Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead

Haunted Subjects Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead

Colin Davis

Haunted Subjects

Also by Colin Davis MICHEL TOURNIER: Philosophy and Fiction (1988) ELIE WIESEL’S SECRETIVE TEXTS (1994) LEVINAS: An Introduction (1996) ETHICAL ISSUES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH FICTION: Killing the Other (2000) FRENCH FICTION IN THE MITTERRAND YEARS: Memory, Narrative, Desire (with Elizabeth Fallaize, 2000) AFTER POSTSTRUCTURALISM: Reading, Stories and Theory (2004)

Haunted Subjects Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead Colin Davis

© Colin Davis 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230507821 hardback ISBN-10: 0230507824 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davis, Colin, 1960 Haunted subjects:deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the return of the dead/Colin Davis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9780230507821 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0230507824 (cloth) 1. Ghosts. 2. Spirits. 3. Deconstruction. 4. Psychoanalysis. I. Title. BF1461.D376 2007 133.1“dc22 2006050320 10 16

9 15

8 14

7 13

6 12

5 11

4 10

3 09

2 08

1 07

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1 Introduction: The Return of the Dead

1

2 Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film

20

3 Sartre’s Living Dead

43

4 Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

66

5 The Ghosts of Auschwitz: Charlotte Delbo

93

6 Speaking with the Dead: De Man, Levinas, Agamben

111

7 Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

128

8 Burying the Dead

151

Notes

160

Bibliography

172

Index

178

v

Acknowledgements Some of the material used in Chapters 1 and 5 first appeared in French Studies; I am grateful to Oxford University Press and the British Society for French Studies for permission to reprint. Material used in Chapters 3 and 6 first appeared in Sartre Studies International and Culture, Theory and Critique respectively; I am grateful to Berghahn Books and to Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint. Many people helped me during the preparation of this book with encouragement, advice and support in innumerable forms. Rather than naming them all here, I would like to take the opportunity to thank generous-spirited anonymous readers, whose comments are all the more appreciated for being from unknown sources. I would like also to thank the students at the University of Warwick who, in 2003– 2004, took the final-year Special Subject during which some of the ideas in this book were formulated.

vi

1 Introduction: The Return of the Dead

Apropos of this phenomenon, let us then ask a naïve and elementary question: why do the dead return?1

The dead and the undead Why do the dead return? What unfinished business do they still have with us or do we still have with them? Ghosts, the dead and the undead walk among us now as much as ever. On television and at the cinema, a host of successful films and television series have portrayed some sort of survival after the grave, from the ghosts of Truly Madly Deeply, Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Others to the vampires of the three Blade films, Interview with the Vampire, Van Helsing or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the zombies of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. When the child in The Sixth Sense tells Bruce Willis ‘I see dead people’, it is a stunning cinematic moment, but not a surprise. Through seven series, on a weekly basis Buffy the Vampire Slayer talked, fought and slept with the undead, and she herself died and returned from the dead. If the haunted child of The Sixth Sense had not seen dead people, it would evidently have been because he had not been to the cinema or seen much television recently. Žižek suggests that the return of the living dead deserves to be called the ‘fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture’.2 Explaining 1

2

Haunted Subjects

this fantasy, Žižek finds a concordance between popular culture and Lacanian psychoanalysis: The answer offered by Lacan [to the question of why the dead return] is the same as that found in popular culture: because they were not properly buried, i.e., because something went wrong with their obsequies. The return of the dead is the sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization; the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt.3 There is some simplification, though, in describing this fantasy as characteristically modern. Nearly two thousand years ago a letter written by Pliny the Younger recounts a number of ghost stories. The second of them tells how in a large, deserted house the clank of iron and the rattle of chains can be heard at night, and the ghost of an old man appears. Intrigued, a philosopher waits for the apparition, notes where it disappears, and has the spot exhumed. There, a man’s bones are discovered. Pliny’s account concludes with the proper public burial of the bones and the definitive termination of the haunting: ‘The bones were collected and given a public burial, and after the shades had been duly laid to rest the house saw them no more.’4 The dead man returns because he has not been ‘duly laid to rest’. The duty of the living to bury the dead has not been performed according to established practice, and the rite of passage remains incomplete. So the dead return in part because their affairs on earth are not yet complete. In his classic study of ghosts and fairies, Keith Thomas describes how the ghosts of preReformation Europe returned ‘to confess some unrequited offence, to describe the punishment which lay in wait for some heinous sin, or to testify to the rewards in store for virtuous conduct’, or ‘to denounce an undetected evil-doer’.5 Here again, something has gone wrong which should be put right. The ghost’s appearance is the sign of a disturbance in the symbolic, moral or epistemological order. Once that disturbance has been corrected, the ghost will depart again, dispatched this time (all being well) for good. So the ghost returns in order to be sent away again. Its incursion in our world is only temporary. Once our symbolic debt has been duly paid, the domains of the living and of the dead can be kept decently separate again.

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 3

In some respects, recent stories of the supernatural reproduce quite faithfully the ‘unfinished business’ model of the commerce between the living and the dead. The dead return either because the rituals of burial, commemoration and mourning have not been properly completed (Truly Madly Deeply), or because they are evil and must be exorcised (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), or because, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, they know of a secret to be revealed, a wrong to be righted, an injustice to be made public or a wrongdoer to be apprehended (Ghost). In this light, The Sixth Sense for example turns out to follow well-established patterns despite its narrative twists. One ghost, that of the child psychiatrist played by Bruce Willis, returns because it wants to make up for the mistakes committed during its lifetime; towards the end of the film another appears to reveal a murder which has gone unpunished. Once the ghost has delivered its message or fulfilled its mission, its place among the living can be relinquished; it can be laid to rest and normality is restored. The ghost story, then, recounts a temporary interruption in the fabric of reality, a glitch in the matrix, in order that the proper moral and epistemological order of things can be put back to rights.6 When the dead return to claim an unpaid debt, it is perhaps not surprising that the response of the living is characteristically ambivalent. We are doubly angry at the deceased. How could they leave us, and why do they not leave us alone? The desire to keep the dead amongst us, to refuse the scandal of death, competes with the desire to be rid of them for good, to stop the dead from returning and disturbing our fragile peace of mind. Žižek observes that the rites of burial are ambivalent: through them, you show your respect for the dead, and thereby prevent them from returning to haunt you. This ambivalence of the work of mourning is clearly discernible in the two opposed attitudes towards the dead: on the one hand, we should not ignore them, but mark their death properly, perform the proper rituals; on the other hand, there is something obscene, transgressive, in talking about the dead at all.7 We both want the dead and want to be rid of them. Later in this introductory chapter I shall look more closely at some of the theoretical and critical aspects of this. First, though, I want to go back

4

Haunted Subjects

to the question of why the dead return. If the dead come back, it is because our belief systems allow for their return. So what is it we actually believe when we believe in ghosts? The belief in ghosts is (like the ghost itself) something that survives or returns long after it should have been relegated to the past; it is a kind of excess or fault line within belief, or perhaps an unconscious remainder of primitive, magical thinking, revealing a gap between what we think we believe (How could there be ghosts? How ridiculous!) and what we nevertheless continue to believe (There are ghosts!).

From Augustine to the Enlightenment: A brief history of faulty burials Ambivalence towards supernatural apparitions was already manifest in early Christian thinking. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) explained the apparent return of the dead within a Christian framework which would exert a decisive influence for a millennium.8 Officially, the Christian must envisage the possibility that the dead are capable of returning from the grave. Christ brought Lazarus back to life and later rose from the dead himself. So there is biblical precedent for the return of the dead, and no Christian could doubt that it is in God’s power to restore life to the deceased. However, the early Church, whilst theoretically sanctioning this possibility, also wished severely to restrict and to police the occurrence of the supernatural. So the dead may appear; a saint, for example, may return to instruct the living, but only with the aid of angelic mediation. There could be no question of a day-to-day commerce with the dead. Strict rituals of burial and mourning aimed to show proper respect for the dead, but also to consign them to their own domain, to keep them separate from the living. The Augustinian position, then, is that the dead may return, but only in extraordinary circumstances. It was important for Augustine and the Church authorities to distinguish Christian orthodoxy from pagan and polytheistic folk beliefs. But as Jean-Claude Schmitt’s Les Revenants demonstrates, this official policing in fact did little to restrict the proliferation of supernatural tales. If Augustinian orthodoxy severely restricted the return of the dead and strenuously denied them any corporeal reality, this position was constantly and bluntly contradicted by a rich narrative tradition.9 Indeed it is possible that

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 5

tales of the returning dead flourished precisely because they issued a challenge to orthodoxy, becoming more terrifyingly enigmatic insofar as they conflicted with Church teaching. Repeatedly in Christian Europe ghosts have been banished or abolished, only to return all the more insistently in folk tales and literature. The vehemence with which they are denied only strengthens belief in them. In European history a number of key moments seemed to signal that belief in ghosts could be extinguished once and for all. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas describes how in preReformation theology ghosts were explained as souls in Purgatory. Under some circumstances they could appear to the living because they were still in an intermediate state, their ultimate fate being not yet decided. After the Reformation, Protestants no longer believed in Purgatory, so for them at least the theological explanation of ghosts was abolished. As Thomas puts it, in the sixteenth century belief in ghosts was ‘a shibboleth which distinguished Protestant from Catholic almost as effectively as belief in the Mass or the Papal Supremacy’.10 For Protestants, ghosts should have been definitively removed from the sphere of the living. Yet, in 1674, a fascinating correspondence between the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza and a Protestant Dutch lawyer named Hugo Boxel demonstrates the persistence of supernatural beliefs. Boxel wrote to Spinoza to enquire about his views on the existence and nature of ghosts. Spinoza politely mocked Boxel’s credulity, ridiculing, for example, his correspondent’s conjecture that all ghosts are male: ‘I am surprised that people who have seen naked ghosts didn’t look at their genitals; perhaps it was through fear or because they didn’t know the difference.’11 Spinoza attributed the belief in ghosts to desire and superstition rather than to reason: men’s desire to recount things not as they are, but as they would like them to be, is particularly evident in stories about phantoms and spectres. The basic reason is, I believe, that in the absence of witnesses other than the narrators themselves, you can make things up as much as you like, adding or suppressing details as you wish, without fear of being contradicted. Nevertheless, Boxel gamely persisted, citing Classical and modern authorities and recounting a story he had heard from a colleague.

6

Haunted Subjects

Neither man succeeded in shaking the conviction of the other, and the correspondence ended in amicable deadlock. The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted to achieve what Spinoza could not by putting an end to superstition once and for all. The entry on superstition in the Encyclopédie (1751–1772) lists ‘spectres, dreams and visions’ as the tools of fear and imagination; and the entry on fantôme is more forceful still in its insistence that ghosts do not exist: We give the name of phantom to all images which make us imagine there are creatures outside us which are not really there. [  ] The word phantom has been applied to all false ideas which cause us fear, respect, and so on, which torment us and make us unhappy: it is bad education which produces these phantoms, it is experience and philosophy which gets rid of them.12 The mission of the Enlightenment, then, was to get rid of ghosts definitively. And yet, stories of the supernatural persisted. A fascinating example of such persistence is provided by Dom Augustin Calmet’s widely read collection of vampire stories. Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) was a Benedictine monk who wrote a series of influential commentaries on the scriptures. In 1746, he brought together numerous stories of ghosts and vampires in a book originally published as Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie. The book quickly sold out, and was subsequently expanded, reprinted and translated into a number of languages. As Marie-Hélène Huet has argued, ‘Calmet’s book belonged to an already flourishing genre that, under the pretence of putting superstitions to rest, indulged in bloodcurdling tales from beyond the grave’.13 Calmet’s stance in his Dissertation is an unstable one: he revels in his gruesome stories whilst not wishing fully to endorse them; as a Christian he cannot doubt that the dead may return to life since nothing is beyond the power of God, but he does not want to give credence to popular tales of widespread vampire attacks across modern Europe. Calmet was ridiculed by the rationalist Voltaire, who, in the entry on vampires in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), insisted that ‘The real vampires are the monks who eat at the expense of kings and peoples’.14 Despite Voltaire’s mockery, Calmet’s work on vampires

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 7

was still read long after his death (and more widely than his scriptural exegeses), becoming, in Huet’s words, ‘one of the most important literary sources of the fantastique movement that would culminate in the nineteenth century’.15 So the Age of Reason witnessed the huge popularity of Dom Augustin Calmet’s collection of vampire stories as well as the rise of gothic literature and what Terry Castle calls ‘the invention of the uncanny’. Indeed, Castle suggests that the aggressive rationalism of the eighteenth century ‘also produced, like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse’.16 Castle’s argument is highly pertinent in the context of this book. In her account, Enlightenment thinking aimed to put an end to superstition, and in the process to make spirits and ghosts obsolete; but rather than abolishing ghosts, it gave them a new hold on the human mind: The rationalists did not so much negate the traditional spirit world as displace it into the realm of psychology. Ghosts were not exorcised – only internalised and reinterpreted as hallucinatory thoughts. Yet this internalisation of apparitions introduced a latent irrationalism into the realm of mental experience. If ghosts were thoughts, then thoughts themselves took on – at least notionally – the haunting reality of ghosts. The mind became subject to spectral presences. The epistemologically unstable, potentially fantastic metaphor of the phantasmagoria simply condensed the historical paradox: by relocating the world of ghosts in the closed space of the imagination, one ended up supernaturalising the mind itself.17 This is, according to Castle, ‘a momentous event in the history of Western consciousness’.18 The ghosts are now inside our heads rather than roaming the outside world, and human subjectivity has been infiltrated by alien, irrational, spectral presences. This relocation of ghosts into the mind sets the stage for Freudian psychoanalysis which, as we shall see later in this chapter, aims to free us from irrational fears whilst introducing the daemonic into the very core of subjectivity. The dead will not go away despite our best efforts. Correspondingly, stories of ghosts and vampires are as popular as ever, even though the superstitions and belief systems that sustained them have supposedly

8

Haunted Subjects

been dispelled. Perhaps the history of Europe can be understood as the failed endeavour to rid itself of its ghosts. We may for the most part no longer believe that the dead return, but we have not entirely given up on them either. Octave Mannoni’s formula of fetishism, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’ [‘I know, but all the same’] might be invoked here: I know ghosts don’t exist, but I still believe in them; or, alternatively, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t entirely believe my lack of belief.19 We are not yet ready to give up on our dead. And perhaps modern Hollywood serves as a place where what we no longer (think we) believe is nevertheless kept real for us. In any case, on a daily basis the media of popular entertainment dramatise the return of the dead; and however ironic, metaphoric or playful this return might be, however much it is presented as mere diversion not to be taken too seriously, even so it continues to correspond to unsurmounted needs, fears or desires which are as urgent now as they ever were. These issues will be discussed at greater length in later chapters. In the rest of this introductory chapter, I want to outline important aspects of the intellectual context in which the present study is written. This involves turning to a phenomenon which to some extent parallels the proliferation of ghosts in popular culture, namely the contemporary interest of theorists and critics in the dead and the undead; and the final section of the chapter sketches the specific contribution of psychoanalysis and deconstruction to our understanding of the return of the dead.

