening [ . . . ] Kwela strips you naked [ . . . ] It is the body addressed in its least of possible heights [ . . . ] Kwela. Climb on. Move [ . . . ] Kwela. Cut, pull, bend. It is necessary to sing. (pp. 3–5)

Women of Zimbabwe

143

The word ‘kwela’ actually means ‘climb on’ (from the Zulu),18 particularly in the context of encouraging those arrested in raids to climb on the police vans. Thus, it connotes solidarity in adversity, amongst other things, such as the exuberance of township life where ‘climb on’ also has sexual connotations. Part of the experience of a migrant work force, it is a music that is related to work songs, spirituals, the blues and jazz. More specifically, kwela is the music of the Bulawayo townships, existing in mutual influence with the South African township jazz and jive scene, that took off in the 1940s and 1950s. Dorothy Masuka is a well-known Bulawayo singer associated with the movement of kwela to South Africa, whilst Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) and Hugh Masekela were inspired and influenced by it. Graeme Ewan, writing on a compilation of South African jazz, states: The link between their music [the South African generation of Dollar Brand] and today’s mbaquanga pop was kwela, a surging melodic style which interpreted the simple, soulful tunes of tradition with whatever instruments were available. Originating in the Southern Rhodesian (Zimbabwe) town of Bulawayo in the early 1950s, the kwela beat was broadcast by penny whistle players from street corners to the ears of the world through a deluge of recordings [ . . . ] Here then is the sound that poured out of every shebeen, dance hall and social gatherings in ’50s South African Townships.19 In Vera’s account of kwela it emerges as a music of double affirmation. That is, the music expresses an attitude of simultaneously accepted hardship and allowed for joy; an affect of the co-existence of constrained necessities and a soaring willto-freedom. Kwela music is where all distinctions collapse and where all distinctions may be elaborated from. It is, therefore, a music that seems to express the non-duality of the ontological: the potential for being and not-(yet)-being coincide here. It may be proposed, however, that one particular affect that the music communicates, an affect that is especially important for an appreciation of the mood and meaning of Vera’s novel, is a keen yearning feeling; a feeling of unrealised creative potential that intensely desires its realisation.20 Moreover, I would say that this yearning is a matter of the individual being’s relation to collective spirit. It concerns both the individual’s desire for self-realisation and the ethos of, in the above words of the novel, ‘We do it together’. Yvonne Vera has spoken of how her novels have unfolded from single epiphanic photographic images, these constituting charged instances that the novels seek to explain and contextualise, as Jane Bryce has suggestively explored.21 In the case of Butterfly Burning, while there may be a generator-image of a visual nature, so to speak, I would argue that the whole novel may be understood as unfolding from a few bars of kwela music. The visual equivalent of this music would probably be the young men of the townships nattily dressed in their gangster-influenced styles – smart suits, felt hats with hatbands, snazzy shirts and socks – and the young women in dresses with neat waists and flaring skirts.

144

Women of Zimbabwe

The women would resemble bright butterflies. When Phephelaphi goes to the shebeen to first hear kwela, she is described in the following terms: ‘She is wearing a flaring white skirt [ . . . ] A white butterfly, her waist a tight loop’ (p. 54). The novel is set in between 1946 and 1948. Historically, this is not a significant time for its setting in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, apart from this constituting the point at which kwela enters the culture. The historical period is removed by half a century from the turbulence of the country’s colonisation and subsequent early resistance to this, as well as being removed from the new wave of resistance beginning in the next decade that would lead to independence. It is thus set between the first and second Chimurengas or uprisings, and, more specifically as Terence Ranger observes, just before the general strike of 1948 and the consequent rise of the nationalist movement.22 Thus, the hiatus captures the feeling of being suspended between two epochs of anti-colonial action with the sense of a build up towards something happening. In this respect, it captures the sense of an urbanised African population frustrated at being held back and keenly yearning for the chances of self-realisation that are reserved for the Europeans: the time not being their own of the African labour being used to build the colonial city. This is given a gendered dimension in the character of Phephelaphi, although it might be more accurate to state that the nature of the desire is feminine to begin with in being the freedom of spirit that would defy all colonisations by the masculine. Phephelaphi is a character that may, in a certain respect, be compared with Dangarembga’s Tambudzai. Whilst Tambu is more privileged in her education and living circumstances, both these female characters are brimming with a potential that social and historical circumstances, including the barriers of masculine selfishness, prevent them from achieving. In drawing attention to similarities between Rousseau and Augustine in their adolescent experiences across time and culture, Derrida serves to posit a type. Is there a certain sense in which these adolescent female characters may also be said to constitute a type? What possible type? What does seem to be explored in these female characters is what may be called the dilemma of a feminine non-mineness when faced with a masculine possessiveness. In terms of the colonial settings of the novels, this is not a matter of seeing feminine emancipation subsumed within the ‘wider’ liberation struggle, largely as a concern much relegated to inferior status, but of entertaining the possibility that liberation of the feminine may actually constitute the wider horizon within which phases of possessive, including re-possessive, nationalisms reveal their limitations and repetition compulsions. In Butterfly Burning, there is a certain disjunction between forms of masculine and feminine desires that is explored and that is arguably constitutive of the novel’s tragic outcome. Fumbatha’s existence is intimately bound up with the death of his father. His father was one of seventeen men hanged by the colonisers in 1896, the year of Fumbatha’s birth. It is written: ‘Fumbatha – this is how a child is born, with fingers tight over an invisible truth. This is when birth is at least different from death – where death and birth touch; like the shape of a

Women of Zimbabwe

145

wing and the invisible air in which it moves’ (p. 10). The invisible and the visible pass over into each other, for the ontological is implied to have a chiasmatic structure like a butterfly. The invisible death of his father is like an ongoing ‘presence’ for Fumbatha, in the form of a persistently felt originary deprivation that makes of his existence a demand for compensation. The place where Fumbatha’s father is hung is by the Umguza River, and Vera’s description of the hanged men is such that when a reader first encounters it, the sense is of a drowning having taken place. That is, it takes a while to realise that the said to be ‘drowned’ men have been drowned in air and float suspended above the ground not in water. When Fumbatha first meets Phephelaphi, she is swimming in the Umguza River. She seems to emerge from near where his father ‘drowned’. Just before this meeting, Vera writes of the township children: ‘When you are a child, floating is the very essence of living, and flight too. Each offers a type of vanishing. The body is without weight. It is a liquid without form except that of the vessel it chooses to inhabit – therefore it is shaped like air, becomes intangible’ (p. 15). It is as if what is called ‘water’ and what is called ‘air’ are modes of a prior substance, one very yielding in nature, that invisibly conjoins them. ‘Floating is the essence of living’ . . . and of dying? Let us say, of living-vanishing-dying-enduring. Phephelaphi appears here as a coalescence of the possible. The epigraph to this chapter cites Francisco Varela on a feminine ontology, where a fuller version of the citation would be: Because, among all these possibilities, there was the possibility to emerge [ . . . ] There is a very aleatory dimension in the world, connected with the notion of gentle evolution or drifting [ . . . ] It is though the ontology of the world were very feminine, an ontology of permissivity, an ontology of possibility.23 When Phephelaphi just emerges from the river before Fumbatha, Vera writes: ‘The rock he sat on was half submerged in water. She emerged breathless and gasping for air beneath his feet and rose out of the river like a spirit’ (p. 20). It is as if she arrives as the revelation of the invisible side of life or what the invisible is for him, in Western terms, the unconscious. Moreover, her breathless and gasping arrival is suggestive of both birth and the strangulation of Fumbatha’s father by hanging. Phephelaphi is strongly associated with life itself as the radiant realisation of the invisible. She is described in the following way: ‘She was sunlight. Her beauty was more than this, not expressed in her beauty alone but in the strength that shone beneath each word, each motion of her body’ (p. 21). She is irreducible to the cut-out form, to appearance as trace or stencil, to the word alone, the phenomenality of the body alone, to herself alone. That is her beauty. That is, her beauty is her connection to a life that flows beneath appearances like a river or like music. Fumbatha’s reaction to her is one of envy and possessiveness. When she speaks, it is ‘with a wild agility that he envied and knew belonged exclusively to the young’ (p. 21). Fumbatha’s name means ‘closed fist’.24 We are told he is

146

Women of Zimbabwe

born with his hand around a secret and, furthermore, when he learns Phephelaphi’s name, it is said: He held the name closely on his palm. It was like holding one part of her inner self. He never wanted to let her go, even though they were strangers. He could never free her [ . . . ] Fumbatha had never wanted to possess anything before, except the land. He wanted her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him. (p. 23) Thus, Fumbatha suffers a reaction of, what Lacan calls, lebensneid in relation to Phephelaphi which leads to an attitude of ‘mineness’ towards her. As already indicated, Fumbatha has been born to a dead man and into a state of disinheritance which gives him an original yearning for the land. Yet, it can also be said that Fumbatha’s attitude to Phephelaphi is unconsciously a destructive one for his attitude of mineness is what would cut him off from the very thing he might really desire. That is, what I would say that Fumbatha unconsciously desires is connection to the ontological whole but his will-to-possess Phephelaphi is an act of selfishness that could only effectively deprive him of what he may actually want if it is a question of connectedness. Lizzy Attree writes of the Ndebele derivation of Phephelaphi’s name: ‘‘‘Pephelapha’’ means: take refuge in, escape to [ . . . ] ‘‘Phephata’’: blow, blow at, blow of wind; ‘‘Phephezela’’: fly or flap in wind; ‘‘isi-phepha’’: gale, storm’.25 Vera consciously deploys this cluster of signification in relation to her character. She is the butterfly that would escape whilst she desires to become one with a storm, a vortex of wind, and her eventual death is imaged in these terms. Fumbatha seeks her explicitly as a refuge and shelter. She is at once very fragile, like a butterfly that he wishes to seize in his grasp, and yet indissociably part of something much greater than she is: spirit, breath, wind, storm, water, radiance and fire. In this, she has a significance comparable to kwela as the music which unites beings and provides solace and refuge to the exilic or migrant in their yearning or melancholy. In addition, whilst Fumbatha associates her with the land, Vera accords her the qualities of ungraspable elements. Phephelaphi may be said to have a presence without much of an identity. She says to Fumbatha: ‘You could give me another name. I do not mind being named by a stranger. I do not mind being renamed if it makes the present clearer’ (p. 24). She, or this fluid feminine being, is certainly not contained by language. There is perhaps an allegorical dimension if she is taken to be or positioned in relation to the land that some would claim by the name of Rhodesia and others by the name of Zimbabwe. In the novel, men and women possibly have a different relation to naming although within Shona culture nomenclature allows for substitute names at different points in a person’s life.26 That said, Fumbatha (presumably Ndebele) is said to be ‘so used to the chameleon quality that women had with names’ (p. 24). Zandile, a prostitute, is said to collect ‘monogrammed handkerchiefs which she has retrieved from the pockets of white men’ (p. 31). She is then said to fan the intensely hot air with a ‘monogrammed

Women of Zimbabwe

147

love’ (p. 32), where the handkerchiefs waved in the heat are metaphorically suggestive of butterflies possessed by the singular stamp of the name. The women in the novel may appear as separate characters but gradually and uncannily the realisation occurs that their names might be names for what cannot be individually differentiated. Phephelaphi, for most of the novel, thinks that her mother is Gertrude, friend of Zandile who looks after her, and the reader is also given this impression. Phephelaphi witnesses Gertrude’s death as she is shot by a white policeman, whom we come to learn is Gertrude’s lover and who we also learn has killed her out of sexual jealousy. Vera presents the following memory from Phephelaphi’s perspective: A stranger had shot her mother. For days and days after that, the arm kept falling from the doorway. This to her was now the symbol of death. Then the dress in which her mother had died was brought back to her by a white policeman [ . . . ] When he turned his back she took a candle and set light to the dress [ . . . ] The dress came in a bag. The bag was inscribed in red ink – Emelda [ . . . ] She was angry at the policeman for not knowing the proper name of her mother [ . . . ] she wondered why her mother had been renamed. (p. 28) It is only possible to understand this passage in the light of the novel as a whole. The policeman calls Gertrude ‘Emelda’ since we realise that this is the pseudonym Gertrude has offered him for herself, something that Phephelaphi is unaware of. It is not only ‘Emelda’ that constitutes a renaming of Phephelaphi’s mother but ‘Gertrude’ in that we learn that Gertrude is not actually Phephelaphi’s mother but Zandile. Names, we understand, are like dresses, something you can slip into or out of. You can also set fire to them; they are perhaps highly flammable. (In Vera’s The Stone Virgins, it is written: ‘His name is Sibaso, a flint to start a flame’.)27 Later in the novel there is some reflection on the flexibility of Gertrude’s body and its relation to her dresses, in particular, that dress, that is: That dress. A hugging sort of dress which pronounced the ooze and flow of all her energy. She needed nothing else but that dress for neighbour’s heads to turn and curse and feel their privacy had been violated and their own attraction put to test, she made trust turn to cinders and birds to fly from hedges, and then a sparkling reckless warmth flowed from Gertrude’s long endless arms, the curve of her shoulders seemed mightier than paradise. (p. 65) Clearly, the dress accentuates the otherwise elliptical blissfulness of Gertrude, where the dress serves to draw attention to something that has no form since it is rather movement, energy, fluidity and warmth. The dress may be said to work as an ostensive signifier for the feminine real. If the dress merely drew attention to itself, it would function in a theatrical, performative, indeed, dressy way. Here, the dress shows up what is ‘not dress’ of any kind. Moreover, those who become aware of this uncontainable being are made aware of the non-containability

148

Women of Zimbabwe

of their own being whilst the intensity of envious or jealous desire in relation to this being is potentially inflammatory. Gertrude is not Phephelaphi’s mother but she could be. The women in the novel are associated with each other through ecstactic being and freedom of spirit, passing from one to the other, that is further elaborated through both the butterfly motif and a paradoxical motif of falling. When Phephelaphi first hears the kwela music, it is written: ‘When the music tears into the room she almost falls to the floor with agony’ (p. 56). With this she experiences an identification with Gertrude as Emelda, as follows: ‘Phephelaphi brings her right arm over her chest and holds down the hurt. Finally, she has found Emelda’ (p. 57). This may be read as suggesting that the women characters – Phephelaphi, Gertrude, Deliwe, Zandile – are all expressions of the same river of existence where you cannot differentiate between being and non-being in that isolated, individual being would an illusion. A separate identity would be a fiction but this is not because there is no ontological reality but because, on the contrary, there is. Whilst Fumbatha wishes to isolate and own Phephelaphi, she herself feels he cannot contain her desires. It is written: ‘Fumbatha could never be the beginning or end of all her yearning, her longing for which she could not find a suitable name. Not a male hurt or anything like it’ (p. 64). It is not a masculine feeling of lack leading to possessiveness but rather a feminine feeling of overabundance seeking to vent itself. It is furthermore a matter of what is not iterable, what cannot be given a name, although if you named it, it could be with a girl’s name, any girl’s name. Zandile muses on names at one point in the following passage, although more extensively than is given: She stopped humming that wonderful tune which said there are now enough girls in Makokoba, with names like Dinah, . . . Melody . . . Martha . . . Eukaria . . . Memory . . . Bella . . . Jane and Julie . . . What happened to Gugulethu . . . to Ntombenele . . . to Zanele. . . . to Ntombiyethemba . . . Nkosinomusa . . . Thandolwenkosi . . . Nkazana and Bathabile . . . (p. 78) Irrespective of whether they are given African or English names (whilst Zandile may regret the Europeanisation), the flow of girls and girlhood continues unabated, ultimately nameless beneath the proliferation and substitution of namings. Phephelaphi, as said, is full of a desire to realise her potential, but this is not really a matter of self-definition. It is said that for Phephelaphi: ‘It is not the being of a nurse which matters, but the movement forward – the entrance into something new and untried’ (p. 60). A little later on we are told: ‘The women had other ideas about their own fulfilment, not only did some of them arrive in the city independently of men, they remained in these single shelters [ . . . ] They craved something possessing the hint of rivers or an expanse as wide and as fascinating as the sea’ (p. 88). The women thus collectively yearn for something

Women of Zimbabwe

149

more than their possession by men. In the city, they are forced to work as sex workers and barwomen in shebeens whilst the colonial administration mainly treated African male labour as being without dependents (a living wage being based on single status). Whilst Fumbatha feels that it is his right to possess Phephelaphi, she reacts to this through a counter-assertion of a desire to take possession of herself that turns out to be self-destructive. Vera writes of Phephelaphi’s recoiling on herself: It was about loving her own eyebrows before he had passed his fingers over them [ . . . ] before he offered her the smoothness on her arms like a gift and gave her the straight lean hips she already owned, and made them hers. She wanted the time before time, before her legs felt empty and useless without him in them. (p. 69) However, the ontological ‘before time’ is not something she can possess, as would constitute an impossible containing of the uncontainable. If the masculine possession of her by Fumbatha makes her feel usurped and destroyed by him, then a self-possession becomes problematically something like a masculine relation to her own being as if a person could be envious or jealous of their own being. In a sense, Phephelaphi does become Fumbatha’s rival for herself. If the desire to possess another being is sadistic, the desire to possess yourself, to turn your desire round on yourself, can be quasi-psychotic, paranoid or self-destructive. When Phephelaphi finds herself pregnant, she aborts the baby. Although she takes possession of her body, it is not exactly a liberation. After the abortion, Phephelaphi is said to be ‘folded into two halves, one part of her is dead, the other living’ (p.109). Earlier, we have been told Fumbatha’s state of being is like this (p. 9). As a writer, Vera offers an unflinching sympathy to her characters in their moments of hardship – she can be said to stay with them in the most gruelling moments – whilst she is anything but euphemistic. In fact, there is a strange abandonment of communication in words towards the end of the novel. Fumbatha knows, without anything being said, that Phephelaphi has aborted their child. Phephelaphi knows, without anything being said, that Fumbatha has withdrawn his love for her and been unfaithful to her. Phephelaphi also knows in a dream the truth of her mother. She knows, without anything being said, that Zandile did not want to have a child, did not want to have her therefore, just as she Phephelaphi did not want her child, as if this were some unspoken transgenerational curse. Vera writes of Fumbatha: ‘How can he ask what is hidden when the most enduring truths are not always spoken with words?’ (p. 112). The novel attempts to broach truths of the real that cannot adequately be spoken in words although they can make themselves felt directly because the feelings are. These truths of the real would pertain to what cannot be helped or the undeniable. Fumbatha is automatically (counter-assertively) proud given the fact his father has been hanged by a white man. He automatically seeks Phephelaphi as a healing balm. She automatically finds his possessiveness of her life claustrophobic.

150

Women of Zimbabwe

She automatically withdraws from Fumbatha who sensing this refusal of his claim, automatically, in his pride, withdraws from her. It is a knock on effect in which Fumbatha, deprived by the colonisers, seeks Phephelaphi, who deprives both him and herself to be deprived by him in turn. In the midst of this unstoppable happening, Vera accords Phephelaphi a first person voice for the first time in the novel. This is when Phephelaphi finds she is pregnant again and cannot continue with her training as a nurse. Whilst this happens to her beyond her will, what remains left to her is her voice on the matter. This is what she then says: I will not. Will NOT. So I have to forget about training as a nurse altogether and what else am I to become but nothing, and he had already left me long before I knew about it, and what he had left me with, for a little while, he came back to get. My being. My woman self tearing away. My sorrowful self. No matter my need, no matter which. I will NOT. Now he has broken my stem with this child he has given me. I am nothing [ . . . ] Nothing is mine. I will NOT. (p. 126) Intertextually speaking, it is NOT Molly Bloom’s monologue with her ‘yes, yeses’ to what is. Intertextually speaking, again, it is vaguely comparable to the NOT that Dangarembga’s Book of Not addresses. Although both Tambu and Phephelaphi are subject to behaviour that would deny their being, even as it is this very being that gets preyed upon, they will still not condone this happening. They are still able to act as, in Hardt and Negri’s terms, figures of refusal (as discussed in the second chapter), although this is more the case of Phephelaphi and possibly Nyasha. Phephelaphi’s ensuing suicide of self-immolation is a defeat but it is not only a defeat. In fact, it is as if Vera wants us to see it as a triumphant defeat. Whilst women are posited in terms of a disavowal of their being, it is as if Phephelaphi makes of death something that most insistently is: an event. It is an event that promises a continuity that will transcend time, Vera writing: ‘she will eventually rise into her own song’ (p. 130). Eventually, in the unfinished genesis of what happens, all the women who have been unfairly denied will be. This is how the novel ends: She had paused for two full days, waiting, watching the arm falling slowly down from the doorway. Finding Emelda. Hearing Zandile toss a soft cushiony cry in the moonlight. Laughing at Gertrude who had the foolishness to trust a man knocking on her door. At midnight. (p. 130) The novel has effected a pause in time in which the women come to unite beneath the fiction of the name. The sense of the ontological in the novel certainly concerns an awareness of non-separable being or of non-duality. In the novel, falling is transcendence is being suspended in air or in water and water is air is fire is life is death is liquid is seed is substance is nothing is nowhere is here

Women of Zimbabwe

151

is music is kwela.28 Butterfly Burning suggests that in one brief, sweet instance of life, a few piercing bars of pennywhistle music, there is all of life. Memorably, the novel eternalises one brief moment in which both Fumbatha and Phephalaphi share in the ecstatic co-presence of the kwela music, as if there were a slight chance for events to have been otherwise regarding, say, a recognition of joint aspirations allowing for each other. However, regarding this ‘all of life’, the novel also presents us with an ethical dilemma, as I have been beginning to elaborate. The ‘all of life’ cannot be possessed. The feminine, for either men or women, may maintain the connection to it but a Heideggerean attitude of mineness is antithetical to what it would possess. Levinas, who admits to only having read Adorno’s critique of authenticity late in his career, finds himself then needing to question the status of the authentic in Heidegger. Levinas states: I would mention, for my part, the notion, primordial in this system, of authenticity, of Eigenlichkeit – conceived in the terms of the ‘mine’, of everything personal, in terms of Jemeinigkeit, an original contraction of the me in mineness (Sein und Zeit, section 9), in terms of a belonging to self and for self in their inalienable self-belonging [ . . . ] Would that make me a friend of the inauthentic? But is the authenticity of the I, its uniqueness, contingent upon that unadulterated possessiveness ‘mineness’, of self for itself, that proud virility ‘more precious than life’, more authentic than love or than concern for the other?29 Well, not. In brief, what is pseudo-authentic in Heidegger is that the essence of possessive virility would irrationally turn out to be its excessive enclosure of the feminine. Or, his masculine will-to-truth would claim to possess the real: an impossibility. And Levinas remains compromised in failing to address questions of gender, failing to ask if the ‘entre nous’, with which he prefaces his collection of essays, might be, between us, a question of the feminine. Vera’s work may be said to indirectly offer the necessary critique of that European existentialist strand of (in)authenticity, of alienated man. Her male and female characters are thwarted, in different ways, by the understandable but misguided, fateful attempts to conflate authenticity (being) and mineness. The male characters in Vera’s novels who have this attitude of possessiveness effect nothing but destruction precisely because they attempt the impossible. They try to include the non-finite in the lacking, finite self. It transpires that they are only able to destroy the femininity they would take from the other. It is also the case that the women cannot possess themselves either, as Primorac observes in her reading of Vera.30 Beyond this futility and this impasse, in order to address what is revolutionary about Vera’s writing, it will now be necessary to relate Butterfly Burning to some of Vera’s other work and to address the taboos that her work is said to repeatedly confront, the volume of essays devoted to her work being entitled Sign and Taboo for this reason. In their introduction to this work, Mandavavarira Maodzwa-Taruvinga and Robert Muponde assert: ‘Yvonne

152

Women of Zimbabwe

Vera’s dense poetic prose, her allusive style, and her ability to handle the most difficult subjects and confront taboos often evokes strong and diverse responses in the reader and has fostered intense discussion about her writing.’31 They also comment here: ‘Vera employs a complex symbolic cartography which can elude deconstruction.’ Kizito Muchemwa, writing of Vera’s lyrical style, maintains that it is in the service not of ‘a direct deconstruction of phallogocentric discourse, but [ . . . ] a recovery of the repressed discourse of women.’32 Muchemwa considers that Vera foregrounds voice in her writing to assert ‘collective presence’ (p. 5), in particular, ‘the collective presence of woman’ (p. 9). Muchemwa, however, is critical of these aspects of Vera’s writing for he sees her work as seductively anaesthetising the reader into an a-critical position and as fostering essentialism, homogeneity and phonocentrism. He explicitly draws on Derrida’s work and takes up motifs of deconstruction to object to Vera’s co-deployment of voice, presence and a reality of the feminine. What troubles Muchemwa is that Vera’s writing bypasses the phallogocentric in its presentation of a feminine lyricism and he states: ‘The defining strategy of this rediscovered and reconstituted discourse is the exclusion of the discourse of men.’ What is thus challenged is masculine authority over the feminine as the feminine is able to voice itself. Muchemwa argues: ‘the authority to speak oneself, others and the world’, is central to Vera’s entire creative enterprise. Authorship by women, female characters, the marginalization and exclusion of men’s voices and characters, all are directly related to this aspect of women speaking themselves and the world’ (p. 4). Regarding this, I would maintain that what is really scandalous about Vera’s work is not simply its choice of difficult topics such as incestuous paedophilia, rape, the torture of women, and so on, but its displacement of a critical masculine authority through according precedence to a creativity and freedom of spirit that is undeniably feminine or indissociable from the reality of the feminine. This is what is unmentionable in masculinist terms, as it somewhat displaces a phallic ontology. Muchemwa’s critique is particularly interesting for the light it serves to throw on deconstruction’s protest over the privileging of the phonocentric, since what is implicitly suggested is that the desire to counter-maintain the privilege of a performativity of writing may actually be bound up with anxieties over masculine authorship in the face of a certain feminine creativity. Vera’s work dares to go beyond deconstruction in raising the neglected question of whether the objection to the voice masks a disavowal of feminine presence and collective being. It is a question of the other side of writing or hither side of deconstruction that was raised at the end of the previous chapter. I agree with Muchemwa that Vera’s work addresses the ontological in collective terms, as my reading of Butterfly Burning would support, but I disagree that this just amounts to an homogenising essentialism of woman. As indicated earlier, Vera’s writing presents the ontological as utterly fluid in its transsubstantiations and its uncontainable movement. It is not something you can pin down. Her words are like mobile markers on a stream whose instability makes

Women of Zimbabwe

153

you conscious of the movement which they convey without being able to enclose. Lizzy Attree comments: Vera’s critics have tended to focus on her choice of taboo-breaking subject matter and the use of a female perspective, rather than examining the way in which her language and imagery are constructed to provide an alternative, fluid and often ambiguous perspective on life, language and conflict.33 It can be said that Vera’s work tempts feminist critics to impose an identity politics upon it when it actually constantly makes us aware of the incommensurability of self-referential identity and liquid life. Muchemwa ends his essay on Vera by stating: ‘The author ceases to celebrate the phonocentric nature of language when she explores the question of identity’ (p. 14). If that is the case, it is precisely because of the incompatibility between the iterability of identity and the escapology of the voice, where one of the difficulties Vera’s works presents critics with is that her female characters are used to portray both social individuals and to signify, in a poetic way, a femininity beyond the individual male or female. Vera’s work, like that of Chenjerai Hove, may be said to be right up against questions of a feminine essentialism and also questions of cultural nationalism, but I would say that this is because both writers are struggling to find ways (no success being assured here), of wresting a connectedness through the feminine away from the closures of self-serving political agendas. Whilst, on the one hand, this is a utopian gesture given the history they are writing against, on the other hand, it is an unflinchingly realistic gesture against celebratory or patriotic rhetorics. Such a realism, against empty idealisations of ‘woman’ and/or ‘nation’, is deployed in order to address the necessities of an ethics of sexual difference together with the chances of a nationalism not based on masculinist possession. In order to explain this further, I will turn to a consideration of The Stone Virgins. The Stone Virgins is set in rural Matabeleland and covers the period just before Independence in the 1970s and the period just after Independence in 1980 with the unresolved conflict between the competing two nationalist movements, the dissidents and the new government. The novel begins with a love affair between Thenjiwe and a man we come to know as Cephas. Cephas is shown to ritualistically yet tenderly worship the body of Thenjiwe where he is attendant to both its beauty and its mortal frailty. The novel moves on from this episode to the jubilant arrival of the moment of Independence. After this optimistic and vibrant beginning, the novel suddenly immerses us in a series of scenes of extreme violence that readers are made to witness in slow motion. The rape of a woman, Nonceba, Thenjiwe’s sister, is described or rather enacted. Then Thenjiwe arrives on the scene. The following occurrence is unfolded from Nonceba’s perspective: She sees a silver bucket approaching from the bright blue of the sky, carried above her head, her sister’s arm holding it up along one side and her fingers curling over the rim of the bucket brimming with water; then the arm drops

154

Women of Zimbabwe and the bucket approaches, steady, steady in that teasing blue. Now she can see the bucket leaning over, filled with water, the tiniest drops breaking like a spray, spilling; then the bucket crushes its contents to the ground; water breaks like stone. [ . . . ] ‘Thenjiwe . . . ’ she calls. A man emerges [ . . . ] His head is behind Thenjiwe, where Thenjiwe was before, floating in her body; he is in her body. (p. 73)

In this extraordinarily real piece of writing, Vera makes us see the scene just as Nonceba would have seen it in its moment of happening. Thus, we see the bucket held high against the sky suddenly falling, unsure as to why this is happening. Then, with further bewilderment, we see the head of a man emerge on the body of Thenjiwe. Only then do we come to register that the man has just beheaded Thenjiwe. Vera thus gives the scene an experiential immediacy that suspends the capacity of the mind to make sense. Not only this, whilst the action appears as senseless, the vision of it is literal in the sense of it being immediately self-explanatory. The reason for the murder is evidently – we see this – that the man seeks to occupy the space of the feminine, that is, to appropriate the feminine to the point of absolute usurpation. The man who carries out this act is a dissident called Sibaso, and he both metonymically stands for the many dissidents who were not integrated into the new Zimbabwe and metaphorically for the ever-colonising spirit of the war machine. One of the risks that Vera takes in The Stone Virgins is that she shows the proximity of love and destructiveness. In the early scenes of the novel we are shown a Cephas who wants to merge with Thenjiwe out of his desire for her. For example, he places his feet in her very footsteps and desires to feel ‘both their lives in her’ (p. 49). Chillingly in retrospect, he loves her to her bones, to the thought of her fossilised skeleton, imagining his claiming of her hipbone as a relic beyond death. Moreover, the slow love scenes between Thenjiwe and Cephas share something of the tempo and intimate intensity of the rape scenes between Sibaso and Nonceba. Thus, both love and sadistic cruelty are shown to involve a desire for the abolition of the distance between self and other. However, Vera also serves to bring out the necessary distinctions. Cephas is shown to be capable of responding to his lover’s fluctuating desires for closeness and separation. His adoration of Thenjiwe is such that he does not want to impose himself on her. Beyond this, the significant distinction is that Cephas wishes to lose himself in the beloved whereas Sibaso seeks to absorb the other, to render himself omnipotent in the assimilative usurpation of otherness. The desire for union thus pertains to contrary dynamics as regards love and sadism. Of Sibaso it is said that ‘He draws her [Nonceba’s] entire body into his own. Mute. He is a predator, with all the fine instincts of annihilation’ (p. 69). I would briefly like to make a passing allusion to Solomon Ansky’s rendition of a mystical Jewish legend in his play The Dybbuk.34 In this work, a young man tries to immortalise himself by taking possession of his bride-to-be, installing his masculine spirit in her body, producing the grotesque dybbuk. He then has to be

Women of Zimbabwe

155

exorcised from her, and it is non-possessiveness of her that has to be learnt for her to embrace him redemptively of her own accord. Vera’s novel follows a similar ethical trajectory to that of The Dybbuk implying a similar ethics of sexual difference. Cephas returns to find Thenjiwe slaughtered and he then gets to know her sister, the mutilated Nonceba, to whom he offers refuge and with whom he seeks shelter. Slowly, the possibility of love begins to emerge between them precisely because Cephas has learnt that in order to win trust and love he needs to allow the feminine its breathing space. Vera writes: ‘Nonceba has grown on him, that is all, like a good song. He wants to help, to sustain, not to contain. He wants her not to doubt her own freedom, to know his distance from her’ (p. 178). Cephas thus comes to appreciate that the feminine can only give freely of itself if not faced with the threat of its appropriation. This is also a political message for the future of Zimbabwe: the land must be loved not possessively fought over. The Stone Virgins is not a novel that marginalises the narratives of the men. Not only does it trace the growing emotional maturity of Cephas, endorsing such, it devotes time to trying to understand the predatory nature of someone like Sibaso. We learn that Sibaso acquires an idealistic nationalism as a student reading writers such as Solomon Mutswairo. He joins the liberation struggle but in the process of his participation in it he becomes de-humanised. We understand that he comes to treat of himself as merely the instrument of history, and he calls himself ‘an instrument of war’ (p. 141). It is said of him: ‘He seems to have a will, an idea that only he can execute [ . . . ] He is the embodiment of time’ (p. 83). In a sense, he recalls Marx’s gruesome statement that may serve to explain an aspect of totalitarianism: ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcase.’35 It is also as if Sibaso’s own being is completely insubstantial, hollowed out, as if he could de-materialise at any point. Sibaso has an obsession with spiders, the spiders serving as an objective correlative for his would-be tenacious yet ghostly mode of being. Terence Ranger writes: ‘If, in her address to the ZIBF Indaba, Vera could compare History to a spider, in The Stone Virgins she offers us a multitude of spiders, some of whom emblematize history.’36 Regarding these spiders, whilst some are predatory of their mates and some dangerous through their poison, they are remarkably ephemeral for their role as figures of history. We are told: ‘There is a type of spider that turns to air, its life a mere gasp [ . . . ] The body vanishes, from inside out, the inside pouring like powdered dust, the legs a fossil’ (p. 83). The legs of spiders that Sibaso collects are described as ‘Time’s shadow: life’s residue’ (p. 83). These spidery remains are compared with words on a page that can be wiped off. Of the post-war spider, it is claimed: ‘The joints upon its legs are mere full stops, abbreviations for a death. Its outline is a parenthesis [ . . . ] Who would want to eat such an already dead thing? In the future there will be no trace of it’ (p. 85, my emphasis). Sibaso is associated with these spiders in various ways throughout the novel. He is like them in that he seems to be very almost dead whilst still alive, a sort of hollowed out, dessicated ghost, just existing, living on