Hauntology: Spectres and phantoms Recently, the relation to the dead has become an important trend in critical and psychoanalytical work. What is sometimes called hauntology has two distinct, related, and to some extent incompatible, sources, both of which will prove important in later chapters of this book.20 The word itself, in its French form hantologie, was coined by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres de Marx (1993), which has rapidly become one of the most controversial and influential works of his later period. Marxist and left-leaning readers have been less than enthusiastic about Derrida’s claim that deconstruction was all along a radicalisation of Marx’s legacy, their responses ranging, as Michael Sprinker puts it, ‘from scepticism, to ire, to outright contempt’.21 But in literary critical circles Derrida’s rehabilitation of ghosts as a

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 9

respectable subject of enquiry has proved to be extraordinarily fertile. Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar as it occupies the place of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving. Hauntology is thus related to, and represents a new aspect of, the ethical turn of deconstruction which has been palpable at least since the 1980s. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in ghosts, as Fredric Jameson explains: Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.22 The second, chronologically prior yet less acknowledged source of hauntology is the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, especially in some of the essays collected in L’Ecorce et le noyau (1978) and Torok’s work subsequent to the death of Abraham.23 In fact Derrida played a key role in getting the work of Abraham and Torok known to a wider audience. In 1976, the year after Abraham’s death, their radical re-working of Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ case study Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups appeared in the Flammarion ‘Philosophie en effet’ series of which Derrida was one of the co-directors, and it was preceded by a long and influential essay by Derrida entitled ‘Fors: Les Mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’.24 Derrida’s essay suggests some of the similarities between his thought and that of Abraham and Torok, but he has next to nothing to say about their work on phantoms and the marked differences between their conception and his. Abraham and Torok had become interested in transgenerational communication, particularly the way in which the undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about

10

Haunted Subjects

their distant causes. What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light. One crucial consequence of this is that the phantom does not, as it does in some versions of the ghost story, return from the dead in order to reveal something hidden or forgotten, to right a wrong or to deliver a message that might otherwise have gone unheeded. On the contrary, the phantom is a liar; its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret remains shrouded in mystery. In this account, phantoms are not the spirits of the dead, but ‘lacunae left inside us by the secrets of others’.25 The ideas of Abraham and Torok will be further discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. The two thinkers have certainly renewed psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice dealing with transgenerational trauma and family secrets.26 They have also appealed to some critics working on literature and popular culture.27 A notable success in this domain was scored by the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in his book Tintin chez le psychanalyste (1985). Analysing a sequence of Tintin albums in which Captain Haddock is haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Tisseron speculated about a possible connection between the ghost’s illegitimate origins and a drama of legitimacy in the family history of Tintin’s creator Hergé. Subsequent biographical research undertaken after Hergé’s death showed that Hergé’s father was indeed the illegitimate child of an unknown father; and in subsequent publications Tisseron took credit for deducing this secret purely from the analysis of the fictional albums, even though he had in fact been mistaken in suggesting that the illegitimacy was most probably on Hergé’s mother’s side of the family. However, despite the success of Tisseron’s work and the intellectual vigour of critics such as Nicholas Rand and Esther Rashkin, the direct impact of Abraham and Torok on literary studies has in fact been limited, perhaps because the endeavour to find undisclosed secrets is likely to succeed in only a small number of cases. By contrast Derrida’s Spectres de Marx has spawned a minor academic industry.28 His hauntology has virtually removed Abraham and Torok from the agenda of literary ghost studies; or to be more precise, when Abraham and Torok are now discussed by deconstructive-minded critics their work is most frequently given a distinctly Derridean inflection.

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 11

Derrida’s spectre is a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate. It does not return to deliver a message as such; nevertheless Derrida calls on us to endeavour to speak and listen to the spectre, despite the reluctance inherited from our intellectual traditions and because of the challenge it may pose to them: ‘So what seems almost impossible is always to speak of the spectre, to speak to the spectre, to speak with it, therefore most of all to make or to let a spirit speak.’29 Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in the expectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise. Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know. For Abraham and Torok the phantom’s secret can and should be revealed in order to achieve ‘a small victory of Love over Death’;30 for Derrida on the contrary the spectre’s secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered. Elsewhere, in a move of key importance for literary hauntology, Derrida associates this kind of essential secret with literature in general: Literature keeps a secret which does not exist, in some way. Behind a novel or a poem, behind what is in effect the wealth of meaning to be interpreted, there is no secret meaning to be sought. A character’s secret, for example, does not exist, there is no substance outside the literary phenomenon. Everything is secret in literature, there is no secret hidden behind it, that is the secret of this strange institution about which and in which I am constantly debating (struggling). [    ] The institution of literature recognises in principle or in essence the right to say everything or not to say whilst saying, that is, the right to flaunt its secret [le droit au secret affiché].31 The attraction of hauntology for deconstructive-minded critics arises from the link between a theme (haunting, ghosts, the supernatural) and the processes of literature and textuality in general. In consequence, much of the most committed work in this area combines close reading with daring speculation. The significant difference between the approach inspired by Abraham and Torok and poststructuralist hauntology can already be seen in Nicholas

12

Haunted Subjects

Royle’s response to Rashkin’s Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). In her conclusion Rashkin concedes that uncovering textual secrets always brings to the fore other enigmas which might demand, but not be susceptible to, solution.32 Royle marks the key difference between critics inspired by Abraham and Torok and those of a more Derridean and poststructuralist bent: in practice, Royle suggests, Rashkin closes down semantic flux by assigning determinate meanings to identifiable secrets, but at least in principle she accepts that the process of meaning may be open-ended and infinite. Royle is more interested in processes than solutions, and he suggests that Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is ‘a more disruptive, housebreaking book than it seems prepared to admit’.33 Whereas Rashkin insists that ‘Not all texts have phantoms’,34 Royle wonders whether ‘every text, including a book review, has phantoms’.35 Jodey Castricano makes a similar point in her Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001): ‘I find [Rashkin’s] assertion that “not all texts have phantoms” to be problematic because her assertion marks a division between texts which reveal “secrets” and those that do not (presumably those that do not harbour an unspeakable secret are transparent)’.36 Royle’s musing and Castricano’s observation provide a clue to the theoretical ambitions of literary hauntologists. Ghosts are a privileged theme because they allow an insight into texts and textuality as such. Rashkin deliberately restricts the scope of her approach in the name of attentiveness to the secrets of individual texts. Whilst remaining eager to respect specificity, the hauntologists also aspire to extend the validity of their enquiry to embrace a greater level of generality. This has sometimes entailed a dramatic escalation of the claims made for the spectral, and by association for the critical work which deals with it. Julian Wolfrey’s Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002), for example, opens with a series of increasingly bold assertions about the importance of literary ghosts. Ghosts ‘exceed any narrative modality, genre or textual manifestation’; the spectral ‘makes possible reproduction even as it also fragments reproduction and ruins the very possibility of reproduction’s apparent guarantee to represent that which is no longer there fully’; in consequence ‘all forms of narrative are spectral to some extent’ and ‘the spectral is at the heart of any narrative of the modern’; moreover, ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 13

a space through which something other returns’, so that ‘all stories are, more or less, ghost stories’.37 In this breathtaking display ghosts progress rapidly from being one theme amongst others to being the ungrounded grounding of representation and a key to all forms of storytelling. They are both unthinkable and the only thing worth thinking about. The crucial difference between the two strands of hauntology, deriving from Abraham and Torok and from Derrida respectively, is to be found in the status of the secret. The secrets of Abraham and Torok’s lying phantoms are unspeakable in the restricted sense of being a subject of shame and prohibition. It is not at all that they cannot be spoken; on the contrary, they can and should be put into words so that the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcised. For Derrida the ghost and its secrets are unspeakable in a quite different sense. Abraham and Torok seek to return the ghost to the order of knowledge; Derrida wants to avoid any such restoration and to encounter what is strange, unheard, other, about the ghost. For Derrida the ghost’s secret is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not-yet formulated possibilities of the future. The secret is not unspeakable because it is taboo, but because it cannot (yet) be articulated in the languages available to us. The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought. The interest here, then, is not in secrets, understood as puzzles to be resolved, but in secrecy, now elevated to what Castricano calls ‘the structural enigma which inaugurates the scene of writing’.38 Hauntology is part of an endeavour to keep raising the stakes of literary study, to make it a place where we can interrogate our relation to the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between the thought and the unthought. The ghost becomes a focus for competing epistemological and ethical positions. For Abraham and Torok, the phantom and its secrets should be uncovered so that it can be dispelled. For Derrida and those impressed by his work the spectre’s ethical injunction requires us on the contrary not to reduce it prematurely to an object of knowledge. Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok in ‘Fors’ emphasises how their work involves attentiveness to disturbances of meaning, the hieroglyphs and secrets which engage the interpreter in a restless labour of deciphering. In the process, Derrida underplays the extent

14

Haunted Subjects

to which Abraham and Torok attempt to bring interpretation to an end by recovering occluded meanings, and his reading has had a significant impact on the more general understanding of their work.39 Their phantoms and his spectres, though, have little in common. Phantoms lie about the past whilst spectres gesture towards a still unformulated future. The difference between them poses in a new form the tension between the desire to understand and openness to what exceeds knowledge; and the resulting critical practices vary between the endeavour to attend patiently to particular texts and exhilarating speculation. This book does not claim for an instant to reconcile these differences, although it undoubtedly bears traces of my own attraction to both critical trends. Whilst remaining close to the texts or films under discussion, I hope also to have left at least some space for what is not (yet) understood; and the final chapter sketches a case for preserving at least some measure of our ignorance.

Deaths of psychoanalysis and deconstruction My subtitle, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead, foregrounds the importance of deconstruction and psychoanalysis in the book. This is not because either or both of them are unremittingly discussed or explicitly used in all chapters. However, the work of Freud, Abraham and Torok, and (to a lesser extent) other psychoanalytic thinkers is frequently invoked, as are the texts of Derrida and (to a lesser extent) other thinkers sometimes associated with deconstruction, such as Paul de Man, Harold Bloom and Barbara Johnson. The reason for this is that both psychoanalysis and deconstruction constitute, in my view, significant, distinct but interrelated contributions to the ways in which we might think about death and the return of the dead. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new framework for understanding the return of the dead was provided by Freudian psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud recounted the now famous dream of a father whose son has just died. The son reproaches him with the words ‘Father, don’t you see I am burning?’, at which point the father awakens to find that a candle has set light to his son’s corpse.40 The dream can be explained quite simply as the fulfilment of the father’s wish to see his son alive again; his son’s words reflect his dim awareness of the fire in the next room, but he

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 15

delays waking up in order to preserve his son’s life for a few more moments. Yet if the son is resurrected in the dream, he is subsequently killed again by the father’s awakening. The dream fulfils a wish, but it also repeats the trauma of loss, leaving the father’s very identity as subject, in Cathy Caruth’s words, ‘bound up with, or founded in, the death that he survives’.41 The dead inhabit the minds of the living. Freud demonstrates this most graphically in Totem and Taboo through the story of the brothers of the primal horde who kill and devour their father in order to claim for themselves the women he had denied them. After the father’s murder the brothers respect his injunctions and prohibitions all the more slavishly, so that the ‘dead father became stronger than the living one had been’.42 The dead live on because the living do not know how to let them go. Freud provides the first psychoanalytical template of the haunted subject, possessed by long-deceased ancestors and unable to bury its dead once and for all. This does not mean, however, that in its earliest stages Freudian psychoanalysis offered any sanction to belief in the return of the dead. It sought to explain it, but certainly not to endorse it. In ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, first published in 1907, Freud reminds his readers that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the return of the dead, which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason.43 To illustrate this he recounts the story of a doctor who feels he might have been to some extent responsible for the death of a patient. This patient comes back, apparently to haunt him: ‘One day, several years later, a girl entered his consulting room, who, in spite of all his efforts, he could not help recognising as the dead one. He could frame only a single thought: “So after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life”.’44 However, it turns out that the patient in question was in fact the sister of the deceased, now suffering from the same disease as her dead sibling. Freud adds plausibility to the story by finally revealing that he was the doctor to whom the incident occurred, and

16

Haunted Subjects

dismissing the momentary belief that the dead come back to life as a ‘temporary delusion’. So we might believe that the dead return – the belief that the dead return comes back to haunt us – but we know, as educated, rational beings, that they do not. A related passage in Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny” ’, first published in 1919 but probably drafted at least in part considerably earlier, goes some way towards explaining how this belief-in-what-we-do-not-believe can persist. Freud argues that the uncanny (das Unheimliche) comes about through the re-awakening of something familiar and long-established which has been repressed. Then, in a remarkable and dense paragraph, he suggests that this sense of the uncanny may occur ‘in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead and to spirits and ghosts’.45 He explains that where death is concerned, despite the advances of civilisation, we still believe in our unconscious that we are immortal whilst fearing that the dead may return to haunt us. So on the one hand ‘almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic’, whilst at the same time ‘[all] supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions’.46 In other words we both have and have not got over the belief that the dead may return; we don’t believe it ‘officially’, but we do believe it unconsciously. And even in our conscious, ‘official’ minds we do not entirely rule out the existence of spirits, though we persuade ourselves that the conditions under which they might appear are improbable and remote. As Freud reminds us, ‘it cannot be denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible’.47 Contact with the dead may not be probable, but it is not entirely out of the question. In these passages, Freud exhibits a clear ambivalence towards the return of the dead. He enjoys a good ghost story as much as anyone; at the same time he equates the belief in the survival of the dead with ‘savage’ thinking, quite properly eradicated from the educated, civilised mind even if it continues to reside in the unconscious.48 And yet a lingering sense remains that the ‘savage’ may after all be right; the dead might return, or they might never have left us. Freud is to some extent an Enlightenment figure who

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 17

wants to dismiss the possibility of commerce with the dead. He confronts stories of ghosts, the supernatural and the uncanny in order to explain them as errors, delusions, ruses of the unconscious or literary fictions. But we have no option other than to believe in these delusions; as Derrida nicely puts it, ‘he believes that we cannot not believe [in ghosts] and that we must not believe in them’.49 At this point, then, Freudian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction are opposed to one another, at least in their aims: Freud acknowledges ghosts in order to demystify our belief in them (even if we cannot entirely rid ourselves of that belief), whereas Derrida, in Spectres de Marx and related texts, wants to put into question the intellectual tradition to which Freud, like Marx (ambiguously) belongs and to allow for the possibility that the spectral other might speak. Freud’s reluctance to accept the return of the dead is fundamentally modified when, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he speculates about the existence of the death drives. This will be discussed further in Chapter 2; in the present context its significance is that the dead do not need literally to return for the subject to be haunted because it is already inhabited by death. Beyond the Pleasure Principle represents a crucial stage in the development of psychoanalysis for a number of reasons. It marks an important departure from Freud’s previous thinking by questioning the primacy and ubiquity of the pleasure principle; it challenges the pretension of psychoanalysis to be rooted in observation and practice by putting at its centre something, the death drives, which cannot be directly witnessed or studied; and it inaugurates what might be termed the poststructuralist or deconstructive Freud.50 Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the key Freudian text for Derrida because it combines speculative boldness with a disconcerting self-doubting textual performance, so that the work can never be confidently tied down to a scientific or philosophical thesis.51 This underpins a reading of Freud as a proto-deconstructive thinker struggling to free thought from the shackles of intellectual tradition. Derrida is referring to his own work as much as Freud’s when he suggests that all Freudian theses are ‘split, divided, contradictory’.52 The death drives play an important role in this Derridean reading of Freud because they elude any attempt to pin them down, circulating silently and imperceptibly yet disrupting the secure self-presence of subjects, concepts, theories and institutions. So there is what

18

Haunted Subjects

Todd Dufresne calls ‘a strange affinity’ between deconstruction and the theory of the death drive; as he puts it, ‘quite simply, both de-structure the system within which they operate’.53 Death and the death drives, then, occupy a key position in Freudian psychoanalysis, at least in its Derridean and more broadly poststructuralist interpretation. Deconstruction and psychoanalysis are also linked to one another and to death in another important respect: both are now, or have been declared to be, themselves dead. Vigorous and in part successful attempts have been made to discredit Freud and his legacy, impugning him on grounds ranging from personal and professional dishonesty to intellectual shabbiness.54 Deconstruction also has been pronounced dead, and we are now sometimes said to be living and working ‘after theory’ or in a ‘post-theoretical’ intellectual context.55 Claims of the death of deconstruction are, however, almost as old as deconstruction itself, and they may even contribute to its continuing vitality. The more it is said to be dead, the more it is still with us, if only in some spectral sense which Derrida spent much of the latter part of his career trying to theorise. An extreme, yet in some ways typical and symptomatic, claim of the deaths of psychoanalysis and deconstruction is made by Dufresne: And, so, where are we today? For those with ears big enough to hear, the poststructuralist revolution is over. The time of deconstruction, once the cutting edge of the movement, has passed away almost as assuredly as psychoanalysis. I say almost – for nothing can be as dead as psychoanalysis, which, having survived its own passing, still enjoys a zombie’s afterlife. I doubt deconstruction will be so (un)lucky.56 So psychoanalysis is dead, poststructuralism is dead, deconstruction is dead. But Dufresne himself knows that psychoanalysis draws at least part of its strength from the virulence of opposition to it.57 The zombie reference here is particularly revealing because it undercuts any hope that death may be an absolute end. In zombie films such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead, the zombie is precisely what has died but will not die; it is what keeps on returning from beyond its grave. To say that psychoanalysis and deconstruction are dead is also to ensure that they are still alive, and perhaps all the more disturbing for being

Introduction: The Return of the Dead 19

dead-and-alive, just as zombies are altogether more frightening than their living counterparts. It is a working assumption throughout this book that, beyond and contrary to announcements of their demise, the work of Freud and Derrida (as well as that of other psychoanalytic and deconstructive thinkers) is still very much worth reading and still contains powerful resources to stimulate us in reading other texts and films. In Spectres de Marx, Derrida calls on us to attend to ghosts, to unlearn what we thought we knew for certain in order to learn what we still cannot formulate or imagine. This does not entail believing in ghosts in any straightforward sense, since the ghost is precisely that of which the existence consists in its not quite existing. The point is to explore the presence of what no longer exists or does not yet exist, in order to understand and to experience how it dislocates the selfpresence of the subject and its contingent realities. The book examines the emergence of Freud’s theory of the death drives in relation to Louis Feuillade’s great episodic silent film of 1915 Les Vampires; the role of the dead in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the returning ghosts of his film-script Les Jeux sont faits; the differences between Derrida’s spectres in Spectres de Marx and the lying phantoms of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok; the place of ghosts in the Holocaust testimony of Auschwitz-survivor Charlotte Delbo; the dialogue with the dead in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul de Man and Giorgio Agamben; and Derrida’s attempt to address the dead in his funeral orations and memorial speeches. Where these works and these analyses depart from earlier and contemporary tales is in their endeavour to traverse the excess within the real represented by ghosts, rather than to restore a temporarilyfractured order. They attempt to inhabit the ambivalence manifested in the simultaneous desire to be rid of the dead and to hold on to them. This book is in a sense about the refusal to mourn, when mourning is understood as the process by which grief is overcome. Rather than the completion of mourning, the book’s horizon (finally reached in Chapter 7) is Derrida’s melancholic subject, commemorating and inhabiting the traumatic loss of the other and of the self.

2 Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film

In 1982, Derrida appeared in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance as a philosopher interviewed by the actress Pascale Ogier about ghosts. In a later discussion Derrida describes how, two or three years after appearing in the film, he watched it with a group of students in the United States. By this time, Pascale Ogier was dead: I suddenly saw Pascale’s face appear on the screen, and I knew it was the face of a dead woman. She was replying to my question: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ As if she were looking straight into my eyes, she was still saying to me on the big screen: ‘Yes, now, yes.’ Which now? Years afterwards in Texas. I had the overwhelming feeling of the return of her ghost, the ghost of her ghost, coming back to say to me, to me, here, now: ‘Now    now    now, that is, in this darkened room, on another continent, in another world, there, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts.’1 In part, Derrida is merely describing an encounter with the dead made possible by the technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Roland Barthes suggests in La Chambre claire, photography already entails an experience of death. In the photograph, Barthes argues, the dead return, but they return as mortal, destined to be lost again; and they remind us of our own mortality.2 Whilst photography made the dead visible once again, moving film and sound recording enabled us also to see and to hear people, to watch their movement and listen to their voices, long after their deaths. 20

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 21

In his account of seeing once again the image of Pascale Ogier, Derrida implies that there is a close relation between film and the disorientating, deconstructive effects of spectrality. The dead return through film to throw into question the experience of time and space: when is now, where is here? Moreover, the filmed subject is always, already enunciating her own death: ‘She was already, she was already saying so, and she knew, as we know, that even if she hadn’t died in the meantime, one day, it is a dead woman who would say: “I am death”, or “I am dead, from where I am I know what I’m talking about, and I am watching you”.’3 To watch film is to be in the presence of spectres, the already-dead or the soon-to-be-dead, and it is also to be watched by them as they look back at us and see that we too shall die. This close connection between film and death has already been noted by the film critic Michel Chion. His comments, though, are concerned principally with the possibility of the dead speaking in film. He refers to voiceovers by characters who turn out to be dead in films such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Honey Pot; and he observes that even when the speaking character is not actually dead, ‘the narrative voiceover is often that of the almost-dead, of the person who has completed his or her life and is only waiting to die’.4 Rather than following Chion’s lead and examining the link between speech and death in the cinema, this chapter discusses the work of death in silent film, in particular in Louis Feuillade’s serial film of 1915 Les Vampires and, at the end of the chapter, in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu of 1922. In the main part of the chapter, I suggest some links between thematic and formal concerns in Feuillade’s film and Freud’s controversial theory of the death drives, through which death is re-located into the very centre of the living subject. In the ten episodes and 7 hours of running time of Les Vampires, a criminal band known as the Vampires creates havoc in First World War Paris. The Vampires, here, are not the supernatural beings of other early vampire movies, notably Murnau’s Nosferatu or Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932); but their association with death is no less constant, as they kill and are killed, they die and sometimes apparently return from the dead. The film does not refer directly to the war and its deadly consequences, but they are always obliquely present. The leader of the Vampire gang, the Grand Vampire, goes through a series of different incarnations

22

Haunted Subjects

because, it has been suggested, the demands of the war made it unfeasible to maintain a stable cast.5 Even the Paris streets in which many of the exterior shots are filmed seem deathlike, as they are eerily deserted of traffic and people. So death touches the film at every level, from the conditions of its production to its most explicit themes.

Freud: From death to the death drives Whilst Feuillade was directing his great serial film, in Vienna Freud was also reflecting profoundly on death. Freud’s work from the years of the First World War and immediately afterwards provides a theoretical resource for understanding the relation between death and silent film. In 1915, the year Les Vampires was made, Freud wrote a series of papers directly or indirectly concerned with the death and bereavement that the First World War was then making commonplace: ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, ‘On Transience’ (published in 1916) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (published in 1917). This is a crucially important moment in the development of Freudian psychoanalysis. In early psychoanalytic thinking the unconscious was radically impervious to the thought of its own death;6 but from the 1915 essays onwards, death would come to occupy an increasingly central place in the Freudian system. The opening lines of the first essay of ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, entitled ‘The Disillusionment of the War’, portray the intellect as bewildered by the inconceivable events of the war: In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which press in upon us and as to the value of the judgements which we form. We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. [    ] The individual who is not himself a combatant – and so a cog in the gigantic

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 23

machine of war – feels bewildered in his orientation, and inhibited in his powers and activities. I believe that he will welcome any indication, however slight, which will make it easier for him to find his bearings within himself at least.7 The war, then, appears as an event which has confounded the sovereignty of the intellect. Freud’s endeavour is to restore something of that sovereignty by going partway to explaining how the barbarities of war are possible. He describes how we might have hoped that civilisation had got rid of lying, deception and brutality, but psychoanalysis has taught us that we are not as civilised as we thought. The deepest, most primitive drives of humankind are never eradicated; and when the social bond that holds them in check breaks down, then they may once again be given free expression: ‘When the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery, barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilisation that one would have thought them impossible’ (67). Freud attempts to overcome the bewilderment of the intellect occasioned by the war by accounting for the occurrence of actions which seem too barbaric for the civilised beings we thought we had become. Freud’s endeavour to restore intelligibility in the face of senseless brutality is paralleled in Les Vampires by the figure of Philippe Guérande, the journalist who tracks down and finally defeats the Vampire gang through the ten episodes of the film. Guérande is presented as someone who confronts and deciphers the mysterious, criminal events that have beset Paris. Episode three, for example, begins by showing him studying the red codebook which contains the Vampires’ secrets. Initially baffled just as Freud was baffled by the events of war, he gradually learns to read its encrypted secrets. Guérande, then, is like Freud, re-asserting the power of the intellect to make sense of the world at a time when dark occurrences are making a mockery of civilised values. Freud explains that, if we are judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we are no more than ‘a gang of murderers’ (86). War creates, or restores, the conditions whereby that gang of murderers may break out of the unconscious and freely walk the streets; in Feuillade’s film this is instantiated in the Vampires, who represent unconstrained sexuality and violence

24

Haunted Subjects

shadowing Guérande’s buttoned-up, bourgeois order. Stanley Cavell has described silent film as presenting a world of ‘immediate intelligibility’, not requiring interpretation.8 Les Vampires questions this view insofar as intelligibility is precisely what is at stake in the film. The Vampires are masters of dissimulation and disguise. They occupy the highest positions in society, but they are also its bitter enemies. They throw into doubt the existence of the intelligible world because their actions sometimes make little sense. Guérande’s role, like Freud’s, is to rediscover the meaning and the order behind the outbreak of chaos. In the years following the war, Freud’s thought took a turn which offers further insight into the conflict between Guérande and the Vampires. In his wartime essays, Freud refers for the first time to a ‘death wish’ residing in the unconscious. Rather than a desire for our own demise, this death wish is a hostility towards others. Our unconscious is, Freud insists, ‘just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as murderously inclined towards strangers, as was primaeval man’ (88); or elsewhere he writes that ‘our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality’.9 So the death wish does not, at this stage, throw into doubt the primacy of the pleasure principle which Freud discerned as the motive force behind all mental functioning. After the war Freud would revise his views on this subject, at first in hypothetical mode in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and then with increasing certainty in The Ego and the Id (1923) and subsequent texts. Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle confidently re-asserting the centrality of the pleasure principle in psychoanalytic theory: ‘In the theory of psychoanalysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle.’10 But as the book progresses Freud accumulates evidence that something other than the pleasure principle is at work in the unconscious. In particular, in some patients a ‘compulsion to repeat’ overrides the pleasure principle, since what is repeated is not associated with past or present pleasure. So Freud speculates that there may be death drives, independent of and antagonistic to the life drives. The life drives seek to prolong life, to create and to maintain ever-greater bonds; the death drives tend towards the destruction of the organism in which they are lodged, of the bonds it creates, of other organisms, and of the external world more generally.