156

Women of Zimbabwe

rather than living. The spidery traces are given to us as a kind of writing in the service of time that fails to secure anything like permanence because this writing is so dead, so cut off from life that it could easily be subject to its instantaneous decomposition: dust to dust, ashes to ashes. There is a curious coincidence between a passage in Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ and a passage in Vera’s The Stone Virgins, each treating of the discovery of a fossil associated with a written sign or trace. However, the treatment of this discovery is revealingly different. Derrida writes of how when reading Rousseau a natural archive was exhumed in Picardy serving remarkably to preserve ‘the cadaver of an insect surprised by death, in an instant, by a geological or geothermal catastrophe, at the moment at which it was sucking the blood of another insect, some fifty-four million years before humans appeared on earth.’ Derrida says this predatory act could also have been a sexual jouissance, noting that some midges were also preserved in amber as they made love. What impresses him is the lasting transmission of what he calls unrepeatable and singular events. Derrida likens this to Rousseau’s expressed desire to archive an unprecedented portrayal of the natural history of man, the singular truth of himself. Derrida relates an anecdote of how a typo occurred in the proofs of Of Grammatology where he had wished to preface his treatment of Rousseau with an epigraph. Derrida writes: ‘The compositor in fact had set: ‘‘J’e´tois comme si j’avais commis un insecte.’’ ‘‘I was as if I had committed an insect.’’’ The correct version is ‘incest’ rather than ‘insect’. Derrida goes on to write: [I]n order to respect the grammatical machine, I had to resolve, to rectify and to normalize. I thus returned from insect to incest, retracing the whole path, the fifty-four million years that lead from the blood-sucking animal to the first man of the Confessions [ . . . ] Oedipus dictating there the first, here the last word of man.37 So the grammatical machine is a normalising one before which Derrida is somehow helpless. He has to provide the correct version of the story which, it turns out, is the Oedipal narrative of man, from first to last, word without end, amen. But which Oedipus is being so empowered? Is the precociously mature, sexual Freudian boy or is it the young man of Sophocles who resists the loss of his childhood femininity? Which is the normal story? And, what of those cultures that maintain they do not have Oedipal complexes, that such structures pertain to the cultural-patriarchal structuring of Western subjectivity? In Derrida’s account, there is a noticeably retrospective intentionality at stake: ‘incest’ replaces ‘insect’ so that the eventual outcome of the incestuous human will have now been instated from the very ‘first’, even in the ‘first’ insect like an anagrammatic code imprinted therein. Ancient insects would have had Freudian Oedipus complexes implanted in their genes like some typo error, some typical error, error of type, running throughout the evolutionary history of all nature? In Derrida’s account of the fossilised insect couple he speaks of the interrupted pleasure of the blood-sucking insect (become singular), comparable to

Women of Zimbabwe

157

jouissance. What of the other insect? Would the other insect see this bloodsucking as a pleasure – help yourself – happy for this to continue? Whose event, whose story, whose history? But the moral of this archive is that the predator died along with his/her prey, sharing a grave forever. For Derrida, there’s only one insect, the insect – only one incest too? call it Oedipus. If there has to be only one – and why one if not for the dream of singularity or singulinearity – why not Jocasta? Derrida writes: We are seeking in this way to advance our research on the subject of that which [ . . . ] comes to pass, is done, comes about, happens, arrives [ . . . ] a performance [ . . . ] an oeuvre that survives its supposed operation and its supposed operator [ . . . ] The machine is the effect of the cut as much as it is a cause of the cut. And that is one of the difficulties in handling this concept of machine, which always and by definition structurally resembles a causa sui. And where one says causa sui, the figure of a god is not far off.38 So, the machine, the performative, the god – we are here given the correlations – cause or originate themselves in being cut off from what you are not allowed to call an origin since this would be to negate the self-origination of what causes itself. So the one who is produced by the cut that (naturally) happens to it (the cut of sexual difference) comes to be the single one that (nonnaturally, technically) authors, inscribes or, rather, appropriates, the cut. He/ Writing, lacking, makes all the differences: not natural ones but inscriptional ones beyond and above nature, life and death? He /Writing makes the law of what happens: in priestly fashion to be sure. And so it comes to pass. And this differs from theophallogocentrism? Does it? How does it relate to the logic of the predator and incest? It would seem to be a matter of trying to usurp or take the place of that which one lacks, has been cut from. But this burial of the other within the one in a fantasy of being the source of difference would, the insects tell us, be but an immortalisation of death: forever dead. Yet that is not the fantasy. Ultimately, may the machine-god performative turn out yet to be an unconfessed fantasy of the resurrection body, what rises and arises without a body? The original life all over again, if that can be said. And, the performative itself may be only the ritualisation and formalisation of something much more unmentionably mystical. Life. In The Stone Virgins, Sibaso, the predator character associated with spiders, retrieves a book he had as a student. In it, he finds ‘a crushed spider weighed down by time’ (p. 121). He reflects: In war, time weaves into a single thread. This thread is a bond. Not all bonds are sacred [ . . . ] A word hides where under the brittle smudge where the spider sinks into the fraying paper [ . . . ] I lift the sheet and this shape falls off the web of words, a fossil floating in noon light, perforated like a dry leaf [ . . . ] The

158

Women of Zimbabwe crushed spider is an outline, the shape alone [ . . . ] its skeleton cannot merge with words. (p. 122)

The spider-logic or cause of war is a single thread, of would-be self-causing man, not a sacred bond. The spider is a trace like a word, as before, but only ‘like’ a word, so also unlike a word. Unlike a word, it is not ink that has been absorbed by a page, part of a page, part of a web of words, a meshing of many threads, a co-text, a context. It is a shape alone and the shape of aloneness. The passage goes on to speak of a weightless ‘crushed solitude’. Cut off. Cut off from all sustenances and sustaining sources, the shape can only crumble into nothingness. It cannot be re-born. It cannot re-enter time. It is utterly the end. As Vera writes of the post-war spider, its death is its discontinuity. A predatoryincestuous logic is one of living off your own kind. It is a logic, therefore, of selfdevouring, as leads to the emptying out of the then desiccated form that can only, finally, at some point disappear. A book may hold this form in its pages for some time, but one day the outline will give up its ghost with a radical finality. I think that in Vera’s vision, that is, my reading of it, what lasts, what needs to endure, is the collective life. This co-present existence never goes away, whilst it has both its visible and invisible aspects. This is not the history of history books so much as history as the continuance of life where the so-called past may accompany the present. The predator is one who would foreclose this collective being that depends on femininity for its bonds, but all this accomplishes is that the predator, with sacrificial violence, cuts himself off from the sustaining whole. With this the predator is at one with an empty self-depleting time of winding down, a time without a future. Sibaso is fascinated by what is preserved in or on stone. The stone virgins of the novel’s title are ancient cave paintings of virgin sacrifices or virgin suicides for the sake of the gods, and Sibaso imagines his rape of Nonceba and destruction of Thenjiwe in such terms. Sibaso’s horrific actions are thus given to us as part of a long history of human violence, at once civilisational and primitive, that is obscurely bound up with ambivalent reactions towards youthful femininity as both sacred and taboo, as both ritualistically foreclosed and savagely preyed upon. What is revolutionary about Vera’s writing is that it asks its readers to honour the memory of all those humans sacrificed by other humans (or driven to suicide), and to engage in a collective attempt to imagine another kind of history, a history in which the preserved outlines and traces of all those many human predators would suddenly lose their capacity for perpetuation, would just suddenly disappear to appear no more. In the novel, there is a second horrific episode of violence when Thandabantu store is burnt down by the army trying to squash and intimidate the dissidents. Those who gather at the store, as constitutes the centre of the small town of Kezi, and the store-keeper, Mahlathini, are killed. It is said that the soldiers ‘made a perverse show out of Mahlathini’s death, accusing him of offering a meeting place where anything could be said, planned and allowed to happen. He was said to be expert at discarding the future’ (p. 211). The store is therefore

Women of Zimbabwe

159

a place where time can slow down, be suspended for the sake of opening up synchronous possibilities that the relentless temporal march into the supposed future would close down, censor and repress. In the broadest sense, the store and the novel offer sheltered airy meeting places for the expression of dissent and dreams. A moving and inspiring aspect of Vera’s career is her friendship with Terence Ranger, one of the most prominent historians of Zimbabwe. Butterfly Burning is dedicated to Ranger and their respective work is informed by a dialogue of mutual influence across different approaches to history. As Ranger recounts, Vera’s fiction-writing enterprise is an attempt at writing a different kind of history, distinct from the academic versions. Nana Wilson-Tagoe is finely attuned to this aspect of Vera’s work, stating that her novels depend on the reader accepting that the symbolic mediations of Vera’s novels hinge on a sense of the real. Wilson-Tagoe observes how Vera does not attempt to represent history in conventional terms but rather works through defamiliarisation, and she states that: defamiliarized spaces [ . . . ] derive from the real world and are structured to re-invent the realities and possibilities of the worlds that shape people’s lives in the climactic years of the second Chimurenga. More crucially, they examine and question the assumptions of the consensus, open up its doxa to reveal those ambiguities, differences and contradictions subsumed within its normative truths: assumptions about freedom, liberation, gender, manhood, identity.39 It sounds somewhat like deconstruction in terms of what deconstruction promises to effect but, as previously cited critics note, the writing is not deconstruction in its practice. Put another way, Vera’s novels interrupt performative normativity and iterability from a creative engagement with the real that allows a reader to see how other realities are possible. Vera, in an interview, speaks of her departure from recorded history in the writing of her novel Nehanda, and states: I wrote it in a very emotional state of clarity that there are alternatives to ‘history’ [ . . . ] And I thought I’d better write about it, since that’s where I can see a concentration of all our beliefs and what makes up our identity as a people, how we create legends and even how we recreate our history. Because, as Africans, our history is there to serve us, not us to serve it [ . . . ] The legend, the history, is created in the mouth, and therefore survival is in the mouth.40 Now, this is apparently very close to a performative understanding of history. Hillis Miller or Derrida might say to me at this juncture: there, you see, she says it – speech acts make history. I have not simply disagreed with this nor would not. Rather, the point is that there are very discrepant philosophical positions around the question of such an event. For Derrida, as considered at length, the

160

Women of Zimbabwe

speech act is self-actualising in accordance with a principle of iterability, citationality, self-referencing, self-referentiality, and so on. For Vera, it is otherwise. If history can be created in the mouth, this is precisely because there is something that evades iterability. This pertains to the emotional clarity with which Vera is able to appreciate the collective spirit and the African philosophical outlook. In brief, if we may inhabit this outlook, inscription, the formalising of history, is there to serve us as our instrument, rather than writing serving to instrumentalise us. The formulation of history changes because life is not static: what is happening now is also re-creating the supposed past. The past is not something that definitively happens but is part of a continuous, unfinished, mutating process that constantly enables the speaking anew of the past. From Vera’s perspective, once something is completely self-referential, perfectly iterable, it enters the time of its ending, its discontinuity: its fossilisation. In Nehanda, it is said of Shona culture: We do not believe that words can become independent of the speech that bore them. Can words exchanged today on this clearing by waving grass become like a child left to be brought up by strangers? Words surrendered to the stranger, like the abandoned child, will become alien – a stranger to our tongues. The paper is the stranger’s own peculiar custom, a trick he employs against time. Among ourselves, speech is not like a rock. Words are as malleable as the minds of the people who create them.41 This is obviously antithetical to the pronouncements of deconstruction with its insistence on writing, the iterable, as that which operates through being cut off from living consciousnesses. Poetically, words maintain their liveliness in going from living consciousness to living consciousness, rather than just maintaining themselves (as words). Pockets or domains of cultural stagnation may be said to occur when there is too much iterability. For example, in conservative religious communities where commandments are set in stone, religion functions like a jargon or set of cliche´s. Equally, in postmodernist cultures of pastiche and advertising spam, a sourceless language functions as a commodity fetish, citing and re-citing itself to stupefaction. Of course, in oral cultures, language can be used in a very formulaic and ritualistic way, but African philosophy is also written as poetry. And poems are not only hedgehogs but chameleons. They change in live interactions with their settings or contexts. Ranger testifies to the fact that Vera’s writing has enlarged his sense of what can be done in the writing of history, particularly as regards a sense of togetherness. Ranger also notes, with some delight, that Cephas, the most hopeful character in The Stone Virgins, turns out to be an historian, in particular, an archivist for the National Museums and Monuments. Thus, Vera’s unconventional view of history and her valuation of orality does not in any way entail a rejection of the archive. Rather, Vera situates the archival within a concept of history that differs from the fossil-like and ghostly adherence to time of Sibaso.

Women of Zimbabwe

161

For Cephas, the archive bears witness to the suffering of atrocities, and offers a form of attendance on the wounded of history. It also serves as the source for recreating the past in the present. As Ranger notes, what is at stake is the notion of the historian as healer which is only possible on the basis of maintaining a patient openness towards collective being. Ranger states: ‘Cephas is a man for whom History is not foreclosing. It allows choice and variation and embraces everybody.’42 For certain cultures and histories, patriarchal and masculinist ones, the feminine real is foreclosed and since the feminine real constitutes the connection to the real more generally, this gradually leads to an historical dessication of adherence to time for time’s sake, pure ghostliness. The revolution of Vera’s writing, is that connection to the real would not be foreclosed but what would be thereby foreclosed is what would otherwise produce foreclosure: the predatory self that would internalise and cannibalise the disavowed other in a myth of self-perpetuation. Philosophically, what is at stake is understanding that you cannot enclose being within time, but you can include time within being. Whilst for Derrida the event, what happens, is writing or the text-machine, the novels of Dangarembga and Vera emphasise that it is really life that happens: life happens, entailing death too. Lizzy Attree points out that Vera in her doctoral dissertation draws on Edward Said to make the point that colonialism is immobilising for the colonised.43 The texts of Dangarembga and Vera emphasise the freeing up of movement, or freedom of spirit, for the historical text of resentments to be re-written. Anyone can be part of this slow and patient revolution. We can be, if able to give up on fantasies of self-generation, if able to avow the feminine, if able to stop cutting ourselves off from the on-going totality that is and is and is beyond any trace. Climb on.

6

Shakespeare the shaman

‘And maybe it’s better that we do this Shakespeare now, Tambu. Otherwise, what it says there would we have known!’ Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not1 You know what’s going to happen in Hamlet, but what you do is relive it, in fact. Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes2 Rarest sounds. Do you not hear? William Shakespeare, Pericles (V.i.226)3

There are so many Shakespeares. The Shakespeare that I wish to engage with in this chapter may be construed of as a mystic and shaman. I wish to engage with this particular Shakespeare through a reading of Hamlet that specifically attends to what I see as the play’s disclosure of a poetic realism that goes beyond the ghostliness of writing. This reading will focus simply on the text before going on to take into account a critical appreciation of how the interpretation I offer pertains to a certain placing of Hamlet in cross-cultural and colonial contexts.

Hamlet and the scene of writing If we accept that Hamlet is an elegy, arguably by a father for a son, like poetic elegies, it is intimately bound up with the questions of what poetry is and what it means to be a poet. In the third chapter of this work, ‘Radiance or Brilliance’, I made use of a prospective mode of reading, a matter of taking the work of literature as it comes, as it unfolds. The same approach will be mobilised here within the practical constraint of not being able to cover the play in its entirety. In this instance, my assumption is that a prospective approach is able to offer a counter-balance to readings of Hamlet that seem compelled to repeat Hamlet’s fixated fascination with the ghost at the expense of following the play through to its conclusion with respect to what is finally worked out there.4 As to what this working out might be said to consist of, we need precisely to engage in its process which is to set off quite blindly. We start, then, where the writing starts as if the play were being written for the first time as we read it.

Shakespeare the shaman

163

‘Who’s there?’5 The play begins with this question and the first scene of the night watch echoes with questions of who or what is there: ‘who is there?’ (I.i.12); ‘what, is Horatio there?’ (I.i.18); ‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’ (I.i.20) The question of the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ is a question of the difference between a thing or a being. In particular, the persistent question is whether the ghost that the watch have seen and expect to see is a being or a thing? Alternatively, what else might it be? The men of the night watch are in the dark, which is presumably why they call out in the manner of ‘who’s there?’ What can they be watching in the dark? The watch are watching minutes, watching time. Marcellus says so in explaining why Horatio has been asked to join them. He says: ‘Therefore I have entreated him along / With us to watch the minutes [ . . . ]’ (I.i.25–6) The coming of the apparition is thus associated with the watching or sensing of time in the dark. Such a trial may recall Aristotle’s account of what philosophers call the sensuous super-sensuous. In Book IV of the Physics, Aristotle proposes a thought experiment in which we may imagine ourselves in the dark ‘not being affected through the body’.6 He says that in such a situation we may begin to sense something without or beyond the senses. And he says that what this is is time. How can that be? Can time be? Why not try the experiment? Close your eyes, slow down. Suspend, almost, yourselves. Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul, While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.7 Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.8 For Wordsworth the river that we may feel streaming through us is the life of things. For Ashbery, it is the synchronicity of what waves out to infinity on either side of you. Eliot writes: ‘Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.’9 In Hamlet, the watchmen are in the dark but there is * a star that appears at a particular time to asterisk the apparition. What time is this particular time of the star and the ghost? The bell then beating one – Enter GHOST. (I.i.38) It is a prompt ghost. It comes on the stroke of one. The number of the ghost is one. It is, in any language, nu´mero uno, the monad, maybe, chacun. For although one, it comes again, not just once. It appears: ‘In the same figure like the King that’s dead’ (I.i.40). It appears as one because it has lost its life? It is an exact or pure likeness. ‘Mark it, Horatio’

164

Shakespeare the shaman

(I.i.42). It (is) the mark. It is perhaps the asterisk and the bookmark. While the watchmen are voices in the dark, the ghost is a visible mark without a voice. The men entreat it to speak but the injunction to speak offends it in its march, on its silent beat. It stalks off. The ghost is said to conduct a ‘martial stalk’, perhaps keeping time, and it appears as a suit of armour. This military mobilisation, it is conjectured, may be because of the history of the dead King. The first thing we learn of King Hamlet is this: ‘Our last King / Whose image even but now appeared to us, / Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway – / Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride’ (I.i.79–81). The ghost is an image or emulation of the King but the first thing we learn of the King was that he was an emulator too. An emulator is not just an imitator in that what would seem to be at stake is the imitation of that which is judged superior. If the King was motivated by emulate pride, does this infer that he must have felt somewhat inferior, secondary perhaps? What appears as one may be an originary emulation, a self-emulation, or that which turns round upon itself in the absence of another. The ghost stalks back but still it will not speak. A cock crows to announce the dawn, the deliverance of radiance. This song is antithetical to the ghost who is thereby called on to disappear. The stroke of one in the night brings it while the crow of the voice makes it go. In the next scene we meet the King, Claudius, who is not one. He tells us he is joined to the Queen that was his sister. He calls her ‘Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state’ (I.ii.9). Although it may be that she is just joined to the state, it sounds as if she has been joined to him so that the two of them occupy a sovereign position as some strange figure of a Kingqueen or Queenking. There is something wrong – rotten? – about this. Fortinbras, Claudius says, thinks that with the death of King Hamlet the state must be ‘disjoint’ and ‘out of frame’. (i.ii.20) Later, Hamlet will tell us that what is out of joint and out of frame is time. Time should be enframed or an enframing? Sited, perhaps cited: enframed by quotation marks? Perhaps time makes of the infinite the finite but repeatable. We are introduced to Laertes as a man with a suit for the King. Laertes is encouraged not to be shy, to come out with it, speak up. What Laertes wants to plead is: can he be given his leave of father and King, possibly of all fathers and Kings? Laertes is granted his reprieve, his ‘fair hour’ (I.ii.62) to spend with his ‘best graces’ (I,ii.63) as he will. He is being granted some feminine space for a while and for his delight, absolved from manly duties. We are also introduced to Hamlet who, completely unlike Laertes, is first given to us as one who does not want to take his leave of father and King. From the start, Hamlet and Laertes are each other’s others. Hamlet tells Gertrude that his grief cannot be reduced to an image, an appearance. For instance, he says: ‘‘‘Seems’’, madam – nay it is, I know not ‘‘seems’’’ (i.i.76). Since we have just been introduced to the ghost as an image, the very likeness of a King who was an emulator, this is arresting. For young Hamlet, images of grief are not authentic, not the feeling itself. Yet one may grieve over a likeness?

Shakespeare the shaman

165

We learn that Hamlet is suffering from depression, as he proclaims: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ (i.ii.133–4). Seem? Nonetheless, Shakespeare conveys the nature of this ashen feeling with convincing authenticity. The depressed subject has no interest in the ambient world. The depressed one’s libido has withdrawn from it or waned. While the world may be said to appear horrible at such a juncture, the depressed person is convinced that that is how it really is, if others could but see it. Everyone else gives the impression of being caught up in illusions, appearances and images, in ideologies and aesthetics, without being able to see how truly devoid of value the world is. I would like to entertain the idea that the two feelings that carry the greatest sense of authenticity for human beings could be severe depression, on the one hand, and pure bliss, on the other. All our other emotions are arguably in between these two states, as if differing musical ratios of them. With the extreme states of depression and bliss, the sense is that this is all that there is. In the case of depression, this is a matter of the isolated self: there is nothing outside this finitude of each separate self ’s existence. In the case of bliss, the sense of reality is a matter of being without a sense of self with this as all that there is ad infinitum. In both cases, there is nothing to offset the feelings hence they are both experienced in terms of undeniability and clarity, albeit in antithetical terms. Horatio – the scholar whose name emphasises ratio – tells Hamlet that he has seen the apparition of his father, affirming: ‘These hands are not more like’ (I.ii.211). Nonetheless, you cannot superimpose one downward facing hand upon one downward facing hand.10 That is, hands are chiasmatic or inverted likenesses of each other. Could this mean that identity is not of this world? In the third scene of the first act, Laertes and Polonius both warn Ophelia to distance herself from Hamlet for they suspect that his feelings for her may not be trustworthy. For Laertes, Hamlet is an instrument of the State, where Laertes reasons: ‘his will is not his own’ (I.iii.17). He is subject to the techno-performativity of his role. For Polonius, Hamlet is faking his emotions, where Polonius warns his daughter: ‘Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers’ (I.iii.126). Whilst Laertes allows that Hamlet may be genuine but not free to follow his heart, Polonius believes that Hamlet feigns true love for the sake of lustful opportunism. We now come to the last two scenes of the act, two of the most famous in literature. As Hamlet and his friends wait for the ghost, Hamlet discourses on blemishes and on how one minor defect, ‘stamp of one defect’ (I.iv.32), may take away from all other virtues. It is a speech about defective marks. When Hamlet utters the word ‘scandal’, the ghost appears. The first words of the ghost to Hamlet are ‘Mark me.’ The ghost is there to be noticed. The ghost (is) a mark to mark a scandal. The ghost, we learn, exists in a state of torment, a sort of purgatory of sulphurous flame. The terminology may be said to remind us of Jacob Boehme on the Qual. Qual is a pharmakonical expression that can mean both ‘source’ and ‘torment’, Boheme writing: ‘we can recognize that the life of darkness is but a languished poison, like a dying torment (Qual)’.11 Boehme’s alchemical language refers to sulphur too. What is the nature of this torment? For Boehme, I think

166

Shakespeare the shaman

that it occurs when the spirit experiences utter isolation at its source: a state of being completely cut off. Torment is perhaps being isolated from all others, from collective being. Hell would be unrelieved selfness, the opposite of Sartre’s version of hell as other people.12 The apartness, the ostracism, the discontinuity of a ghost is that a ghost can neither touch or be touched. In such a state, it would seem that the spirit can only consume itself, burn itself away until nothing remains. For Derrida, Heidegger’s possible torment over his Nazism is a question of spirit-in-flame, the holocaust as this.13 The ghost reveals that the father has been poisoned through the ear. Perhaps what is suggested is that the ear has become a mouth forced to swallow the speech that should be breathed out. In a sense, energy or spirit is being made to turn round upon itself to cut the living being off from life. This is imaged in terms of a sudden drying up. The river or sea is no more. It is the melancholic nightmare of Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ It is the parched praying for rain in ‘The Waste Land’. The ghost says: ‘Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched.’ (I.v.74–5) Brother hand? Cannot occupy the same place as brother hand. In one stroke, the King has lost his sovereignty and his wife, his life. As the first words of the ghost to Hamlet are ‘Mark me’, his parting words are ‘remember me’ (I.v.91). Hamlet then says he will erase everything of himself other than his father’s words, promising ‘thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain’ (I.v.102–3). From this point on, his spirit has to be understood as somewhat possessed, Hamlet not himself, as various readers of the play have observed. The father’s spirit may be said to require a worldly vehicle to carry out unfinished business to rescue him from his cut off torment. And Hamlet agrees to be this instrument. Then comes the pact of secrecy between the men, between men, concerning the revelation of father as ghost. It is forbidden to mention that the father has been seen as a ghost. Is it because he is supposed to be an origin and not something secondary? There is a certain encrypting of the excrypted. A certain foreclosure takes place. The play has yet to begin. Then these words arrive, words that feel electrifying because it is as if Shakespeare speaks directly to us through the mouth of Hamlet: The time is out of joint; O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! (II.i.186–7) Hamlet the character, and Hamlet the play, have been born to set right some disarticulation of the time or time. For Shakespeare, the son has died before the father. To right this, the father must die and be put to rest before the son. The young should not die before the old if time flows in the right direction: from birth to death, not death to birth. If this temporal misdirection is to be corrected, we may have to journey to the real birth or beginning and not begin with ghosts and death. Might that be where this drama is taking us?

Shakespeare the shaman

167

Shortly after Hamlet has seen the ghost, he is seen as a ghost, as if it is catching, this ghost-seeing. Ophelia sees Hamlet as a ghost. She says to Polonius: ‘Oh my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!’ (II.i.72) And she goes on to describe Hamlet, ‘Pale as his shirt’ (II.i.78). He is not just seen as a ghost but as that ghost, the ghost, as is suggested by the lines: ‘As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors, he comes before me’ (II.i.80–1). Hamlet could have said as much of his father’s ghost with the ghost’s ‘horrible, most horrible’ (I.v.80). And, to Ophelia, he does seem possessed. Ophelia goes on to explain how Hamlet holds her at an arm’s length, before turning away from her to look back on her. He shakes his head three times. This marks his demise and his severance from Ophelia. She says: ‘He raised a sigh so piteous and so profound / As it did seem to shatter all his bulk / And end his being. That done, he lets me go / And with his head over his shoulder turned / He seemed to find his way without his eyes’ (II.i.91–5). Let us pause to consider this. In this strangely contorted manoeuvre we perhaps are given a mystical diagram. Masculine and feminine are straining in opposite directions, as if spiralling away from each other but without quite breaking loose from each other. The masculine turns round on the feminine, but with an empty gaze. He no longer sees her. Gone is an awareness of the feminine, but not before Hamlet has carefully perused Ophelia’s face as if he would draw it or duplicate it from memory. The scene is like so: 1

This could roughly be seen as Lacan’s Meobius or Mo¨bius strip of the psyche, or as the Lorenz Attractor, that butterfly.14 It could be the yin and yang symbol of counter-spiralling masculine and feminine energies, and much else besides. Since this condensation cannot be elaborated upon here, the following may be put forward as just a philosophical suggestion: the active energy becomes or makes for time whilst the yielding energy does not enter time. We are all torn by such a tension? After Polonius has received Ophelia’s account of Hamlet’s behaviour, he procures from her a love letter written to her from Hamlet. Regarding what arises from this, why is it that so many critics insist on seeing Hamlet as a poet when Shakespeare goes to some lengths to disprove such a notion? Polonius says: ‘Now gather, and surmise’ (II.ii.197), proceeding to disclose the letter. [Reads.] To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia – that’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, ‘Beautified’ is a vile phrase, but you shall hear – thus in

168

Shakespeare the shaman her excellent white bosom, these, etc. [ . . . ] [Reads.] Doubt that the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar But never doubt I love. Oh dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon my groans, but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu. Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him. Hamlet. (II.ii.108–21)

Thus, on three accounts Hamlet is established as not a poet. First, Polonius comments critically on Hamlet’s lack of aptitude with words, his would-be poeticising. Second, the poem by Hamlet that is read out, the poem that Shakespeare devises for him, fails. We hear that the last line lets it down, the song goes a little flat. Third, Hamlet, honest with himself, admits the lack of rhythmic ability, his difficulty with accented verse, no less sincere for that. Even though he lacks the art, he assures Ophelia that his feelings are genuine. Hamlet may not be a poet, but he is no performer either. For Hamlet, love, and feelings more generally, cannot be a matter of mere performance. After this scene, Hamlet enters reading and says what he is reading, when asked by Polonius, is but ‘Words, words, words’ (II.ii.189). Hamlet goes on to say what he is reading is nonsense, mere words, slanders, in that his reading material maintains that old men have old appearances and bodies, such as grey beards, wrinkled faces, slack muscles, and so on. His objection seems not to make sense. However, remembering that Hamlet has said to the ghost that he has emptied himself of all his own words to receive the words of the ghost alone, it might help us to understand that Hamlet is being inhabited by his father’s spirit, an old spirit. Thus, Hamlet is saying that you can look young and have a young body but actually feel very old. He says he does not disagree with the writers that he reads but that they are not ‘honest’. Thus, perhaps, it is true that the old look old, but it is also the case that, in honesty, the young in appearance may be old too. He says to Polonius: ‘For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if, like a crab, you could go backward’ (II.ii.1999–201). For Hamlet, age and youth have been reversed. This could either be a case of his depression or because he harbours his father’s spirit in order to attend to the disarticulation of time. How else are we to make sense of this foolish wisdom? Hamlet is a play that perhaps especially asks us to enter the protagonist’s state of mind for one of the extraordinary things about the writing of it is that Shakespeare is able to give us the feeling of the whole play taking place within Hamlet’s mind. Given that it can seem as if everything were taking place within his depressed, thus isolated consciousness, the characters apart from Hamlet all seem a bit unreal or wraithlike. Compared with the complexity of Hamlet, do not the other characters seem rather remote, as if viewed from a distance in outline? In this respect, Hamlet’s mind seems to contain the play, Hamlet stating

Shakespeare the shaman

169

to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’ (II.ii. 254–6).15 Rosencrantz has just suggested that Denmark is not big enough for his mind, so it is as if Hamlet is saying he could live in his mind, cranium, nut-shell, but for his tormented thoughts. Hamlet goes on to state further that the world is as nothing to him: ‘this most excellent canopy [ . . . ] appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’ (II.ii.265–9). The other characters are like actors compared with Hamlet’s grim reality. As for the players, Hamlet learns that the fashion is for child actors. Anne Barton notes: The discussion of the success of child actors is somewhat intrusive in the play and more acerb than we like to associate with Shakespeare. Its inclusion [in the first Folio] is surprising, because the episode must have become more obscure with the passage of years.16 However, it may be said that Hamlet (rather than Shakespeare) is quite centrally preoccupied with the very transition from boy to man. He wonders what will happen to the child actors when their voices break and does seem a bit bitter over the fact that these girlish boys are so valued. He wonders too if the boys will thank the writers if the writers ‘make them exclaim against their own succession’ (Jenkins, II.ii.349). Writers, Shakespeare hints to us, should be writing parts for grown up men, or even for young men who do not feel young. The discussion of the popularity of the boy actors leads Hamlet to reflect on what we might today call consumer society. He says: ‘For my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little’ (II.ii.300–3). The King, it would seem, is like a commodity fetish, a coinage. The King, a thing. But with respect to what? His cloning capacity? The ability to make little versions of himself like a ‘Kingqueen’? Hamlet goes on to mock femininity in male actors, teasing one player as follows: ‘By’r Lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring’ (II.ii.363–6). Uncurrent gold would be rare, not counterfeitable. The coin, gold ring, to which fetishism attaches itself perhaps concerns then the value of uncracked or feminine voice or spirit. The value of virginity is also perhaps implied. After the players perform, Hamlet wonders how it is that they can bring so much feeling to the words they speak. He comments: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

170

Shakespeare the shaman A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? (II.ii.486–92)