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 25

Freud concedes that his theory of the death drives is ‘speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection’; he develops the idea ‘out of curiosity to see where it will lead’.11 Even if Freud himself became increasingly convinced of the validity of his own speculation, his psychoanalytic descendants have often been more sceptical; and Todd Dufresne has described the idea of the death drives as ‘[an] untestable piece of mythology’.12 In the present context, rather than exploring theoretical problems with the theory of the death drives, I want to stress two aspects of Freud’s discussion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle which are relevant for the discussion of Les Vampires: 1. First, the theory of death drives is an explanatory fiction corresponding to a hermeneutic need. The pleasure principle is deemed to be ubiquitous, but its explanatory power does not clear away all enigmas. Freud describes himself as ‘forced to admit that [    ] the whole ground is not covered by the operation of the familiar motive forces. Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat – something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides’ (294). The hypothesis of the death drives arises, then, to fill a gap which established principles cannot explain. It becomes, as Dufresne puts it, ‘a repository into which [Freud] could dump everything that didn’t fit well in the categories of sexuality or libido’.13 The hypothesis may be difficult or even impossible to prove on the basis of direct observation, but it is necessary if the theorising mind is not to be paralysed by bewilderment. So Freud needs the death drives if he is to maintain the momentum of psychoanalysis in its project to achieve intellectual mastery of its subject: the obscure workings of the psyche. In this context it is perhaps not surprising that what began as a speculative hypothesis rapidly became for Freud a near-certainty. 2. Second, when referring to the death drives and related phenomena, Freud repeatedly invokes them in supernatural terms. They give the subject the sense of being in the thrall of something eerie and unnerving: ‘The impression they [transference phenomena] give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or

26

Haunted Subjects

possessed by some “daemonic” power’; ‘The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat [    ] give the appearance of some “daemonic” power at work’; ‘It may be presumed, too, that when people unfamiliar with analysis feel an obscure fear – a dread of rousing something that, so they feel, is better left sleeping – what they are afraid of at bottom is the emergence of this compulsion [to repeat] with its hint of possession by some “daemonic” power’.14 In the wake of Freud, psychoanalysts who accept the plausibility of his theory of the death drives also associate them with supernatural phenomena. Abraham and Torok, for example, link them to their conception of the phantom (which will be discussed in later chapters of this book): Little by little, something surprising becomes evident: the work of the phantom corresponds, point by point, to what Freud called the death drive. First, in effect it has no energy of its own; therefore it cannot be ‘abreacted’ but only named. Second, it pursues its work of unbinding in silence. Let us add that it is supported by concealed words, so many invisible gnomes who work in the unconscious to break all coherent links. Finally, it is the source of endless repetitions, which more often than not cannot be rationalised.15 Commenting on this passage, which was written by Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok glosses his reference to gnomes: ‘The seeds contained in the word gnome are as follows: gnome – knowledge; but gnome, as a malformed being: knowledge which is truncated (by notknowing [nescience], one might suppose); gnome – an invisible being, controlling the elements inside the Earth.’16 So the gnome rejoins the phantom, the daemon and the death drives as it impairs understanding and appears to be a supernatural power whilst in fact drawing its energy from the most hidden parts of the unconscious. It shatters coherence and unity, sets in motion an endless sequence of senseless repetitions, and resists attempts at rationalisation. Abraham and Torok, like Freud, adopt the language of the supernatural, though they also maintain that in the end no supernatural element is involved and that the phenomena in question can be rationally explained in psychoanalytical terms. In this respect

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 27

Feuillade’s Vampires are like Freud’s daemons and Abraham and Torok’s phantoms: their supernatural associations are misleading, though perhaps also they are never entirely dissipated. The death drives serve initially as a hypothesis to fill a gap in the analyst’s conceptual armoury. Part of the tension inherent in them is that they serve a rational purpose – the understanding of the human mind – but seem allied to irrational, even supernatural forces. This tension, as I shall show in the next section, is played out in Les Vampires. The title leads us to expect a tale of the supernatural, but the gang turns out to be ‘only’ banal criminals; they set up mysteries which can be explained and defused by the journalistdetective-analyst Guérande. And yet, time and time again in the film, the Vampires seem so close to the supernatural, to the undead vampires of legend, that the suspicion remains that their mystery has not, after all, been dispelled. The theory of death drives explains what otherwise remained unintelligible, but it raises a whole series of new problems which leave the challenge to rational hermeneutic mastery as acute as it was without it. Likewise, in Feuillade’s film the Vampires seem to instantiate the will to destroy, which, once instantiated, can be identified, contained and eradicated; but it is also hinted that the eradication is not complete, the enigma remains. Once invoked, the ‘daemonic power’ to which Freud refers and which Les Vampires defuses by re-assuring us that these are merely mortal criminals rather than real vampires, does not quite go away. Freud writes in The Ego and the Id that the death drives are ‘by their nature mute’.17 Laplanche describes death, for Freud, as a ‘silent character’; and Abraham states that the activity of the phantom takes place ‘in silence’.18 This perhaps points to a link between death, the death drives and Feuillade’s Vampires who, because their medium is silent film, perform their wicked deeds without sound. In the rest of this chapter I shall suggest that silent film, and in particular a vampire movie – Les Vampires – which turns out not to be a vampire movie, provides a location well suited for the manifestation of the death drives. The eerie, senseless forces of destruction that Freud was attempting to conceptualise and to capture in the theory of the death drives are also explored in the Vampires’ rampaging through wartime Paris in Feuillade’s great film.19

28

Haunted Subjects

Feuillade’s Les Vampires In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, on the verge of launching into his speculations on the death drives, Freud observes that the compulsion to repeat can be observed in the lives of ‘normal people’: Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion.20 Alluding to Nietzsche, Freud calls this the ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’;21 and because the compulsion to repeat cannot be explained purely in terms of the pleasure principle, it leads Freud ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ to the death drives. It is significant here that the compulsion to repeat is manifested in brief narratives, comprising the pared-down life histories of Freud’s acquaintances. Identical or near-identical stories are compulsively re-enacted. The psychoanalytic resonance of serial films can be initially suggested by the fact that, in them, the compulsion to repeat effectively becomes a fundamental principle of narrative construction. Accordingly, Les Vampires constantly repeats the same situations with sometimes only minor variants. Guérande is captured by the Vampires in episodes two and five, and in that episode he is also captured by the criminal Moreno; his mother is kidnapped in episode three and his wife in episode ten. Of the criminals, Moreno is imprisoned in episode four and escapes in episode five by feigning his suicide; Satanas, one of the sequence of Grand Vampires, is imprisoned in episode eight and kills himself; Irma Vep, the leading female Vampire, is captured in episode seven, narrowly misses death and escapes in episode eight, is captured and escapes again in episode nine before finally being

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 29

killed – apparently – at the end of episode ten. The series of chases, kidnaps, imprisonments and escapes could be extended indefinitely, as the film gets drawn into a cycle of repetition and variance. This is introduced from the very first scene of the first episode. Here, Guérande discovers that his Vampire files have been stolen by his future sidekick Mazamette. Threatened with being handed over to the police, Mazamette explains his crime by showing Guérande a photograph of himself surrounded by his three sons and a letter demanding immediate payment for childcare, and he promises to reform his ways. In episode two, however, Guérande finds that Mazamette is once more working with the Vampire gang. Mazamette explains himself by showing Guérande a photograph of himself surrounded by his three sons and a letter demanding immediate payment for their schooling. The photograph is different, though its composition is virtually identical; the need for quick cash is not the same, though it is quite similar. In these scenes with Mazamette, as elsewhere in the film, we are likely to have the unsettling sense that we have been here before. The repetition seems redundant, and it unnerves because it suggests that something may be going on which is not entirely explained by an end-orientated narrative logic. It does not quite make sense in terms of the restricted needs of the story. Freud took the compulsion to repeat as a hint at the existence of drives beyond the pleasure principle; in Les Vampires it may also hint that there is something beyond the principle of narrative economy, something which remains to be accounted for. This feeling that something is left unexplained even after a fully adequate explanation has apparently been given recurs throughout the film as it flirts with supernatural themes without ever quite endorsing them. The supernatural is, as it were, the film’s uncanny remainder, constantly in the background but never made explicit. This is already invoked in the title Les Vampires, and the tension that this raises between the expectations we may have of the film and the fact that the Vampires turn out to be merely human. Similar effects are produced throughout the film. One of the incarnations of the Grand Vampire is called the Spectre, another is Satanas.22 Moreno, who leads a rival criminal gang, is a master of hypnotism, which may recall the fact that Freud also used hypnotism in the early days of psychoanalysis. At the end of episode one a prisoner apparently vanishes from a locked room; it turns out that

30

Haunted Subjects

he has climbed up the chimney. In episode five the representatives of Parisian high society are gassed at midnight, the witching hour; and as the Vampires, clad all in black, come to rob them, they look fleetingly as if they are feeding off their prey like their supernatural namesakes. This flirtation with the supernatural, with the mysterious which remains mysterious even after it has been explained, is particularly evident in the theme of the resurrection of the dead. In episode three Guérande shoots and apparently kills Irma Vep and the Grand Vampire; he goes to fetch the police but returns to find they have gone. His revolver had been loaded with blanks. In episode four, a bearded bank employee called Mr Metadier is murdered by the Vampires with a hatpin and thrown from a train; the following Monday he turns up for work as usual. It is later explained that Moreno had discovered his body and disguised himself as Metadier in order to bring off a robbery. In episode eight, Irma Vep is aboard a ship which is blown up, leaving, according to a newspaper report, no survivors; later in the episode it turns out that she has after all miraculously escaped. The most striking example of the return of the dead occurs in episode five. Moreno, captured by the police and imprisoned, swallows poison and is pronounced dead. His corpse is covered in a white sheet and left overnight in a cell. Soon, however, it begins to move, and with the sheet over his head as he rises from his bed he looks like the most clichéd and unpersuasive of Halloween ghosts. The dead are never quite dead enough; and so when Irma is finally shot at the end of episode ten, this is the third time she has apparently been killed, and one might suspect that her death here is no more terminal than the first two. In fact, as Guérande and his wife turn their back on her and leave her for dead, she is still visibly breathing. This theme of the return from death accords with the title of the film, since vampires are precisely the undead, creatures who bring death to others without themselves being either alive or fully dead. In Lacanian terms, vampires are between two deaths: they have died once, but await their final dispatch. They can only be ultimately destroyed by extraordinary means. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is stabbed through the heart before he can arise again at sunset; in Murnau’s Nosferatu the vampire dies when a woman lures him into staying with her until sunrise. As its characters are killed yet fail to die, Feuillade’s

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 31

film also implies that the Vampires cannot be destroyed by ordinary means. Whilst playing with supernatural themes, however, the film consistently offers a naturalising, rational explanation for its most mystifying events: the prisoner escaped through the chimney, the gun that killed Irma and the Grand Vampire contained blanks, the drug taken by Moreno made him appear dead but did not really kill him. The dead may not be quite dead, but the Vampires are not really vampires either. Throughout the film Guérande is the character who tracks down the Vampires, deciphers codes, solves enigmas and ensures that order is to be restored.23 He is the rational principle who, like Freud at the beginning of ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, is initially bewildered and endeavours to understand the barbarities that are occurring in the world, and to seek out the ‘gang of murderers’ who have broken out of the unconscious. Guérande builds order and coherence. Visually, he is associated with prim interiors and impeccably pressed, fully buttoned-up clothing. The principle of rigorously maintained order, discipline and control which he embodies is particularly apparent in episode three when Guérande is in his bedroom, wearing his pyjamas, being attended to by Irma Vep, who is disguised as a maid. The sexual frisson that runs through this scene is both resisted and heightened by Guérande’s apparent lack of sexuality, as he keeps his pyjamas chastely buttoned up to his neck. Irma is teasing, sexually available and dangerous; but no disruptive outbreak of sexuality occurs. Guérande is saving himself for marriage, and the film ends with him safely wedded to a suitable partner. Even his louche sidekick Mazamette, who is tempted by crime and by excess and debauchery, gets engaged in the final scene of the film and thus, possibly, is brought back to the path of legitimacy. Guérande’s antithesis is Irma Vep, played by the actress Musidora. Although Guérande occupies more of the film than she does (she does not appear until episode three), she is by far its most memorable figure. Whereas Guérande embodies order, coherence and intelligibility, Irma is a figure of enigma, indeterminacy, destruction and unleashed sexuality. She is characterised by an extreme mobility of identity, as she appears in a series of roles and disguises, as night-club singer, stenographer, maid or bourgeois spinster. In episode six she even takes on the role of Viscount Guy, the son of the latest incarnation of the Grand Vampire; though in the same episode she also

32

Haunted Subjects

appears in the figure-hugging black costume for which the film is famous, and which makes her femininity unmissably apparent. This ability to cross over genders is intensified by her vampiric associations. The vampire is typically male, linked with penetration as it both enters the chamber of its female victims and enters their bodies by biting their necks. But when Irma is at her most vampiric, when she is in the bedroom of the virginal Guérande or dressed in her black costume, she is also at her most blatantly, sexually feminine. So she occupies and embodies what one critic has called a ‘zone of anxiety’.24 Another critic describes her as ‘a free-floating sexual signifier’, and ‘the embodiment of the uncanny in Les Vampires. Her black suit is a visible tache or stain on the screen that can be read as a moment of uncertainty that the detective-cum-analyst tries to translate from textual opacity to a legible sign.’25 Irma, though, retains her ambiguity throughout the film. When her name first appears on a poster outside a nightclub, the letters are re-arranged on screen to show that Irma Vep is an anagram of Vampire. What is not explained is whether she is named after the vampires or they are named after her.26 Which is the original term, and which its scrambled version? Irma remains an enigma; at the end she is not so much resolved as eliminated, when she is shot by Guérande’s wife and the couple, representing the bourgeois family unit now safely re-constituted, literally turn their back on her. What is at stake in Les Vampires is the extent to which order can be restored once it has been stained and its legibility disturbed. The possibility that restoration does not take place is implied by Irma’s still-breathing body when she last appears; perhaps she is still not yet dead, perhaps Guérande’s marriage and Mazamette’s engagement cannot dispel the threat to legitimacy and re-establish order, perhaps the frenzy of the Vampires lives on. In the final scene of the film, Mazamette embraces his new fiancée and twice leans over to kiss her on the neck. Or does he intend to bite her?27 Is he now, still, one of the Vampires, preparing to carry their outrages into the bourgeois institution of marriage?

Life drives and death drives So far, I have suggested that Guérande can be read as occupying the same role as Freud as he peered with horror at the mysteries

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 33

of war, death and the death drives and tried to make sense out of what seemed to be an affront to reason. As such, Guérande and Freud are allies of the life drives, seeking unity, coherence and a viable future. The Vampires, and especially Irma, are correspondingly agents of the death drives, Freud’s ‘gang of murderers’ who lurk in the unconscious and have become all too real, if only on film. They aim to tear apart the structures of society and reason. The wedding of Irma and the Grand Vampire at the end of the film is a frantic inversion of the placid, legitimate union of Guérande and his bride. The Vampires’ crimes are perpetrated in silence, they appear close to the irrational and the supernatural even when they have been rationally explained. They are motivated more by a love of perversity than material profit. They embody the Freudian death drives which are expressed in part, as Freud puts it, ‘as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms’.28 At the same time, their destructive tendencies are masochistically self-harming, indifferent to pleasure or gain in their insane rush towards annihilation. Satanas seems to think that the only way to save Irma from deportation to Algeria is to blow up the ship on which she is travelling and to kill everyone on board. Moreno appears to kill himself when imprisoned, Satanas actually does kill himself. This self-destructiveness culminates in the death of Irma Vep. On her wedding day the Vampires’ den is raided by Guérande and the police. Irma hides whilst the rest of the gang are killed or captured. We see her in close-up, with what may be blood trickling from her mouth, as if, vampire-like, she has been feeding on her prey. She picks up a gun that has been dropped in the fight, but instead of attempting to escape she goes to the cellar where Guérande’s wife and maid are held captive. What she does not know, presumably, is that earlier Guérande had managed to pass his gun to his wife through a grille. Irma taunts the wife and maid; as she turns to leave, the wife shoots her, and Guérande and Mazamette quickly join them to witness Irma’s demise. The mobility of desire and destructiveness in this sequence is fascinating. The wife stands in for her husband, Guérande, as the Vampires’ victim and nemesis. She has been captured by them as he had been in previous episodes; and she completes the work begun by Guérande in episode three when he shoots Irma but fails to kill her because his gun is loaded with blanks. The wife succeeds where the husband fails, using his gun to better

34

Haunted Subjects

effect than he did himself. It is not difficult to make sexual innuendo out of this. With obvious phallic symbolism, the gun brandished by Irma is noticeably larger than the one given by Guérande to his wife. Guérande only has a short gun, which fires blanks; he needs his wife to make it work properly. But even then their phallic power is overshadowed by that of Irma Vep, the male-female, lover-killer, whose revenge on Guérande even in her death is to turn his wife into a killer. So the wife realises her husband’s desire by killing Irma; and in the process she also realises Irma’s desire to taint the marriage that seemed flawless, making explicit the murderous violence lurking within the film’s prim bourgeois interiors. When the wife becomes a killer, in the place of both Guérande and Irma, the film reveals an underlying motivation behind the invention of the Vampire gang. By projecting the violence of society onto an identifiable group of criminals, the forces of order can assure the intelligibility of evil, deny their own responsibility for it, and indulge their inclination to violence in eradicating it. In its final moments the film shows that the bourgeois are killers too; they summon the Vampires into existence in order to justify their own desire to kill. And in the climax of the film when Irma is apparently shot dead on her wedding day by Guérande’s wife, perhaps she offers herself up too readily to her killer, uniting in one brilliant gesture the wife’s desire to kill her and her own wish to die. The criminals of Les Vampires thus incarnate, in Žižek’s characterisation of the death drives, ‘[this] constant implicit presence of a tendency to self-annihilation, of an enjoyment found in provoking one’s own ruin’.29 But Žižek also insists that the death drives are the very opposite of dying, designating ‘the dimension of what horror fiction calls the “undead”, a strange, immortal, indestructible life that persists beyond death’.30 So Irma can be taken to represent the death drives both in her collusion, in her own death and through the possibility that once again she survives her apparent demise, if only in a celluloid afterlife. The Vampires represent wanton, senseless destruction, but they also exercise an ambiguous seduction. In this respect they confirm one of the literary and filmic stereotypes of the supernatural vampire, in whom the promise of death is associated inextricably with sexual fascination. If, as Kristine Butler persuasively demonstrates, Guérande himself is never seriously at risk of succumbing to Irma’s charms, it is not so certain that the viewer will fare so comfortably.31 The Vampires

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 35

may be murderous and senselessly destructive, but the society they combat barely seems to be a source of life. There is an atmosphere of death in the deserted Paris streets through which they roam, and there is something deathlike also about Guérande, who lives with his mother in an immaculate apartment and goes to bed in neatly pressed pyjamas which leave no flesh showing. Even his marriage, to an eminently suitable girl, is curiously sexless. The final shot of the film shows Mazamette kissing (or biting? See above) his new fiancée whilst Guérande plants a chaste kiss on his wife’s cheek. In comparison, in this deadened context the Vampires are a pocket of desire and sexuality. The film may be leading all the while to their eradication, but they are also what gives it its death-dealing energy. Freud insisted that the death drives and the life drives are ‘fused, blended and alloyed with each other’.32 There is no simple opposition between them; and in Les Vampires we see them mingled and contaminated, each drawing impetus from the other, and each reversible into the other. The Vampires embody sexuality, whereas the forces of order are possessed by their deathlike, sexless sterility. The death drives are exuberant in the same measure that the life drives are mortifying. It is surely significant that Irma Vep, the death-bringing Vampire, dies precisely on her wedding day, so that the promise of a new future coincides with the curtailment of life. Irma, killed as she marries, thus stands for the deadlock of Eros and Thanatos, their irresistible and unsustainable entanglement with one another. In Freud’s work the death drives began as a hypothesis, as a possible way of explaining a gap left unfilled by his established conceptual framework. They rapidly became intellectually compelling, as Freud conceded in Civilization and its Discontents: ‘To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the ideas that I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way.’33 So the death drives begin as an explanatory fiction which accounts for an otherwise unexplained tendency to destroy, and they then acquire an irresistible power of seduction over the theorising mind. They destroy and repel, but also become indispensable. Freud’s seduction by the death drives is played out in Les Vampires. In this film the Vampires triumph, not in its ethically staid narrative, but insofar as the excess they embody is its only source of momentum. Like the death drives, they open a breach in the rational order of the real which will not easily be closed up

36

Haunted Subjects

again, and which, for want of better words, might be described as uncanny or daemonic. The smooth, consistent orders of chronology and space that Les Vampires carefully tries to maintain never quite contain the excess of the real.34 Death is never quite terminal, the dead live on, mutely perpetuated in the medium of silent film. As Derrida’s experience of seeing Pascale Ogier in Ghost Dance suggests, film brings back the dead. The Vampires of Feuillade’s film survive as the undead, in the un-death that celluloid confers. The genius of Les Vampires lies in its knowing exploration of their death and resurrection, of the return of the dead in and because of the medium of film. At the same time, the condition of this spectral return is that the Vampires were always already the agents and victims of the death drives they personify. Edgar Allan Poe’s M. Valdemar makes the apparently impossible statement, ‘I am dead’.35 Irma Vep, staring down from the screen, does not employ speech, but even so she tells us that she is dead, and that she has survived, watching, waiting, spying out our own past and future deaths. Feuillade’s Les Vampires explores some of the same territory as Freud’s speculations on desire, death and the death drives. Civilised humans are no less murderously inclined than primaeval man. To kill is no less fundamental an urge than it ever was, and we are all murderers at least in the unconscious of our desire.36 The death drives explain why the destructiveness of the human subject is turned inwards. We tend towards an inorganic state even as we long for life. Of course, as critics have been quick to point out, the death drives are utterly unprovable; they cannot be directly observed. Rather than a biological fact, they underpin a conception of the subject as the site of competing forces, where life and death are opposed and entangled. The Vampires of Feuillade’s film thus rejoin Freudian theory in offering a first sketch of the haunted subject which will be examined in subsequent chapters. Living in the presence of the undead, the subject is itself touched by death, unable to inhabit fully the domain of the living or the dead, or to keep their worlds neatly separate.

Nosferatu and the call of the death bird This chapter has argued that Feuillade’s Les Vampires plays upon the supernatural status of the vampire in an investigation of the

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 37

entanglement of life and death which parallels Freud’s study of the death drives. To conclude this discussion of vampires and silent cinema, I want to indicate how another vampire film, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, develops some of the same issues and anticipates questions which will be discussed later in this book. Nosferatu is the first known film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and unlike Les Vampires it asks us to believe that its central figure is genuinely a vampire. Names and some details are changed from Stoker’s original in part because Murnau did not have the rights to the novel; but the film opens with an acknowledgement of its debt to Dracula. This acknowledgement was perhaps foolish, since it allowed Stoker’s widow to sue its makers and insist that all copies of it be destroyed. Fortunately, Murnau’s film survived, thereby achieving, like the vampire, an afterlife that it was not supposed to have. The film opens in the town of Wisborg, amidst blissful, sunlit scenes depicting the apparently joyful marriage of Hutter and Ellen. On the promise of profit, and despite the foreboding of his wife, Hutter travels into what an intertitle calls ‘the country of ghosts’, to the Transylvanian castle of Count Orlok, who we soon discover is also the vampire Nosferatu, and who wishes to buy a property in Wisborg. Nosferatu sees a portrait of Ellen and admires her neck; he drinks Hutter’s blood but does not kill him. Having concluded the purchase of the property in Wisborg, Nosferatu packs up his coffin and departs. Hutter escapes and travels overland to Wisborg. Nosferatu arrives in Wisborg by sea, on a ship of which the crew are now all dead. He brings the plague with him; and as it relentlessly grips the city, Ellen discovers that the only way to save it is to give herself willingly to Nosferatu, now residing in a derelict building directly opposite her own house. If she can make him stay with her until the first cock’s crow, he will be destroyed. She gets rid of her husband on a pretext, summons Nosferatu, and lets him suck her blood until sunrise. He dies; Hutter returns, but Ellen is also dead. At the same moment, the plague abates. This summary of Murnau’s film does no justice to its visual brilliance, its key role in formulating the syntax of the horror genre, or its intriguingly knowing ambiguities. These ambiguities begin from the first moments of the film when Hutter offers Ellen a bouquet of flowers as token of his love. Ellen seems more distressed than pleased, asking her husband why he has destroyed the beautiful

38

Haunted Subjects

flowers. Death has entered this world and tainted love before Hutter even sets foot in the country of ghosts. From this early point Ellen’s love will always be touched by death. The entwining of light and dark impinges most importantly in the film through the hint of some sort of mysterious bond between Ellen and Nosferatu. This bond seems to be formed on Hutter’s second night in Nosferatu’s castle, when the vampire seems on the point of attacking and perhaps killing his guest. After Nosferatu has entered Hutter’s bedroom, the film cuts to Ellen, sleeping far away in Wisgborg. She awakens and, in a trance, walks along a balustrade outside her room, precariously close to falling. It is as if she is taking upon herself the danger currently facing her husband. She falls, but on the side of life and safety, at least on this occasion. The sequence then cuts back to Transylvania, where the shot of Nosferatu’s shadow looming over Hutter anticipates the sequence at the end of the film when we will see his shadow falling over Ellen’s body in the encounter that leads to both their deaths. Now, the sequence cuts back and forth between Transylvania and Wisborg. In Wisborg, Ellen is to the right of the screen, and she looks from right to left, holding out her arms as if beseeching Nosferatu not to proceed. Back in Transylvania, Nosferatu is facing his victim to the left of the screen. He looks back over his shoulder, as if he is looking directly at Ellen, to whom the film cuts once again. The rapid cutting here implies that Nosferatu has seen and heard Ellen, and that he is obeying her wishes. He gives up the attack and leaves Hutter’s bedroom. In Wisborg, Ellen passes out, and the doctor declares that she is suffering from ‘harmless blood congestion’; a panel informs the audience, however, that ‘her soul had heard the call of the death bird’. The cutting between Nosferatu and Ellen resembles the classic shot/reverse shot technique which links two characters in dialogue with one another. It suggests that an encounter or exchange takes place despite the spatial distance between the couple. Ellen knows what Nosferatu is doing; Nosferatu knows that she knows, and he does as she silently asks. At this moment she saves her husband and perhaps damns herself; and the link to Nosferatu cannot now be severed. As Hutter and Nosferatu make their way separately towards Wisborg, Ellen senses that someone is approaching, saying ‘I have to go to him. He is coming’. But it is not clear whether the he here is Hutter or Nosferatu, whose approach is felt by his deranged servant, the estate agent Knock. The possibility that it might be Nosferatu

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 39

rather than Hutter is suggested by the fact that Ellen is pictured waiting for whomever it is by the sea. Nosferatu, we know, is coming to Wisborg by ship, whereas Hutter is travelling by land. So visually at least, the film hints that Ellen is waiting for Nosferatu rather than Hutter. Consequently, when Ellen is seen embroidering the words ‘Ich liebe Dich’ (I love you), it may be an open question to whom she is declaring her love. The film hints also that Ellen and Hutter’s marriage may be less than entirely fulfilled. A late scene shows Ellen lying in bed whilst her husband sleeps in a chair, suggesting perhaps a lack of sexual union. And whereas her husband slept chastely in a chair, when she summons Nosferatu to her bedroom, he feeds off her whilst she lies on the bed, clad in a virginally white night dress. Herzog’s 1979 version of Nosferatu makes the sexual element of this much more explicit: the vampire touches his victim’s breast and genitals whilst sucking her blood, whereas Murnau’s character is seen touching only her head and back. But to deny some sort of erotic element in Murnau’s version would surely be as blinkered as to make too much of it. The ambiguous eroticism of Murnau’s film is more subtly stated. As Nosferatu first enters Ellen’s bedroom we see the shadow of his hand fall over her breast and clench as if in a fist. It is not easy to say whether Ellen’s response is agony or ecstasy. In any case, we do not see or need to see the physical caress. In The Material Ghost Gilberto Perez reads Nosferatu in a broadly Heideggerian perspective as a film about death and different ways of responding to it. Made five years before the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time, the film anticipates Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein. Perez explains this by suggesting that ‘surely the ideas of German existentialism were in the air the film breathed’.37 In Ellen’s sacrifice Perez sees ‘the self embracing, anxiously yet freely, the condition of “being-toward-death” ’ (147). He contrasts her assumption of her death with the attitudes of other characters: As Nosferatu the vampire personifies death, so the woman who confronts him, and who defines herself as an individual through this confrontation, may be seen to personify authentic Dasein. The wife in Nosferatu represents what, in the existential view of life, is the best way of being human at the juncture most defining of human being, the juncture with death. In destroying the vampire

40

Haunted Subjects

she certainly does not conquer death: she knows that in the process she must die herself. Unlike her husband in his journey, she is not the smiling type who would rather not think of death; unlike her husband later and unlike most of the townspeople, she is not the solemn type who would subsume death under the conventions of mortuary composure. Neither detached like the professor nor deathly afraid like the ship’s first mate, neither resigned to die like the dutiful captain nor welcoming of death like the mad realestate agent, she meets death of her own free will but in fear and trembling. She has what Heidegger calls the ‘courage of anxiety’ in the face of the end. Her peculiar bond with the vampire and her power over this figure of death may be seen to allegorize the orientation toward death peculiar to human being and the power one gains by making one’s death one’s own. (147) In this reading Ellen occupies a stoically, bravely Heideggerian position, confronting and accepting death as the fulfilment of her own being. Perez describes the film as ‘an allegory of the self thrown into a world where death impends’ (127). Ellen is Nosferatu’s ‘opponent’ and ‘destroyer’ (146). Perez downplays the sexuality of the final encounter, seeing in it a ‘metaphor’ for the self’s embracing of beingtoward-death (147). The fundamental narrative of the film is of how Ellen becomes ‘a figure of existentially authentic human being’ (147). This reading reproduces the Heideggerian model according to which the death that concerns me is my own; this model will be further discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to Sartre and Chapter 6 in relation to Levinas. In the current context it is important to underline that the Heideggerian reading fails to see the extent to which Ellen’s actions are not only a matter of her stance towards her own death. What she does is also due to her ambiguous link to the dead or undead other. Whatever the nature of the bond between them, there is certainly something which ties together Ellen and Nosferatu, even if they never physically meet until the film’s conclusion when they both die. Their relation is absurd, unfounded, nonsensical, suicidal even; but in the excess of its incomprehensibility, it may precisely illustrate Levinas’s disagreement with Heidegger, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6: I am constituted by the death of the other in ways that I could never have anticipated, and which could not have made sense to me. The death which concerns Ellen is not just her own, it is also