It is a philosophically dense moment, raising the question of whether the performative can be genuine or the genuine performative. ‘Conceit’ suggests image, design and intentionality. Can emotions be engineered or copied or attach themselves to copies? Would such feelings be authentic? Hamlet has been observing how people attach feelings to mere images and fictions, and how feelings can be manipulated by such. And, as discussed, the ghost has been given to us as the likeness of an emulator and as a mark. What underlies this area of anxiety is, as before, the relation of being to things. The image of the father may be said to have value because it outlasts the life of the father. The image worshipped for its own sake is implicitly worshipped for its temporal endurance. But that does not mean that the lasting image has more value than what it outlasts; and not all lasting images have lasting value. The image of the father would have no value if his life had no value. For example, a cartoon character or a photograph of someone you love? The example could be refined, but the point, I hope, is made. An image may bear witness to a reality beyond it. So Hamlet believes The Mousetrap will point to the reality of what Claudius is trying to deny. The play also asks us to consider whether even death is an illusion, nothing but an image. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy raises this question. If Hamlet carries his father’s ghost then a finality of death is to be devoutly wished for by the ghost in torment. As for Hamlet, suicide is an uncertain resolution because he sees that something of life persists after death if his father has indeed addressed him beyond the grave. What if absolute death were an impossibility and to die in a state of misery or guilt would be to persist in such a state for all eternity? Horrible, most horrible. Hamlet asks Ophelia to remember him in her prayers, unsurprisingly. But then he turns on her with his violent injunction that she imprison herself in a nunnery. I would agree with those who consider that Hamlet’s feelings towards Ophelia are bound up with his feelings towards his mother. Here, I would like to suggest that Ophelia and Gertrude could be seen in terms of aspects of Hamlet himself. In Chapter 3, I suggested that an allegorical approach could be brought to Shakespearean tragedy where we might see the female characters as emblematic of the lives of the male protagonists who represent the self. Such an approach would also work with the consideration that Hamlet may be happening within Hamlet. Hamlet is perhaps struggling with something that no one will let him say. What can he say? Hamlet keeps plainly wanting to protest against sexuality and yet no one will hear him or they wish to misunderstand him: he cannot be protesting against sex. He does fancy Ophelia, Polonius insists. That may be so, but Hamlet is in a state of conflict over this. Taking up the suggestion that Ophelia and Gertrude might be read as representatives of Hamlet’s own nature,

Shakespeare the shaman

171

Hamlet may be heard as telling Ophelia, innocent nature so to speak, to hide from the encroachments of his sexuality. And when he meets with the Queen in private, it is to confront and confess something in or of himself. Bluntly, he tells his sexual nature that she disgusts him: something he can admit to no man (hence the killing of Polonius, he who is so insistently keen to prove Hamlet’s healthy heterosexuality). Hamlet says to Gertrude that if she is to be sincere, she must be herself with Claudius and not adopt his own dissembling ways with words that half-hide and half-confess (his disgust over Claudius with Gertrude). It is here that Gertrude formulates a pneumatological riddle as follows: Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, And breath of life, I have no life to breathe What thou has said to me. (III.iv.195–7) Whilst Hamlet in a cryptic speech has just indicated that Gertrude should not imitate his mad flighty way with words, she replies that she cannot repeat his words because the sequence is from life to breath to words, not words–breath–life. Or life inspires words? Words are inspired by life? I think so. However, it is also as Hamlet’s sexual nature that Gertrude can be heard to reply in her riddle. Since her being is sexual pleasure, it is not in her nature – she does not have the life – to utter ‘crazy’ words, like Hamlet, against sexuality and thus she is in no danger of betraying the secret of his agitation: ‘Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou has said to me.’ Hamlet does not, then, desire his mother. However, it could be said that his mother is his desire, in a sense, and it could be said that he projects his sexuality onto her in order to retain the image of his father as pure, as a pure image, that is, without body: as a ghost. His dilemma seems to be that he is torn between his love for his father as a disembodied ideal and an inability to come to terms with bodily manhood as he would like to preserve himself from mature sexuality. ‘O, that this too, too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew’ (I.ii.129–30). Hamlet’s antipathy towards Claudius has something of a feeling of paranoid projection. Claudius is the foreign man – Hamlet calls him a blackamoor17 – responsible for appropriating the life of the father, his wife, and converting it to lust. Hamlet’s famous delay thus perhaps concerns a refusal of the course of life through its forward progression in time. There is the further matter of Hamlet’s mission with respect to his father’s unquiet spirit to attend to. Paternal mortality is the undoing of Ophelia. Like Hamlet, she is unable to accept the non-being of the father. Both fathers are too casually dispatched, whilst Ophelia, like Hamlet’s father, stands to be insufficiently mourned herself. I wish to attend to the scene in which Ophelia is buried as the scene which answers to the apparition of the ghost and helps to expose and resolve the play’s mysteries. However, first, it may be observed that there is an extreme polarisation between Hamlet’s melancholic attachment to the fire-washed idealisation of the

172

Shakespeare the shaman

father alone, and Ophelia’s psychotic loss of the paternal principle as issues in the loss of her mind and her dissolution into the watery element of, possibly, feminine being/non-being. In Wulf Sach’s Black Hamlet (a work to be engaged with further on), we are told that, according to African divination, to dream of a river signifies the feminine. These two extremes, say the fatalities of ‘man pure’ or ‘woman pure’, may be understood as the Scylla and Charybdis to navigate between on the sea of life. Ophelia, as a suicide, is not to be granted a proper Christian burial. She is to be buried outside the city walls. She is thus associated with a cryptic foreclosure as perhaps corresponds with the crypt of the ghost. Laertes is angered by the priest’s doorkeeper stance over his denial of proper burial rites to Ophelia. Given this, it is a most Antigone-like situation: a brother now affirms his undying love for a sister not allowed official recognition or, we could say, mentionability. Laertes says to the priest: ‘I tell thee, churlish priest, / A ministering angel shall my sister be / When thou liest howling’ (V.i.229–31). Ophelia is not a ghost but an angel, and the angelic concerns a poetic deliverance. Here it comes, Laertes leaping into the grave to embrace Ophelia, with these words: Now pile your dust upon the quick and the dead Till of this flat a mountain you have made T’o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head Of blue Olympus. (V.i.240–3) I will explain these lines shortly, but first, Hamlet’s response to this utterance is: What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane. (V.i.243–7) Earlier, Hamlet has said of his poem to Ophelia that his groans lack the right emphasis. Here, he attests to the fact that the grief of Laertes expresses itself in an inspired and inspiring manner. What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis? A poet. If it is Laertes who is the poet, this is perhaps because it is Laertes who avows the conjointness of the brother-sister relationship. Poetry is not a matter of the temporal successiveness, diachrony, of father-son generation, but concerns a sense of synchronicity. Hamlet asks ‘What is he . . . ?’ What is he, or might we also enquire, who is he? Once, in attempting to respond to Hamlet’s cue, I was lead to an epiphanic moment. Prompted by Hamlet’s question, ‘What is he[ . . . ]?’ my gaze was directed away from the speech to the question of its author and, reading from right to left, I read Laertes’ name backwards. Backwards, LAERTES reads:

Shakespeare the shaman

173

SETREAL. Set real. Hamlet tells us that he is born to set things right (while Antigone says she is born to join in love). And Laertes is born to set things real. Could Shakespeare have intended this? I think he could well have done for everything seems to cohere here. Temporality is diachronic and concerns the succession of father by son. This would be a matter of setting right. In fact, the play ends with the righted succession of young Fortinbras. However, poetic creativity requires a holistic sense of the real, as may be arrived at through chiasmatic inversion or perhaps extraversion if a reversal of a previous inversion. While we call this ‘synchronicity’, I think time is always staggered or deferred. Rather, what is at stake is the ontological, the reality of being. In Hamlet, if the time is out of joint, it could be because it has lost its point of juncture, its crossroads, its anchorage or setting in the horizontal or the oceanic horizonality of the real or being. In order to set right, first you must set real. What this seems to entail is the realisation that the feminine is that which is beside or between us. What Laertes is is a poet, but who is he? Have we not heard that name before? Laertes is the father of Odysseus, of course. Is it not strange that Shakespeare should choose such a name for a Dane? Shakespeare wishes his audience to notice something then. This Laertes-poet is to be associated with Homer, with the collective oral tradition, with the origins of poetry. And this is not just free association. Whilst, according to the concordances to Shakespeare scholarship, Shakespeare supposedly did not know Homer’s The Odyssey, I would beg to re-consider.18 Do you know that the speech Laertes utters in Ophelia’s grave actually comes from the Hades episode in The Odyssey, ‘The Book of the Dead’? Almost exactly those words. Might this have possibly gone unnoticed for centuries in the pages of Hamlet, like the insect-fossil that intrigues Derrida in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’? However, here, in Hamlet, this is not just a matter of the ghostly self-referential word cut off from its origin to ensure its endurance. Rather, what seems to remain in play are questions of the feminine, the voice, the unsurpassed oral tradition and other such persistences. Shakespeare is probably using the precise reference to the Hades episode to bookmark it. Mark this. The story in Homer concerns the twins, Otus and Ephialtes, called godlike, and of them the following is narrated: In their ninth year they were nine cubits across the shoulders and nine fathoms tall. It was this pair that threatened to go to war with the very gods on Olympus in the din and turmoil of battle. It was their ambition to pile Mount Ossa on Olympus, and wooded Pelion on Ossa, to make a stairway up to heaven. And this they would have accomplished had they reached their youthful prime. But Apollo, the son whom Leto of the lovely tresses bore to Zeus, destroyed them both before their beards began to grow and cover their cheeks with the soft down of youth.19 The twins are thus almost so perfect as to rival the gods for which they are cut down, like Aristophanes’ androgynes. Might this be a case of Shakespeare trying

174

Shakespeare the shaman

to suggest a reason for the death of his young son, not yet a man? Moreover, this state of near-perfection would seem to concern an androgyny before puberty, the question of a femininity to be lost and mourned. What is also remarkable is that the name Ophelia is anagrammatically contained in the names of the twins: O tus Ephial tes. In The Odyssey, Odysseus encounters in Hades not the ghost of his father, Laertes (for he is still alive), but the soul of his dead mother, Anticleia. He says: ‘My eyes filled with tears when I saw her there, and I was stirred to compassion’ (p. 161). She tells him that she died of no disease but out of her yearning for his return, saying: ‘No, it was my heartache for you, my glorious Odysseus, and for your wise and gentle ways, that brought my life with all its sweetness to its end’ (p. 165). Shakespeare thus might be directing us to a mourning of the son, together with a mourning of the feminine, behind the ostensible story of a mourning of the father. What is especially poignant is that Odysseus tries to embrace the spirit of his mother three times to find that he cannot for she is too insubstantial to be held. He says: ‘I long to reach you, so that even in Hell we may throw our loving arms round each other and draw cold comfort from our tears. Or is this a mere phantom that august Persephone has sent me to increase my grief ?’ (p. 165). His mother explains that: ‘once life has departed from our white bones, all is consumed by the fierce heat of the blazing fire, and the soul slips away like a dream and goes fluttering on its ways’ (p. 165). The fire of the afterlife recalls the paternal ghost’s testimony. After the effects of the fire, the soul is left then as a breath. In Hades, the souls seem sometimes glimpsed in that they are recognised, but they yet seem to be mainly voices or currents of air, referred to as ‘fluttering’ and, on a couple of occasions, as being an ‘eerie clamour’. In the story of the over-reacher twins, the number nine would seem to be especially significant. In Pythagoran mathematics, according to John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook: The ennead, the number nine, is called horizon, because it marks the line between the decad and the numbers that lead to it. Following on from the idea of the horizon, it is also called Oceanus, and represents crossings and passages. Nine was also called ‘that which brings to fruition’ because it completes the perfect nine months for birth. Because so many principles converge and dance within the aenead, it is the number of the muses, particularly Tepsichore, the muse of dance and movement.20 Thus, it is fitting that the number nine be associated with the poetic Laertes who, as I’ll come to, is indeed associated with rhythmic flexibility. Numbers do seem to be of some significance in Hamlet. The ghost is associated with one or the monad. Gertrude and Claudius constitute a problematic dyad. Hamlet’s severance from Ophelia is associated with the number three, where three times three would give us the nine of Laertes’s bond with Ophelia. Hamlet comes to maintain of Laertes: ‘to divide him inventorily would dazzle th’arithmetic of memory’ (V.ii.109). Hamlet’s father, we learn from Ophelia has

Shakespeare the shaman

175

been dead for four months. The gravediggers tell us that it takes between eight and nine months for a body to decompose. Laertes say his tears for Ophelia in her madness are seven times salt. Whilst not certain of this, it may be that Shakespeare is proposing a mathematical or musical harmony to existence, as Plato did, influenced by the same Egyptian legacy as Pythagoras. I would also propose that this would seem to concern questions of sexual difference where the number one would pertain to a solitary transcendental masculinity whilst the number nine would pertain to the greatest possible amount of femininity in possible ratios of the masculine and feminine, the latter constituting a laterality. A further consideration, related to the above speculations, is that Shakespeare is possibly offering a critique of the kind of mathematico-magical thought that led to the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Whilst Frances Yates argues that The Merchant of Venice shows evidence of Shakespeare’s engagement with Rosicrucian philosophy, as derives in part from the mathematician-mystic John Dee, it could be proposed that Hamlet reveals something of a critique of it.21 This concerns what may be wrong and repugnant in the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius. This union is repeatedly spoken of in terms of brother-sister incest and it is just possible that Shakespeare might be objecting to the sovereign position (of one or the monad) being inhabited by Man and Woman together. Yates speaks of the Rosicrucian hope for a royal mystic marriage, that of masculine with feminine, that emerges explicitly in the later Rosicrucian literature.22 However, the sovereign position of masculine transcendence is not one which can rationally include the transcended feminine. The brother-sister relationship of Laertes and Ophelia is something of an antidote to that. It concerns what should be maintained as a low horizontality of the side by side rather than that which can be hierarchically appropriated. Put another way, the place of the singular one cannot include the all. Such could be a matter of trying to reach the (non-existent?) gods on high for which you would be cut down. Yet another way of saying this is to assert, again, that the ontological cannot be encompassed by the ghostliness of the temporal although the temporal can and does occur within the ontological. Whilst the paternal principle is time, time as succession, the brother-sister reality cannot be subsumed or completely framed by this ghostly temporality. Returning to the ending of Hamlet, Hamlet appears to express a certain belated identification with Laertes, signalled in the following syntax: ‘What is he . . . This is I.’ Indeed, Hamlet goes on to express a mimetic desire in the following: Woul’t weep, woul’t fight, woul’t fast, woul’t tear thyself, Woul’t drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine, To outface me with me with leaping in her grave? Be quick buried with her, and so will I. (V.i.257) Emulate pride? It all gushes out here, perhaps cathartically. Prior to this scene, in Act IV, scene vii, Claudius has spoken of Hamlet’s envy of Laertes where this

176

Shakespeare the shaman

has been occasioned by a visiting Frenchman who has sung the praises of Laertes for his gifts in fencing. The Frenchman is himself accorded a flexible or rhythmic dexterity as a consummate horseman that he in turn much admires in Laertes. Of his admiration, Claudius states: ‘this report of his / Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy [ . . . ]’ (IV.vii.100–1). Of course, it is envy that is the venom that courses through the play. As we have seen, Horatio tells us that King Hamlet first challenges Fortinbras to a duel out of ‘emulate pride’. And then, Claudius seems to kill his brother out of such a poisoned-poisoning emulate pride, wishing to have his brother’s life, his wife. The ghost is, as ghosts are, envious of the living, but the ghost cannot have his life back. He gives Hamlet what could well be a truly impossible command, namely, kill Claudius but harm not the Queen, now his brother’s life. How kill without harming life? Hamlet consciously mourns his father but the melancholia, unconscious mourning, is for a life yet to be mourned. This comes to consciousness in the mourning of Ophelia, where Hamlet may be heard to assert he yet has a life of his own and that he loves life as much as or even more than Laertes. It is only at this point that Hamlet says ‘yes’ to life, or he utters his authorisation as permission. He finally says ‘Let be’. He says: ‘The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be’ (V.ii.200–1). He is now ready to surf that wave. Just before Hamlet’s ‘let be’, Horatio has said to him: ‘If your mind dislike anything, obey it’ (V.ii.195). But this is precisely what Hamlet has learnt is wrong: that our disavowals of ‘what is’ or reality are futile. Furthermore, Hamlet has been trying to obey his mind or his father’s double-bind, kill but don’t kill, throughout the play and finally he wants to . . . be free? To be, to go along with life, as it is and as it unfolds in time, and so to die, all necessarily. When Hamlet says ‘let be’ it marks a mature acceptance of life as it comes and thus a selfacceptance that would include, finally, an acceptance of sexual maturity, age and death. The appointment with the ‘quick’ Laertes may be seen as one with unstoppable life. When the two come to duel with each other, it is no longer on the basis of envenomed envy, emulate pride. They go along with the consequences of that history to its destructive end, but neither acts out of hatred of each other. In fact, Hamlet says to Laertes: ‘I’ll be your foil, Laertes’ (V.ii.232). He will show Laertes up to his best advantage, precisely as a fencer. However, he is also saying that he will be the instrument of Laertes: the instrument not of envy but of admiration of life. He could be affirming that he is willing to serve as the perpetuation of life – as a man – and affirming that he will be the means of paying tribute to life, as a poet. Although Hamlet probably does not begin the play as a poet, he could be understood to die as one. From an allegorical point of view, Laertes may be seen as the poet in him that finally comes to the fore. The poetic and ethical lesson of Hamlet may thus be the necessity of converting envy into admiration. When Hamlet expresses his envy of Laertes, the turning point is arrived at because an openly expressed envy begins to cease to be envy as it becomes acknowledgement of the other: the other as worthy of envy and thus of admiration. Hamlet’s mysterious mission in relation to his

Shakespeare the shaman

177

father could be understood in terms of Hamlet needing to take upon himself his father’s spirit with its obscure burden of a secret envy in order to confess this spirit cathartically and thus exorcise it. Breathe it out. In doing so, Hamlet allows his father’s spirit to rest finally. When Hamlet dies, it is wished ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (V.ii.344). Now, let it be said that the angelic voice is other than a ghost. The ghost may be said to be writing as the mark and as the sign-vehicle. Such a writing marks time, is the mark of time and concerns a temporal endurance. However, saying this is also to say that the ghost is something more than writing as the material signifier. The ghost is, in every way, the after-effect. Writing, thought and time may be said to be the temporal after-effects, perhaps after-affects, of being. Spectres are speculations. A thought is the ghost of a feeling. And a ghost is also what we like to quote. Shakespeare’s plays reach us by means of writing, however, what reaches us is not just writing. I would risk saying what reaches us with the writing, as distinct from it as writing, is an ontological authenticity or feelings of the real. And these are conveyed through the music of the voice, sometimes through the angelic song of love for a being, for being. Regarding the epigraph to this chapter from Said, its context is a discussion on music with the conductor Daniel Barenboim. It may therefore be entertained that the reliving of a text is an acoustic experience. So: who’s there? A being. A feeling. A voice. A voice without a name. Call him, or her, Homer. Call him or her: poet of the sea of being. I have introduced this poetic reading of Hamlet in order to show that the play directs us to considerations of a poetic realism beyond the ghostliness of temporality, history, writing and patrilineal inheritance. I would like now to direct some limited attention to how this reading may be connected with certain anthropological and colonial approaches to Hamlet.

Colonising or decolonising Hamlet The first text that I wish to refer to is Gilbert Murray’s Hamlet and Orestes, a lecture given by Murray for the British Academy in 1914, for this could be one of the first attempts to approach Shakespeare from an anthropological perspective, as well as something of a psychoanalytic one. Murray is a classical scholar, particularly of Greek tragedy, and in turning to Shakespeare he is preoccupied with the question of how it is that literary works seem to repeat each other over time and across cultures where there is no evidence of historical influence. Thus, Murray is interested in the question of whether there is such a thing as a cross-cultural imagination, or a universality of the unconscious, or even a collective consciousness. Murray says of his experience as a scholar of various languages and cultures: I have found myself haunted by a curious problem [ . . . ] It concerns the interaction of two elements in Literature, and especially in Drama, which is a very primitive and instinctive kind of literature: I mean the two elements of tradition and invention, or the unconscious and the conscious.23

178

Shakespeare the shaman

He considers that the tragic characters of Hamlet and Orestes constitute ‘Traditional Types’ that concern constellations or complexes of features pertaining to sagas and myths that Murray identifies in detail. It is worth noting that Murray goes on to offer an explicitly feminist reading, stating: ‘Both heroes also tend – if I may use such an expression – to bully any woman they are left alone with [ . . . ] There are not many tragic heroes with such an extreme anti-feminist record’ (p. 12). With this, Murray is interested, as regards the palimpsest of texts he looks at, in the fact that the hero’s mother is instinctively kept sympathetic (as, it may be noted, is the case of James Joyce’s Molly in his version of a Hamlet-Odyssey). Murray comes then to propose a particular mythic constellation on which a recurrent Greek-saga is based, one that he sees re-emerging in Hamlet. He writes: What is the common element in all these stories? You will doubtless have recognized it. It is the world-wide ritual story of what we may call the Golden-Bough Kings. That ritual story is, as I have tried to show elsewhere, the fundamental conception that lies at the root of Greek tragedy; as it lies at the root of the traditional Mummer’s Play [ . . . ] each Year-king comes first as a wintry slayer, weds the queen, grows proud and royal, and then is slain by the Avenger of his predecessor [ . . . ] But for all this subject I must refer you to the eloquent pages of Sir James Frazer. (pp. 19–20) Doubtless, you will have recognised it. ‘The Waste Land.’ And not only ‘The Waste Land’, for there are also Eliot’s companion pieces to the poem, his essay on Hamlet and his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Moreover, as often overlooked, the second section of ‘The Waste Land’ is based on the boudoir scene in Hamlet. The fact that Murray’s theme is very explicitly tradition and the individual talent in relation to the Golden Bough legend and to the figure of Hamlet, would suggest that Murray is evidently a major unconfessed inspirational source for Eliot’s work of this period (both Eliot and Murray being based at Oxford at this time). Sooner or later . . . That said, Eliot does indicate that he is familiar with Murray’s work in ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ (1918). In this essay Eliot subjects Murray’s translations from the Greek, translations that he considers to be in the manner of Swinburne, to corrosive derision, preferring a more Poundian or more intellectual and masculine aesthetic. Nonetheless, he identifies Murray as being ‘very much of the present day’ even though he also calls this but a phase. Eliot writes of this current phase: This day began, in a sense, with Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot and Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson; a philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled abroad [ . . . ] and we have a curious Freudian-socialmystical-rationalistic-higher-critical interpretation of the Classics and what used to be called the Scriptures.24

Shakespeare the shaman

179

After this weary and bathetic survey, Eliot goes on to bemoan the anthropological exoticism associated with this modernist nexus of the progression of the human sciences. What, then, of ‘The Waste Land’ is original if Murray’s ideas are its source, if so many of its lines are traceable to other poets, including Shakespeare, and if Pound edits and shapes the work? It would seem that whilst Murray argues that poets unintentionally repeat the same mythic concerns, Eliot quite deliberately appropriates the tradition in question to insert himself into it mechanically. Nonetheless, in spite of this, I do think that ‘The Waste Land’ reads as an authentic work of art. I think that this is because the work is effective in its affective capacity where it addresses, along with other work by Eliot at this time, a tormented melancholic feeling of creativity drying up, a horror of sexual maturity and a fear of ageing and death. That is, it is because Eliot feels this crisis so profoundly that he seems to recognise an instinctive connection with Murray’s material. Moreover, it could actually be claimed that a pastiche of plagiarised sources is the perfect objective correlative for a crisis of creativity. However, Eliot and Murray stand in quite a different relation to the mythic or psycho-anthropological cluster in question. Basically, Eliot seems to identify in an unreflective manner with the misogyny that Murray finds in Hamlet and Orestes. From this point of view, women are to blame for they are fickle and abandon their men. Eliot sees Hamlet as a play mainly about the effect of maternal guilt upon the son.25 Murray, with a cool detachment, notes that while the Orestes-Hamlet characters may have this attitude, the plays in a wider or more holistic sense do not. He maintains that the women characters should not simply be regarded as characters, and he writes: The Greek stories speak her name openly: Gaia and Rhea are confessed Earth-Mothers, Jocasta only a stage less so. One cannot apply moral disapproval to the annual re-marriages of Mother Earth. Nor yet possibly to the impersonal and compulsory re-marriages of the human queen in certain very primitive stages of society. But later on, when life has become more fully human, if once a poet or a dramatist gets to thinking of the story, and tries to realize the position and feelings of this eternally traitorous wife, this eternally fostering and protecting mother, he cannot but feel in her that element of inward conflict that is the seed of great drama. She is torn between husband, lover, and son [ . . . ] English tragedy has followed the son. Yet Gerutha, Amba, Gertude, Hermutrude, Gaia, Rhea, Jocasta – there is tragedy in all of them, and it is in the main the same tragedy. (p. 23) The tragedy of the women is how they suffer through the masculine resentments over generational or temporal succession. Here, an Oresteian-Oedipal understanding, as opposed to a Freudian-Oedipal one, could be that the son resents the displacement of his father because he wishes to remain in the place of the son: he wishes to halt the generational progression that would lead to his own eventual deposition. Murray understands how women are caught between their

180

Shakespeare the shaman

generational roles and their symbolic significance as Mother Nature. It could be added that women are, after all, as subject to generational abandonment and displacement by Mother Nature as men, even as they are supposed to remain loyal to father, husband and son. What is unusual in Murray’s feminist approach, in the light of the later material I will refer to, is that he not only confronts a male fear of abandonment but the predicament of women in relation to it. Murray’s reading also serves to explain the intense preoccupation with funeral rites in the tragic drama in question. Funeral rites are, of course, a matter of our human resistance to being replaced so easily by Mother Earth. Remember us. This remembrance is not just a matter of the individual for mourning can play an important role in awakening us to a sense of our collective existence. That is, co-presence can be experienced through losses that are communally registered. Antigone, Hamlet and Laertes all protest against the failure of their communities to accord their dead sufficient public recognition as if the violation is not just a question of the unrecognised individual but of the inseparability of our existences. Octave Mannoni, in Prospero and Caliban, makes use of Shakespeare to address the psycho-anthropological question of the relation of the individual to the collective in not just a cross-cultural context but a specifically colonial one.26 For Mannoni, coloniser and colonised constitute two mutually consolidating and mutually exclusive positions. Ranjana Khanna offers a succinct summary of Mannoni’s argument, as follows: ‘Colonizers sought out dependents as they were overcompensating for their inferiority complexes; and the colonized welcomed the colonialists on whom they felt they could depend.’27 Mannoni thus makes colonialism appear as a convenient way of fulfilling complementary needs, tending to naturalise the cultural in an ideological fashion. Fanon is very quick to pick up on the outrageousness of this in his objection that the colonised are not naturally-culturally dependent but have dependency violently forced upon them.28 Mannoni’s argument is indeed structured in such a way as to absolve the colonisers of any initiatory violence, Khanna commenting: ‘Mannoni wrote, of course, right after the 1947 rebellion of Madagascar, when the repression of the Malagasy population led to the murder of so many. Burning the evidence and killing the messenger of political disquiet effectively demonstrates how France, and indeed how Mannoni in Prospero and Caliban, chose to hear the news as non arrive´.’29 This bad faith may be brought out further by juxtaposing the two following statements by Mannoni: Although the concept of dependence seems to be the one which will best explain the psychology of the Malagasy who has been ‘colonized’ and is now in course of evolution, it is doubtful whether it would be equally valid with respect to more ‘primitive’ communities, those which have hardly been touched by our civilisation, if in fact there are any remaining. . . . (ellipsis in text, p. 67) To my mind there is no doubting the fact that colonization has always required the existence of a need for dependence. Not all peoples can be colonized: only those who experience this need. (p. 85)

Shakespeare the shaman

181

Regarding the first citation, my library copy of Mannoni’s text has this comment scribbled in the margin: ‘You’ve eliminated most, you savage brutes – e.g. in America (the Red Indians), in the Caribbean (the Arawaks), in Australia (the Aborigines).’ Mannoni’s ellipsis makes it look as if such native populations magically disappear of their own accord. Whilst admitting that other civilisations are unlikely to be psychologically dependent outside the advent of colonialism, Mannoni goes on to claim that a pre-disposition for dependency is a pre-requisite for colonialism. Where does the dependency come from but the coloniser’s need for such? The counter-analyses are to be found not only in Fanon, but in Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized and Sartre’s Colonialism and Neocolonialism.30 For Mannoni, the coloniser/colonised situation is a magical given. Whilst supposedly coloniser and colonised conveniently meet each other’s psychological needs, when we examine the coloniser’s psyche through Shakespeare & Co., we are able to see the pseudo-symmetry of this, a matter of what Khanna, drawing on Emily Apter, calls ‘whiting out’ or a case of master paradigms of assimilation that may be said to ignore the epistemic fractures between, as well as within, cultures.31 Regarding this and first of all, it should be pointed out that Mannoni is misreading what he takes to be dependency. He fails to understand the collective and reciprocal ethos of the colonised cultures, a matter of acknowledged inter-dependency rather than master/slave dependency. Regarding this reciprocal ethos, for the European man to form a society with those he lives alongside, the demand is that he should share what he has. Mannoni can only interpret this economic expectation of socialist distribution amongst the group – share what you have – as the dependency of the other on him, asking of him what he sees as his own. That said, Mannoni contradicts himself. He denies the assertion by D. Westermann that there is a collective inter-dependence of equals regarding pre-colonial native groups, but when he needs to explain the difficulty of psychoanalysing the Malagasy individual as an individual, he says: we do not find in him that disharmony, amounting almost to conflict, between the social being and the inner personality which is frequently met with among the civilized and offers the analyst a means of access to the psyche. The oriental ‘face’ is different from the Jungian persona in being more firmly welded to the whole being. (p. 41) What Mannoni is unintentionally saying here is that the Malagasy stand in no particular need of psychoanalysis because they are not alienated like their Western counterparts. What is also unintentionally revealing about Mannoni’s statement is that it shows up the fact that the Western man’s unconscious turns out to be basically his loss of collective consciousness. He maintains that Jung’s term ‘collective unconscious’ is a contradiction in terms. I would agree but with considerations beyond Mannoni’s. For Mannoni, the psyche is basically individual, a matter of individuation: thus the unconscious would be the individual repression of anything beyond the individual consciousness. I would argue that what the individual psyche represses,

182

Shakespeare the shaman

is not conscious of, is collective consciousness: thus, there would be a collective consciousness but not a collective unconscious. The colonial analyst is thus driven to analyse the colonised other in order to try and discover what he no longer knows by himself but the very form of his will-to-know is a barrier to what he wants to know. What Mannoni wants to know is actually that which is unamenable to psychoanalysis as a matter of individual consciousness. It would be easier to access through trance and dance. Whilst Mannoni’s account of the colonised is very dubious – where it is easy to understand why he so angers Fanon, though productively – Mannoni’s analysis of the male coloniser constitutes a more honest and even brave self-reckoning. Mannoni’s theory of the coloniser type is that he has an inferiority complex rooted in a misanthropic inability to come to terms with his society due to something like an arrested childhood. Drawing on Defoe’s Crusoe, he argues: ‘colonial life is simply a substitute to those who are still obscurely drawn to a world without men – to those, that is, who have failed to make the effort necessary to adapt infantile images to adult reality’ (p. 105). The obscurity is easily explained. The world without men is a world fantasised to be without men. Mannoni says as much. Thus, Crusoe flees the world of paternal, manly imperatives so he can go on playing at being a boy with a childlike native as his playmate. It is a Kiplingesque Peter Pan world of Neverland or, perhaps, Camping or, maybe, Queer nomadism. Mannoni is perhaps rather over-moralising about this in that a youthful spirit, youth culture, the backpacker world, for example, adventurous playfulness, and so on, can hardly be said to be bad things per se, and artists may be said to maintain a sense of playful spirit in their exotic escapeedoms. In saying this, I do not mean to advocate, for instance, an irresponsible tourism but am simply asking: why be categorically against fun in a reinforcement of hyper-manliness? Rather, the problem arises with the projections of the coloniser and with his secret, disavowed forms of envy as played out in arenas of power. As regards the coloniser’s projections, a persistent example of such is his perception of natives as children. This is because he makes the metaleptic mistake of assuming that because childhood is feminine (for him), then those others who exhibit any femininity – perhaps exuberance, jouissance – are children. Mannoni, as much as Hegel, posits the ‘oriental’ as a dependent child for such a reason. Indeed, the loss of a childhood femininity is projected onto others in a variety of ways. The colonised are not only cast as children; oddly, they can also be cast as mothers. If the coloniser is trying to escape male adulthood, as Mannoni claims, then he possibly seeks the persistence of maternal care and nurture. Here, the colonised are often forced into the role of servants in order to provide this: they cook for the coloniser, wash his clothes, make his bed, tidy up his stuff, etcetera, as if he remained an infant indulged by a mother. Sindiwe Magona in her amusing autobiographical account of being a maid in apartheid South Africa brings out the childlike helplessness of ‘white adults’ in relation to their servants.32 In the preface to the English translation of Mannoni’s book, Philip Mason, elaborating on Mannoni’s theory of ‘coloniser with an inferiority