Vampires, Death Drives and Silent Film 41

Nosferatu’s – the death which has already happened and which is yet still to happen, and which she brings about at the same time as she hastens her own. This is not to say that Nosferatu should be read as offering a cinematic version of Levinas’s views on death. What it lacks for such a reading to be persuasive is a narrative of encounter and loss which would make place events in a coherent chronological sequence. In Murnau’s film, it is as if the encounter has already taken place, loss has already occurred, before the contingencies of empirical events. The subject is possessed by death before the trauma of actual bereavement. The film bears a sense that everything significant has already been decided before anything has actually happened. As Hutter rushes to work at the beginning of the film, he is told not to hurry because ‘Nobody can escape his destiny’. Everything is already settled. In fact, the film’s narrative only makes sense if somehow or other characters know in advance what awaits them, and what they must do. There is no surprise or need for choice. Ellen’s affinity with death is presaged by her lament over the dead flowers in the opening sequence; indeed, in the opening sequence, she seems to be dressed in black, as if she were already mourning a death, perhaps her own. The estate agent’s desire to sell to Nosferatu the building opposite Ellen and Hutter’s house is explained if we assume that he can already envisage the vampire’s yearning for Ellen; indeed, Nosferatu is bound to Ellen long before he sees her in person, and Ellen waits by the sea as if she knows the route he is taking. Most importantly, both characters must know that their encounter at the end of the film will lead to their deaths, so that their destruction becomes not so much an unfortunate consequence of their encounter as its true object and the enactment of a destiny that both have foreseen. Nosferatu is not lured into staying too long in Ellen’s bedchamber; rather, he allows himself to remain in fulfilment of a tacit pact which ensures that both he and Ellen will die. This film, I find myself wanting to say, knows a great deal about love and death and their strange entanglements; and it knows that the subject is haunted, inhabited by its own death and the death of others, before any encounter has taken place, before I have even met the one I will love and lose and grieve, or with whom I will choose to die. Nosferatu shares some key themes with Les Vampires. Both films describe an established, settled society beset by terrors which it

42

Haunted Subjects

cannot understand, and which threaten to bring it crashing down. In Nosferatu, though, the scientists and doctors are more ineffectual than Guérande in Les Vampires in their efforts to contain and eradicate the ravages of the vampire. It is as if Murnau’s film were even more sceptical than its predecessor concerning the prospects that a thinker like Freud might regain his intellectual mastery over an opaque reality. In both films it is ultimately a woman who succeeds where the men have failed: Guérande’s wife shoots Irma Vep, and Ellen brings about Nosferatu’s destruction. This suggests, perhaps, that in both films the threat of the irrational can be contained only by different forms of intervention from traditionally male models of logic and deduction. There are also important differences in the two films’ investigations of the entanglements of life and death. Feuillade’s Vampires are fully human, whereas Murnau’s vampire is a supernatural creature. Even so Nosferatu is strangely, recognisably human, despite or because of his awkward movements and hideous demeanour. He epitomises the ghost world of shadows, liminal spaces and the walking dead; yet he is also frail, alone, yearning and vulnerable, both the same as us and unspeakably alien. So even though Nosferatu asks us to believe that its central figure is a vampire whereas Les Vampires does not, neither film allows a clear demarcation between the living and the dead, the ordinary and the uncanny. Both films indicate that if the dead return it is because the living cannot be fully alive. Life and death have a hold on each other. Feuillade’s Les Vampires understands the peculiar vitality of the death drives, and Murnau’s Nosferatu shows the presence of death even at the height of life. Irma seems born to live even though it appears that she is killed several times; Ellen seems promised to death, having heard the death bird long before she even knew of Nosferatu’s existence. Finally, both Les Vampires and Nosferatu show remarkable insight into their own filmic medium, and in particular into the link between film and death. They describe domestic spaces becoming invaded by strangeness, light being overwhelmed by shadow, the known crumbling in the face of the unknown. Film transforms the familiar world into a land of ghosts, between life and death, seething with dangers as yet unseen and unnameable. It exhibits haunted subjects who do not know by whom or by what they are haunted, and who find themselves touched by death before and beyond any encounter in time and space.

3 Sartre’s Living Dead

Arise, vampires, spectres, ghosts, harpies, terror of the night. Arise, soldiers who blasphemed as they died, arise the unfortunate, the humiliated, arise the dead from hunger whose death cry was a curse. See, the living are here, the fat living prey! Arise, swoop down on them in a whirlwind and eat the flesh from their bones! Arise! Arise! Arise!    1

Spectral worlds The Freudian theory of the death drives describes the entanglement of life and death, and the haunting of the subject by its drive to self-annihilation. Jean-Paul Sartre’s subject is also haunted, but in very different ways. It is tragically free, ungrounded, motivated by desires and possibilities it can never realise. By looking at Sartre’s philosophical work L’Etre et le néant and at his script for the film Les Jeux sont faits, this chapter discusses how the Sartrean subject is also haunted in a more literal sense: it is surrounded by the dead, constantly obliged to contend with them, with their past actions, and with their influence on the living present. Sartre might seem an unlikely antecedent of hauntology, yet I suggest here that his treatment of the dead in L’Etre et le néant and Les Jeux sont faits to some extent prefigures Derrida’s deconstructive insights. Finally, the chapter examines two models for the relation with the returning dead in Sartre’s work, the first from L’Etre et le néant, the second from his 1964 lecture on Kierkegaard, ‘L’Universel singulier’. Here again, 43

44

Haunted Subjects

Sartre’s argument for Kierkegaard’s survival as subject long after his death anticipates Derrida’s endeavour (discussed in Chapter 7) to maintain a dialogue with dead writers and philosophers. The dead will remain with us, Sartre remarks at the end of his autobiographical text Les Mots, for as long as humanity roams the earth.2 The dead are never quite dead; they survive in what Sartre calls in L’Etre et le néant ‘dead life [la vie morte]’.3 In Huis clos Sartre envisages an afterlife in which, although they can no longer act, the dead continue to agonise over the meaning of their lives and their now irrevocable actions. Sartre’s script of Les Jeux sont faits, filmed by Jean Delannoy and shown at the Cannes film festival in 1947, goes a step further. It depicts two dead people allowed to return to earth in the pursuit of love, and at the same time given the chance to rectify their earlier mistakes, to change the meaning of their lives by intervening more effectively in their worlds. Despite its supernatural subject the stakes of Les Jeux sont faits are recognisably Sartrean. The film serves as an opportunity to probe the themes of freedom, responsibility, choice, the role of the individual agent in history, the self’s opacity to itself, the conflict endemic in the human condition, and the ways in which external circumstances make a mockery of our endeavours. The film poses the question: if we were given a second chance, could we revisit the scenes of our failures and transform them into successes, could we learn from our mistakes and lucidly re-model the world in the form of our desires, or are we condemned only to fail again, to make the same mistakes twice over? Ghost stories typically revolve around a temporary breach in the barriers which separate the worlds of the living and the dead, so that for a period the dead walk amongst us again. L’Etre et le néant suggests, rather, that the dead are with us always; they are an objective part of our situation and they are a factor which cannot be ignored in our decisions and actions. Moreover, Sartre’s version of phenomenology can be regarded as a precursor of hauntology insofar as it entails a suspension of the separation between appearance and reality, material objects and mere illusions, spectral presences and living beings. Sartre announces this from the opening sentence of the book: ‘Human thought has made considerable progress by reducing what exists to the series of appearances [apparitions] which manifest it’ (11). The French apparitions means both appearances and apparitions, and Sartre’s use of the word effectively erases the distinction

Sartre’s Living Dead 45

between what is materially and tangibly present and the ghost which merely appears. In the phenomenology of Hegel and Heidegger, the phenomenon is the means by which something else – Spirit or Being – appears in the world. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates how Spirit works its way through history without ever being directly manifested in it. In Heidegger’s Being and Time the phenomenon is that which shows itself, and through which is announced something which does not show itself: the Being of beings, for example. In these instances the phenomenon is the mode of appearance of something non-phenomenal. Sartre’s world, on the contrary, is a world in which the appearance hides nothing except other appearances: ‘What exists no longer has an exterior, if by that is meant an outer skin which would hide the true nature of the object. [  ] The appearances [apparitions] which manifest the existing being are neither interior nor exterior: none is worth more than any other; they all refer to other appearances and none of them is privileged’ (11). So there is nothing hidden in the phenomenon, no Being, Spirit, essence or identity that grounds reality and saves it from the ceaseless play of appearances. The phenomenon is both nothing other than itself and a sign that no appearance can ever be fully, finally itself. When we see a cup, for example, we know that there is no essence of the cup lurking behind its appearance, but we also know that our perception of it can never be complete: ‘what appears, in effect, is only an aspect of the object and the object is entirely in this aspect and entirely outside it. Entirely within insofar as it manifests itself in this aspect: it indicates itself as the structure of the appearance [apparition], which at the same time explains the series. Entirely outside, because the series itself will never appear nor can it appear’ (13–14). The cup, then, is both fully present, because there is no other dimension in which its essence might be located, but also largely absent because its appearance does not exhaust its reality. Sartre’s use of the word apparition is entirely apposite because the phenomenon both is, and can never be, fully itself; it is both present and absent, real and ghostlike. This is a point which makes of L’Etre et le néant an important unacknowledged precursor of hauntology. In the wake of Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, critics of poststructuralist inclination have become interested in ghosts in part because they epitomise the deconstructive disturbance of binary opposites: the ghost is neither properly dead nor fully alive, it is neither here nor not here, it is neither in the present

46

Haunted Subjects

nor in the past. Sartre’s apparitions prefigure Derrida’s ghosts and their role in his endeavour to disrupt the metaphysics of presence. They divest perceptible reality of its material or transcendental grounding; and they thrust us into a world of appearances and apparitions in which at the same time everything is only what it seems and nothing is quite what it seems. Moreover, the paradoxical status of the phenomenon as both nothing other than itself and never fully itself is reproduced in Sartre’s account of consciousness. Consciousness is described as ‘a being [which] implies a being other than itself ’ (29). It never fully coincides with itself, its being consists in its lack of being. The Sartrean pour-soi (for-itself) is ‘a presence to itself which lacks a certain presence to itself and it is as lack of this presence that it is presence to itself’ (140); or as Sartre famously puts it, it is a being ‘which is not what it is and which is what it is not’ (117). The pour-soi pursues a doomed project of self-coincidence. It desires to be other than it is, but it can never attain what it wants without its desire being instantaneously deflected elsewhere. It strains to be what it can never be, and it can never achieve the impossible status of the en-soipour-soi (in-itself-for-itself) in which project and being would be at one. Consciousness, then, is eminently ghost-like, in that it is both there and not there; it is self-present only insofar as it is absent from itself. However, the knowledge that the pour-soi can never coincide with itself cannot prevent it from attempting to realise its desires, because it is its destiny to try and to fail. So Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant can be read as a kind of ghost story in which the subject is haunted by itself, by its elusive self-presence and its unrealisable desires. It is, as Sartre puts it, ‘haunted [hanté] by the presence of that with which it would have to coincide to be itself ’ (140); I am ‘haunted [hanté] by that being which I fear to encounter one day in my path, which is so alien to me and yet which is my being, and about which I also know that, despite my best efforts, I will never encounter it’ (418). And as we shall see, Les Jeux sont faits is a more lucid re-writing of L’Etre et le néant because it baldly presents the union of humankind with its actions and their meanings as nothing more than a fantastical ghost story. L’Etre et le néant and Les Jeux sont faits are, then, both concerned with unrealisable desires and failed projects. They also both consider the possibility of second chances, of revisiting the scenes of past failures with the prospect of rectifying them. In L’Etre et le néant Sartre

Sartre’s Living Dead 47

suggests that there are no second chances because the situations in which we act and choose can never be reproduced (604–5). Les Jeux sont faits allows its protagonists to revisit their lives, offering them the opportunity to make good their former failures only to show that they cannot truly grasp it.

Second chances Second chances and alternative realities have long been stock themes of film, and there are, I believe, good reasons for this. Film as medium is tied to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies which made possible the photographic reproduction of images, and then of moving images, and of sound. Repetition without significant variation is the formal condition of film art. A film is made to be shown again and again, and to be always the same. There have been cases of films shot and screened with alternative endings, and the release of directors’ cuts also ensures that the earliest versions to be released may not be definitive. On the whole, though, variance is a relatively minor phenomenon in film form, and this may be why it has acquired such significance as a theme. Utterly bound to the technologies of reproduction and the unvarying repetition of the same, filmmakers have rebelled against the limitations of their medium by making film a place where second chances are offered, where repetition becomes an opportunity to correct the errors committed the first time around. The senseless chance encounters which form our reality could, with only the tiniest of adjustments, have led to quite different results. Film can show us how this is possible by forging fundamentally different worlds out of nearidentical data. Examples which use film in this way include Kie´slowski’s Blind Chance, which traces three alternative lives for a man who misses a train, or Run Lola Run, in which minor variants produce, once again, three quite different conclusions, or Resnais’s Smoking No Smoking, in which the decision whether or not to smoke a cigarette produces two alternative films with a total of twelve possible endings. The film that pushes the device to its extreme point is perhaps Groundhog Day, in which a cynical weatherman relives the same day over and over again until he finally gets it right in every detail. For the purposes of this chapter, the most important example of the ‘alternative worlds’

48

Haunted Subjects

theme is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. A man driven to the brink of suicide is shown by his guardian angel what the world would have been like had he never existed. He learns that life, for all its flaws, compromises, abandoned hopes and imperfections, is precious, and that a well-meaning individual really can make a huge positive impact on the world he inhabits. Capra’s film was released in 1946, the year before Les Jeux sont faits; and I am tempted to regard Sartre’s scenario as a direct re-writing and inversion of Capra’s version of American liberal individualism in which the benevolent subject changes the world for the better. Any apparent link between Capra’s hopeful individualism and Sartre’s existentialism is only superficial. Sartre’s script demonstrates rather that motives are obscure, decisions are flawed, actions backfire, and nothing really changes. A theoretical framework for understanding second chances and alternative worlds in film is provided by Slavoj Žižek, particularly in his book on Kie´slowski, The Fright of Real Tears. According to Žižek the growing perception of our reality as but one of innumerable alternative or possible worlds is at odds with the predominantly linear forms most frequently adopted in the storytelling media. This clashes with a growing perception of our reality ‘as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an “open” situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our “true” reality as a spectre of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency’.4 Such is the reign of blind chance that things so easily could have been totally different, and perhaps somewhere they are. Films such as those mentioned above develop alternative narrative lines in the attempt to depict the ghosting of our reality by other possible worlds. This might appear to be liberating since it offers us a vision of redeemed contingency: things may go wrong for us here, but somewhere there is a world in which everything runs according to our desires. However Žižek asks whether this sense of alternative realities is liberating or oppressive. If there is only one ‘real’ world, we might make choices which would change it meaningfully; but if all possibilities are in some way played out in alternative worlds, then there is, as Žižek puts it, ‘no freedom of choice precisely because all choices have already been realised’ (79). The proliferation of realities might look as if it holds out the prospect of ultimate freedom, but it actually negates it utterly.