Shakespeare the shaman

183

complex’ in symbiosis with the ‘dependant native’, states: ‘To the spirit convinced of his own inferiority, the homage of a dependant [sic] is balm and honey and to surround oneself with dependants is perhaps the easiest way of appeasing an ego eager for reassurance’ (p. 11). So, His Majesty the Baby with a feminine balm and honey on tap? Is not this coloniser of the inferiority complex also the dependent one? Apart from questions of mechanisms of projection, there are colonial pathologies that pertain to questions of ‘emulate pride’. The coloniser with an inferiority complex serves to counteract his fear of abandonment and his dread of the exposure of his sense of inferiority through forcing the other into servility and submission. The racist bully is one who has a secret sense of inferiority where the form that the disavowal takes is one of a need to enforce a master (race)/slave dichotomy in order to assert a reactionary superiority. This, I think, is a matter also of the authoritarian personality as regards the parallels between colonialism and fascism. Problematically, Mannoni states: ‘In general, it might be said that they (the colonised) accept everything in detail but refuse our civilisation as a whole, and it is this attitude which gives Europeans the impression that the native is ready enough to mimic them but never succeeds in emulating them’ (p. 23). According to Mannoni’s own logic, why would you want to emulate, as opposed to mimic, those who dominate you out of their inferiority complexes? What is there to emulate? In addition to the considerations raised above, it is worth noting that Gayatri Spivak in both ‘Resident Alien’ and ‘Foucault and Najibullah’ treats of continuities between colonisation in India and more contemporary political theatres of power in terms of a performative logic of ‘The Great Game’. Given that she touches on would-be boyish figures masquerading as others, as well as on patriarchal envy, her analyses may be situated in relation to the critique opened up by Mannoni.33 With respect to his deployment of Shakespeare, Mannoni writes: ‘The Tempest repeats, in order to resolve it, the Hamlet situation [ . . . ] hatred of the mother, brooding instead of action – the latter a regression due to a loss of real power’ (p. 107). Mannoni’s argument is that Prospero, rather like Crusoe, is an escapee into a magical regressive world in an evasion of adulthood. In other words, he enters into an imaginary colonial theatre as an alternative to the paralysis of Hamlet’s assumed inferiority complex. I have tried to show that Hamlet carries its own cathartic resolution to the paralysis and low self-esteem of melancholia in its acceptance of reality, and will later explain how I see the late plays in relation to this. The enforced socio-economic dependency of the slave or colonised can create, in turn, psychological problems of inertia that Memmi explores in detail, and that also serve to inform Fanon’s engagement with questions of postcolonial agency and responsibility. The inertia of the colonised is also a central preoccupation of Wulf Sach’s psychoanalytic and anthropological case study, Black Hamlet. Sachs offers us an account of his analysis of and, indeed, friendship with John Chavafambira, a healer and diviner from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) who also finds

184

Shakespeare the shaman

employment as a worker in South Africa, residing in the townships there. Jacquelin Rose offers the following eloquent summary of Sachs’s study: Sachs chooses Shakespeare’s Hamlet because of the remarkable narrative affinities between Hamlet’s tale and Chavafambira’s: the father dies, the uncle suspected of poisoning him marries the mother, the son feels deprived of the inheritance that should have been his [ . . . ] Sachs also chooses it because he reads in Chavafambira’s reluctance to reclaim his destiny the same kind of halting, maimed agency that critics over the centuries have identified in Shakespeare’s play [ . . . ] Hamlet – the play and the character – has often been taken as the first glimmer of Enlightenment man, a new figure of the human condition who, transcending that moment of emergence, stretches backward and forward through time [ . . . ] Through John Chavafambira we can read Hamlet in this backward direction; that is we can use this story to identify a form of personhood bereft once outside its collectively or ancestrally sanctioned domain [ . . . ]34 Ranjana Khanna addresses this predicament in terms of colonially induced melancholia, as is apt, and as serves to constitute a critical agency with respect to what resists assimilation.35 It could also be pointed out that the melancholia in question could constitute something of a phase: in the history addressed by Sachs it precedes anti-colonial resistance and collective struggle. What interests me in Rose’s above summary is the attention given to the suffered loss of a collective consciousness as a consideration of key relevance. As Rose’s account serves to bring out, there are degrees of counter-transference, identification and projection in Sachs relation to Chavafambira. In particular, Sachs is an exilic Lithuanian Jew, who identifies Chavafambira as an exilic African Odysseus as well as a Black Hamlet, whilst Sachs has socialist and antiracist commitments. Whilst Sachs’ study is more or less contemporaneous with Mannoni’s work and shares some of its concerns, Sachs’ study may be said to be a significantly more humane and much more politicised one. Sachs is explicitly concerned with convincing his readers to share his in assumption that there are no essential psychological differences between Africans and Europeans. Time and again, Hamlet is appealed to over the question of whether there is an ontological unity of being prior to cultural differences. That is what seems to be at stake in these various readings. If Sachs is implicitly invested in a scenario of mutual need in his relation to Chavafambira, this would seem to a matter of a desire to engage Chavafambira in an anti-colonial struggle towards an integrated modern society in which both Africans and Europeans have a stake. Whilst this is laudable, where Sachs’ work betrays flaws is in his treatment of the African women that Chavafambira is involved with, as Rose draws attention to. Interestingly, Sachs tends to racism when he tends to sexism. In particular, it is Maggie, Chavafambira’s wife, who bears the brunt of a hostile reaction on the part of Sachs. As Rose sardonically points out, in a text with much Oedipal insistence, it is Maggie who is actually lame and, along with

Shakespeare the shaman

185

this, is treated as lame in other ways. It could be said that Sachs sees Maggie as the disabling burden in Chavafambira’s life; his sympathies for his wife are seen as dragging him back from a more active manly role towards his individuation and emancipation. The strong impression is that Chavafambira remains too identified with the feminine for Sachs’s liking. Anne McClintock notes that in nationalist discourse time is often posited as ‘the natural division of gender’ so that: ‘Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity.’36 This is a masculine perspective in that femininity is posited as something to be left behind. As my readings of Dangarembga and Vera explore, feminine continuity is contrarily what remains dynamically, fluidly and laterally present in their work as a source of renewal and mobilisation: quite opposed to the relegations of a rigid tradition. Whilst Maggie serves in Sachs’ text as the focus for feelings of aversion and abjection, rendering her as, it could be said, the bearer of backwardness, there is an aspect of the case history that tallies particularly with my earlier reading of Hamlet regarding a coming to terms with the feminine. At the very outset of the story of Chavafambira that Sachs narrates, we are given an episode in which a young Chavafambira, on the brink of manhood, encounters a beautiful Manyika witch who tells him of how she is an instrument of revenge concerning her murdered father, where ‘Everything is bad and out of order’ (p. 86). This ‘first scene’ of the case history does serve as its primal scene, where John experiences a strange sympathy with the witch: we could say she is like a female self for him. Sachs maintains that Chavafambira remains unable to forget this first love, whilst Sachs seems unable to resolve the significance of the African witch throughout his account. However, it may be proposed that the psychic significance of the witch comes precisely to the fore in what is the case story’s resolution of Chavafambira’s drama of indecision and paralysis. Towards the end of the story, Sachs takes Chavafambira back to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to extricate him from a potential danger with the law. Back in Rhodesia, Chavafambira falls in love with a woman whom Sachs tellingly describes as very beautiful according to universal (i.e. Western) standards and it seems that he is very keen to encourage Chavafambira’s amorous inclinations towards her. Analysing Sach’s investment in this, it can be surmised he wants Chavafambira to deflect his love from Maggie, the ‘backward’ African woman, towards one that reflects a universality of sexual desire. However, the appeal of this woman has a different kind of charge for Chavafambira himself. He says he has known nothing like the attraction he feels for her: it is an uncommon, strangely compelling attraction. After Sachs leaves, Chavafambira goes on to sleep with the woman. After he has had sex with her, he asks her what, in terms of his upbringing, he should have been careful to establish in the first place, her totemic affiliation, mutupo. She is a Soko (monkey affiliate). So is he. What this means is that he has committed what is in effect brother-sister incest. What I want to suggest is that it is a repressed brother-sister desire that troubles Chavafambira throughout the period covered by Sach’s study. When he

186

Shakespeare the shaman

first met the witch, he was experiencing anxieties over whether he was considered sufficiently past puberty, sufficiently mature, to take up succession, within the generational privileges of his society, as a diviner and healer. The female witch is associated with his pubertal self as his feminine counterpart and so his desire for her has a transgressive feel to it, possibly an androgynous/ incestuous mixing of genders. This woman remains significant for Chavafambira in years to come for she serves to bookmark something unresolved in him concerning his desire. It can also be said that Chavafambira is so blocked in his life, so unable to move on, specifically because he cannot let go of what the witch means to him precisely because he does not know what this is. He does not know what is holding him back. It is only when he sleeps with the strangely compelling woman of his own totem that the reality of his repressed desire comes to light as brother-sister desire. When it does come to light, it constitutes a kind of catharsis for Chavafambira. He actually tells Sachs, regarding the story of his Soko incest, that the witch of his youth: ‘followed me all the years. But now I feel free of her’ (p. 339). Chavafambira not only consciously realises what has been repressed in him, he also immediately decides that this is what he has to move on from. He breaks off the relationship with the woman, and he turns away from his fixations of the past towards questions of the future. He tells Sachs he must attend to building a world for others, especially his son, stating: ‘‘‘The boy must be educated for life as it is now, and not as it was when I was a boy’’’ (p. 339). The readiness is all? With respect to Hamlet, what I want to say of Chavafambira’s story is that before you can set right, you first have to set real. Black Hamlet is indeed Black Hamlet. The brother-sister relationship may be said to be the psychic proto-type for collective solidarity on a social level. Chavafambira realises that he would be arrested in his development if he tried to enact his youthful desire on a personal and literally incestuous level. Instead, he transfers the affect to a yearning towards a future society in which all can have a place: a world that he seeks to make as a father for his son. That is, our desire for connectedness cannot remain tied to our childhoods, our pasts, or to nationalistic atavisms. It is necessary to recreate connectedness in tandem with the circumstances of the present and the world around us. And according to Sachs, Chavafambira did start to become politically active from this point onward. Whilst, however, as Khanna observes, Sachs wants to cast this merely in terms of father-son diachrony or filiation, Chavafambira’s story speaks of a need to realise and reconstitute affiliation too. Regarding the deployments of Hamlet engaged with, Hamlet concerns questions of an ontological universality that subtends different cultures. However, this universality obviously cannot be predicated on the basis of masculinity alone. Masculinity alone would seem to concern the self cut off from others, troubled by fears of abandonment, sometimes driven to force dependency on others in false self-other relations. In the affirmation of the feminine real, in the affirmation of our interdependency, it may be said that we find our connections with others. Nonetheless, this so-called ‘primitive’ or founding condition has to learn, of course, to accommodate itself to the necessities of time.

Shakespeare the shaman

187

Unfortunately, there is not space to engage with all the cross-cultural treatments of Hamlet.37 However, I will attend very briefly to a couple of further works that use Hamlet to raise the question of a cross-cultural universality. In ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’, the anthropologist Laura Bohannan, in her visit to the Tiv of South Africa, turns to reading Hamlet to relieve the solitude of her evenings in the bush.38 She is concerned that the Tiv have only a functionalist view of writing as an instrument of bureaucracy and she seeks to explain to them that her absorption with her reading is due to the fact that literature has the capacity to preserve the stories of long ago. She further seeks to share her reading of Hamlet with the Tiv, initially convinced that the meaning of Hamlet is universal: it is again a case of this desire for a cross-cultural Hamlet. However, she finds that her interpretation of Hamlet is countered at every turn by the Tiv. In short, whilst Bohannan favours a romantic and domestic version of Hamlet, the Tiv counter her views with a cynical, political reading of the play as a theatre of witchcraft and envious machinations, this to Bohannan’s distress. I think that what subtends this scenario is that Bohannan’s implicitly romantic view of the Tiv as innocents in the bush is overturned whereas it is she who emerges as the hopeless innocent. Her anthropological approach is described as ‘naive realism’ by the editors of the collection in which it appears but it is actually ‘naive romanticism’.39 Her possible expectations of family romances, in several senses, are everywhere confounded. Martin Orkin’s Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Powers positions itself as a response to the failed universality of Bohannan’s encounter with the Tiv. He notices that whilst Bohannan works to construct the Tiv as other through her insistence of misunderstanding, the site of shared reading becomes one of negotiation that allows for points of connection. Orkin seeks to explore how local knowledges might transform our reception of Shakespeare. From his own preoccupations with male violence in South African apartheid and post-apartheid history, together with the situation in Israel/Palestine, Orkin reads Shakespeare’s late plays to consider how a performative masculinity, one of self-congratulatory self-fashioning, acts as a means of self-redemption that can serve to evade questions of masculine unruliness. Methodologically, he draws particularly on the Tswana approach to the ‘processural, lived in complexities of masculine experience’40 as a form of negotiation and conflict resolution. I am very sympathetic to this approach in that it questions the imperatives of a Western masculinist performativity, and more broadly self-fashioning, with respect to the kinds of questions raised by the Zimbabwean writing looked at in the previous chapter. In particular, this performativity of the self does serve to bracket off questions of the real, including the sources and occurrences of violence, and it is the case that traditional African philosophies serve to offer an alternative emphasis on reciprocal negotiation and a collective ethos. This said, I do also think that there is yet something to be said for the redemptive vision of the late plays if they are approached allegorically and in terms of a poetic realism as opposed to a strictly social realism. After the unbearable violence and bleakness of the tragedies, Pericles comes as a moving relief. (And, as far as Eliot is concerned, his ‘Four Quartets’ may have

188

Shakespeare the shaman

a similar status in relation to his ‘The Waste Land’.) Pericles does not offer us anything like a utopian world free of suffering but it does offer a vision of the potential for transforming history through an acceptance of life, the sea of being, in its changing vicissitudes. The play’s point of departure is from the predatory figure of Antiochus who is secretly involved in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, one described in cannibalistic terms. If incest and cannibalism are the two necessary taboos for human society, this is surely because they both constitute cases of preying upon your own kind. It is as if modern societies forget this in foreclosing the feminine whilst allowing for the violence of predatory behaviour. In brief, whilst in the tragedies the male protagonists exhibit a violently possessive or controlling attitude towards life, a life symbolised by the female characters, in the late plays, the male protagonists, with the lesson of Hamlet in mind, are forced to let go. The male protagonists, such as Pericles, learn to endure the loss of the feminine but once they have learnt this nonpossessiveness, the feminine returns to them. Thaisa and Marina return, as do Perdita (the name signifying the lost feminine) and Hermione. That is how it happens, if only this could be learnt. And with this, we may learn to admire (as exemplified by The Tempest’s Miranda). Whilst Antiochus seeks to make the feminine life his private property, Pericles effects an inversion of this in the following recognition of a marine-femininity that precedes and surrounds him: ‘Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget, / Thou that was born at sea, buried at Tarsus, / And found at sea again!’ (V.i.190). Such an adjustment rescues Pericles from his ‘melancholic state’ (v.i.209) and restores to him an ability to hear the angelic: ‘Most heavenly music’ (V.i.220). Orkin ends his book quoting the speech from Caliban that begins: ‘Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’41 This speech resonates with Birago Diop’s poem ‘Breath’ which begins: Listen more to what is Than to words that are said. The water’s voice sings And the flame cries And the wind that brings The wood to sighs Is the breathing of the dead. Who have not gone away Who are not under the ground Who are never dead.42 Since Orkin is concerned with masculinity with reference to the violence of Southern African, Israeli and Palestinian histories, I will end this chapter through alluding to a couple of texts of relevance. The first, A Walk in the Night, is by the South African writer, Alex La Guma and is an explicit response to Hamlet. I think that the message of this novella is that masculine resentment needs to convert itself, through a sympathy with the feminine, into collective

Shakespeare the shaman

189

social purpose: I have elsewhere given a reading of this text along these lines.43 In addition, I would draw attention to Samuel Durrant’s important work on the significance of collective mourning in post-apartheid literature against an instrumentalisation of being, or the melancholic reification of life.44 The second literary text to mention is The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist by the Arab-Israeli writer Emile Habiby. Habiby’s most humane and wryly comic text distances itself from masculine idealism, in particular, from that most traditional of masculine types, the phantom of the heroic warrior ideal. Towards the end of the novel, a young woman, somewhat symbolic of Palestine, comes to persuade the ill-fated protagonist that he cannot return to her and his youth. Nonetheless, she assures him that whilst he cannot return to his beginnings, she will return to him in the future, maintaining: ‘Water cannot ever truly leave the sea, uncle. It evaporates, then returns in winter in the springs and rivers. It will always return.’45 In terms of the material covered by this chapter, it would seem that misogyny and racism can be somewhat accounted for in terms of an initial inability to come to terms with sexually mature manhood. Failure to resolve such a crisis, the non-confrontation or repression of it, leads to destructiveness or paralysis whilst a conscious acceptance of reality may allow for the recovery in time of connectedness on a social plane, even for a socialism to come. Thus, the severance represented by the paternal principle should not be taken as a finality, as it so often is, but could more hopefully be regarded as a transitional phase.46 The reason why I have attempted to initiate a discussion of a mystical or visionary Shakespeare has been to query the ideological presentation of the ghost-obsessed Hamlet as the progressive subject of modernity, and to advance this in terms of a particular approach to the tragedies and late plays. The supposition here has been that these plays may be read as allegories of the ontological or of the real, hence the mystical dimension of gesturing towards what lies beyond representation. Regarding this, it is the tragedies that offer us male protagonists who tend to have an excessively possessive, controlling, envious or jealous attitude towards life, and this leads to violence against both others and the self. The vision of the late plays is not at all idealistic whilst a poetic realism comes to the fore in them. This concerns an acceptance of life in its vicissitudes. Perhaps the strange thing about mysticism is that it is not really about uncovering complex hidden meanings but may rather involve a radical simplicity or minimalism: the ‘deconstruction’ as de-cluttering of our perceptions in embracing the reality of what may be. We force our meanings onto life – Horatio’s rationalism as a matter of denying reality to obey what the mind would rather see – when, if we cease to do so, the real may reveal itself in a moment of clarity. A sense of beauty, distinct from idealism, due to a seeing for the first time, can arrive with this. Hegel famously maintains that the rational is the real, but it can be said that the attempt to force reason and reality together fails or leads to violence in that Hegel’s assumption is ultimately wrong. It is probably the mystical that is the real, therefore, let be.

7

Sisters of Marx A conclusion

A space in which his words might begin to mean differently and where hers might be recognized more widely. Denise deCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry1

This book has been anticipating this chapter’s engagement with a defence of Marxism but it has taken some time to establish its premise, namely, that a politics of setting right, especially with respect to the question of a collective inheritance, depends on a condition of avowing reality and realities. The consideration has also been that an avowal of reality necessarily entails an avowal of the feminine real. In the space that remains, it will be necessary to get to the point as quickly as possible. What kind of feminist are you? For the purposes of debate, I would like to propose three strands of feminism: poetic-utopian, capitalist-democratic and socialistpostcolonial. The first strand tends to concern itself with an affirmation of the feminine for the sake of creativity as can be found in writers such as Virginia Woolf and He´le`ne Cixous. It is utopian because it cannot be contained, and therefore should not aim to be contained, within spatio-temporal locations. It pertains rather to a sense of unbounded totality and the potential for being. Whilst it is important to keep open utopian horizons, this utopianism may be said to lack practical purpose and situational social engagement. Capitalist-democratic feminism, going back to early figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, has concerned itself with the liberation of women within Enlightenment models of self-production and self-advancement.2 It is perhaps basically assimilationist, national or global rather than utopian, whilst it depends, not unimportantly, on recognising a principle of individual autonomy. In its deployment of technologies of the self and of identity politics, it tends to rely on masculine models where this has often been its impasse, entailing then the production of identity-in-crisis: for instance, Judith Butler’s preoccupation with a deforming of the norms. The third strand that, in this sketch which is just a sketch, I refer to as socialist-postcolonial is the strand that this chapter is concerned with. In order to address it, I will begin by offering a reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx that endorses the relevance of Gayatri Spivak’s critique of this work. In the responses to Specters of Marx that have emerged over the years what has struck me is that a number of the work’s readers have felt prompted to point to

Sisters of Marx

191

sources that seem to be significant for it but that are unmentioned in it or seemingly bypassed by it. For example, Elisabeth Roudinesco expresses such a reaction in a dialogue with Derrida published as De quoi demain. . . . . In a section entitled ‘Spirit of the Revolution’, Roudinesco says she would like to evoke the memory of Louis Althusser and pay tribute to his intellectual influence (on herself and others). She goes on to say to Derrida: ‘You have not commented on his work as you have on the works of Lacan, Foucault and Levi-Strauss. However, I have the impression that in Specters of Marx, he is present on every page.’3 Derrida immediately replies: ‘Specters of Marx could in effect be read, if one wants, as a kind of homage to Althusser. An indirect salute, but above all friendly and nostalgic and a bit melancholic. The question is open to analysis.’4 What is somewhat strange about this response is that, first, if Specters of Marx is a homage to Althusser, then it is odd that Althusser is not mentioned. What does it mean to pay homage to someone without naming them? Is it still a homage? According to the OED, the word ‘homage’ means ‘formal public acknowledgement’ and thus an anonymous homage would be enigmatic indeed. (Oddly Althusser’s name is in the index but not main body of the text.) Then, Nicholas Royle in a review essay on Specters of Marx, points out that it is rather surprising that Derrida does not explicitly mention Abraham and Torok, for they too could be said to be sensed as present in the pages of Specters: Royle speaks of their ‘strange ‘‘place’’’ in the text.5 Indeed, these theorists of the crypt would seem to be there – but where? – encrypted. It is Abraham and Torok who elaborate ideas of Ferenczi and Freud on mourning and melancholia, with respect to phantoms and crypts, and as Royle draws attention to there is Abraham’s well-known engagement with the idea of the phantom in Hamlet. Various Marxist critics have also noted curious omissions in Derrida’s, say, one-to-one encounter with Marx.6 And, when Derrida maintains he is addressing the overly masculinist nature of Marxism, he writes as if this has not been extensively engaged with already, eliding the feminist engagements with Marxism.7 In short: collective spirit? That will be my question. I say ‘question’ for there is also value in the ‘one-to-one encounter’, where a contemporary academic scene is sometimes over-reliant on an obligatory citationality that is thoroughly bound up with standardising legitimations that fail to risk the event of a ‘response-ability’. Deconstruction is much concerned with this ‘response-ability’, although it could be said that Derrida’s acknowledged sources appear overwhelmingly Eurocentric and androcentric. I will now turn to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Ghostwriting’, her reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx in order to address further this question of sources and acknowledgements.8 ‘Ghostwriting’ is concerned with a writing about ghosts while it is also the title of a signed article whereby the signature becomes ghostly in more than one way, thus ambiguously or ambivalently so. That which is acknowledged and signed as a ghostwriting offers us a signature that eclipses another signature or else offers us a signature that is to be eclipsed by another. In ‘Ghostwriting’, to a certain extent, Spivak speaks for a Marx who cannot, in obvious ways, respond

192

Sisters of Marx

to possible contemporary misreadings of his work, specifically those that may, potentially, be found in Specters of Marx. We could say then that she acts as Marx’s familiar: one well-acquainted with his works and also one who is his spirit-attendant. She also writes to attest to the signatures of those barely received, where in ‘Ghostwriting’ this is specifically a matter of counter-signing or acknowledging the receipt of the writing of Assia Djebar. Beyond this Spivak also writes, I believe, as herself a source yet to be adequately acknowledged. Put bluntly, Specters of Marx, a long-hoped for reading of Marx by Derrida, does not engage with or attest to Spivak’s committed and sustained work on Marxismand-deconstruction, or only barely. That is, in a footnote Derrida remarks: ‘one would have to recall a great number of essays that it is impossible to list here’ and in parentheses a list of names is given amongst them: G. Spivak.9 As I will indicate further, this is not simply a sidelining but may be a question of what appears legible or is accorded legibility within the sightlines of knowledgetransmission. A quick flip-through ‘Ghostwriting’ could show how it ‘leaps’ from a consideration of the socialisation of reproductive labour-power to a detailed crossreading of Derrida on Marx with what in Marx is said to be overlooked, to a consideration of Djebar’s fictional treatment of Islam’s foundational scenes of inheritance, raising the question of the daughter as collaborator or as heir. I hope to emphasise the necessity of those leaps or moves whilst re-inscribing them in a shuffling of textual palimpsests for the sake of what thereby also comes into view. At the outset of ‘Ghostwriting’, Spivak writes: I have always had trouble with Derrida on Marx [ . . . ] My main problem has been Derrida’s seeming refusal to honor the difference between commercial and industrial capital. Derrida writes of speculative interest as excess and surplus value: money begets money [ . . . ] Therefore [ . . . ] he can chart a continuity from Marx back to Aristotle and Plato (p. 65). In this opening observation there is a certain shifting in the material for debate as conceptual labour is implicitly distinguished from social labour, or labourpower as commodity (and Marx himself both commended Hegel’s emphasis on labour as definitive of the human whilst also protesting against Hegel’s exclusive privileging of conceptual labour in the form of abstract self-consciousness).10 Furthermore, there is in the above the trace of a distinction between conceptformation (say, philosophical genius) and scholarly labour, the work of a painstaking familiarisation (and, indeed, referencing). For what is to follow it is also worth emphasising the auto-generative dynamic touched on, as in: capital begets capital; philosophical speculation begets philosophical speculation. Having formulated her main problem with Derrida on Marx, Spivak goes on to point out of Specters of Marx: ‘If Derrida plays Hamlet to Marx’s Ghost, there are no takers for Gertrude or Ophelia’ (p. 66). This is followed by a consideration of both the socialisation of ‘the labor of the patriarchally defined subaltern

Sisters of Marx

193

woman’ and the socialisation of ‘the reproductive body of woman’ (p. 67). In a discussion of the donation of not only sperm but of ova, Spivak asks: If this [socialised reproductive] labor were to use the fetish-character of itself as (reproductive) labor-power (as commodity) pharmakonically to bring about gender-neutral socialism in its traffic, equitable by need and capacity, and capacity, from a common fund, would that be just? (p. 68). I will return to some issues that are raised by this question. At this stage, it may be said that a certain, say patrilineal ‘auto-generation’, spoken of above, is being juxtaposed with the question of a feminine source that in its socio-economic integration would be neutralised, de-essentialised, and de-naturalised in ways that serve to suggest an equality of exchange between genders and, perhaps, capital and labour. Spivak goes on to explore in detail how Derrida’s reading of Marx does not adequately take into account the Marx who discovers ‘the creation of surplus value through labor-power as commodity’ (p. 72). It is noted that Derrida sets up a Marx who pits the ghostliness of the commodity against the homeliness of use-value, whilst this Marx – for Derrida –retains an obsession with the ghosts he would ward off. For Spivak, such set-ups of Marx serve to ridicule a silly Marx as opposed to a Marx of crucial clarity, the dispeller of false consciousness. Derrida certainly has fun in Specters of Marx, as regards the ghostliness of the commodity, with Marx’s famous table. He makes much of it. Indeed, he makes more and more of it. Marx’s satirical imagining of the table’s preposterous mystical character would seem to have a certain infectious or inspiring power as pages of Specters of Marx take off from it, amusingly so. This laughter, though, is the sort of laughter that can career off into sheer hysteria or develop a very hollow ring. But first, what makes us crazy about the crazy performance of the dancing table? What exactly is so funny about it? Is it because it is so dim-witted in its giddy behaviour, so ‘thick-as-a-plank’? Is it because it is so camply unserious about its supposedly ingrained identity? Is it because its leggy shapeliness makes heads turn, ‘phwoar’? Is it because when it dances its limbs are a little stiff, a little ‘wooden’ as we’d whisper? The answer, I propose, lies in ‘The Sandman’.11 It is appropriate to usher in this text since it bears a resemblance to Hamlet12 and since, also, it is the sourcetext for theories of the uncanny – and Derrida refers to Marx as das unheimlich – while Marx is discussed in terms of Hamlet rather than ‘The Sandman’. What I want to ask is this: If Derrida’s version of Marx’s table were to be given a name might this be ‘Olimpia’? (And, as I will indicate further, the full name of the table could, in the veiled allusions of Derrida’s reading, be spelled out as Olimpia, daughter of King Hamlet.) It does seem to me that in Specters of Marx, Olimpia – the wooden doll or automaton – is cast as the wooden table of Marx’s fetishised commodity. Before I give further evidence of this, I wish to turn to Derrida’s response to Spivak, given in his essay ‘Marx and Sons’. Derrida reacts with annoyance to Spivak’s

194

Sisters of Marx

reading, speaking of it as a ‘distracted’ reading.13 The way in which Spivak cites Derrida, cutting one of his statements mid-sentence, serves to distort his sense. However, it may be that beyond this, Spivak’s reading is considered more generally distracted in that Derrida implies that he is addressing her concerns – that is, that he is dealing with labour as commodity in terms that are at once both gendered and gender neutral – only Spivak is not seeing this in that she is not attending closely enough to what he says. So let us attend closely to the following: pp. 151–4. Notably, Derrida’s elaborate description in these pages would allow for such an identification of Olimpia with the commodity-table. The table as commodity is a coup de the´aˆtre just as Olimpia is presented to the public for the first time as a theatrical event. (Enter Commodity. Enter Olimpia. Enter Ghost?). Derrida writes of the Table-Thing: autonomous and automaton, its fantastic silhouette moves on its own, free without attachment [ . . . ] it appears [ . . . ] a little mad and unsettled as well, ‘out of joint’, delirious, capricious, and unpredictable [ . . . ] a stiff mechanical doll whose dance obeys the technical rigidity of a program. (p. 153) It is just like Olimpia then, herself a mechanical dancing doll. He also writes: ‘it unfolds itself . . . it gives birth through its head [ . . . to] inventions more bizarre or marvelous than if this mad capricious and untenable table, its head beginning to spin, started to dance of its own initiative’ (p. 152). In ‘The Sandman’, Nathanael’s condensed version of this is: ‘Spin wooden dolly, hey, spin, pretty wooden dolly.’14 So here then is where the question of sexual difference or roles for women in Specters of Marx might make a deceptive appearance. While Derrida uses conventionally feminine terms to describe the spinning table – ‘capricious’, ‘dancing doll’ – he is not taken in by this appearance of femininity and speaks of it being of ‘indeterminate sex’ and also as a ‘Father-mother’. In ‘The Sandman’, Olimpia is the creation of Spalanzani in collaboration with Coppola. That is, while Olimpia seems to ‘automate’ herself, she is the product or reproduction of a father, but a strange kind of ‘father’ since he himself acts as a mother, but a wombless one. Olimpia as ‘father-mother’ (one of Derrida’s term for the selfautomating commodity) is but the re-presentation of a father-‘mother’. That is to say, ‘she’ is a kind of clone; and the repetition complex that governs everything in the story needs to be thought of in terms of a logic of cloning. Olimpia is the engineered clone of the father-double, the brilliant Spalanzani with the aid of his satanic mechanic, Coppola, as Coppola is the replica of Coppelius, the double of Nathanael’s father, and Coppelius is a replica of the Sandman, that predatory bogeyman or ghost. Freud in his reading of the tale affirms that Nathanael’s train of identifications are right, that ‘Coppola [ . . . ] is Coppelius and also, therefore, the Sand-Man’.15 The same? But, or and, ought not Olimpia that clone of the father be added to this series? If so, then ‘she’, autonomous-automaton, would be the identical twin of ‘her’ Father-‘mother’ but for

Sisters of Marx

195

the out-of-jointness of time. This out-of-jointness of time, that Hamlet curses, is revolved at length in Specters of Marx. Is it that, but for the spacing of time, she – child/commodity/clone – would be simultaneous with her parent/source. And in this anachrony, would it be possible to state that Olimpia is the GhostDaughter of Hamlet’s father, or not? Fancifully and in truth, her body would be artefactual, let’s say like a suit of armour, as the Ghost is armed from head to foot, whereby it is possible to speculate about ‘the inside’ or ‘core’, if there be any, of the mechanical body and what drives it or makes it ‘walk’ and ‘talk’. As already implied, Derrida relates the reactions occasioned by the commodity to the uncanniness of the paternal spectre in Hamlet where this is accomplished through the use of imagery, here for instance: Become like a living being the table resembles [ . . . ] an idol would like to make the law. But, inversely, the spirit, soul or life that animates it remains caught in the opaque and heavy thingness of the hule- [ . . . ] mask of automatism. A mask, indeed a visor that that may always be hiding no living gaze beneath the helmet [ . . . ] The Thing [but which?] is neither dead nor alive [ . . . ] this war machine is a theatrical machine, a mechane-. What one has just seen [?] cross the stage is an apparition, a quasi-divinity – fallen from the sky or come out of the earth. And Derrida adds: ‘But the vision also survives’ (pp. 153–4, emphasis in text). What we have just seen in this is that the idol-dolly (I-doll) has just exchanged its wooden mask for a visor, a helmet, and in this process, this costume change, it acquires the war-like character of a quasi-divinity. The idol-dolly is the image of the image of the father: except that and in that both are perhaps veiled. The daughter as commodity as veiled woman might be the displaced replica of the veiled phallus or veiled god, who does not reveal Himself, or replica of a veiled ‘?’, enigma, for there may be no presence there. At any rate, what we seem to have is what appears as a ‘King’ and appears as a ‘thing’, intimately related. ‘The King is a thing’ (as Hamlet says, IV.iii.26). And in this, there is nothing of woman, as such, she’s the thin(g)-King’s thing: Olimpia is a performative thing that merely appears to be a woman. So, this then is Derrida’s ‘theo’-mechanico logic of the performative, identical to that of ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, as explored in previous chapters. With respect to Spivak’s points, it appears to be a logic of auto-generativity in which patrilineal generation seems conflated, mistakenly, with the generative. Surely, then, Spivak is correct to maintain that Derrida has failed to grasp the point of Marx’s demystification of capital. Capitalism may make use of a pseudo-religious image in offering itself as auto-generative, but we know that this illusion or virtuality is not actually the case. Or, capitalism fetishises creativity but it is not in itself creative. I would say that this is because it begins with the end result – the model or design – that it installs as the intention, separating the intending head from the instrumentalised body: the latter then carries out production plans to clone the design in commodities. For creativity, on the other hand, it can be said