Sartre’s Living Dead 49

In fact, alternative reality movies characteristically back off from their most radical suggestion that all the possibilities they depict are equally real and that our randomly contingent world has no ontological priority over any other. Perhaps because film remains a linear, sequential medium, it tends to imply that the final alternative shown is also the most real one. In Kie´slowski’s Blind Chance the protagonist ‘really’ becomes a doctor and dies in a plane explosion; in Run Lola Run Lola ‘really’ does save herself, her boyfriend and the money. As Žižek puts it, ‘in both cases, one can interpret the film as if only the third story is the “real” one, the other two staging the fantasmatic price the subject has to pay for the “real” outcome’ (81). These films seem to explore the possibility of alternative worlds, but end up endorsing only one. Its linear medium wins out over its thematic musings about parallel realities. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life also refuses to give equal weight to the two worlds it proposes. The world finally sanctioned as ‘real’ is the wonderful one to which James Stewart joyfully returns at the end of the film, even though, as Žižek suggests, everyone will be aware that the squalid alternative world of prostitution, alcoholism and crime is in fact at least as real as the saccharine small-town vision of happy families and virtue rewarded (63–4). A variant on the ‘alternative worlds’ form is the second-chance scenario, whereby characters are given the opportunity of taking again the decisions and actions that went wrong in the past. The implication here is that we can learn from our mistakes and those of others, we can go back and replace failure with success. Following Annette Insdorf’s book Double Lives, Second Chances, Žižek sees Kie´slowski’s films as a cinema of second chances. Fatal choices can be repeated and put right. A prior mistake can become what Insdorf calls ‘a base for successful action’.5 But the second chance is also the opportunity to make the same mistake again, or new mistakes, because in our botched, contingent and senseless world the ‘right’ answer can never be assured. So on the one hand, as Žižek puts it, ‘we are given a second chance, we can learn from the past’ (138); but at the same time the revised choice, the ‘wise’ choice informed by previous mistakes, may simply be a different kind of mistake. In Kie´slowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique, for example, the second Véronique extends her life by giving up her singing career, but in the process she compromises her desire and commits what Žižek calls an

50

Haunted Subjects

‘ethical betrayal’ (138). The second chance may after all be merely the chance to fail differently. Sartre’s script and Delannoy’s film of Les Jeux sont faits pose the questions that arise in the course of Žižek’s discussion: if we were given a second chance, could we learn from our mistakes and make a better, wiser choice capable of re-inventing the world? Sartre’s high existentialist optimism, his belief in humankind as the creator of its own future, would seem to commit him to a positive response; but the film suggests that the second chance is not in fact real, that we are destined to repeat our mistakes, making (to misquote Marx misquoting Hegel) a farce out of the tragedy of our historical failings.6 The film revolves around two characters, Eve and Pierre. Eve is dying, poisoned by her husband who has married her for her dowry and who now wants to marry her younger sister for the same reason. Pierre is the leader of an imminent insurrection against a protofascist dictatorship. He is shot and killed by a police informer, but he dies confident in the belief that the forthcoming insurrection will succeed in overturning the government. Once dead, Eve and Pierre become ghosts in a bizarre afterlife in which they are free to roam wherever they want, though they cannot touch or communicate with the living. Curious to see at close quarters the dictator against whom he has conspired for many years, Pierre goes to his palace and learns that the government knows all about the planned insurrection, and that it intends to use it as an occasion brutally to repress all opposition. Pierre has failed, just as Eve has failed to save her sister. The two ghosts meet, and it is suggested that they might even have had a romance, if they were still living. At this point they are returned to the offices of the administration where they initially signed on as ghosts, and Article 140 is explained to them. According to this Article, if two beings who were destined to be together never met during their lifetimes, they may return to earth for 24 hours, with full memory of their experiences as ghosts. If, in those 24 hours, they can form a flawless union, they will be allowed to continue their lives together; but if there is any distrust between them, they will return to the afterlife. Eve and Pierre accept this opportunity. However, an ambiguity remains throughout the film over whether they return in order to find love, or to rectify their earlier mistakes. In the climactic sequence, Pierre tries to persuade the revolutionaries to delay the insurrection, but it is too late, and

Sartre’s Living Dead 51

he is killed again; and Eve tries to make her sister see the truth about her husband but does not succeed in convincing her, and she dies at the same moment as Pierre. The final scene shows them as ghosts again, still unsure about whether or not they could have achieved true love. Finally, two young ghosts run up to them and ask them if they know about Article 140. The two youngsters believe that they were destined for one another and hope that they may return to life in order to pursue the chance of happiness. Eve and Pierre advise the couple to give it a try, and they then go their separate ways. They have been given a second chance, and failed to take advantage of it; perhaps others will fare better.

The living dead There is a clear element of whimsy in Les Jeux sont faits, particularly in the depiction of the afterlife administration as an officious bureaucracy with regulations and rulebooks. At the same time, the philosophical seriousness of the work should not be underestimated. The drama of haunted consciousness endeavouring and failing to realise its projects staged in L’Etre et le néant is literalised in Les Jeux sont faits as the story of ghosts striving to make themselves and their desires real. Moreover, Sartre’s film script depends directly on his discussion of death in L’Etre et le néant (‘Ma mort’, 589–612), and even the title of the film is anticipated in the earlier philosophical work. In L’Etre et le néant Sartre works out his views on death through a critical engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. There, Heidegger insists that Being is Being-for-death. Death is always my own, it is ‘my ownmost possibility’; I cannot die for anyone else and no one else can die for me.7 Sartre counters by wondering whether death can be individualised and personalised in this way. How can I know that it is my death that awaits me? Sartre gives the example of a man condemned to death who prepares himself bravely for his final moments on the scaffold, but is carried off prematurely by Spanish flu (591). His ‘ownmost’ death has been stolen from him by chance. For Sartre, death is something that happens to us, rather than something that belongs to us in our most authentic being. Moreover, Sartre questions whether Heidegger is right to say that no one can die in our place. In a sense it is obviously true that at the moment of our death

52

Haunted Subjects

no one can die for us; but in another sense one death can substitute for another: ‘if dying is dying in order to edify, to bear witness, for one’s country, and so on, then anyone at all can die in my place’ (592). For Sartre, Heidegger’s account of death makes of it something too personal, too much the property of the individual. Whereas for Heidegger death is my most authentic possibility, for Sartre it is rather ‘an always possible destruction of my possibilities, which is outside my possibilities’ (595). Heideggerian Dasein lives with its eye firmly focussed on its own mortality; Sartrean pour-soi, on the other hand, does not dwell on death. Restlessly, it projects and plans for possible futures, it never gives up the aim of transforming itself and its world. In this perspective death is absurd, it strikes from the outside and it comes always too soon or too late. It is not what makes sense of an existence, but rather what robs life of its capacity to create and to renew its meanings. For Heidegger, the dead are no longer part of our world. For Sartre, on the other hand, the dead are all around us, they are still present even if no longer active. In Les Jeux sont faits the dead roam amongst the living, but unseen by them. From the perspective of L’Etre et le néant, the failure to see the dead is a choice of the living, because the dead do not simply disappear or survive only in the memories or consciousness of the living. They continue to constitute the world as they did before their demise; the only – not insignificant – difference is that they can no longer play an active part in determining its meaning. It is now for the living to take responsibility for the dead, and they cannot refuse to do so: In reality, the relation to the dead – to all the dead – is an essential structure of the fundamental relation I have called ‘being-forthe-other’. [  ] It is true that the dead choose us, but first of all we must have chosen them. Here we find again the fundamental relation linking facticity to freedom: we choose our attitude towards the dead, but it is not possible for us to choose none at all. (600) Sartre differs from Heidegger in maintaining that a relation with the other persists beyond death. But the dead subject has lost all agency, and it has been defeated in its struggle to control the meaning of its acts. It is now the living who will decide to recall or to forget

Sartre’s Living Dead 53

me, to give my acts meaning or to rob them of their justification. The living can fight to control their own meanings; the dead have them assigned by the surviving other. Two key points emerge from this discussion of death in L’Etre et le néant. First, living subjects are engaged in a drama with the dead. Whether they accept it or not, they play out a conflict over the significance of the past and its insertion into the present. Indifference to the dead is merely a relation to them which we have chosen from amongst other possibilities. Second, death is not a property, the ‘ownmost possibility’, of the subject; rather it is a contingent event which strikes from the outside and destroys my capacity to play a role in the future determination of meaning. Except in the rarest circumstances, death will never come at the perfect moment, it will never be fully my own: We have in fact every chance of dying before completing our task or, on the contrary, of surviving it. So there is a very weak chance that our death will be presented, like Sophocles’s for example, as a perfect culmination. But if it is only chance which decides the character of our death, and therefore of our life, even the death which would be most like the end of a melody cannot be expected as such: chance, as it decides on the matter, takes away any semblance of a harmonious end. (594)

Failing again The principal characters of Les Jeux sont faits will be given a lesson in the harsh contingencies that characterise the world of L’Etre et le néant. This is illustrated, for example, by Pierre’s loss of control over the significance of his life. After his death he is confident that his work is complete: the insurrection he has been preparing for years will be successful, and his actions will have the meaning he intended them to have. He believes that ‘the essential is to have done what one had to do’.8 He has done his job properly, and now the insurrection is bound to succeed: ‘It can’t go wrong’ (41). The future meaning of his life is assured by his past actions. He learns, though, that being dead he no longer has a role to play in the determination of meaning. He has in fact miscalculated, the insurrection will fail, and his work will prove to have been

54

Haunted Subjects

pointless. Rather than a heroic leader who died on the eve of his greatest success, he will be remembered as a failure whose efforts were in vain. The expression les jeux sont faits, from which Sartre’s script takes its title, refers to the moment in, for example, a game of roulette when bets have been laid; it is too late to revoke them, but the spin of the wheel has not yet determined who will win or lose. It is a moment of uncertainty: decisions have been taken, but their consequences are not yet known. This recalls the situation of the dead in L’Etre et le néant, and indeed Sartre’s discussion employs the expression which would provide the title for his film script. He argues that the dead are still with us, but that the meaning of their acts and of their legacy is still undecided because it is up to the living to accept or to transform them. To be dead means no longer to be able to intervene in the human project of giving sense to the world. The life of the dead is both fully complete and incessantly changing: ‘That means that, for them, the chips are down [les jeux sont faits] and they will now undergo their changes without being at all responsible for them’ (601). The dead are dispossessed of their acts. They have made their choices, but it is for the living to allocate their meaning and to decide their success or failure, their importance or irrelevance. Sartre continues the gambling metaphor a few pages later when referring to the irreversibility of time and choice. He suggests that there are no second chances because time does not run backwards and circumstances will never be repeated: ‘From that point, even if I were immortal, I could not “change my bet” [reprendre mon coup]; it is forbidden by the irreversibility of temporality, and this irreversibility is nothing other than the character proper to liberty realising itself in time’ (604). Earlier also, Sartre had described human life as ‘a life which cannot start again, in which you can never change your bet [où l’on ne reprend jamais son coup]’ (590). Eve reflects these lines in the closing scene of Les Jeux sont faits in the script’s only reference to its title: ‘The chips are down, you see. You can’t change your bet [Les jeux sont faits, voyez vous. On ne reprend pas son coup]’ (141). For the dead, then, there is no second chance, even if the meaning of their now-irrevocable actions has yet to be settled. Whilst haunting the regent’s palace and still confident in the success of the insurrection he has prepared, Pierre believes that his life has been a success: ‘I haven’t failed in my life’ (43). In L’Etre et le néant, though,

Sartre’s Living Dead 55

Sartre tells us that ‘The story of a life, whatever it is, is the story of a failure’ (538); and the other ghosts in Les Jeux sont faits echo this view: ‘Everyone fails in their life’, ‘You always fail in your life, from the moment that you die’, ‘You always die too soon    or too late’ (42). Pierre’s claim that he has not failed exhibits an entirely false belief that the consequences of his actions are determined in advance by his decisions. Because he has carefully planned and prepared the insurrection, he is convinced that it must succeed. He believes that he controls the meaning of his actions because their success will flow directly from his choices. He has not yet discovered that the authorities know all about the insurrection, and that it is in fact bound to fail. When he returns to the world of the living, Pierre attempts to make up for his errors by delaying the insurrection, but again he does not succeed. Even his standing as leader slips away as his former comrades become persuaded that he has betrayed them. Leader or traitor, hero or fool, revolutionary or unwitting agent of repression, Pierre cannot determine the significance that will be attached to his own life. His freely taken decisions set up a chain of events in which he is not free to intervene, and to which he is not free to give the meaning he might wish. This is a key respect in which Les Jeux sont faits re-writes and inverts the optimistic individualism of the previous year’s It’s a Wonderful Life. In Capra’s film, the goodness of one man really does affect the community for the better; in Les Jeux sont faits the consequences of actions are incalculable, and most likely to turn out for the worse. Whereas Capra’s world is kept in order by benevolent guardian angels, Sartre’s is governed by chance, contingency and the near-inevitability of failure. Capra’s hero decides to kill himself because he believes he has failed; but he is given a second chance, shown that in fact he has succeeded in ways he could never have anticipated, and he is allowed to return to his former life in the knowledge of his success. Sartre’s protagonists in Les Jeux sont faits are also given the illusion of a second chance as they are permitted to return to earth with the knowledge they have acquired in the afterlife. But this knowledge does not allow them to redeem their failures. Eve will not persuade her sister to abandon her murderous husband, Pierre will not prevent the suppression of the opposition movement he had founded, and the couple will not find the flawless love that had eluded them during their earlier lives. They do perhaps have one not insignificant success when they

56

Haunted Subjects

rescue the child of a fellow ghost from her abusive stepfather and give her the chance of a better future. But in their major projects they fail just as decisively as they had the first time around, even if they fail for different reasons. Given more time, Eve still cannot persuade her sister of her husband’s wickedness. Pierre, now compromised by his relationship with the wife of a leader of the hated Militia, is no longer trusted by the insurgents and his warnings are ignored. And inadvertently, in his last attempt to save the insurrection Pierre in fact aggravates the disaster he had wanted to avoid. He leads his future assassin to the hangar where his comrades are gathered; the assassin then telephones the Militia, who arrive on the scene and capture or kill the insurgents. The consequences of Pierre’s acts are precisely the opposite of what he intended. For the dead, and even for the living, there are then no second chances, except perhaps the unhoped-for chance to fail for a second time. The films discussed earlier hold out the prospect of second chances presented to us as if by a benevolent destiny which allows us to try again, informed by our failures; or else they depict alternative worlds in which our projects are realised, however improbably. I might fail here, now, but in some parallel reality the senseless contingent encounters that have impeded me conspire instead to bring all my dreams to fruition. Elsewhere, I am the hero of circumstance, not its victim. Les Jeux sont faits, on the contrary, is a film about second chances and alternative outcomes which shows that in fact the future cannot be modelled in the form of our desires. There is no second chance for the dead, as there is none for the living. For Sartre in the 1940s, we are of course free, terribly free; however this does not mean that we can simply do what we want. A prisoner is not free to leave her prison, for example.9 She is free to plan her escape or work for her liberation, but there is no guarantee that her projects will succeed. Sartrean freedom is a far cry from the promise that desire can be realised; and in Les Jeux sont faits Eve and Pierre learn that inscrutable contingency rather than benevolent destiny causes their projects to falter. So Les Jeux sont faits offers a filmic vehicle for Sartre’s uncompromising vision of human reality as conflict and failure. Freedom is a terrible given and a doomed project. The second chance is missed as surely as the first one, the revolution fails, love fails. However we should not forget that the film is also haunted by Sartre’s incorrigible