196

Sisters of Marx

we require a living process of responsiveness and discovery in which the end result is not pre-given. Taking stock a little, using this financial metaphor but also one of breeding, it can be said that Specters of Marx is indeed taking into account labour as commodity, this ghostliness of labour in the social or socialised form of the feminine: that which has a feminine form but is not a woman as such. Thus, arguably, it might be plausible to call Spivak’s reading distracted for not noticing this. Spivak could be cited again, as follows: ‘If this [socialised reproductive] labour were to use the fetish-character of itself as (reproductive) labor-power (as commodity) pharmakonically to bring about gender-neutral socialism in its traffic, equitable and from a common fund, would that be just?’ (p. 68). I would like to suggest that Olimpia signifies ‘what works as a woman’, ‘the working woman’, and that you could then say that all labour is feminised, but a feminisation of the masculine (the Olimpia-version of the King, the bearer of his order). Furthermore, this structure could be thought of in terms of a logic of what Derrida terms ‘invagination’, and in veiled or enigmatic fashion Specters of Marx does allude to this. Spivak having spoken of the gender neutrality referred to above – what I’m glossing or explaining in terms of the King as Olimpia, sovereign masculinity in the mere form of the female, capital as commodified labour – asks ‘would that be just?’ Well, is a democratising capitalism just – it is this that Spivak seems to be asking – can there be a just capitalism? And would this capitalism depend on an homogenising singularisation of being, or a reduction to some lowest common denominator of commodification? There is more to Spivak’s point, but let us return to Specters of Marx. In speaking of the yearning for a justice that would be ‘infinitely foreign, heterogenous at its source’, a justice more than removed from the fatality of vengeance, Derrida writes: And is this day before us [both anterior to and in front of us] and to come, or more ancient than memory itself ? If it is difficult, in truth impossible, today, to decide between these two hypotheses, it is precisely because ‘The time is out of joint’: such would be the originary corruption of the day of today, or such would be, as well, the malediction of the dispenser of justice, of the day I saw the light of day. Is it impossible to gather under a single roof the apparently disordered plurivocity [ . . . ] of these interpretations? (p. 22) In this there are echoes (as I hear it) of Blanchot’s La folie du jour, Madness of the Day, which Derrida reads in ‘The Law of Genre’ where he speaks of the invagination – a chiasmatic inversion – of genre. The inversion would seem to be a matter of a masculinity that seeks to take over and internalise the feminine (under his single roof) whereby the ‘daughter’ or feminine stands to become merely the self-externalisation, the product and property of the father. The desire on the part of men to feminise themselves through appropriation is subject to critique in Spivak’s objections to Derrida’s reading of Blanchot, her critique of ‘The Law of Genre’, where she maintains that such a move only serves

Sisters of Marx

197

to effect a double displacement of woman.16 That is, here, if the father seeks, like Frankenstein, to be a father-mother who clones himself in a monstrous-doll, then woman is not even in second place: she is nowhere. (The monster in Frankenstein has feminine aspects without being feminine, the monster being both commodity and invisible labour.) Less reductively, it is a question of temporal frameworks in which succession displaces co-operation. Spivak could be forgiven for missing that Derrida does partially address the thing she says he overlooks – Olimpia or the working woman or what works as a woman – in that Derrida only addresses this working-(as)-woman in an extremely indirect way, as we have seen, through a terminology that relies on an evocation of literary texts. That said, Spivak states that her particular concern is actually ‘the socialization of reproductive labour-power not ‘‘the feminization of labour’’’ (p. 67, my emphasis). On the one hand, it is the case that labour is feminised in both capitalism and colonialism: for instance, empty, willing submissiveness is what employers want in employees or servants. On the other hand, this very feminisation of labour serves to erase or drain the realities of the feminine, be they material or spirited, somatic-spirited: femininity as submission is a femininity drained of life. So, it is a case of taking into account the difference between what works as a woman and the woman who works as irreducible to this. I think this might be Spivak’s point. She speaks, for instance, of the commodification of reproduction which may be said to spectralise the maternal. Again, what seems to be at stake here is a technologic of cloning. Derrida angles some of Specters of Marx against Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of late capitalism as the Hegelian end of history. I think most would find Derrida’s scathing reaction to Fukuyama’s proposition convincing. However, Fukuyama subsequently went on to retract his notion of historical closure as a premature gesture precisely because he came to appreciate how capitalist Hegelian spirit is a cloning phenomenon that developments in science have made a practical possibility, thus opening up a possible new course of history.17 I have shown how Derrida operates, without seeming to consciously confront this, according to a cloning logic: automaton-Olimpia as clone of the automatonghost. Regarding cloning, DNA is sucked out of the ovum to be replaced by the code of another, so it is a colonising operation. However, cloning also shows that both penis and sperm are not necessary to reproduction whilst ovum and womb remain crucial: so, in reality, dependency on the feminine is increased. What is at stake is the disavowal of dependency on reality, especially the feminine real. In Rogues, Derrida maintains that he intends not to pronounce on the ethics of cloning, even as he makes some passing observations,18 but I do think that it raises questions pertaining to the commodification and instrumentalisation of being that are of relevance to the ethico-political concerns of Marx and Engels. It comes back to the question that I was exploring in my own reading of Hamlet as regards the difference between beings and things. Here, it may be said that to treat life as (a) property constitutes a commodification of it. In a footnote to the ‘Wears and Tears’ section of Specters of Marx, Derrida writes with respect to the juridical and justice:

198

Sisters of Marx There is nothing surprising in the fact it is most often a question of the property and proper nature of life [la proprie´te´ de la vie], of its inheritance, of its generations (the scientific, juridical, economic, and political problems of the so-called human genome, gene therapy, organ transplants, surrogate mothers, frozen embryos and so forth.) (p. 184)

This floating footnote is not attached to anything in the main text. However, is not the arch-spectre of capitalism – including the spectres of the I-doll and the commodity – the spectre of property, of private property? It is as if Derrida wants to say that the spectrality of the spectre means that it is not a spectre of the proper, that is, if the proper is given as ‘the proper nature of life’. But would this amount to a capitalism that disowns itself ? From a Marxist point of view, the spectrality of the proper, of proprietorship, of ownership is indeed spectral because a fiction of ownership based on appropriation. Nonetheless, this fiction has real effects through the enforcements of its performance. As I touched on in my first chapter, Marx objects to commodity fetishism as monstrous in that commodities appear on the stage as if mystifyingly selfanimated and they are treated by the seduced as if they were alive, as if they were beings. Marx is fully aware of the uncanny nature of capitalism which is why Francis Wheen states that Capital can read as: ‘a work of the imagination: a Victorian melodrama, or a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created [where] we are entering a world of spectres and apparitions, as [Marx] reminds us regularly through the next 1,000 pages.’19 What Derrida seems not to want to accept is Marx’s insistence that in spite of this an automaton is just an automaton, a thing is just a thing – not a living being – however much we invest these things with ‘theological niceties’ or all our loves and yearnings. It is basically the argument developed in Naomi Klein’s No Logo.20 And, at the same time that capitalism ontologises the thing, it treats living labour as if beings were just things that you could use up and discard. It is a case of inversions: if Marx sought to stand Hegel on his head, Derrida seems to seek to re-Hegelianise Marx, only not along Fukuyama’s lines. The commodity would seem to be uncanny for Marx and Derrida in quite different ways. Derrida seems impressed by ‘the idea of the father’ in the commodity, maybe the technological or conceptual brilliance of human beings. As Spivak notes in ‘Ghostwriting’, he is often impressed by the high-tech (p. 68). Marx, though, sees ‘congealed labour’ in the commodity, or we could say he sees the deadened existence of the workers in the commodity, the sweatshops or ‘filthy workshops’ of production, and so on.21 The term ‘congealed’ suggests blood in relation to a capitalism considered by Marx to be predatory and vampiric.22 Moreover, Marx of course sees that what we worship in commodities is an alienated desire for the sociality of our own labour. The commodity provides an inauthentic substitute for what would ultimately be our desire for social connectedness, shared creativity, collective spirit, hence: working class solidarity. In her discussion with Derrida, Roudinesco maintains that the ghost of Marx haunts us due to the lost ideal or hope of socialism as regards a depressive

Sisters of Marx

199

Western society, this being something that Roudinesco finds in Althusser’s relation to Marxism.23 As discussed by Jonathan Flatley and Donna Landry, Andrei Platonov treats of a melancholy that his work serves to suggest may be cured by socialism.24 In Chevengur, Platonov has a character say: ‘‘‘I kept wondering why I was depressed and now I know I was depressed about not having socialism!’’’25 In this book, I have been exploring how the socialist desire for human connectedness may entail a consciousness of reality that is bound up with an avowal of the feminine real, or that which is irreducible to a ghostly masculinity. Yet again, this is not a dismissal of the virtual, only the absolutising of it. Regarding an affirmative approach to the spectral, Nicholas Royle writes: ‘There are phantom effects, even if phantoms do not exist.’26 Equally, the real is a potential, even if it evades phantomacity. Spivak objects that Derrida produces a silly Marx, a Marx who supposedly fails to understand the ghostly performativity of capitalism, a Marx who appears to be cast in the role of a naive Nathanael, while at the same time she implies that it may be Derrida who is caught up in Nathanael’s obsession with paternity and spectrality. The Marx of Spivak concerns a desire for clarity and Spivak speaks of herself, in a phrase that makes me smile, as a ‘clarity fetishist’ (p. 72). Spivak, a clarity fetishist? Well, why not? Let us consider it. The term ‘clarity fetishist’ in the context of a reading of Marx and ‘The Sandman’ brings to mind the name Clara, the name of the sister. Samuel Weber points out of Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’ that Freud reads the whole story from the perspective of Nathanael and that therefore, just like Nathanael, Freud is unable to see Clara and thus misses the point of the story.27 To tell the truth, we are all perhaps clarity fetishists in that the fetish (Olimpia) pertains to Clara, where the phallus is probably the first fetish rather than the unavowed being or original being that the fetish pertains to. Regarding the feminine as other than what works or performs as a woman, it is worth turning to Antonio Negri’s critique of Specters of Marx, and Derrida’s reply to it in ‘Marx and Sons’. Negri sees that Derrida provides an apt account of spectral labour in the world of late capitalist postmodernism, but he considers Derrida’s spectres to be intellectual spectres and he argues that: ‘Derrida is a prisoner of the ideology he critiques’ (p. 13). Negri’s claim may be supported in that Derrida’s notion of the ontological, hauntology, remains traditionally based on an ontology of presence/absence. Negri points to Spinoza as offering an alternative where Spinoza thinks of being in terms of fluxes and conversions of energy. Negri suggests, appealingly, that instead of the generic (ghostly) subject we should reckon with ‘a flux, a mobile and flexible reality, a hybrid potential that traverses the spectral movement of production’, where this would amount to: ‘A new paradigm: most definitely exploited, yet new – a different power, a new constituency of laboring energy, an accumulation of cooperative energy’ (p. 12). He adds this is a ‘new – post-deconstructive – ontology’. I have already touched on this in my second chapter as regards the work of Asada Akira. Regarding this, the scientific materialism of Marx certainly benefits from taking into account the scientific revolutions from quantum physics onwards, where it

200

Sisters of Marx

has been proposed that the scientific vision of Engels accords well with the perspectives offered by chaos theory.28 Negri’s article concludes with a reference to a story in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections. The anecdote in question concerns a bourgeois family dining on the left bank while the sounds of revolution are heard in the street. Negri writes: the cannonade fired by the bourgeoisie against the rebellion of rioting workers resounds suddenly – distant noises from the right bank. The diners shiver, their faces darken. But a smile escapes a young waitress who serves their table [ . . . ] Isn’t the true spectre of communism perhaps there in that smile? [ . . . ] Isn’t a glimmer of joy there, making for the spectre of liberation? (p. 15) In his response to this, Derrida warms to the smile drawn attention to, but questions what Negri means here by liberation. In brief, Negri is seen as wanting to bring back an ontology of presence, the joy of this, as opposed to the hauntology of mourning or melancholia. Derrida says that Negri cedes to what is most problematic in Marx, the ‘desire to conjure away any and all spectrality so as to recover the full, concrete reality of the process of genesis hidden behind the spectre’s mask’ (p. 258). But why not this joy, creativity and freedom of spirit? Is this because this non-negativity is not so much falsely there but too femininely or youthfully there? Or, is it that it has no place in the workplace? In terms of ‘The Sandman’, (the birdman stealing eyes/ova for his children) the concrete reality of the process of genesis would be a matter of the growth of a foetus: how does the mask or masquerade of the father manage to guard this living genesis? Would the coyness be his lack of a womb or femininity? The masquerade of the father is that he gives birth by himself to versions of himself: that is the very nature of his perverse performative self-production. It would be the literalising of an ideal of autonomous auto-mating. Why does Derrida want to preserve this religious fiction, so to speak, from scrutiny? However, much less literally, what I want to say is that this reality, basically of life, does not have to be thought of in terms of a concrete presence, something objectified, nor a something hidden within, but that it could nonetheless be fully affirmed and avowed: a question of consciousness of reality, awareness of the being of the other. That is, it is not a matter of presenting an essence but a question of suspending (not abolishing) the ghostliness of all our preconceptions and conceptions for the sake of a noticing, a receptivity towards what might then be. Such would maintain the possibility of a mentionability that would not be self-referential. (For Marx, the alienation of Hegel is: ‘man only as self-consciousness.’29) Clara is that which clearly is: is clearly. Can we be aware of the invisible? For this, we might need another table (see overleaf). What this concerns is the difference between an Olimpia and a Clara. This difference cannot be addressed in terms of traditional Western metaphysics, but it can still be addressed and addressed philosophically. For instance, in quasiWittgensteinian terms, Olimpia is a thing, whilst Clara is not a thing but a fact. However, for the early Wittgenstein, the problem is that the fact is a representation,

Sisters of Marx

201

Encore, a table Strictly speaking, ‘women’ cannot be said to exist. – Julia Kristeva30

It is Clarissa, He said. For there she was. – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway31

Woman is nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself [ . . . ] – Otto Weininger, Sex and Character32

[Y]our face swims into focus/ through soft clouds of cigarette smoke and from behind the/ much much harder barriers erected by some/ quite unbelievable/ 20th century philosophy – Ama Ata Aidoo, ‘For Bessie Head’33

Women are hollow suitcases or suitcases with dividers [ . . . ] I prefer to pack my intellectual contents into the former – Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen34

Men will see how long they have been blind [ . . . ] shall see woman – HD, ‘The Master’35

You may be sure that she felt nothing at all . . . The oriental woman is not more than a machine – Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert36

Then I realised that I would never make him see. A good man. He had never imagined himself in my place. He didn’t know there was such a place. – Sindiwe Magona, Forced to Grow37

As onlookers watched the image of our new Eve begin to appear on the computer screen, several staff members began to fall in love. Said one: ‘It really breaks my heart that she doesn’t exist’ – Time Magazine38

Scrupulous transmitters of course, but already naturally inclined by habit to occult all feminine presence – Assia Djebar, Loin de Me´dine39

or as he says a picture.40 By means of ‘The Sandman’ we can see that the thing (Olimpia) is the representation. So, things are representations and, we could add, ghosts. Clara is not the kind of fact that could be reduced to a representation. She concerns the fact of the ontological beyond any representations and as that which may be avowed as really being. She is mentionable, ostensively speaking, as you can see in the above, but this is not a case of the iterability of the performative. Olimpia, the iterable-performative, is the masculine subject’s or the self-centred subject’s idea of woman: and there will always be a gap between ideas of woman and women. However, to say that there is only Olimpia, only this performative representation, is to guarantee the authority of the self-centred subject: there would be no way of challenging his idea-fiction of woman. Olimpias would rule (that is, serve, and serve in the name of the father), and Claras (the spirited living beings) would be unmentionable. It is in this way that authoritativeness and the performative serve to reinforce each other. What can be said about Clara is that she is alive: this, most importantly, more than that she’s ‘a woman’. That is, representations of others pertain to living beings with all the responsibilities that this entails. Moreover, it is also real life that is capable of fighting back, dissenting against the ways in which it is represented by those in power, as in Negri’s example. And so, I feel an affinity with what Negri says about the smile of the serving girl, a smile of joy and liberation, except I myself would not exactly speak of this

202

Sisters of Marx

in terms of the spectre as Negri does (which is where the confusion between Derrida and Negri may arise). Negri calls it ‘the spectre’s smile’. Derrida, in his astuteness, states: ‘I owe a debt of gratitude to Antonio Negri for having, in his way, left this smile floating about the lips of a specter – though it is not easy to say which one’ (p. 257). Or, if one? What is interesting about the way that Derrida puts this is that the question of whose the smile is focused on: not easy to say whose smile. The ghost in Hamlet is a spectre in torment, so it would be callous, or sado-masochistic, to say it is his smile. I have suggested that the torment of this ghost is a matter of his being cut-off from life, from the lives of others. Regarding this, I would say that the smile of the serving-girl is directed against the spectrality of alienated middle class existence and is not, in fact, the smile of a spectre (the boss or his servants). Her smile pertains to her awareness of her comrades in the streets and it pertains to the liberation of a collective existence, that co-operative energy that Negri addresses. In masculinist terms, independence is thought of in terms of individual autonomy: the capitalistmasculine versions of the Enlightenment as this. However, individual autonomy – the illusion of which is partly necessary – is eventually either a mere pretence or it is a matter of miserable self-imprisonment. Kate Soper writes of the development of feminism: Even within Western societies there remains much shocking and systematic abuse of women, and formal recognition of gender parity still demands immanent critique in the light of continuing difference of status, role and power between the sexes. There are also limitations and contradictions in the very forms of freedom and self-realisation enjoyed by emancipated women within contemporary society. Greater gender parity there certainly is, but it is the parity of competing individuals often caught up in transient and narcissistic forms of sexual fulfilment and expression, and the overall context remains that of the market with its commodified and consumersist – and ecologically disastorous – perceptions of personal well-being and success.41 I agree, and I have been arguing that real liberation is collective, for the sake of a collective existence, and for this a reality of the feminine is needed. And what this further requires is some kind of challenge to the tyranny of time, especially in its abstracting of human beings. What remains unexplained in Negri’s analysis is how he sees the spectralisation of labour, which he speaks of approvingly, combining with co-operative energy to produce a ‘new proletariat’. He also does not explain how his envisaged form of solidarity would differ from the class solidarity of the past. I do not think that the failure of communism can really be explained in terms of a chasing away of spectres. Rather, communism could be said to have failed through a resentful insistence on equality in terms of sameness. It may be said to have achieved a gender neutrality of labour (think of the iconography of women on tractors), but with a thoroughly de-spiriting and thus hyper-ghostly effect. Communism may be said to have promoted equality through intensifying

Sisters of Marx

203

homogenising standardisation and mechanised existences, thus denying scope for the human potential and desire for creativity. It is as if, whilst capitalism misattributes creativity to the head, communism tries to do away with it altogether. The co-operative energy that Negri refers to could only constitute a new paradigm of labour if this labour were allowed to flourish as a creative process. For example, since all the talk is of performativity, we might direct our attention from the stage on which the commodities appear to the off-stage rehearsal space of a theatre troupe. Here, labour as the troupe of actors would not just be a case of the mechanical performance of pre-established roles but a case of collaborative effort and interplay leading to the improvisation of different scripts and changing roles that do not contain the lives of those who give them life. It is a case of not fully giving the working life over to its commodification and domination by time. The spectropoetic blurring of the table-thing and the suit of armour (disrupting chronologies and topologies) could be read as de-historicising a thinking of the ‘non-sensuous sensuous’. Derrida writes: In question is the formula that, at the opening of Capital, defines exchangevalue and determines the table as ‘non-sensuous sensuous’ thing’, [sic] sensuously supersensible. This formula literally recalls (and this literality cannot be taken as fortuitous or external) the definition of time – of time as well as space – in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (Philosophy of Nature, Mechanics). (p. 155) What is thus suggested is that Marx can be affiliated not only to Hegel but through him to Kant, and back through Kant to Aristotle, a genealogy explored in Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy.42 With but the slightest nod in the direction of this philosophical cluster, what the non-sensuous sensuous refers to is a sense or sensing of time (time as spacing and enframing) in which time is thought of in terms of non-presence, non-being, against the assumption of being as presence. If Marx can be affiliated to this tradition of thought (I will come to Spivak’s objection), this would imply that to think of the commodity as the non-sensuous sensuous is to posit the sense of its ghost-effect – the supersensible apprehension of it – in terms of the non-being of time or time as non-being, where the Marxist specification would be of ‘labour-time’ and surplus value. For Derrida, the ghostly commodity-thing marks a survivance, an afterlife, although it may also be said that commodities mainly have little lasting value, their temporality being that of the temporary, the surpassable. To maintain a desire for nowness, newness, otherness, the commodity needs be passe´ and more of the same. But it may be said that the commodity pertains to a totemic or tribal desire for belonging in its paternal idealising aspect, whilst it also pertains to a constant refusal of, and thus fuelling of, a yearning for feminine being, ‘the real thing’ or lively, human, affective connectedness as opposed to symbolic connectedness. It should be said that what would also be at stake here is the endurance of life (life of the whole), as opposed to the temporal. Nathanael sees Olimpia in terms of an idealisation of presence, but this it-girl of the moment, latest model, reveals

204

Sisters of Marx

itself to be a worthless fantasy. So-called ‘presence’ cannot be the inner essence of an enclosing form (male or female). Spivak objects to the above alignment of Marx with Hegel by Derrida, stating: ‘No, the commodity is quite the opposite’, (p. 77) quoting the following from Specters of Marx: ‘a sensuous non-sensuous thing . . . ein sinnlich u¨bersinnliches Ding’ (p. 150). Without investigating the various sources here, the question is one of what difference this reversal would make. Although Spivak does not discuss the passage in Marx, the concern is with ‘the ghostliness of labor-power’, a ghostliness that arises through the abstraction of labour as abstract labour-time. If the non-sensuous sensuous concerns an intuitive sensing beyond or apart from what is present-to-the senses, then a ‘sensuous non-sensuous’ thing, suggests that something beyond the sensuous (something supersensible or invisible) would be present to the senses in the commodity. For Derrida, the difference between a spirit and a spectre is that the latter is disembodied (p. 117), so the inversion may be that the invisible is embodied in the sight of the commodity: in the commodity you can actually perceive what cannot be seen. Or, I would like to say that even if we cannot see spirit or ‘life itself ’ we can be aware of it through living beings, along with perhaps the traces of it in things. Spivak states that: ‘the space between the sinnlich [sensuous] and the u¨bersinnliche [supersensible] is precisely that ‘‘empirical actuality’’ to which Derrida thinks that Marx is committed’ (p. 77). That is, the sensuous – the wood or matter of the table – would not constitute its actuality, for its actuality would arise in the differentiation (spacing) between sensuous woodiness and the equivalency or homogeneity of signs in the same system. Put another way, the table as commodity would not be ‘a table’ but a commodity among commodities, whilst also the table as but ‘wood’/matter would not be a table. The empirical actuality of the table – there is a table – would be something other than its status as wood and other than its status as commodity. With respect to the former, Derrida sees Marx as opposing the commodity form of the table with its woody thingness and critiques this as follows: ‘The said use-value of the said ordinary sensuous thing, simple hule- [ . . . ] its very form, the form that informs its hule- must have at least promised it to iterability, to substitution, to exchange to value, it must have made a start [ . . . ] on an idealisation’ (p. 160). It is true that Marx says the following which could justify Derrida’s reading: ‘The form of wood [ . . . ] is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be a common, everyday thing, wood.’43 However, elsewhere, Marx speaks of a defining characteristic of human labour as opposed to the work carried out in nature by nature as precisely a capacity for idealisation.44 The point to be made here though is that the difference between ‘wood’ and ‘table’ is not that the latter is informed by and is the product of the idea of a table but that there is a process of work that transforms the wood – brainwork and physical work – both kinds of living labour-power. What is revealing about Derrida’s position is its idealism: there is, for him, idealisation from the start in the (in)forming of the commodity. Thus, the performativity of the commodity-automaton, its iterability, is a question of

Sisters of Marx

205

intentionality and design: the very thing Derrida denies in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ and that he accuses Austin of. What remains mysterious is what Derrida understands by the ‘automatic’ nature of the ‘automaton’. It drives itself ? Do automatons really drive and cause themselves? Is it rather a case of the self that drives itself ? But if not through real bodily drives, would this then be through the ego itself or the superego? How does the working (thing) work? Derrida notes that Marx is interested in Wirklichkeit (p. 130). The German verb wirken means to weave or work (wonders) and to work as in ‘be effective’, ‘have an impact, look seem’, where wirklich, from the same stem, means ‘real; true; genuine’. Olimpia’s convincing reality can be attributed to her effectiveness, her wondrous working: she works, she walks or moves; c¸a marche, it goes. Her reality and truth is thus an effect of her performance. On the one hand, she is, as has been discussed, a humanised commodity, where her humanisation is what makes people ‘buy’ (believe in) her: and, if she were an art work, this would not just be a case of her mechanical reproduction but of the aura of the creative process of her manufacture. On the other hand, as briefly indicated, she is (the) alienated and mechanised human labour(er), a mindless mechanical production, a working woman whose sole worth is her effective efficiency by which she is de-humanised, de-realised or de-spirited. And what makes this labour work are conditions of ownership and structures of domination. While this would also apply to the male labourer, it is especially women who have become these ‘working devices’, as indicated by Spivak’s account of socialised feminine labour. Spivak states: ‘The subaltern woman is now to a rather large extent the support of production’ (p. 67). In Derrida’s account of commodity production, labour would seem merely to be a commodity, a thing not a being, whilst Marx sees the invisible human being in the commodity, an invisible but real being with making capacities and energies: this rather than the inexplicably, uncannily animated thing. Spivak writes: ‘Labortime is abstract, but not identical with labor-power (and certainly not with human existence)’ (p. 77). Indeed. What is at stake is that capitalism operates as if time is the sole, over-arching source of value when this is not the case. However, the alternative source of value would not be use-value. Spivak notices that the difference between use and exchange value is not that convincing: it can be easily deconstructed (p. 75). It could be said that both exchange value and use value are instrumentalising. Rather, it would have to be considered that the other source of value would need to concern what of being cannot be made subject to time. For Derrida and Hegel, time is spacing, deferral, diachrony, diffe´rance. What would thus be at stake, as other than this, is the inseparability of being. It is then a case of so-called synchronicity; both real creative potential and, in social terms, our brother-sister solidarity. It would be the value of the ontological, life or the real, however much disavowed, as interdependency. The father ideal or sovereignty of the supposed auto-generator, automatically and singularly autonomous, does not really bind us together: it is the reality of our living interdependency that binds us together, the fact that our lives depend on each other. The father-ideal as father-time does have a certain predatory-submissive logic: give your lives over

206

Sisters of Marx

to father-time, all of life is owed to time. Except, time creates nothing by itself; it is more the effect of life than the cause of it. This said, Derrida may well have a point regarding Marx’s rather paranoid sense of persecution in relation to father figures. We are all mortal: why blame one or other parent, one or other sex, for this fact? And what might a demystified but non-paranoid notion of the father ideal be? In terms of capitalism, it might be simply the demand for labour. Our work would both issue from such a demand or expectation and also not issue from it. For a start, I would maintain that the ideal is not there to begin with. It is the work we put into something that carves it out, that forms it. The university subject ‘English literature’ is not something given from the start; the work we do serves to weave, make and re-make it. This work-in-process is not actually the replica-product of a father ideal, but, nonetheless, a principle of authority and disciplinarity serves to exact the work from us. The performativity of the economy may be said to be this paternal or superegoic demand and authority: why then mystify it as a mystical generative principle? Can we not just see it as it is? Claire Denis’ film Beau Travail, about the good work, the training, the performativity that maintains the structure of an army, the Foreign Legion, explicitly presents the leader of the group, the commandant, Forestier, as a ‘man without ideals’. Julia Borossa comments: The ideal itself is a sham; that which binds together the family of the Legion, and by implication the patriarchal Oedipal family, is the process of idealisation. Its object itself is not important. All is in the gestures, the ‘training’ [ . . . ] Forestier succeeds as a father-ideal for his men despite his lack of ideals, his drug-taking and his friendship with Africans, because he knows what the rules are, what the structure means and where to take his place within them.45 There is nothing there to believe other than, we could say, the need to make something work. We could say this is a process value that mediates between living and temporal durations. This performative structure of a ‘making work’, is just that, and can be seen to have its beauty even, but this techno-performativity is not itself something generative. That lies beyond it, to be acknowledged as such. The army is of course a war machine as a self-maintaining regime. Beyond this war machine would be the further questions of creating new life, nurturing it, healing it, and so on, processes that cannot be divorced from naturality and that would concern interdependent webs of generativity. Furthermore, while in the army, and in totalitarian structures, lives are yielded up to the leader, in democratic society, as distinct from the army, the leaders are inversely supposed to be responsible to the people who elect them. If capitalism is an inversion of reality, this appears to be because it attempts to internalise, incorporate or encrypt what is external to it, producing more of the same. It would seem to be structurally incapable of admitting to anything outside itself. So, for example, there is the difficulty of getting corporations to take

Sisters of Marx

207

on environmental issues pertaining both to the living environments of workers and to the sustaining of the planet. Where Derrida sees the enabling paternal ghost (and thereby questions of an ethics based on the ideality of time and survivance), Marx sees the phantom as vampire-predator (and thereby questions of politics and survival). I think that what is implicit in Derrida’s perspective is that it is the performative machine that survives, irrespective of those that fuel it, and the paternal spectre is the symbol, idea or ideal of this survival of the machine. However, the Marxist position regarding this is that we should not just work for the machine but make the work-machine work for us as beings not wholly contained by it. This perhaps goes some way to responding to Spivak’s point about the pharmakon. The work-machine has the ambiguity of the poison-remedy but to turn it round into a cure, we would need to acknowledge something wider than it, of more value than it: a surplus value of the non-expendable life. What Spivak says here is elegantly and convincingly to the point, that is, she says: ‘Marx wants to use the ghostliness in man for socialism’ (p. 75). Stephen Morton explains that for Spivak the Marxist imperative of the social redistribution of capital has to take into account the disenfranchisement and specific conditions of subaltern labour. Marxism in an international context needs to contend with the prejudices of what counts as progressive history and with the chances of transnational literacy. Regarding the former, Morton brings the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty into a relation with the work of Spivak and he comments: by re-conceptualizing the term pre-capitalist as a Derridean trace of heterogenous forms of subaltern labour rather than a primitive stage in the linear history of global capitalist accumulation, Chakrabarty provides a critical vocabulary for articulating different histories of subaltern labour.46 This would presumably be a matter of attending to the synchronous or ‘the alongside’ in a contestation of the homogenous time of abstract labour. Regarding transnational literacy, Morton comments: ‘Spivak’s theoretical work has always criticized the limits of existing structures of political representation, and carefully elaborated the conditions of possibility for a new idiom in which the subaltern can speak and be heard.’47 Morton considers how this is a matter of resisting false co-optations of the collective through efforts towards ethical singularity. The way that I would elaborate this in the context of this chapter is that it is a matter of being able to differentiate between Olimpia as a generic representation (false collective position) and Clara as a question of the noticeable and real being to whom attention may be effectively directed. However, it also needs to be pointed out that in attending to the subaltern what you can often hear is a locally inflected affirmation of the collective as opposed to the generic. Sumud and unhu are two terms of a transnational literacy that this book has attempted not to be deaf to, along with Yvonne Vera’s soundings out of the collective potential of kwela in terms of a mobilising from below. As for ‘singularity’, a term very dependent on a European monadic philosophical heritage, I

208

Sisters of Marx

think we need to take some care. While the term may be intended as a useful resistance to generalisation, it is not infrequently deployed to suggest an autogenerativity of the singular, the one: as can collapse into the capital generalisation of the generative and as happens at times in Peter Hallward’s positing of a postcolonial absolute.48 When Derrida directs our attention from the commodity to the spectre what is elided is the historical perspective, somewhat ironically, for the sake of a transhistorical temporality, and if the animate-inanimate ‘inspired’ thing is to be regarded in terms of survivance then this certainly goes way beyond Marx’s interest in the commodity form as specific to a capitalist mode of production. Indeed, it is Derrida’s point: We will see (translate: we will see come) the end of this delirium and of these ghosts, Marx obviously thinks. It is necessary, because these ghosts are bound to the categories of bourgeois economy. This madness here? Those ghosts there? Or spectrality in general? This is more or less our whole question – and our circumspection. (p. 164) For Derrida, there would be nothing, therefore, outside the ghostliness of time, the economic as pertaining to this. No co-presence, therefore? In The Post Card, Derrida calls synchronicity ‘vulgarity’.49 Why ‘vulgar’? Because otherwise both sacred and common to all? In insisting that Marx is subject to anachrony, Derrida states in Specters of Marx: ‘But synchrony does not have a chance, no time is contemporary with itself ’ (p. 111). Derrida’s concept of diffe´rance is a diachronic and anachronic one – spacing and deferral as opposed to simultaneity – and it is for this reason, I think, that generativity is assimilated to generation in his treatment of a financially understood capitalism. Derrida draws on texts such as Hamlet, ‘The Sandman’, and possibly, Frankenstein, but from the perspective of the central male character. He fails to notice that these very texts position the rather blinkered and self-preoccupied male heroes within the wider domain of a brother-sister correspondence. In ‘The Sandman’, Clara intercepts a letter meant for her brother, and the story unfolds within this. Frankenstein is a story told by Walton to his sister. And, as shown in the previous chapter, Hamlet’s obsession with the ghost prevents him from seeing the significance of the poetic, synchronous brother-sister relationship until the end of the play. The perspectives of Nathanael, Victor Frankenstein and Hamlet concern the narcissism of the ghostly man ideal, that which refers to self, the self-referential and its self-sufficient endurance. The perspectives of the art works exceed this narcissism, however, with respect to an understanding that the ‘autonomous’ singular self is not actually creative, but it is a relation to the other and every other that is, and that what lives on is the holistic (which is what the awkward ‘synchronicity’, or I want to say ‘synchromaticity’, pertains to). Barring synchronicity in Marx’s work, Derrida yet writes: ‘Two times at the same time, originary iterability [ . . . ]’ (p. 163). But is not this formulation just an illusory logic of self-identity?

Sisters of Marx

209

What I should like to add is that synchronicity has gained a scientific credibility in the works of Wolfgang Pauli, Ilya Prigogine, David Bohm, and others. Popularising the scientific research into synchronicity, David Peat goes so far as to claim: we have built our lives and our civilisations on an illusion. An illusion [spectre] of the supreme reality of the self, of becoming over being, of temporal progress over infinitely more subtle time orders that merge into eternity [ . . . ] Synchronicities have opened a window onto a creative source of infinite potential, the well-spring of the universe itself. They have shown how mind and matter are not distinct, separate aspects of nature but arise in a deeper order of reality.50 And, Rosemarie Waldrop, addressing questions of synchronicity in relation to poetry, writes: ‘The transcendence is not upward, but horizontal, contextual [ . . .] In other words, no split between spirit and matter.’51 ‘Transcendence’, I think, would not be the right word then. Spivak concludes her reading of Specters of Marx, through turning to Assia Djebar’s attempts to imagine the origins of Islam with respect to the women who were significant in the Prophet’s life. This indirectly serves to touch on the question of Derrida’s relation to Algerian sisters, as not engaged with in Specters of Marx, even as deconstruction may be said to owe quite a lot to a scene of Algerian decolonisation.52 With respect to Djebar’s concerns, Spivak considers that there may be a desired form of androgyny so that a masculinised daughter might be able to enter the line of inheritance. The daughter as heir would though be a female version of the masculine type? However, a foundational androgyny remains of significance in other ways. It may be seen as the basis of an appeal for a justice to come (not a nostalgia) as well as the impetus for social activism. For Djebar, in an interview, it concerns an equal participation of genders at the origin, a question of equal value, that is lost in the historical development of Islam.53 In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the incestuous brother-sister relationship pertains to what resists assimilation into a society in which human beings do not have equal value as human beings (rather than as things): women and slaves of both sexes as commodities, the reduction of the human to the economic, the instrumentalising of being.54 What is interesting is that after the writing of The God of Small Things, Roy has devoted herself to social activism.55 As in the case of Black Hamlet, it is as if the psychological working through of this androgynous brother-sister desire (which would be regressive on a familial level) is able to mobilise a socially radical commitment: working towards a society for all against the excessive capitalist instrumentalisation and commodification of human life. What is at stake here is a politics of friendship that, in the book of that name, Derrida sees as needing to concern itself with the sister, although this remains something of a rhetorical gesture in that Derrida only looks at male friendship

210

Sisters of Marx

himself in this work. Nonetheless, as Spivak notes: ‘One of the greatest merits of Politics of Friendship is its repeated consideration not only of the exclusion of woman from the political philosophy of democracy, but also of her appropriation into the male lineaments as the price of inclusion.’56 And let it also be noted that there are male critics and theorists who certainly do not treat of the feminine and feminism as a mere after-thought in their work on colonialism and postcolonialism.57 In Specters of Marx, justice is a matter of both an empty messianism and the new International. The former concerns a receptive attitude to what arrives or what happens. With reference to the ending of Hamlet, this would be an allowing of being to be, Hamlet’s ‘let be’, and a readiness to engage. Derrida strictly avoids the ontological implications of an allowing being to be, life to happen, and I think an account of ‘readiness’ would help to rescue Derrida’s account of empty messianism from the accusations of mere passivity that tend to be made against it, even as Derrida protests against such accusations.58 What would actually be needed is alert attentiveness, a capacity to notice those who stand in need of aid and reinforcement. In Aristotlean terms, it might be a case of the ethical precondition for activism. Derrida treats of empty messianism as an alternative form of activism, rejecting Jameson’s claim that it is a utopianism. He states: ‘Nothing would seem at a further remove from Utopia or Utopianism [ . . . ] than the messianicity and spectrality which are at the heart of Specters of Marx.’59 However, I would propose that it is better to keep what Derrida calls ‘empty messianism’ distinct from activism. In fact, I would say it would be helpful to call for various – hard to make – distinctions here regarding empty messianism, utopianism and activism. Firstly, I would say that the term empty messianism should pertain to the space of the father ideal (spectre) as hollowed out – hollow at the core – as explained by Borossa. This place of the ideal is without ideals and illusions itself. As considered, this would be the determinant of a temporal and necessary demand in order to keep the social organisation going. What is problematic about the saviour or redeemer complex is that it borders on psychotic and paranoid formations or conditions. This can, for example, be seen in the case of Schreber as well as in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. What seems broadly to be at stake is that the psychotic would seem to be possessive of being in the delusion that an enemy other poses a persecutory threat to the life of an idealised principle of selfhood. This paranoia also plays itself out in authoritarian and fundamentalist politics and racist conflicts as regards what is basically an attempt to colonise the sources of being or life in the name of an ideal. It would seem to be for this reason that idealised selfhood has to be maintained as empty and ghostly, as not really a living reality. If anything, it would be, as Derrida keeps arguing, a matter of spectral performance. Apart from this, would be the utopian horizon of what cannot be subsumed within the temporal organisation as temporal and what cannot be subsumed within a principle of selfhood, a justice for all, an infinite opening. Trying to force this – boundless potential of the real or for being – into spatio-temporal

Sisters of Marx

211

situations can lead to violence, so it needs be kept as it is: as a precondition. Nonetheless, this utopian precondition may serve to guide our dissenting activism outside the organisations governed by subservience to self-interest, and hence the necessity of keeping it distinct from the ideal-without-ideals of the paternal principle. It is this utopianism that concerns an allowing to be and a freedom of spirit, so it cannot be forced, contained, directed or localised as such. Moreover, it is not spectral but concerns the real of the synchronous. Regarding the distinction between utopianism and activism, an example will be offered. On the basis of a precondition of justice for all, for the excluded, we might support, for example, the Palestinian struggle but, in doing so, we would have to make a transition from the cosmic appeal to the particular and specific case of a limited group, the Palestinians. The utopian precondition and the activist cause could not be the same thing: the transition would be from readiness to actual commitment, the latter accepting its necessary strategic limitations. Moreover, for something to work here, there would possibly need to be a common acceptance of an ideal without ideals: a disillusioned idealism as a certain realism. In Udi Aloni’s film, Local Angel, one that takes up Walter Benjamin’s concept of a weak messianism, Aloni shows how his Israeli activist mother, Shulamit Aloni, and Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian activist, are able to negotiate in friendly terms, unlike their menfolk, because of their greater realism or non-idealism.60 What of activism, what of the new International in Specters of Marx? Derrida significantly proposes a transformation of international law to create a superState in order to promote international democracy and curtail domination by powerful Nation-states. Beyond this legal super-State, his formulation of a new International is extremely and deliberately vague, as follows: ‘Barely deserving the name community, the new International belongs only to anonymity’ (p. 90). But why not mention what might be significant here? Why insist on unmentionability at this juncture? Why would you not want to draw attention to where and how we might mobilise and maximise the worthwhile struggles? This is probably because Derrida fails to differentiate between the ethics of empty messianism (what may be the empty or spectral father ideal along with other forms of the uncanny) and the dissenting political activism of the (utopianinspired and realistically specific) International: between, first, the father ideal and the utopian appeal, and second, between the cosmic precondition and the necessarily selective commitments. Everything in Derrida is so blurred here, even if deliberately, that its radical potential could be easily lost and come across as a kind of well-intentioned liberalism. The work of Benita Parry may be said to effect the kind of demarcations that I have been trying to bring to bear on Derrida’s welcome yet insufficiently elaborated initiatives, and that I think are necessary. In Conrad and Imperialism, Parry maintains of Conrad’s work that: ‘ethical absolutes are revealed to be pragmatic utilities for ensuring social stability and inhibiting dissent.’61 This is similar to Borossa’s perception of the role of Beau Travail’s Forestier where the ethical ideal turns out to be the production of a working order. As Laura Chrisman argues,

212

Sisters of Marx

Parry, in her work on the writings of imperialism, is able to distinguish between dominatory and emancipatory forms with respect to the affirmations of a utopian stance. Chrisman writes that Parry’s ‘writings, from imperialism to postcolonial theory to resistance, articulate optimistic belief in the achievability of political solidarity and common understanding across races, nations and cultures, brought together in the struggle for human freedom’.62 Whilst there is this utopianism in Parry’s work, it does not become the alibi for the unspecifiably nebulous but serves instead to motivate concrete commitments. In speaking of the need to identify with a socialist avant-garde that is able to reinvent the solidarities that have preceded it, Parry writes: ‘To embark on such work presupposes that globalization is recognized as yet another reconfiguration of systemic capitalism, that the theoretical repudiation of internationalist anticapitalist movements is dispelled, that the concept of the party is restored in a form disentangled from its Stalinist distortions, and that the work of the engaged intellectual is again in place.’63 And Spivak writes of subaltern movements: ‘Their struggles reflect a continuity of insurgency which can only too easily be appropriated by the discourse of a come-lately New internationality [ . . . ] Subalternity remains silenced there’ (p. 71). Comrades, the struggle continues. Derrida yet writes: ‘Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished [ . . . ] They do no more than deny the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to comeback’ (p. 99). But, if we are talking about that which does not die, are we talking about ghosts? We could say that the struggle for communism goes on being in trying constantly to be, its spirit kept alive from one generation to the next. Derrida also writes: ‘Present existence has never been the condition, object, or the thing [chose] of justice’ (p. 175). But don’t we want to save the lives of the living in the here and now if we possibly can? What should we say to the ghosts of those who felt we turned a blind eye to their struggles for existence when they were alive: ‘Present existence has never been the condition, etcetera, for justice’? Derrida’s understandable insistence on de-ontologising the ego ideal and its ideologies (as can be seen in his discussion of Stirner) leaves us still with the need to emphasise the real lives of others across the borders that demarcate selfhoods. Terry Eagleton’s critique of Specters of Marx maintains that it offers us a ‘Marxism without Marxism’.64 Derrida retorts that that is indeed the point regarding what he sees as his going beyond outmoded legacies of Marxism.65 But New Labour tried to offer us a socialism without socialism in order to modernise and that has turned out to be a hollow performativity indeed. In ‘Marx and Sons’, Derrida maintains that the response to his book on Marx that pleased him the most is Werner Hamacher’s ‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx’. Whilst Hamacher’s essay may be the most philosophical of the responses in a convoluted, abstract and highly Hegelian way, it really has the least to offer politically, in my own view. This essay basically treats of the theatre of commodity production to show us (yet again) that its logic and dynamic is one of performativity, especially what is called: peverformative and pe`reformative, say, the performativity of a perverse

Sisters of Marx

213

paternity. I could affirm this perversity in terms of a father who maintains the ideal without believing in it, in a disillusioned way. But for Hamacher and Derrida this paternal perversity has rather to do with the autonomousautomaton, as could be said to erase-appropriate the feminine, in terms of what I am here regarding as a pseudo-self-sufficiency. Hamacher begins his essay by stating: ‘Cloth speaks’.66 This insistence on a language of commodities is maintained throughout the essay as the lesson ‘Cloth speaks’ is repeatedly intoned: ‘Cloth, then speaks’ (p. 170); ‘The cloth, then, the commodity speaks’ (p. 174); ‘Cloth speaks’ (p. 186). It is a repetitious thing, this clamorous cloth, whose formula is similar to the, lo-and-behold, ‘Language speaks’ of Heidegger and de Man that troubles Hillis Miller as regards the attributing of being to language (considered in Chapter 4). In a manner of speaking, you can pretend commodities speak, and all they ever seem to have to say is: ‘me, notice me, mark me, buy me, me’, as if they all had inferiority complexes. Whereas Marx and I would want to say it is as if they speak, but in actuality they don’t (unless you are psychotic), Hamacher affirms it is as if they speak where all the rest would seem to be silence. Hamacher states: ‘They seem to have, to take up a popular word, a performative character’ (p. 171). He says ‘commodity language disregards all natural determinations’ and that it disregards (disavows) itself as a thing ‘positing itself as value’ and that, according to Marx, the ‘exchange language of commodities is a language of inversion’, (p. 171, commodities as soulful, humans as soulless, for instance). Hamacher states: ‘an inversion which seems that much more unavoidable as there seems to be no other language and no other reality than that of commodities’ (p. 172, my emphasis). This ‘there seems’ carries an extraordinary authority for humans are somehow obliged to subject themselves to this no other language than the speech of commodities, this Warensprache. Whilst commodities may governed by a performative logic, why this mysterious obligation to be as one? Presumably Hamacher would see the fictionings of capitalism as determining our realities. So, the subaltern working in a sweatshop would understand that capitalism has fictioned the performative enactment of her labour in such a way, as would not be wrong. However, from a Marxist point of view, she would have yet have a life outside this obligatory fiction, this fiction of obligation, especially when she can see it as such. Hamacher quotes Marx as follows: ‘‘‘In fact the realm of freedom begins only where labor is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus, in the very nature of things, it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production’’’ (p. 179). The basic point is that there is life outside economic determinants and freedom may arise through realising this. However, Hamacher’s contorted interpretation is that since labour gives rise to capital and capital seems to produce itself, they are both governed by an over-arching logic of self-production and it is this ‘self-producing’ logic that promises us a future life of freedom from labour. I find this rather incredible, but it is at such point that Hamacher’s essay acquires more and more of a religious fervour. Hamacher writes: ‘There will be no more labor: this is the promise of the commodity language’ (p. 180). As if ? Or, is this rather the language of being

214

Sisters of Marx

guaranteed servants? This messianism of the commodity is further developed, as follows: The cloth – promise, project, ideal, capital and fetish of the I – is always also a religious linen, Veronica’s veil, with the impression of abstract man announcing his return, his resurrection and reincarnation [ . . . ] Capital is an infinite project [ . . . ] In it, the name of the father, the meta-figure – one is strangely enough to assume it is maternal, a mater-figure – becomes a phenomenal figure of generative, paternal phenomenality. (p. 187, my emphasis; I first wrote ‘phenomentality’) So, we are back to this performative theological cliche´ of a ghostly father(-mother) miraculuosly capable of generativity. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has pointed out that supposedly secular capitalist democracy is not that secular.67 The ‘unchallengeable fiction’ of commodity-speak would here certainly seem to require a lot of faith. Moreover, it is precisely the censoring of the speaking of another reality to absolutise the ‘as if ’ of commodity-language that allows for the surreptitious re-ontologising of the commodity or economic domain. Spivak in the first footnote to ‘Ghostwriting’ states: I was amused by Ahmad’s admission that the ‘identification of ‘‘historicity’’ with opening up ‘‘access’’ to ‘‘the messianic’’ leaves me somewhat speechless’ [101] I respect his admission, rather than the pompous verbiage on the occasion of fantasmatic Heideggers and Levinases that one encounters in cultural criticism today. (p. 65) As pointed out before, Adorno calls this pseudo-mysticism in the service of vivifying a patriarchal capitalism a ‘jargon of authenticity’. Why does Hamacher seek to go along with this, and why does Derrida seek to endorse him? Hamacher states: ‘Although he calls it a ‘‘derangement’’, Marx makes no secret of the fact that commodity-language is correct and that this is what produces its dominating authority’ (p. 178). He also states that for Derrida the performative concerns an absolute ‘self-positing’ in the spectre’s realisation of itself (p. 191). Given that this commodity-language is performative, its ‘correctness’ and ‘authority’ is self-authorisation: not so much what is actually creative as what is ‘as if ’ creative, perhaps an impression of originality. In ‘Marx and Sons’, Derrida states: In Specters of Marx, as in all of my texts of at least the past twenty-five years, all my argumentation has been everywhere determined and overdetermined by a concern to take into account the performative dimension (not only of language in the narrow sense, but also of what I call the trace and writing) [ . . . ] As to what Hamacher here says about and does with what – in precisely, The Post Card – I called, in 1979, the ‘peverformative’, which he ties in with more recent texts like ‘Avances’, it is in my view, one of the

Sisters of Marx

215

many luminous, powerful gestures of his interpretation, in a text that is impressive, admirable and original. (p. 224, Derrida’s emphasis) What I would emphasise here is ‘all of my texts’ and ‘everywhere determined’ as regards the scope Derrida wishes to give to the performative. Furthermore, performativity is said to become a very original and luminous affair for all its ghostliness, but presumably not seriously speaking. However, this is my difficulty with Specters of Marx in that whilst I agree with Derrida’s listing of capitalism’s failings and his hopes for a new International, I do not think that an all-pervasive politics of performativity allows for any effective left wing movement as does need to keep challenging a performative politics. With New Labour, politics has maximised the performative both in our workplaces, our educational institutions, and in terms of foreign politics where policies need not have anything to do with realities but just enact themselves ‘auto-legitimately’. It is worth remembering that Edward Said’s Orientalism, is a severe critique of, not an endorsement of, a performative politics. When the historians of the future look back on the 1990s and early twentyfirst century, I wonder if a correlation will be drawn between the erosion of the left, the maximisation of a politics of performativity and the popularisation of the performative in academic discourses. Will this be seen as part of the same epistemic-ideological formation, a drift into another kind of authoritarianism, performativity as obligatory conformativity, a homogenising singulinearity, and the undermining of dissenting counter-movements? Before speaking just a little more of activism, I wish to take up a challenge offered by Hamacher. Hamacher states: If Marx is indeed to speak a second, other language, then this new Marxian or Marxist language must fulfill at least one condition which cannot be filled by the language of cloth [ . . . ] This other, this allocategory could – and even must – have an altogether peculiar form incommensurable with the categories of political economy, perhaps not even a form. (p. 168–9) Well, let us give it a go for the sake of, at least, keeping our options open. Quite a few allocategories may be proposed as alternatives to Hamacher’s language of the cloth (by which he means especially the commodity, the text, performativity, iterability, spectrality). deconstruction virtuality differance the undecidable the text, the cloth the paternal spectre the general economy

compositionality potentiality synchronicity the undeniable weaving brother-sister spirits the non-domesticated

216

Sisters of Marx

non-origin, the trace mourning–inheritance–generation melancholia, the sublime, the gothic doubling the unconscious the unthinkable the king-thing-fetish technology grammatology narcissism solitary transcendence self-reflexive autonomy the performative the baroque an ethics and poetics of the spectral capitalism

sources generativity the marvellous and ecstactic androgyny moments of being the sayable the pharmakon (co-operative energy) animism pneumatology negative capability (poetic creativity) oceanic horizonality collective freedom the ostensive the lyrical an ethics and poetics of the real communism

(The one term proposed by Hamacher that would pertain to the second column is ‘the admissive’, which I think could be thought of in terms of admitting to or confessing the other.) The above is not meant dogmatically. It is just to say that a kind of sister-philosophy to accompany the ghostly masculine is demonstrably a debatable possibility, as would be governed by a logic of complementarity. The spacing between the two columns – as might, in some respects, look back to Derrida’s Glas in order to look forward from it – would also help to guard against totalitarianism: you could chiasmatically cross or invert from one to the other but you could not conflate them without inviting madness. Hamacher asserts that a language beyond commodification is not possible. Looking up: I would say that it is. You can find it in literature, but not only literature. Of all the arts, it is probably music that can best give us a sense of the cooperation of the inseparable and the indivisible. Musician Daniel Barenboim explains to Edward Said: ‘I believe that when all things are right on the stage – when the playing, the expression, everything becomes permanently, constantly interdependent – it becomes indivisible [ . . . ] The experience of music-making is that [ . . . ] This is what I mean by the mystical.’68 Said’s response to Barenboim’s sense of the compositional whole is that it cannot be recuperated by the political sphere, which I think we do have to see as necessarily divisible and actually divided and compromised. Rather, it constitutes an indispensable outside, one offering a means of resistance to the conflation of existence with the economic, Said stating: ‘a very important part of the practice of music is that music, in some profound way, is perhaps the final resistance to the acculturation and the commodification of everything.’69 Finally, an activism of dissent, bearing witness and the rallying cry remains irreducible to the auto-productions of performativity. It derives its impetus from elsewhere. Furthermore, in its improvisations and contigency, this activism often needs to be and often is creative.

Sisters of Marx

217

Whilst Spivak is modest about her activism to increase literacy, in my opinion, the setting up of a school for literacy is something more creative than, say, meditating on and fetishising your own creativity. Creativity is other oriented, and activist work is especially that. The Israeli and Arab orchestra set up by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim may surely be affirmed to be an activist event. There are, of course, many such activist events worth mentioning and supporting. In a Southern African context, I would draw attention to the cooperative farming projects treated of by Bessie Head in her fiction in paying homage to the transnational and local experiments pioneered by Patrick van Rensberg in Botswana, as have inspired similar ventures in Zimbabwe.70 Regarding an academic feminist-postcolonial socialism, there are a great many sources that I have not been able to acknowledge here. We are all, along with Derrida, doomed to omissions. That said, I hope you will let me know if I really should have mentioned you or her or him in these pages. In addressing Specters of Marx with respect to the concerns of this book, I particularly wished to commend the resoluteness of the Marxist elaborations of both Gayatri Spivak and Benita Parry.71 Returning to the start of the chapter, it may be said that the feminist-socialist international is one that weaves its work from both the synchronous (utopianreal) axis and the diachronic (spectral-messianic) axis in its life-writings. And so, sisters and, of course, brothers, we need to continue to resist the commodification of everything, the reduction of everything to capitalist performativity, the instrumentalisation of existence, the perpetuation of the war machine, the theologising of singularities, the myth of self-sufficient autonomies, if we are to mobilise the international alternatives or with the subalternatives.

Notes

Introduction 1 See, for example, Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Amongst studies that treat of the depiction of the land as feminine see C.L. Innes, Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–1935 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) and Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 2 Lacan writes: ‘And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.’ Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 147. 3 Eric Gans, Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 8. 4 Gans, p. 66. 5 See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press, 2001), p. 58. 6 Arthur Cools, ‘Revisiting the Il y a: Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas on the Question of Subjectivity’ in Paragraph, Vol. 28: 3 (November 2005), p. 55. 7 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 52. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Baraba Harshav (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 196. 9 Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. xiv. 10 Oliver, p. xxi. 11 Oliver, p. 125. 12 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, trans. Stephen Heath, in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, Second Revised Edition, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 261. 13 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 14 Barthes, p. 259, emphasis in text. 15 Edward Said, ‘Beginnings’, Interview in Diacritics (1976), reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. and introd. Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 18–19. 16 Edward Said, Interview with Gauri Viswanathan in Power, Politics and Culture, p. 269. 17 Albert Einstein, ‘Why War?’ in The Penguin Freud, Vol. 12, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 347–8.

Notes

219

18 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 2–3. 19 Notre Musique, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (Optimum Releasing Ltd, 2005). 20 Srinivas Aravamudan, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 145. 21 Clemency Schofield, ‘‘‘For those who have no doorway’’: Palestinian literature and national consciousness’, PhD, University of Kent (2007), p. 179. 22 Simon Critchley attends to the relation of poetry to the real in Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 23 Erwin Schro¨dinger, ‘Mind and Matter’ in What is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Bohm, On Creativity (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 132–5. 24 Grigorio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). David Bohm and Charles Biederman, Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science, ed. Paavo Pylkka¨nen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 52. 25 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). 26 I am grateful to Donna Landry for suggesting the useful term ‘conformative’ to me. 27 I would draw attention here to the work of Forbes Morlock, Nicholas Royle and Sarah Wood. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington in The Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 18 (1996), pp. 3–66. 29 Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation’ in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. and introd. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Harlow: Longman, 1994), pp. 376–91. 30 For an overview of this work, see New Formations, Special Issue on Critical Realism Today, 56 (Autumn 2005). See also, Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1997). 31 Carrie Hull, The Ontology of Sex: A Critical Inquiry into the Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Categories (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 32 Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 19. 33 J.M. Coetzee, Foe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 121. 34 Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography, trans. Olive Kenny (Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 1990), p. 36. 1 From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 227. 2 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Seminar VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 84. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 3 John David Ebert, Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Spirituality and Science at the End of an Age (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1999), p. 165. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), pp. 303–40. 5 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. and introd. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 37. 6 Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things, With Other Writings (Cambridge and London: James Clarke, 1969). 7 Pierre-Laurent Sanner, ‘Sculpteurs Sur Pierre’ in Revue Noir, 28 (March–April–May 1998), p. 34.

220

Notes

8 Charles Baudelaire, ‘La Double Vie par Charles Asselineau’, in L’Art Romantique: Litte´rature et Musique, ed. Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), p. 231. 9 The following generalisations are based on my wide-ranging doctoral study of a literature of the double, alongside a literature of the androgyne, where Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) are being drawn on for examples since these texts are relatively well-known. 10 H.G. Wells, ‘The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham’ (1897) from The Plattner Story and Others, in The Short Stories of H.G. Wells (London: Ernest Benn, 1927). 11 Enrico Coen, The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 36. All further references to this work appear in the text. 12 Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 76, p. 207. All further references to this work appear in the text. 13 However, he also admits the reductiveness of this: ‘There are no computers and no guidebooks. . . . But a guidebook is a handy analogy’ (p. 175); ‘Our very language is larded with intentionality. I wrote earlier that my genes built me. . . . My genes did nothing of the sort’ (p. 310). 14 Ridley writes: ‘Paternal genes, inherited from the father, are responsible for making the placenta; maternal genes, inherited from the mother, are responsible for making the greater part of the embryo, especially its head and brain. Why should this be so?’ (p. 209). My guess is that this fact rather offends Ridley’s male ego. Ridley’s answer is that the mother is too selfish to nourish the organism, whereas the paternal is driven by its own selfish interests to ignore this maternal selfishness. But you could see the genes as co-operating in what are both inter-reliant yet necessarily distinct vital processes. 15 The translations are from Lacan’s reading: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 263. The translation that I am working with offers ‘passionate’ and ‘wild’: Sophocles, Antigone in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles, ed. and introd. Bernard Knox (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 82. Lacan also states that, unlike the Chorus, ‘we shouldn’t situate her at the level of the monstrous’ (p. 263). 16 Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000). This work originally appeared under the title of ‘Clandestine Antigones’ in The Oxford Literary Review, 19 (1997). 17 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 541. 18 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Ge´ne´alogies (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 88–9. 19 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), emphasis in text, p. 2. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 20 Catherine Grant, ‘Still Moving Images: Photographs of the Disappeared in Films about the ‘‘Dirty War’’ in Argentina’ in Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, ed. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003) pp. 63–86. 21 David Bohm and David Peat, Science, Order and Creativity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 114. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 22 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, analysis and forward by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1977), x 430, p. 257. 23 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; London: Granada, 1977), p. 86. 24 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 147. 25 The ‘Society of Outsiders’ is what comes to be formulated in Woolf ’s Three Guineas. Some of what is suggested there reappears in Derrida’s proposal of a ‘new International’ in Specters of Marx, as will be considered in the last chapter of this book. 26 Aquinas remarks: ‘For the philosopher states that the female is a male manque´ [a misbegotten male]. But nothing manque´ or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been reproduced then,’

Notes

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

221

in Summa Theology 1a, question 92, article 1, trans. Edmund Hill (London: Blackfriars, 1964), p. 35. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 155. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Collected Works, 29, 269. The German citations are from the MEGA edition. Perhaps ‘un-geheuer’ is similar to ‘un-heimlich’, ‘geheurer’ signifying ‘eerie’. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). As indicated earlier, Shona sculpture divides its audiences over what they see in seeing it. In an issue of Revue Noir devoted to Zimbabwean art (Vol. 28, 1998), Pierre-Laurent Sanner speaks of its monstrous proliferation, saying of all this creativity ‘L’oeil se perd’ (The eye loses itself), p.34. Psychoanalysis would, no doubt, read this in terms of castration anxiety. Aristotle, Poetics, 406a, in The Basic Works of Aristotle ed. and introd. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1482. See Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 280. George Byron, ‘Epistle to Augusta’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, Second Edition, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 711. William Wordsworth, ‘To my Sister’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Wu, pp. 225–6. Butler writes: ‘I ask this . . . during a time in which children . . . because of migration, exile, and refugee status . . . may well have more than one woman who operates as the mother’ (p. 22). Also, gay people who are outsiders may have something in common with some other outsiders or outlaws. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 42. All further references to this work will appear in the text. This is a reference to the Cole Porter song ‘Everytime We Say Goodbye’. William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. M.R. Riley (London: Routledge, 1991), I.v.3–5. Op. cit. I.iii. 35–6. Plato, Symposium in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Forbes Morlock, ‘Solid Cinema: Claire Denis’s Strange Solidarities’ in The Journal of European Studies, 34: 1/2 (March/June 2004), pp. 82–91. Helena Lindholm Schulz, The Reconstruction of Palestinian Nationalism: Between Revolution and Statehood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 54–5. Clemency Schofield, ‘‘‘For Those Who Have no Doorway’’: Palestinian Literature and National Consciousness’, PhD, University of Kent (2006). Liana Badr, ‘The Story of a Novel or Reflections of Details in the Mirror: Between Awareness and Madness’ in In the House of Silence, ed. Fadia Faqir, trans. Shirley Eber and Fadia Faqir (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1998), p. 38. Antigone, retold by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao, illustrated by Indrapramit Roy (Chennai: Tara Publishing, nd), my emphases, last page. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2006), p. 103. This letter is quoted in: William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999), p. 172. Philippe Van Haute, ‘Death and Sublimation in Lacan’s Reading of Antigone’ in Le´vinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 103. Drucilla Cornell, ‘Rethinking the Beyond of the Real’ in Le´vinas and Lacan, pp. 139–81. Van Haute, p. 117. Cornell, p. 159; Lacan, p. 83. Lacan, my emphasis, p. 237. Lacan does imply that it is a masculine envy of the feminine, in that he talks of it relating to the ‘gap in man’.

222

Notes

52 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘On this Earth’ in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, eds. Munir Akash, Carolyn Forche, Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 6. 53 Van Haute, p. 116. 54 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 12. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 55 Regarding this question, I am interested in the work-in-progress of Jennie Batchelor on Mary Wollstonecraft. 56 Their names happen to be Jewish but this should not be read as Anti-Semitism. While there were Jewish businesses that profited from the labour conditions of apartheid (and the novel is based on experience), it is also the case that many of the most courageous and committed anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. 57 Miriam Tlali, Between Two Worlds (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), pp. 84–7. 2 What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? 1 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanual Kant, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), p. 17. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 2 Slavoj Zˇizˇek draws attention to a scrolling machine that performs this function in The Sublime Object of Ideology 3 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 36. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 4 Sa´ndor Ferenczi, ‘The Problem of the Acceptance of Unpleasure’ in Selected Writings, ed. and introd. Julia Borossa (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 5 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 659. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 6 Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 17. 7 Michael Losonsky, Enlightenment and Action From Descartes to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 10. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 8 As cited by Losonsky, p. 133. 9 See Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003). 10 Caroline Rooney, ‘Against the Corruption of Language: The Poetry of Chenjerai Hove’ in Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005). 11 Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). 12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 186. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 13 For the significance of Spinoza to Einstein, see Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 14 Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: Heinemann, 2003). 15 In Looking for Spinoza, Damasio quotes Freud writing the following: ‘‘‘I confess without hesitation my dependence regarding the teachings of Spinoza. If I never cared to cite his name directly, it is because I never drew the tenets of my thinking from the study of that author but rather from the atmosphere they created’’’, p. 260. 16 Israel, p.632, my emphasis.

Notes

223

17 John Ferguson, ed. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 24. 18 Op. cit. 19 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980). 20 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Care of the Self, Vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1988). 21 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ in A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 112. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 22 Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Harlow: Longman, 1985); Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, trans. Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2003); Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not (London: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2006). 23 Marilyn Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artefacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan’ in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 24 Waysun Liao, T’ai Chi Classics (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1990), p. 18. 25 Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1988), p. 166. 26 Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, p. 169. 27 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan#_Meets_OncomouseTM (London: Routledge, 1997). 28 Asada Akira, ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale’, trans. Kyoko Seldon, in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 29 Transcribed discussion of Asada Akira, Jacques Derrida, Karatani Ko-jin, ‘Cho-sho-hi shakai to chishikijin no yakuwari’ (‘The Ultra-Consumer Society and the Role of the Intellectual’), Asahi jaanaru (Asahi Journal) (25 May 1984), pp. 6–14. See Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artefacts’, p. 41. 30 Derrida even maintains in the film, Derrida, that there is nothing outside of narcissism. It would be necessary to add: says the narcissist. 31 D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 113. 32 See Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artefacts’, p. 41. 33 Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000). 34 Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby’ in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970); J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (London: Vintage, 1998). 35 Olive Schreiner, The Story of An African Farm (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). 36 Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi (Oxford: Heinemann, 1978). 37 Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). 38 Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). 39 Zymunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 40 Carla Hesse, ‘Kant, Foucault and Three Women’ in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 85. All further references to this work appear in the text. 41 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), p. 122. 42 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 85. 43 Ipshita Chanda, ‘Feminist Theory in Perspective’ in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Scwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 498. 44 Hidden dir. Michael Haneke (France, 2005).

224

Notes

45 Jacques Derrida, ‘ . . . and pomegranates’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 326–44. 46 Slavoj Zˇizˇek, ‘Human Rights in a Chocolate Egg’ in Cabinet Magazine, 11 (Summer 2003), pp. 43–6. 47 Donna Landry, ‘Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History’ in Reenactment History, Volume 2: Settlers and Creoles, ed. Jonathan Lamb, (Palgrave, forthcoming). 48 Landry, ‘Settlers on the Edge’. 49 Kate Soper, ‘Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies’ in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barabra Taylor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 706. 50 Soper, p. 712. 3 Radiance or brilliance 1 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Lifting Our Eyes From the Page’ in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (Harlow: Longman, 1995), pp. 222–34. 2 Aristotle, Physics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and introd. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 291. See also, Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–8. 3 See Maurice Blanchot, Le pas au-dela` (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973), pp. 90–2. See also, Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99. 4 Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (New York, Station Hill press, 1981). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 5 I discuss this poetics of ‘eclipsement’ in African Literature, Animism and Politics, pp. 186–204. 6 Foucault evokes Blanchot as follows: ‘Madness, the lyrical halo of illness, continues to extinguish itself ’. Michel Foucault, ‘Madness as the Absence of the Work’ in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 104. I think though that Foucault brings madness and literature too closely together. 7 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Seminar VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 272. 8 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ in the Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 237. Freud equates the daughter simply with death. My reading is a revision of this. 10 Heinrich von Kleist, ‘The Marquise of O—’ in The Marquise of O— and Other Stories, trans. and introd. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 11 Aristotle, p. 294. 12 Rene´e Vivien, ‘Prince Charming’ in The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, ed. Margaret Reynolds (London: Viking, 1993). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 13 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Leves Amores’ in The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 14 Timothy Clark’s clarification is of relevance: ‘So ‘‘being’’, for Heidegger, names this openedness, or ‘‘clearing’’, that realm of unconcealment whereby a world of particular beings appear to us.’ In Martin Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 23. 15 Marcel Proust, ‘Before Dark’, trans. Richard Howard, in The Other Persuasion, ed. and introd. Seymour Kleinberg (London: Picador, 1977). All further references to this work will appear in the text.

Notes

225

16 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’ in Bliss and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982). 17 Ellipses seem to be masculine, and emphases feminine, though this may be too emphatic. Thomas Dutoit has an interesting reading of the Marquise’s knitting in Kleist’s story concerning a puncturing of the textual fabric: see, ‘Rape, Crypt and Fantasm: Kleist’s ‘‘Marquise of O . . . ’’’ in Mosaic, 27/3 (September 1994). 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). 19 In the Republic, Book VI, 507: Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press) p. 743. 20 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in The Oxford Literary Review, 18 (1996). 21 Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, p. 249. 22 Benedict de Spinoza, ‘A Critique of Traditional Religion’ in A Spinoza Reader, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 26, my emphases. 23 Spinoza, p. 29, my emphases. 24 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 21–2. 25 Nicholas Royle maintains that Derrida is a ‘singularly non-prospective’ thinker in Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 104, and I agree with this. 26 Samuel Weber, ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’ in Modern Language Notes, vol. 888, pp. 1102–33. 27 H.D., ‘The Wise Sappho’ in The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, pp. 26–7, my ellipsis. 28 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 152. Marx is attempting to distinguish between the mechanical materialism of Descartes and a socialist materialism, a sensuous empiricism, the latter problematically counting as a real humanism. 29 I say this because Marx seems to follow Hegel in prefacing a consideration of Boehme with one of Bacon. 30 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 199. 31 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of Psychoanalysis, 23 (London: The Hogarth Press), p. 300. As cited by Janet Sayers, Divine Therapy: Love, Mysticism and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 59. 32 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, p. 197. 33 Janet McCrickard, Eclipse of the Sun: An Investigation into Sun and Moon Myths (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 1990). 34 Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Japhcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), p. 52. 35 See Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney, Book Unbinding: The Ontological Stain (London: Artwords Press, 2005). 36 W.B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 70. 37 As cited from The Gay Science by Lou Salome´ in Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 83. Salome´ cites this in the context of tracing Nietzsche’s own tragic fall into madness. 38 Jacques Derrida, ‘‘‘To Do Justice to Freud’’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis’ in Foucault and his Interlocutors, p. 96. For Freud on Charybdis, see ‘Explanations, Applications and Orientations’ in The Oxford Literary Review, Vol.23, special issue on ‘Monstrism’. 39 According to Francis Wheen, the first English translation in 1850 of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ offers us ‘hobgoblin’ rather than ‘spectre’: ‘a frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe’. See Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 124.

226

Notes

4 The other of the confession: the philosophical type 1 Edward Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life’, Interview with Imre Salusinszky in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. and introd. Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 82. 2 Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida, ‘Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews’, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 113. 3 Stiegler and Derrida, p. 115. 4 Stiegler and Derrida, p. 115. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, trans. and introd. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1981), p. 202. 6 Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 202. 7 See Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney in ‘The Scriptless Script’ in art-omma, www.art-omma.org. 8 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 133. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 9 Jean-Luc Godard, as cited by James Williams, ‘Music, Love and the Cinematic Event’ in For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), p. 292. 10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ in Without Alibi, ed. introd. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 72. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 11 Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 566. 12 He´le`ne Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 141. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 13 John Gribbin, In Search of Schro¨dinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (London: Black Swan Books, 1998), p. 190. 14 J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 219. 15 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 248. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 16 F. David Peat, The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Helix Books, 2000), p. 147. 17 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Mural’ in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. and ed. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche´ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 154–5. 18 Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 55. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 19 This is noted by Ibrahim Muhawi in his introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, p. xxv. 20 J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 152. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 21 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 67. 22 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995). 23 Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 24 Jacques Derrida, Circumfession in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 65–9. 25 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 18 (1996), pp. 3–36. 26 Wilson Harris, Selected Essays: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A.J.M. Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 249. 27 Harris, p. 250.

Notes

227

28 David Bohm and Charles Biederman, Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science, ed. Paavo Pylkka¨nen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 126. 29 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 56–7. 30 On the masochistic sexuality of Rousseau, see Robin Howells, ‘Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality’ in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 31 Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘Western Autobiography and Colonial Discourse: An Overview’ in Wasafiri, 48 (July 2006), pp. 9–16. 32 J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 241. 33 Austin, p. 236, my emphasis. 34 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ in Limited Inc, p. 15. 35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 45. 36 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (London: Corgi Books, 1980). 37 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 587–9. 38 Bohm and Biederman, p. 126. 39 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p.112. 40 Adorno, p. 51. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Che cos’e` la poesia?’ in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 42 Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Choral Works, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), p. 167. 43 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). 44 William Blake, ‘Tyger’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, Second Edition, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 79. 45 William Blake, ‘London’ in Romanticism: An Anthology, p. 77. 46 Plato, ‘Letter II’ in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1567. 47 Jacques Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’ in Art Against Apartheid (Paris: Association Franc¸aise d’Action Artistique, 1983), pp. 54–9. 48 Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, ‘No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida’s ‘‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme’’’ in Critical Inquiry, 13 (Autumn 1986), pp. 140–54. 49 Jacques Derrida, ‘But beyond . . . Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon’, trans. Peggy Kamuf in Critical Inquiry, 13 (Autumn 1986), pp. 155–70. 50 Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’, p. 54. 51 Derrida, Rogues, p. 152. Tentatively, I think there is a shift in Derrida’s thinking towards the end of his career that I do not know how to account for. 52 Herman Rapaport, ‘Deconstruction’s Other: Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Jacques Derrida’ in Diacritics, Vol. 25 (Summer 1995), p. 112. 53 Rapaport, p. 112. 5 The other of the confession: women in Zimbabwe 1 Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not (London: Ayebia Clarke, 2006), p. 220. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 2 Francisco Varela, ‘Le cerveau n’est pas un ordinateur. On ne peut comprendre la cognition si l’on s’abstrait de son incarnation’, interview by H. Kempfe in La Recherche, 38 (1998), p. 12.

228

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Notes

This is cited by Telmo Pievani, ‘The Contigent Subject for a Radical Emerge’ in The Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 17 (Summer–Winter 2003), p. 75. Freedom Nyamubaya, ‘That Special Place’ in Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (Harare: Weaver Press, 2003). See Caroline Rooney, ‘Re-possessions: Inheritance and Independence in Chenjerai Hove’s Bones and Tstsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions’ in Essays on African Writing: Contemporary Literature, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (London: Heinemann, 1995), pp. 119– 34. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 113. Stanlake Samkange, The Mourned One (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 95. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) p. 89. Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself ’ in Diacritics, 31:4 (2001), pp. 22–40. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1990), p. 251. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 248. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 254–6. Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga by Caroline Rooney (24 November, 2006), forthcoming in Wasafiri. This chapter was written before the interview was conducted. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 209. Ranka Primorac, The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), p. 171. See also, Flora Veit-Wild, Teachers, Preachers and Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature (Harare: Baobab Books, 1993). Ranka Primorac, ‘Iron Butterflies: Notes on Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning’ in Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, ed. Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (Harare: Weaver Press, 202), p. 101. Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab Books, 1998). All further references to this work will appear in the text. This is mentioned by Lizzy Attree, drawing on Coplan, in her discussion of kwela in ‘Language, Kwela Music and Modernity in Butterfly Burning ’in Sign and Taboo, p. 71. Graeme Ewens, compilation and sleevenotes, Township Jazz ’N Jive (Nascente CD, 1977) Elleke Boehmer’s reading of the novel also draws attention to its emphasis on yearning. See Elleke Boehmer, ‘Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga’ in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39:3 (2004), pp. 135–48. Jane Bryce, ‘Imaginary Snapshots: Cinematic Techniques in the Writing of Yvonne Vera’ in Sign and Taboo. Terence Ranger, ‘History Has its Ceiling: The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins’ in Sign and Taboo, p. 205. Varela, p. 12. See Violet Bridget Lunga, ‘Between the Pause and the Waiting: The Struggle Against Time in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning’ in Sign and Taboo, p. 197. Attree, p. 66. See Emmanuel Chiwome, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Solomon Mutswairo’s and Yvonne Vera’s Handling of the Legend of Nehanda’ in Sign and Taboo, p. 181. Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) p. 81. All further references to this work will appear in the text. A number of the critics in Sign and Taboo emphasise this metamorphosing fluidity of Vera’s writing including: Meg Samuelson, Lizzy Attree and Carolyn Martin Shaw. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London and New York: Continuum2006), pp. 195–6.

Notes

229

30 Primorac, ‘Iron Butterflies’, p. 107. 31 Muponde and Maodzwa-Taruvinga, p. xi. 32 Kizito Z. Muchemwa, ‘Language, voice and presence in Under the Tongue and Without a Name’ in Sign and Taboo, p. 3. All further references to this article will appear in the text. 33 Attree, p. 63. 34 Solomon Ansky, The Dybbuk, trans. G. Alsberg and Winifred Katzin (London: Ernest Benn, 1927). 35 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1996), p. 47. 36 Ranger, p. 206. 37 Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans., ed. and introd. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 133. 38 Derrida, p. 133. 39 Nana Wilson-Tagoe, ‘History, Gender and the Problem of Representation in the Novels of Yvonne Vera’ in Sign and Taboo, p. 169. 40 Jane Bryce, Interview with Yvonne Vera in Sign and Taboo, p. 221. 41 Yvonne Vera, Nehanda (Harare: Baobab Books, 1993), pp. 39–40. 42 Ranger, p. 216. 43 Attree, p. 76. 6 Shakespeare the shaman 1 Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2006), p. 173. 2 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. Ara Guzeliman (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 53. 3 William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004). 4 As my next chapter will show, Derrida’s reading of Hamlet in Specters of Marx proposes that it is not possible to go beyond the ghost. In addition, Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of Hamlet in ‘What is the History of Literature?’ explicitly seeks to stay with the illusion of the ghost. I will be arguing that this is at the expense of considering what the play has to say about poetic realism. See, Greenblatt, ‘What is the History of Literature?’ in Critical Inquiry, 23 (Spring 1997). 5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). 6 Aristotle, Physics in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and introd. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 291. I discuss this passage in relation to African literature in the introduction to my African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000). 7 William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ in Romanticism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 266. 8 John Ashbery, ‘What is Poetry?’ in Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 236. 9 T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’ in The Collected Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 176. 10 This alludes in passing to the Kantian distinction between ‘enantiomorph’ and ‘homomorph’, and thus to the philosophical debates concerning incongruent counterparts. 11 Jacob Boheme, Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, trans. John Rolleston Earle (New York: Knopf, 1920), as cited by Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 179. 12 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos, ed. J. Hardre and G.B. Daniel (London: Methuen, 1964). Hell is defined as other people in this play.

230

Notes

13 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 14 See Jacques Lacan, E´crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 223; and Roberto Harari, ‘The Sinthome: Turbulence and Dissipation’ in Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002). I should point out that I am creating my own version here. 15 This in not in Q2, but in the earlier Arden edition of Hamlet by Harold Jenkins. 16 Ann Barton, Commentary, Hamlet (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 256. 17 Ania Loomba, drawing on a statement made by Queen Elizabeth, states: ‘Her proclamation suggests that ‘‘blackamoors’’ have come to England after being expelled from Spain. The expulsions of Moors and Jews from Spain produced complaints on both sides that these communities were relocating to England.’ See Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 52. 18 The Arden edition only suggests Ovid as a possible source. Stuart Gillespie maintains that The Odyssey was ‘probably not known to Shakespeare in any shape or form’. See Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 251. 19 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 168. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 20 John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook, Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2003), pp. 75–6. 21 Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in The Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 148–56. 22 See Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2002). 23 Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types (New York: Oxford University Press American Branch, 1978), p. 3. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 24 T.S. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 62. 25 Eliot, ‘Hamlet’ in Selected Essays, p. 144. 26 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (London: Methuen, 1956). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 27 Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 154. 28 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam (New York: Grive, 1967). Much of this work is a retort to Mannoni. 29 Khanna, p. 165. 30 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, introd. Jean-Paul Sartre (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism (London: Routledge, 2001). 31 Khanna, p. 162. 32 Sindiwe Magona, To My Children’s Children (London: Women’s Press, 1991). 33 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Resident Alien’ in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002) pp. 47–65; and ‘Foucault and Najibulla’ in Lyrical Symbols and Narrative Translations: Essays in Honor of Ralph Freedman, ed. Kathleen L. Komar and Ross Shideler (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), pp. 218–35. 34 Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet, introd. Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 41. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 35 Khanna, pp. 242–68. 36 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 359.

Notes

231

37 See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, ‘What is the History of Literature?’ in Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997). 38 Laura Bohannan, ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’ in Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, ed. James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy (New York: Harper Collins, 1994). 39 Conformity and Conflict, p. 44. 40 Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Powers (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 77. 41 Orkin, p. 170. The reference is to: The Tempest, III.ii.133–43. 42 Birago Diop, ‘Breath’ in African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. E. Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 427–8. I have modified the translation. 43 Alex La Guma, ‘A Walk in the Night’ and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1982). See Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 216–27. 44 See, for example, Sam Durrant, ‘The Invention of Mourning in Post-Apartheid Literature’ in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (April 2005). 45 Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, trans. S.K. Jayyusi and T. LeGassick (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2003), p. 154. 46 Julia Borossa treats of languages of both loss and connection in ‘Identity, Loss and the Mother Tongue’ in Paragraph, 21:3 (November 1998), pp. 391–402. 7 Sisters of Marx 1 Denise deCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 245. 2 I refer to Wollstonecraft’s philosophical and political rather than literary writings for there are also questions of genre to take into account here. 3 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard and Galile´e, 2001), p. 169. The translation is my own. 4 Derrida and Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . , p. 169. 5 Nicholas Royle, ‘Phantom Review’ in Textual Practice, vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer 1997). 6 See Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999). 7 In a French context, the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy and Miche`le le Doeuff, amongst others, could be taken into account. 8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ghostwriting’ in Diacritics, 25.2 (Summer 1995). All further references to this work will appear in the text. 9 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and The New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 185. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 10 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 101. 11 E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’ in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 12 In both texts there is a fixation with the phantasm of the father figure. In addition, in the readings that I have offered in this book, there are questions of the transition from boyhood to manhood at stake. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’ in Ghostly Demarcations, p. 245. 14 Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, p. 114. 15 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Art and Literature, Vol. 14, The Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 352. 16 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Women’ in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 17 Francis Fukuyama, Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Goux, 2002).

232

Notes

18 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 147–8. In Rogues, Derrida at least concedes: ‘one objects to cloning in the name of that incalculable element that must be left to birth, to the coming to light or into the world of a unique, irreplaceable, free and thus nonprogrammable human being.’ But what of the commodification of the human (e.g. the Olimpia material) in Spectres of Marx? 19 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 305. 20 Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001). 21 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, in Selected Writings, p. 432. 22 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, in Selected Writings, p. 475. 23 Derrida and Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . , pp. 129–30. 24 Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard University Press, forthcoming); Donna Landry, ‘Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History’ in Reenactment History, Volume 2: Settlers and Creoles (Palgrave, forthcoming). 25 Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, trans. Anthony Olcott (Ann Arbour: Ardis, 1878), p. 96. 26 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 278. 27 Samuel Weber, ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’ in Modern Language Notes, 88, (1973), 1102–33. 28 See Susan Owen, ‘Chaos Theory, Marxism and Literature’ in New Formations, 29 (Autumn 1996). 29 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Selected Writings, p. 100. 30 Julia Kristeva, as cited by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. 31 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (St Albans: Triad/ Panther Books, 1996), p. 172 32 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London: William Heinemann, 1907), p. 300. For this reference and the references to Krauss and Flaubert, I am indebted to: Laurie Teal, ‘The Hollow Women: Modernism, the Prostitute and Commodity Aesthetics’ in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 7 (Fall 1995), pp. 80–108. 33 Ama Ata Aidoo, ‘For Bessie Head’ in An Angry Letter in January (Coventry, Sydney and Aarhus: Dangaroo Press, 1992), p. 52. 34 Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen (Munich: Ko¨sel-Verlag, 1955), p. 22. The translation is by Laurie Teal. 35 HD, ‘The Master’ in Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. L. Martz (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), p. 460. 36 Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 181. 37 Sindiwe Magona. Forced to Grow (London: The Women’s Press, 1992), p. 231. 38 This is cited from Time’s ‘Rebirthing America’ special issue (Fall 1993) by Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan#_Meets_OncomouseTM (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 264. 39 Assia Djebar, Loin de Me´dine (Paris: E´ditions Albin Michel), p. 5. My translation. 40 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 8. 41 Kate Soper, ‘Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies’ in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 713. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ouisa and Gramme-: Note on a Note from Being and Time’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982). 43 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I in Selected Writings, p. 435. 44 Op. cit., p. 456. 45 Julia Borossa, ‘Love of the Soldier: Citizenship, Love and Belonging in Beau Travail’ in The Journal of European Studies, Vol. 34.1/2 (March/June 2004), pp. 101–2.

Notes

233

46 Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambrige: Polity Press, 2007), p. 94. 47 Morton, p. 173. 48 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). I have offered my reservations in ‘Against the Corruption of Language: The Poetry of Chenjerai Hove’ in Versions of Zimbabwe, ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005). See also, Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney, Book Unbinding: The Ontological Stain (London: Artwords Press, 2005). 49 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 111. 50 F. David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 241. 51 Rosemarie Waldrop, ‘Form and Discontent’ in Diacritics, 26.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1996), p. 61. I think Waldrop’s treatment of synchronicity is rather haphazard as she tries to reconcile it with postmodernism. Peat’s treatment, given above, is more rigorous. 52 My PhD student, Ouamar Azzeradj is working on the widespread impact of Algerian decolonisation on the formations of recent French philosophy. 53 Assia Djebar, interviewed by Clarisse Zimra, ‘When the Past Answers the Present’ in Callaloo, 16.1 (1993), pp. 116–31. 54 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1998). The brother-sister relationship in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale has a similar significance. 55 See, for example, Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London: Flamingo, 2002). 56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Schmitt and Poststructuralism: A Response’ in Cordozo Law Review, Vol. 21, Nos. 5–6 (2000), p. 1736. 57 In brief, with apologies for the brevity, this would include the work of Robert Young, Gerald MacLean, Brendan Nicholls, Stephen Morton, James Graham, amongst others. 58 See Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’, passim. 59 Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’, p. 248. 60 Udi Aloni, dir., Local Angel: Theological and Political Fragments (ICA, 2004). 61 Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983) p. 2. 62 Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 164. 63 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 103. 64 Terry Eagleton, ‘Marxism Without Marxism’ in Ghostly Demarcations, p. 86. 65 Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’, pp. 221–2; pp. 251–2. 66 Werner Hamacher, ‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx’ in Ghostly Demarcations, p. 169. All further references to this essay will appear in the text. 67 This was in the context of a paper entitled ‘Secularism’s Meanings’ at a conference on Edward Said at the University of Sussex (2004). 68 Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 156. 69 Barenboim and Said, p. 168. 70 Bessie Head, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988). 71 I do not mean to imply that there positions are just the same for their work certainly has different emphases. Whereas Parry is optimistic about the effectiveness of liberation discourse, Spivak is concerned with the non-reception of or misrepresentation of the gendered subaltern.

Index

Abraham, Nicolas 191 activism 40, 209, 211, 216–17 Adorno, Theodor 6, 8, 51, 104, 117–18, 118, 120, 151, 214 advertising: Japanese art 64 African-Americans 31, 32 African literature: figures of ‘Refusal’ 68–69; see also Zimbabwean writing African philosophy 130–31, 160, 187 Africans: identity and writing of history 159; racist designations 19; Sachs’s assumptions 184; situation in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 144; substitution of ‘African’ in Butler’s ‘Antigone’ 40–41 Agamben, Grigorio 9 Aidoo, Ama Ata 201 Algeria 19, 33, 209 Allende, Isabel 89 Aloni, Shulamit and Udi 211 Althusser, Louis 191, 199 America see United States (US) Ames, William 50 Amsterdam: Spinoza 49 androgyny: before puberty 174; in blind short stories 81, 84, 87–88; in Djebar’s work 209; ‘four legs’ of youth 31; Tiresias in Antigone 30; Woolf ’s theory of creativity 27 animals: domestication 45 Ansky, Solomon: The Dybbuk 154–55 anthropocentric episteme (Foucault) 14 anthropology see psycho-anthropology anti-colonialism: liberation theory 7; in Sachs’s Black Hamlet 184; significance accorded to Antigone 19; Zimbabwe’s struggle 51, 144 Antigone (Sophocles): Antigone and blind Oedipus 84, 96; Butler’s reading 19– 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 40, 40–42; Copjec’s

reading 33; Harris’s reading 109; Hegel’s reading 19, 21, 22, 23, 24–25; Lacan’s reading 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 35–36, 36–37, 37; poetic realist approach 29–30, 38–40; re-telling by Wolf and Rao 35 apartheid 118, 119, 123–24, 182 Apter, Emily 181 Aquinas, Thomas 27 Aravamundan, Srinivas 8 architecture: Choral Work (Derrida and Eisenman) 120–21 Argentina: the Disappeared 21 Aristophanes 34 Aristotle 29, 39, 40, 75–76, 80, 163, 203, 210 art: and advertising 64; Derrida and antiapartheid exhibition 123; from sense of being outside time 141 artificial intelligence 28, 115 Asada Akira 44, 58, 199; Derrida on phenomenon of 64–65; ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale’ 62–64, 66, 67; Ivy’s essay on 59, 60–61, 64, 65; Structure and Power 59–60, 62, 65 Ashbery, John 163 Ashrawi, Hanan 8, 211 Attree, Lizzy 146, 153, 161 Augustine of Hippo, St 100, 105, 106, 107, 110–11, 136, 144 Austen, Jane 56, 57 Austin, J.L.: author’s letter to 124–25; Derrida’s critique 105, 111, 113, 116, 117, 205; Hillis Miller’s critique 118, 118–19; theory of the performative 5, 99, 104, 111, 112–13, 133 authoritarianism: Adorno’s critique 6, 104, 118; and the performative 9, 104, 113

Index authorship: Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ 5–7; in Butler’s reading of Antigone 19–20, 26 autobiographical writing: Cavell’s study of philosophy 105; confessional genre 99–100, 111; Derrida 107–8 automaticity: Derrida on Marx’s view 198, 204–5; and freedom 114 autonomy: in Copjec’s view of Antigone 33; Enlightenment 10, 74, 190, 202; masculine subject 114 Badiou, Alain 34 Badr, Liana 34–35 Balzac, Honore´ de 6–7 Barenboim, Daniel 177, 216, 217 Barton, Anne 169 Bataille, Laurent: support for FLN 19, 33 Baudelaire, Charles 15, 53–54, 59, 72 Bauls 54, 55, 101 Bauman, Zygmunt 69 Beau Travail (film, dir. Denis) 206, 211 beauty 37, 38, 189 being: in acts of creativity 29; and non-being in Butterfly Burning 143, 148, 150–51; in poetic-utopian feminism 190; in poetry 104; writing as ghost of 177; see also sumud; unhu Beirut: Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness 102–3 Belsey, Catherine 11, 11–12 Benjamin, Walter 77, 89, 121, 211 Bergson, Henri 98 Bhabha, Homi 7, 133, 139 Bhaskar, Roy 11 Biederman, Charles 110, 115 Bildungsroman 141 Blake, William 122 Blanchot, Maurice: ‘The Madness of the Day’ (‘La folie du jour’) 76–77, 78, 82, 84–85, 86, 119, 196–97 blind short story 75–91 Boehme, Jacob 88, 89, 110, 165–66 Bohannan, Laura: ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’ 187 Bohm, David 9, 23–24, 28–29, 110, 114, 115, 209 Bonnefoy, Yves 75 Borossa, Julia 206, 210, 211 Botswana 217 brilliance: in blind short stories 75, 78, 80, 90; and radiance 75, 91, 92 Britain: ‘adult’ capitalism 62

235

brother-sister relationship 29–30, 88, 89; in Hamlet 175; in Roy’s The God of Small Things 209; in Sachs’s Black Hamlet 185–86, 209; in ‘The Sandman’ 208; in Vivien’s ‘Prince Charming’ 87–88 Buddhism 64, 65–66, 130 Bulawayo, Rhodesia 143, 144 Butler, Judith: critiques 11–12, 190; Gender Trouble 26, 67, 114; ‘Giving an Account of Oneself ’ 137; reading of Antigone 19– 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 40, 40–42; Undoing Gender 28 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron 29–30, 56, 57 Camp 56, 72, 140 cannibalism 188 capitalism: Asada’s work 62–64, 66; Derrida and performative masculinity 110–11; father ideal 206; Fukuyama’s theory 197; Hamacher’s essay on commodity language 213–14; as inversion of reality 206–7; Marx on capital and commodity 27–28, 198; and neo-colonial situation of Zimbabweans 138; Spivak’s views 192, 196, 197, 199; and technologisation 68, 69 capitalist-democratic feminism 190 Capra, Fritjof 58–59 Cavell, Stanley 99, 105, 106, 112, 115, 118 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 207 Chanda, Ipshita 71 Chaos Theory 13–14, 200 Charrie`re Belle Van Zuylen, Isabelle de: Trois Femmes 70 Chavafambira, John 183–84 ch’i 58–59, 60, 65–66 Chrisman, Laura 211–12 civil obedience: Kant 46–47 Cixous, He´le`ne 85, 98, 190 Cleopatra (Anthony and Cleopatra) 34 cloning 197 Coen, Enrico 16, 17, 18 Coetzee, J.M. 12; character of Michael K. 67, 68 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 166 collective consciousness 181–82, 184 collectivity/the collective 10; Antigone’s connection with 19; depression and separation from 4; disruption by selfbased behaviour 130; in Eros 33–34; ethics of 14, 126; ethos of African

236

Index

philosophy 187; false and real positions 207; and the feminine real 190, 202; and freedom of thought 74; kwela music 143; Murray’s interest in 177; Palestinian solidarity 34–35; questions about Specters of Marx 191; in Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s work 124; in Vera’s work 148–49, 152–53, 158, 160 colonialism: cloning 197; the colonised in ethics of the feminine 126; context of emancipation in Zimbabwean novels 131, 144; Fanon’s work 5; feminisation of labour 197; Mannoni’s view in Prospero and Caliban 180–83; problems for new Zimbabweans 138; Said’s work 161 commodity: Hamacher’s language of 212–14, 215–16; Ivy on Asada Akira’s work 61 commodity/commodity fetish: art in advertising 64; Marxist view 27–28, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198; in Specters of Marx 203, 204–5, 208 communism 202–3 conatus (gentle perseverance) 34 conceptual labour 192 confessional writing 99–100, 111; in Dangaremba’s The Book of Not 137; in Derrida’s own work 108–9, 137; Derrida’s writings on 100–102, 106, 107–8, 113, 126; the other of 126 conformity 9, 46 Conrad, Joseph 211 consciousness: in blind short stories 75, 82, 84; of the feminine 4, 38–39; and iteration 115; Marxist view 46–47; in poetic realism 9 constructivist feminism 1, 9, 11 Cools, Arthur 3 Copjec, Joan 33, 34, 35, 37 Cornell, Drucilla 36, 38 Corrie, Rachel 40 cosmology: ending of mechanical episteme 13–14 counter-history: Bhabha 139 creative writing 137 creativity: activism 216–17; affirmation of the feminine 190; Asada Akira on Japanese capitalism 61, 63, 63–64; and being 29; Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 136, 137, 139–40, 140; Derrida on opposition between machine and 97, 105; difference with logo-centricity 25–26; Foucault’s idea of dandysme 55; instrumentalisation of self in 104;

Spinoza’s engagement with 52; treatment by capitalism and communism 203; Woolf ’s theory 27, 31 critical theory: and Japanese chi 58, 59 cross-cultural perspectives: Asada Akira 60; Murray 177; readings of Shakespeare 186–89 Damasio, Antonio 52, 53 dandysme (Foucault) 55–56, 73, 129 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 12, 161, 185; The Book of Not 35, 57, 126, 127–41, 144, 150, 162; Nervous Conditions 127, 128, 132 Darwish, Mahmoud 34, 37–38, 50–51, 102–4 Dawkins, Richard 17, 28, 60 death drive 34, 62, 68 Declarations of Independence 117, 118–19 deconstruction: Japanese society and Asada 64–65; masculine knowledge of the feminine 2; Muchemwa’s critique of Vera’s writing 152; and the performative 9, 93, 159; in relation to radiance 84–86; Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work 124; view of writing 93, 160 Dee, John 175 Defoe, Daniel 182 Deleuze, Gilles 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67 De Man, Paul 97, 99, 104, 105, 115, 213; and Derrida 105, 105–6, 107, 108 Denis, Claire 34, 206; Beau Travail (film) 206, 211 depression/melancholia 4–5; Hamlet 4, 165, 168–69; induced by colonialism 184; and loss of socialism 198–99 Derrida, Jacques: ‘ . . . and pomegranates’ 71–72; ‘Che cos’e` la poesia?’ 120–21, 122–23; Circumfession 108–9, 111; and De Man 105, 105–6; diffe´rance 103–4, 104, 205, 208; exploration of phrase ‘Je t’aime’ 116–17; on Foucault’s spiralled duality 90; on friendship 39–40; Glas 31, 216; Hillis Miller on 116–17, 118–20; influence on Muchemwa 152; on iterability 113, 115, 118, 159–60; on Japan and Asada 64–65; ‘The Law of Genre’ 84–86, 196–97; Margins of Philosophy 203; ‘Marx and Sons’ 193–94, 199, 200, 202, 203, 212, 214–15; Of Grammatology 100–102, 156; Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question 166; Politics of Friendship 209–10; The Post Card 137,

Index 208, 214; ‘Racism’s Last Word’ 123–24; Rogues 124, 197; Said’s observations 7, 93; ‘Signature Event Context’ 99, 105, 111, 112, 113–14; ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ 28, 85, 107–8; Specters of Marx see Specters of Marx (Derrida); Stiegler’s interview with 94; treatment of the performative and confessional 93; ‘types’ of women 108, 144; ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ 97–98, 100, 105, 105–7, 108–9, 110–11, 113, 114, 117, 131, 136, 156–57, 173, 205; view of speech acts 159–60 Descartes, Rene´ 50 determinism: Butler 12; Ridley’s Genome 17 dialectics: Kant 53; Plato 46 Dietrich, Vera: film clip of writing hands 95, 95, 96 diffe´rance 11, 91; Derrida 10, 103–4, 205, 208 difference see racial difference; sexual difference Diop, Birago 188 Diotima 34 discourse: Said and Foucault 7–8 Djebar, Assia 192, 201, 209 DNA 91, 197; Ridley’s autobiography of 16–18 Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) 143 domestication: Kant’s depiction of 45, 47; and subjectification 67 Doolittle, Hilda see H.D. double/do¨ppelganger 15, 47, 62 Durrant, Samuel 189 dystopia: Asada on capitalism 63–64, 67 Eagleton, Terry 212 Ebert, John David 13–14, 14 education: in Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 127–28; performativity 60; see also university ego 62, 64, 84, 116 Einstein, Albert 8, 52, 60 Eisenman, Peter 120–21 Eliot, T.S. 163; ‘Four Quartets’ 187–88; and Murray 178–79; The Waste Land 166, 178, 179 emancipation: defined by Kant against the performative 44; ethics and politics of 11; labour mobility due to 69; selfrealisation and collectivity 74; see also freedom Engels, Friedrich 88, 197, 200

237

‘English literature’ 206 enlightenment: Asada Akira’s enquiry 59, 60; Foucault’s re-working of Kant’s essay 24, 44, 47–48, 53–56, 57, 59, 66, 70, 139; Kant’s essay 44–47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 60; treatment of radiance in literary texts 75 Enlightenment (European): before Kant 48–49; fictional critique in figure of the double 62; humanist and mystical strands 11; issues of autonomy 10, 74, 190, 202 envy: of the feminine 71; in Hamlet 175–77; Lacanian psychoanalytic view 2; see also Lebensneid Eros: poetic/philosophical 33–34, 35, 37 eroticism: dimension of the ontological 34; ‘The Marquise of O-’ 79 essentialism: ideas of the feminine 1, 6–7 ethics: Antigone’s solidarity 33; Aristotelian 39, 40, 210; of the collective 14; of the colonised 126; differences between psychoanalysis and philosophy 39; Foucault’s approach 56; Lacan’s concern with covetousness 36–37; Spinoza’s freedom 53; sumud 35 Europe: ‘elderly’ capitalism 62, 63 Europeans: colonial attitude towards natives 183; monadism and singularity 207–8; Sachs’s assumptions 184 Ewan, Graeme 143 existentialism (European) 151 family: in Butler’s reading of Antigone 24, 26, 32; Hegel’s ideal 24–25, 31; Oedipal 67 fana (Sufi notion of dying-to-self) 54, 101 Fanon, Frantz 5, 7, 138, 180, 181, 182 fascism 6, 8, 118 father-daughter relationship 77–78 father ideal 205–6, 207, 210 Fell, Margaret 50 femininity/the feminine: anti-essentialist approach 4; as antithetical to Heidegger’s approach 151; Barthes’s approach 6–7; for collectivity/creativity 190, 202; in Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 139–41; Derrida’s deconstruction 72; in Derrida’s typewriter metaphor 97, 108; designations of the real 1–2; Hamlet’s anxieties 169; identification with childhood in Mannoni 182; ironic persistence in modernity 56; Lacanian psychoanalytic approach 2; in

238

Index

Lacanian readings of Antigone 25, 36, 36–37, 38, 41–42; loss of 2, 71; ontology in Vera’s novels 144–45, 152–53, 155, 158; and performativity 11; and the poetic real in Antigone 30, 38–39; relationship with freedom of spirit 72–73; as signifying life 84; in terms of ethics of the collective 14; Woolf on guardians 71 feminism: Butler 41–42; Charrie`re’s critique of modern subjectivity 70; constructivist 1, 11; essentialist 1; Murray’s perspective on tragedy 178, 180; postcolonial socialist 217; three strands 190 Ferenczi, Sa´ndor 47, 191 fetishism: silk/skin discourse of Derrida 107–8; Spivak’s concern for clarity 199; see also commodity/commodity fetish film: Derrida on ghostliness of 94; Dietrich’s work 95, 95 Flatley, Jonathan 199 Flaubert, Gustave 90, 201 Foucault, Michel: on dandysme 55–56, 73, 129; and Dangarembga’s novels 128; on discourse 7–8; ethics of The Care of the Self 56, 72, 74; figure of the double 62; interest in spiralled duality 90; ‘Madness as the absence of the work’ 76; The Order of Things/on anthropocentric episteme 14; on performative speech acts 112–13; ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 24, 44, 47–48, 50, 53–56, 57, 59, 66, 70, 73, 139 Frankenstein (Shelley) 97, 197, 208 Frankfurt school 59 Frazer, Sir James 178 Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia 53 freedom: and automaticity 114; Kant and Foucault 74; poetry 115–16; Spinoza 52–53; see also emancipation freedom of movement 69, 73, 114; in Dangaremba and Vera’s novels 139–40, 161 freedom of spirit 37, 69, 72; in Dangaremba and Vera’s novels 161; femininity 2, 4, 25; Kant’s concern with 46–47, 51, 60, 64, 67; in utopianism 211 Freud, Sigmund 8, 9, 37, 191; death drive and pleasure principle 16, 34; on father-daughter relationship 77–78; ‘Female Sexuality’ 13; on mysticism

88–89; Oedipal complex 31; reading of ‘The Sandman’ 86–88, 194–95, 199; Spinoza as precursor of 52, 53; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 33; view of poetic Eros 33, 35 friendship 39–40 Fukuyama, Francis 197 Gaia 13 Gans, Eric 2–3 gay families: in Butler’s reading of Antigone 19, 22–23, 31 gender: ambiguities in blind short story 84; ‘decolonising’ 4; equality 202; performative theory of 14, 21, 28 genetic technology: Derrida on justice and property 198; logic of the double 15–16; Ridley’s Genome 16–18 genre: Derrida’s essay 84–86, 196 Germany: importance of Spinoza 48–49; inauguration of fascism 118; Nazis’ stance towards Jews 51 ghostliness: the colonised 139; Derrida on commodity 196, 203, 208; Derrida on film 94; photography 99; writing 93, 115, 177 globalisation: in Parry’s work on imperialism 212; strategy of inclusion 66–67 Godard, Jean-Luc 8, 96–97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 29 Gospels: Harris on ‘resurrection-body’ 109–10 Grant, Catherine 21 Greek tragedy: Murray’s observations 177–78, 179 Gribbin, John 99 guardians 45–46, 71 Guattari, Fe´lix 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67 Guys, Constantin 54, 72 Habiby, Emile 57, 189 Hall, Radclyffe: The Well of Loneliness 25 Hallward, Peter 208 Halper, Jeff 34 Hamacher, Werner: challenge for new Marxist language 215–16; Derrida’s endorsement of 214–15; essay on Specters of Marx 212–14 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 4, 76, 78, 183; Bohannan’s essay 187; Derrida’s explorations 86, 106–7, 108, 192, 194, 195, 210; Murray and Eliot on tradition in 178, 179; paternal ghost

Index 47, 106–7, 162, 163–64, 165, 166–67, 170, 191, 195, 201, 208; poetic reading of 98, 162–77, 189; and Sachs’s Black Hamlet 184, 186 Haneke, Michael see Hidden (Cache´) Haraway, Donna 60 Hardt, Michael: Empire (with Negri) 51–52, 66–68, 69–70, 130 Harris, Wilson 109–10, 110, 141 Haug, Frigga 61 Haute, Philippe van 35–36, 38 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 88, 201 Head, Bessie 210 Hegel, G.W.F. 4, 66, 68, 182, 205; admiration of Boehme 88, 89; dialectic 130; on family ideal 31; Fukuyama’s engagement with 197; and Marx 11, 198, 200, 203, 204; reading of Antigone as seen by Butler 19, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 40 Heidegger, Martin 3–4, 83, 104, 118, 151, 166, 213 heroisation (Foucault) 54–55 Hesse, Carla 70 Hidden (Cache´) (film, dir. Haneke) 71 Hillis Miller, J. 99, 104, 116–17, 159, 213 history: Fukuyama’s ‘end of ’ 197; in Vera’s novels 155–56, 159–61 Hobbes, Thomas 50, 52, 53 ‘The hobgoblin’ (story) 91–92 Hoffmann, E.T.A. See ’The Sandman’ holism 10–11; replaced by machinism in Japan 63–64 holocaust/Holocaust 48, 123 homage 191 Homer: The Odyssey 173–74 homophobia 2, 32 Hove, Chenjerai 153 Hull, Carrie 11 Hulme, Keri 89 humanism: Butler’s proposal for new type 41; critique in figure of the double 62; in Kant’s definition of enlightenment 44 Hurndall, Tom 40 Ibrahim, Abdullah 143 idealisation 4, 36, 38; Derrida on commodity 204–5; see also father ideal idealist-literalist continuum 14–18 identities: African history 159; social construction of 67; women characters in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 148, 153 identity politics: feminism 190

239

An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions (Ferguson) 54 imperialism (Parry) 211–12 incest 89, 188 individual autonomy see autonomy intelligence: difference with intellect 23–24; see also artificial intelligence intentionality: Derrida on the machine 114; and iterability 111–12, 113 Irigaray, Luce 96 Islam: Djebar’s fictional treatment of 192, 209 Israel, Jonathan I. 48–49, 51 Israelis 51, 187, 188; see also Aloni, Shulamit and Udi Italy 49 iterability: Derrida 113, 115, 118; writing in deconstruction theory 160 Ivy, Marilyn 58; on Asada Akira 59, 60–61, 62, 64, 65 Jains 13 Jameson, Fredric 66, 210 Japan: art in advertising 64; Asada Akira’s influence 44, 64–65; Asada on capitalism and postmodernism 62–64; Ivy on consumption of knowledge in 58, 59, 60–61 Jekyll and Hyde 15, 16, 26–27, 62 Jewishness: community ethos 51; Derrida’s identity 111 Jews: exilic consciousness 50; expulsion from Spain 49; see also holocaust/ Holocaust jouissance 2, 37, 119 Joyce, James 66, 112; Molly Bloom in Ulysses 150, 178 justice: in Specters of Marx 196, 197–98, 210–11 Kandiyoti, Deniz 10 Kant, Immanuel 37, 109, 203; attitude towards women and servants 70, 71, 72; categorical imperative regarding others 130; Charrie`re’s re-writing of ‘On the Proverb’ 70; concerns with freedom 46–47, 51, 60, 64, 67, 73, 73–74; critical spirit addressed by 72–73; essay on enlightenment 44–47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 60, 68; Foucault’s re-working of 24, 44, 47–48, 53–56, 57, 70; private/ public distinction 46, 51, 53; and Spinoza 49–50, 51 Karatani Ko-jin 64

240

Index

Khanna, Ranjana 180, 181, 184, 186 kinship (Butler’s reading of Antigone) 19, 24, 26, 27, 41 Klein, Naomi 198 Kleist, Heinrich von: ‘The Marquise of O-’ 78–81, 84 Kraus, Karl 201 Kristeva, Julia 201 kwela: meanings 142–43; in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 142, 143–44, 148, 151, 207 labour: Hamacher’s essay on commodity language 213–14; Negri’s idea of cooperative energy 202–3; Olimpia in ‘The Sandman’ 205; Spivak on Specters of Marx 192, 196, 205, 207; technologised 68; women’s 11, 192–93, 196, 197 Lacan, Jacques 38, 59, 77, 146, 167; account of femininity 1, 2; on Freud’s emphasis on sexuality 13, 38; reading of Antigone 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 33, 35–36, 36–37, 37; on the unconscious 80 La Guma, Alex 188–89 Landry, Donna 73–74, 199 language: Adorno on fetishisation of 120; Barthes on performativity and authorship 5–6; Cavell’s critique of the iterable 116; of commodities (Hamacher) 213–14, 215–16; de Man’s performative view 104; in postmodern cultures 160; Tambu’s writing in The Book of Not 139–40; see also ostensive language Larsen, Nella 89 Latour, Bruno 60 laughter: Asada Akira 66; in Derrida’s Specters of Marx 193 law (Spinoza) 85 Lebensneid (envy of perseverance in being) 37, 146 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 10, 48 lesbian families see gay families lesbian stories see Sapphic blind very short stories letters: reading 94 Levinas, Emmanuel 3–4, 151 liberation theory 7, 32 literacy: Spivak’s activism 217 literalism see idealist-literalist continuum literature: brother-sister relationship 29–30; of the double 15, 62; figures of the feminine 1, 2; language beyond

commodification 216; poetic realism as distinct from ‘writing as writing’ 110; postmodern Western view 104; see also blind short story; Sapphic blind very short stories; Zimbabwean writing Local Angel (film, dir. Aloni) 211 Locke, John 50 Lock, Margaret 58 Loescher, Valentin Ernst 49 logo-centricity: difference with creativity in performance 25–26; Ridley’s conception of DNA 17; in theory of performativity 21 Losonsky, Michael 49–50, 52–53 Lou Andreas-Salome´ see Salome´, Lou Andreas love: announcement ‘I love you’ 116–17; falling in 33–34; inability to 4; see also Eros love poetry 34 loyalty: Aristotelian ethics 39 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 58 McClintock, Anne 123–24, 185 McCrickard, Janet 89 machine see the mechanical Madagascar see Malagasy madness 90–91, 114 Magona, Sindiwe 182, 201 Malagasy: Mannoni’s view of colonization of 180, 181 male puberty: Hamlet’s preoccupation with 169; loss of femininity 2, 108–9 Mandela, Nelson 19, 35 Mannoni, Octave: Prospero and Caliban 180–83 Mansfield, Katherine: ‘Bliss’ 83; ‘Leves Amores’ 81–82 Maodzwa-Taruvinga, Mandavavarira see Sign and Taboo Mapuranga, Juliette: sculpture 43 Marranos (Spain) 47 marriage: performative utterances 111–12 Marxism 46–47, 207 Marx, Karl: on commodity and capital 27–28, 193, 213; and Hegel 11, 198, 200, 203, 204; materialism 88, 199–200; on power of time 155; on self-destructive drive of capitalism 62; see also Specters of Marx (Derrida) masculinism: and foreclosing of feminine real 161, 188; ideology in Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 138, 138–39; individual autonomy 202;

Index Lacanian projection of women 36; in readings of Antigone 22, 25, 41–42 masculinity: against femininity in Hamlet 167, 186; and autonomy 114; capitalism and performativity 111; deconstruction’s anxieties 152; Derrida’s inscription within 107–8, 108–9; and feminine desires in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 144–45; maturity 47; in Orkin’s study of Shakespeare’s late plays 187; as signifying ego 84; see also male puberty Masekela, Hugh 143 Mason, Philip 182–83 Masuka, Dorothy 143 Matabeleland 153 materialism: Derrida 107; Marx 88, 199–200 Matisse, Henri 82 maturity: in Asada’s view of modernisation 62–63, 66; issue in Kant 47, 57–58 May ‘68 revolution, Paris 5 the mechanical: administrative performativity 104; Bergson’s concept of movement 98; in Butler’s idea of performativity 27; Derrida on creativity/performativity and the machine 97, 105, 107, 113–14, 123, 157, 161, 195–96; in poetry 121–22; scientists’ rejection of worldview dominated by 13–14, 114–15 mechanisation: creativity in Japanese society 64; Israel’s depiction of Spinoza 51; Kant’s depiction of 45–46, 47, 68 Melville, Herman: character of Bartleby 67–68; Moby Dick 139 Melville, Pauline: The Ventriloquist’s Tale 69 Memmi, Albert 7, 73, 181 Mendelssohn, Moses 48 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 96 Michelangelo 95 Milton, John 73 Minoan civilisation 13 misogyny: and envy/paranoia 2, 71; Lacanian attempts against 36; and male loss of femininity 108, 189; seen by Murray in Hamlet and Orestes 179 modernisation 62–63, 66 Modernism: Baudelaire on Guys 54, 72 modernity: and enlightenment 44; Foucault 53, 54–55, 66; Spinoza’s Ethics 52

241

monadism 10, 207–8 monstrosity: attributed to Antigone by Butler 28; of capital and commodity 28, 198; literalist perceptions of 14–15; mechanical creation 97; racial difference in performative gender theory 14; and racism 41; in Woolf ’s theory of creativity 27 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 111 Moors: expulsion from Spain 49 Morlock, Forbes 28, 34 Morton, Stephen 207 mourning 180, 189 Muchemwa, Kizito 152, 153 Mugabe, Robert 51 Muponde, Robert see Sign and Taboo Murray, Gilbert: and Eliot 178–79; Hamlet and Orestes 177–78, 179–80 Musaeus 48 music: Godard on 97; kwela 142, 143–44, 151; language beyond commodification 216; lyric poetry 121, 122; reliving of Hamlet 177 Mutswairo, Solomon 155 mysticism: Baudelaire 54; Boehme 88; Cabala 49; and femininity 1; Freud on 88–89; in music making 216; poetic reading of Shakespeare 189; Spinoza 49, 51, 52 myths: in Murray’s study of tragedy 178 names: in Hamlet 165, 172–73, 174; significance of Clara 89, 199; in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 146–47, 148 Nandy, Ashis 7, 130–31 Narain, Denise deCaires 190 narcissism: in Foucault’s concept of modernity 55, 129; ghostly man idea and self 208; orientation of deconstruction 64 nationalisms: configuration of women as backward 10, 185; issues in Vera’s novels 153; perspectives in Zimbabwean writing 141, 144 nature: Jameson on effect of modernisation on 66, 67; Kant’s concept 47; Newtonian model 87; Spinoza’s approach 52 Nazism 51, 166 Negri, Antonio: critique of Specters of Marx 199–200, 201–2, 203; Empire (with Hardt) 51–52, 66–68, 69–70, 130 neume 100–101 New Criticism 118

242

Index

new International: Specters of Marx 70–71, 211 New Labour 212 Newton, Sir Isaac 51, 87 Ngˇugˇi Wa Thiong’o: A Grain of Wheat 129 Nietzsche, Friedrich 59, 60, 65, 90 Nixon, Rob 123–24 nomadism: Coetzee’s character of Michael K. 68; Landry’s study of Platonov’s work 73 non-being: the feminine 2 Notre Musique (film, dir. Godard) 8 numbers: in Hamlet 174–75 Nyamubaya, Freedom 127 O: significance and symbolism in literature 89 obedience 45–46, 46–47, 64 Oedipalisation 62, 67 Oedipus 31, 156 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 29 Oliver, Kelly 4–5 ontology/the ontological: Asada’s approach 65; Derrida’s approach 65, 199, 210; epistemological privilege and denial of 32; erotic dimension 34; Hamlet 173, 177; humans as stains of 89; inter-connectedness 11; regarding Darwish’s poetic 103–4; sense in Vera’s Butterfly Burning 149, 150–51, 152–53; in Shakespeare 189; and temporality in Derrida 109; writing’s relationship with 104 oral cultures 160 Orestes: Murray on 178, 179 Orientalism: Said’s study 7–8, 215 Orkin, Martin: Local Shakespeares 187–88 the ostensive 1–2, 2–3; in blind short stories 75 the other: in African philodophy 130; Derrida on ethics of friendship 39; ethics of service to 72, 73–74; poetry and voice of 116; Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s work 124 other-consciousness 4, 137 Palestinians 32, 187, 188; activism in support of 40, 211; Darwish’s poetry 50–51; importance of sumud 34–35 paranoia: in envy and racism 2, 71, 210 Paris: May ’68 revolution 5 Parry, Benita 217; Conrad and Imperialism 211–12 paternity: issues in Antigone 29, 30–31, 31, 32 Patterson, Orlando 32

Pauli, Wolfgang 209 Peat, F. David 13–14, 14, 23–24, 28–29, 101, 114, 209 Penrose, Roger 114–15 performativity/the performative: Austin’s theory 5, 99, 104, 111, 112, 113; Barthes on 5–7; in Bhabha’s counterhistory 139; Butler’s position 9, 19, 20, 21, 27–28; capitalist economy 206, 217; in Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 133, 136; and deconstruction 9–10, 93; de-humanising and authoritarian dimensions 9, 104; Derrida 99, 100, 109, 111, 117, 118, 123–24, 156, 195–96, 214–15; Foucault and Said on 112–13; Hamacher’s essay on commodity 212–14; Harris on resurrection-body 110; Hillis Miller’s reading of de Man on 104; in ideas of the feminine 1; Kant on ritualistic obedience of 45–46; Kant’s essay defining emancipation against 44, 74; masculinity 111, 187; obedience 40, 60; in politics 212, 215; theatrical as distinct from techno-56, 74; theory of gender 14, 21 phallocentricity: Ridley’s conception of DNA 17 pharmakon 87–88, 207 philosophical Eros 33–34, 37 philosophical ethics: difference with psychoanalysis 39 philosophical speculation 192 photography: Barthes on 94, 99; generation of Vera’s novels 143 Pirsig, Robert 114 Plaatje, Sol: Mhudi 68 Plato 46, 85, 175; Derrida’s references to 88, 100; on learning by heart 122; Symposium 34 Platonov, Andrei 73, 74, 199 Plotnitsky, Arkady 115 poetic Eros 33–34, 35, 37 poetic realism/poetics of the real 1, 9, 37–38, 93, 110; blind short stories 75; in Hamlet 162, 173, 177, 189; Harris 109–10; knowledge of non-knowledge in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ 83 poetic-utopian feminism 190 poetry: African philosophy written as 160; Benjamin on music in 121; Darwish’s prose memoir 102–4; Derrida’s ‘Che cos’e` la poesia?’ 120–21, 122–23; synchronicity 209; tendency towards freedom 115–16

Index politics: Antigone’s quality of solidarity 33; opposition created by appropriation of land 127; performative 212, 215 politics of friendship: Derrida 209–10 postcolonialism: emphases on collective emancipation 10; and feminist socialism 217; Hallward on singularity and the absolute 208; predicament 138, 139 postcolonial theory 7, 32, 67 postmodernism: deployment of the performative 56; Derrida’s spectres 199; Jameson’s view of end of nature with 66, 67; use of language as commodity fetish 160 post-structuralism: Asada Akira’s work 59 Pound, Ezra 90, 179 Prigogine, Ilya 209 Primorac, Ranka 141, 151 private/public distinction: Hardt and Negri on fracturing of 67; Kant 46–47, 51, 53 Proust, Marcel: ‘Before Dark’ 83–84, 88 psychoanalysis: ethical difference with philosophy 39; The Thing 36, 38; see also Freud, Sigmund psycho-anthropology: perspectives on Shakespeare 177–89 Pythagoras 175 quantum physics 9, 110, 115, 199–200 queer families see gay families queer thinking 31 queer writing: blind short story 75 racial difference: in performative theory of gender 14 racism: and envy/paranoia 2, 71; in inclusion strategy of globalisation 66–67; inferiority and master/slave dichotomy 183; male inability to come to terms with maturity 189; Smith’s politics in Rhodesia 119; see also apartheid radiance: in blind short stories 75–91; in Boehme’s mysticism 88; and brilliance 75, 91, 92; and deconstruction 84–86; in photography 94; and tragedy 84 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 214 Ranger, Terence 144, 155, 159, 160–61 Rao, Sirish 35 Rapaport, Herman 124 reading: Asada on snacking on books 61–62; letters 94; prospective mode 162

243

realism/the real: collectivity and the feminine 190; as designated by the feminine 1–2; Lacanian ethics of 38; loss of in Japanese capitalist society 64; relation of theatrical performativity to 56; in Romantic and Modernist writing 8; sense preceding writing 141; and temporality 109; in Vera’s novels 153, 159; Zizek’s illusory ‘kernel’ of 72; see also poetic realism relativity theory 99 religion: Dawkins’s attacks on 60 Rensberg, Patrick van 217 Rhodesia 119, 126, 143; see also Zimbabwe Ridley, Matt: Genome 16–18, 28 Rolland, Romain 35 Rose, Jacqueline 51, 184, 184–85 Rosicrucianism 49, 175 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 19, 191, 198–99 Rousseau, Jean Jacques: Derrida’s explorations 100–102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110–11, 136, 144, 156; servant (Marion) wronged by 108, 126 Roy, Arundhati 209 Royle, Nicholas 191, 199 Russian steppe: peasant socialism 73 Sachs, Wulf: Black Hamlet 172, 183–86, 209 Sade, Marquis de 37 Said, Edward 7–8, 93, 111, 112–13, 161, 162; music with Barenboim 177, 216, 217; Orientalism 7–8, 215 Salome´, Lou Andreas 52 Samkange, Stanlake: The Mourned One 132 ‘The Sandman’ (Hoffmann) 77, 89, 90; brilliance and radiance in 91; Freud’s reading 86–88, 194–95, 199; relevance to Specters of Marx 193–95, 196, 200–201, 203–4, 205, 207, 208 Sapphic blind very short stories 81–84 Sartre, Jean-Paul 166, 181 Schneider, David 27 Schofield, Clemency 8 Scholem, Gershom 118 Schreber 210 Schreiner, Olive 68 Schro¨dinger, Erwin 9, 121 Schulz, Helena 34 science see genetic technology; quantum physics; relativity theory scientific authority: authoritarianism 60

244

Index

scientists: rejection of mechanical worldview 13–14, 114–15 Searle, John R. 99, 105, 113, 115, 116 self: in capitalist-democratic feminism 190; confronted with the beautiful 38; in Dorian Gray 15; Foucault’s idea of theatrical performativity 56, 72; Hegelian dialectic 130, 200; in language 104; in philosophers’ writings 106; represented by ghostly man ideal 208, 210 servants/servitude: Kant 70, 72, 73, 74 Selvon, Sam 57 sexual difference: addressed in Butterfly Burning 153, 155; the feminine in The Book of Not 140; numbers in masculine-feminine ratio 175; Oedipal story 31; suggestion of Olimpia in Specters of Marx 194 sexuality: connotations of kwela 143; Hamlet’s anxieties 170–71; Lacanian idea of the feminine 2 Shakespeare, William: Anthony and Cleopatra 34; King Lear 40, 77, 77–78, 79, 84; Macbeth 38; The Merchant of Venice 175; Orkin’s work on late plays 187–88; Pericles 162, 187–88; psycho-anthropological perspectives 177–89; references in The Book of Not 134; The Tempest 183, 188; see also Hamlet (Shakespeare) Shelley, Mary see Frankenstein (Shelley) Shona 130, 146, 160; sculpture 14–15, 29 signatures: in Spivak’s ‘Ghostwriting’ 191–92 Sign and Taboo (ed. Maodzwa-Taruvinga & Muponde) 151–52 singularity 10, 207–8 sister-brother relationship see brother-sister relationship Smith, Ian 119 socialism 74, 198–99, 207; feminist postcolonial 190, 217 Socrates 34 solidarity: Antigone’s quality of perseverance 33; brother-sister relationship 186; kwela 143; Negri’s notion 202; Parry’s work on imperialism 212; and sumud 34 Sontag, Susan 57 Soper, Kate 74, 202 Sophocles see Antigone; Oedipus Rex; The Theban Trilogy

South Africa: apartheid 118, 123–24, 187; Bohannan’s visit to the Tiv 187; jazz and kwela 143; Magana’s autobiographical work 182; see also Mandela, Nelson Southern Africa 35, 188, 217 Spain: expulsion of Jews and Moors 49; Marranos 47 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 9–10, 66, 70–71, 77, 108; Eagleton on 212; Hamacher’s essay 212–14; Negri’s critique 199–200, 201–2, 203; relevance of Hamlet and ‘The Sandman’ 77, 86, 106–7, 193–95, 196, 200–201, 203–4, 205; significant sources pointed out in responses to 190–91; Spivak’s critique 9, 190, 191–93, 195–97, 198, 199, 204, 207, 209, 212, 214 spectrality: challenge of radiance and brilliance 75, 82; Derrida 80, 94; father ideal 210 speech acts: Antigone 19, 20, 21; Derrida’s theory 118, 159–60; Foucault and Said on performative 112–13; Hillis Miller on Derrida’s explorations 116–17; King Lear 40; Vera’s view 159–60 spiders (The Stone Virgins) 155–56, 157–58 Spinoza, Benedict de 10, 34, 54, 74, 88; in Asada Akira’s work 59, 60, 65; Hardt and Negri on 51–52, 199; inner conviction 50; Israel’s study 48–49, 51; on law 85; Losonsky on 49–50, 52–53 spirals 90, 167 Spivak, Gayatri 183, 217; critique of Specters of Marx 9, 190, 191–93, 195–97, 198, 199, 204, 207, 209, 212, 214; on Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’ 196–97; on Derrida’s Politics of Friendship 210; Derrida’s response to 193–94 Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 15 Stiegler, Bernard 94, 99 Strohmeier, John 174 sublimation 4, 29, 35–36, 36, 38 sumud (collective perseverance in being) 14, 34–35, 39, 50, 207 superego 62, 205 Suzuki, D.T. 64 Swimme, Brian 13 synchronicity 208, 209 Taoism 65–66, 130 team spirit 131 techno-humanism/techno-rationality 14 techno-idealism 38

Index technology: and creativity in Japanese society 63–64 techno-mobility 69 techno-performativity: Adorno on administrative power 117–18; and Butler’s theory of gender trouble 67; Foucault’s theatrical performativity as distinct from 56, 74; Kant 72; the machine 114; photographic image 99; war 8 theatre: Butler’s reading of Antigone 26, 29; example of collaborative creativity in labour 203; performative events 112 theatrical performativity: Foucault on 56, 72, 74 Time Magazine 201 time/temporality: Aristotelian 76, 80; art from sense of being outside of 141; in Bhabha’s view of colonial predicament 139; in Dangarembga’s The Book of Not 138–39; Derrida’s considerations of 101–2, 109, 205–6, 208; out-ofjointedness in Hamlet 173, 195; tragic effect beyond 84 Tiresias 30, 35 Tiv (South African tribe) 187 Tlali, Miriam: Between Two Worlds/Muriel at the Metropolitan 42–43 Tocqueville, Alexis de 200 Torok, Maria 191 trace: and create 94–95, 115; in Derrida’s typewriter metaphor 97; and e´cart 95–96, 98 tragedy: Benjamin’s theory 89; in blind short story 77–78, 83, 84; elevation of Antigone 36; Murray’s observations in Hamlet and Orestes 177–78, 179–80; see also Greek tragedy transnational literacy 207 Trinh T. Minh-Ha 124 Tswana 187 Tuqan, Fadwa 12 Tutuola, Amos: The Palm Wine Drunkard 68–69 typewriters: Derrida’s thoughts on 97–98, 107, 108 the unconscious 80, 181–82 unhu (knowledge of being) 35, 130, 131, 131–32, 138, 140, 141, 207 United States (US): ‘adult’ capitalism 62, 64; American Declaration of Independence 118–19, 119; imagined American Antigone 32

245

university: Asada Akira’s perspective 59, 60 the unspeakable 18, 42 utopia: and dystopia of Japanese capitalism 63 utopianism: and Derrida’s ‘empty messianism’ 210; and freedom of spirit 210–11; in Parry’s work on imperialism 212; in poetic-utopian feminism 190 Van Zuylen, Isabelle de Charrie`re Belle see Charrie`re Belle Van Zuylen, Isabelle de Varela, Francisco 126, 145 Veit-Wild, Flora 141 Vera, Yvonne 12, 126, 141, 161, 207; Butterfly Burning 142–51, 159; Nehanda 159, 160; ontology of the feminine 152–53, 185; Stone Virgins 147, 153–56, 157–59, 160–61 Vivien, Renee´: ‘Prince Charming’ 81, 87–88 voice: Rousseau on three kinds of 100; Vera’s foregrounding of 152 Waldrop, Rosemarie 209 war 8, 71–72; in The Book of Not 132, 134–35 Warhol, Andy 64 war machine: Derrida 106–7, 131; need to resist 217 ‘weapons of mass destruction’ 20–21, 113 Weber, Samuel 86, 199 Weininger, Otto 201 Wells, H.G.: ‘The Story of the Late Mr Evlesham’ 15 Westbrook, Peter 174 Westermann, D. 181 Wheen, Francis 198 whirlpools 90 Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray 15, 27, 55, 57; theatrical sense 56, 57 Wilson-Tagoe, Nana 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 105, 115, 200–201 Wittig, Monique 85 Wolff, Christian 48 Wolf, Gita 35 Wollstonecraft, Mary 190 women: configuration in terms of backwardness 10, 138, 184–85; Derrida’s ‘types’ 108, 144; Enlightenment and issue of autonomy 74, 190; idealist and poetic realist visions 36, 38–39; Kant’s attitude in ‘On the Proverb’ 70, 71, 72; Murray

246

Index

on Orestes-Hamlet characters 179–80; socialisation of labour and reproduction 192–93, 196, 197 Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway 89, 201; Orlando 25; A Room of One’s Own 27; ‘Society of Outsiders’ 26, 70–71, 71; theory of creativity 27, 31, 190; To the Lighthouse 141 words: Cavell’s critique of the iterable 116; performative acts with 104; Tambu’s writing in The Book of Not 139–40 Wordsworth, William 30, 34, 163 writing: act of composition 29; Barthes’s The Death of the Author 5–7; Dangarembga’s sense of 140; Derrida’s typewriter metaphor 97–98, 105–6, 161; distinction of poetic realism 110; feeling trace and movement of 94–96; ghostly temporality and poetic realism

93, 177; philosophical and poetic 98–99; in postmodern Western view of the literary 104 Yashuhiro, Nakasone 58, 62 Yates, Frances 49, 175 Yeats, W.B. 90 Yin and Yang 65, 167 yu (presence) 63 ZANU (Zimbabwean African National Union) 51 Zimbabwe: anti-colonial struggle 51; complex problems 138; constitution of 126–27; co-operative farming ventures 217; see also Rhodesia; Shona Zimbabwean writing 141, 187; see also Dangarembga, Tsitsi; Vera, Yvonne Zionism 51 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 72