Sartre’s Living Dead 57

optimism. It ends, despite everything, with the possibility of a fresh beginning, as a couple of new ghosts announce their desire to appeal to Article 140, to see if it is after all possible to make up for one’s past failings. ‘Can one try to begin one’s life again?’, asks the young man. ‘Try [Essayez]’, Pierre advises, to which Eve adds ‘Try all the same [Essayez tout de même]’ (143). This ‘Try all the same’ sums up the position of the free subject knowing itself to have little prospect of success, but trying its chances anyway. It recalls Kie´slowski’s comment on the ending of one of his films in which ‘everything is still possible, although we already know that nothing is possible’.10 And the ending of Les Jeux sont faits perhaps also reflects Sartre’s own stubborn, possibly admirable, refusal to accept his own bleakest insights. Knowing that every life is a failure, that the world is not changing for the better, that we kick against history and history kicks back harder, that our actions and our meanings escape us, that we are the playthings of contingency, Sartre refuses to draw the lessons that might inescapably flow from such insights. ‘Try all the same’ are the last words spoken in Les Jeux sont faits, and they are its final expression of hope that there might be, after all, second chances and alternative futures. And even if failure is the inevitable outcome of our endeavours, there is yet another twist to the tale. By the spiralling logic of qui perd gagne (loser wins), failure may be a form of success, even if success is also a form of failure, since failure is an aspect of human freedom. Pierre and Eve were, we are told, destined for one another, but their failure to stay together breaks the chains of a causality which was not of their making. Pierre and Eve fail because of the choices they make, and choosing to fail is still choice, freely made whatever the cost. Destiny can after all be cheated, even if there is still a grim price to pay for denying its rule. So failure is one of the ways in which human beings contrive to remain centres of indeterminacy, not fully subject to the shackles of History even as it seeks to make us submit to its intolerable conditions.11 Les Jeux sont faits suggests that we have little prospect of learning from our mistakes and realising a future in the likeness of our desires in a world given over to absurdity and blind, senseless contingency. But the game goes on. Our best chance may be, as Beckett advises, to try again, to fail again, and to fail better.12 And perhaps we can learn to hold on to our failures, to make them our own, because they are the stuff our lives are made of.

58

Haunted Subjects

The return of the dead The dead of Les Jeux sont faits return, then, to fail for a second time, though failure is a complex word in Sartre’s vocabulary, and one that should certainly not be understood in only negative terms. This final section examines two models for the relation between the living and the dead in Sartre’s writing; in the second, less conflictual model, failure once again plays an essential role in saving some element of optimism for our commerce with the dead. Harold Bloom’s use of the term apophrades in The Anxiety of Influence provides a useful starting point for understanding Sartre’s two models. Apophrades is the last of what Bloom calls the six ‘revisionary ratios’ through which poets create their own work by reading, misreading, transforming or being transformed by the poems of their precursors. Bloom explains the term as follows: Apophrades, or the return of the dead; I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead returned to reinhabit the houses in which they had lived. The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.13 Bloom’s use of the term entails a dramatic and crucial reversal. The return of the dead into the houses of the living is at first unwelcome, ‘dismal’ and ‘unlucky’. It seems that we are not yet rid of the dead after all; they are still the true masters in what we thought were our homes or our poems. And yet, truly strong poets turn this to their benefit, engineering what Bloom calls a ‘positive apophrades’.14 In the search for poetic originality, which is also the search for subjectivity, poets and subjects are locked in an involuntary struggle with the dead, in which the dead most often emerge victorious. But sometimes

Sartre’s Living Dead 59

living poets succeed in asserting their priority over their precursors, so that, as Bloom puts it, ‘the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors’.15 In Bloom’s account the relation with the dead is a battle for priority. He proposes two possible outcomes, one in which the dead tyrannise the living to the point that they are virtually incapacitated, and the second in which the living succeed in asserting their ascendancy over the dead. In both cases the relation is defined by a struggle which the dead are likely, but not certain, to win. In this section, I shall suggest that Sartre also proposes two versions of apophrades, but that in the second, later model he manages to think outside the conflictual schema of his writing in the 1940s and to offer an account of the survival of the dead directly pertinent to his own continuing relevance more than a hundred years after his birth. In Act II of his play Les Mouches Sartre stages a version of apophrades in the ceremony through which the dead of Argos are released from Hell for a day. As Electre puts it, ‘our dead, so it is said, come back from Hell and spread around the town. We lay places for them at table, we offer them chairs and beds, we squeeze up a little to make space for them in the evening, they go wherever they want. No one thinks of anyone but them. You can imagine how the living lament: “My little dead one, my little dead one, I did not mean to offend you, forgive me”.’16 Sartre’s Argos is a city entirely in the thrall of the dead, given over to fear, regret, repentance, remorse and grief. The major crime which the city expiates is the murder of Agamemnon by Egisthe, but everyone has reason to feel that their lives are blighted by the dead. As noted in Chapter 1 of this book, Žižek observes that the return of the living dead may be the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture; and he suggests that the dead return ‘as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt’.17 Žižek’s view is foreshadowed in Sartre’s Argos. Once dead, debtors become creditors who can never be paid off: ‘there they are, all your unfortunate debtors, those who died in misery and those who hanged themselves because you were ruining them. There they are, and now it is they who are your creditors.’18 Every crime, every misdemeanour, every failing towards the dead is now ossified into an unpayable debt, as Egisthe explains: ‘Their grievances cannot be assuaged because their account has been frozen for ever. [  ] The dead no longer exist – do

60

Haunted Subjects

you understand this implacable word? – they no longer exist, and that is why they have become the incorruptible guardians of your crimes.’19 There can be no pity or respite; the dead have debilitated the living. What the living do not know, or what they know without wanting to know, is what Jupiter calls ‘the painful secret of Gods and kings’, which is also the secret of the dead, namely that men and women are free.20 Their unpaid and unpayable debt to the dead is chosen by them because there is in fact no compelling obligation which forces them to accept it. This does not mean that, for Sartre, the dead are not still with us; on the contrary, as was indicated at the beginning of this chapter, he remarks at the end of Les Mots that they will remain with us for as long as humanity roams the earth. Nor does it mean that the relation with the dead is not, as it is for Harold Bloom, a struggle for supremacy. But in the agonistic context of L’Etre et le néant at least, victory is for the living. Sartre is adamant in L’Etre et le néant that the dead exist, and not just in what he calls ‘simple spectral survival’, as memories and images in the minds of the living: ‘My being-for-the-other is a real being, and if it remains in the hands of the other like a coat that I leave behind after my death, it is a real dimension of my being – a dimension that has become my only dimension – and not merely an insubstantial ghost’ (602). The dead are ‘objective and opaque beings, but ones which are simply reduced to the sole dimension of exteriority’ (602). So the dead live on in what Sartre calls their ‘dead life’ (599), though they are no longer agents, no longer capable of conceiving projects for the future or actively intervening in the meaning of the present. Rather than the dead being the guardians of our crimes, as Egisthe insists in Les Mouches, it is the living who are the guardians of the dead (599). In terms of the conflict between self and other which informs the analysis in L’Etre et le néant, my death is also my ultimate defeat at the hands of the surviving other: But the fact of death, without exactly being on the side of one or other of the adversaries in the combat, gives the final victory to the Other’s point of view by moving the combat and its stakes onto a different terrain, that is, by suddenly suppressing one of the combatants. In this sense dying is to be condemned, whatever ephemeral victory one might have had over the Other and even

Sartre’s Living Dead 61

if one has used the Other ‘to sculpt one’s own statue’, to being no longer in existence except through the Other and to receiving from the Other one’s meaning and even the meaning of one’s victory. (602) For the Sartre of L’Etre et le néant, death prolongs the conflict which characterises relations between the living; but it removes my ability to determine the sense of my own actions, so, as Sartre puts it, ‘To be dead is to be at the prey of the living’ (601). This precisely inverts the situation in Les Mouches, in which the living are prey to the dead, though in fact the two texts are entirely compatible with one another. The citizens of Argos exemplify an inauthentic stance, reluctant to acknowledge the terrifying reality of freedom; L’Etre et le néant describes death and the dead as a part of the human situation, but only the living remain capable of giving that situation meaning. In both cases the dead are a real presence, and in both cases the struggle for priority serves as the key for the relation between the living and the dead. In this respect Bloom’s apophrades defines what is at stake in the Sartrean return of the dead. When the dead return to inhabit the houses of the living, who will emerge victorious in the battle for ascendancy? For Bloom, the issue depends on whether the poet is weak or strong, since the strong poet, whether living or dead, will always win through. For Sartre the issue is more one of authenticity or inauthenticity, since, whether we accept it or not, the dead have always inevitably lost because it is now their role to be assigned meaning rather than to play a part in creating it. They do not victimise us, as the people of Argos have allowed themselves to be persuaded; rather they depend on us to approve and to complete their projects, or to relegate them to oblivion. The dead can haunt the house of the living only insofar as we are willing to make space for them. For Sartre in the 1940s death is resolutely not, as it is for Heidegger, the realisation of an aspect of my being nor, as with the Freudian death drives, a tendency secretly working away within my psyche. It comes entirely from the outside; it is always an accident, albeit one which will inevitably occur at some time or other. Underlying Sartre’s position is a conflictual model of human relations in which death appears as defeat and failure. It is the curtailment of my projects and my submission to the probably hostile guardianship of the Other.

62

Haunted Subjects

The dead return not, as the self-deluded citizens of Argos believe, to blight the lives of the living, nor as the ghosts of Les Jeux sont faits believe, to complete the work they had begun in their lifetimes; they survive only as the now-frozen adversaries of the living, vanquished and depending on their successors to decide the meanings of their lives and actions. However, there is another model for the return of the dead to be found in Sartre’s writing. It is developed most fully in his lecture on Kierkegaard entitled ‘L’Universel singulier’. This lecture was delivered in 1964, nearly one hundred years after Kierkegaard’s death (he died in 1865), as part of a conference entitled ‘Kierkegaard vivant’ (Kierkegaard alive). The paper is in part a discussion of what it means to talk about the survival and afterlife of Kierkegaard; and for us now, more than one hundred years after Sartre’s birth, it can be read as Sartre’s reflection on his own afterlife. What we find here is a very different account of the return of the dead from that offered in L’Etre et le néant or Les Mouches, one unencumbered by the conflictual apparatus dominating the earlier texts and entailing a recuperation of the notion of death as failure. In some respects ‘L’Universel singulier’ is compatible with the arguments of L’Etre et le néant. Death turns the subject into an object, leaving the living to determine its significance. At the same time there is an important shift in perspective. L’Etre et le néant refers to my death, the death of the first person, and the victory over me of the surviving Other; in ‘L’Universel singulier’ it is the Other (Kierkegaard) who dies, and the first person who survives. This goes along with two further crucial shifts. First, there is no sense here that the self has defeated the Other by the mere fact of its survival. The dead person is no longer depicted as a vanquished adversary. And, second, the Other’s death is not associated with a complete abolition of his subjectivity. Death transforms the subject into an object, it abolishes the subject’s agency and allows the flux of an existence to be turned into the rigidity of knowledge. And yet, Sartre insists, something remains as yet unaccounted for in the passing of the dead. Kierkegaard is a scandal and a paradox because he shows better than anyone that some part of subjectivity survives the brutal march of history: ‘the paradox proclaimed by this dead man is that a historical being, after his death, can still communicate with following generations as a non-object, as an absolute subject’.21

Sartre’s Living Dead 63

This ability to communicate beyond the grave has nothing to do with the formulation of determinate meanings. Such meanings could be transformed into objects of knowledge, whereas the survival of subjectivity requires that the subject continues to elude totalising knowledge. What Kierkegaard communicates is precisely his ungraspability. Philosophically, Sartre’s target here is the same as Kierkegaard’s, namely the prospect of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge. The dead will be merely objects once they are fully known; they survive as subjects precisely insofar as they remain outside knowledge: ‘In this sense, lived experience as concrete reality is posited as non-knowing [non-savoir]. But this negation of knowledge implies the affirmation of oneself’ (159). Kierkegaard’s numerous pseudonyms are masks that defer or impede the final revelation of the objective historical man. His work survives through its ability to maintain that impediment; Kierkegaard still produces gaps or lacunae in knowledge. As we shall see in Chapter 4 in relation to Derrida, Abraham and Torok, the key issue in the survival of the dead and their continuing hold over the living concerns the status of their secrets. In his false identities and his contradictions, through humour and irony, Kierkegaard ‘shows himself and hides himself at the same time. It is not true that he refuses to communicate: it’s simply that he remains secret even in communication’ (161). So what the dead Kierkegaard communicates is not the content of his secrets, the hidden truth which once revealed becomes knowledge, but secrecy itself. In principle, death curtails the ability of the subject to reinvent its own significance. This does not mean that its significance is closed down, only that it is now entirely in the hands of the living. Where ‘L’Universel singulier’ marks a crucial shift from L’Etre et le néant and Les Jeux sont faits is in the suggestion that, beyond their deaths, the dead can still intervene in the construction of the sense of their lives. This is because, and insofar as, they present themselves not as signifieds but as signifiers, still engaged in the production of meaning rather than mere objects for understanding. In terms used by Sartre, the interiority of the subject is a hole in history, non-savoir, the place of the secret (184). Kierkegaard is engaged in ‘the intentional contesting of any action reduced to its objective result’, seeking ‘incompleteness, non-being, non-meaning [l’incomplétude, le non-être, la non-signification]’ (184). Therein lies his survival beyond death: ‘But he enters into knowledge

64

Haunted Subjects

as unintelligible, as the disqualification of knowledge, as a virulent lacuna which escapes the concept and in consequence escapes death’ (184). As in L’Etre et le néant, Sartre insists here that all lives end in failure because our projects are never completed: ‘Any enterprise, even if it is conducted triumphantly, remains a failure, that is to say, an incompleteness to be completed’ (189). But here he adds a crucial qualification: ‘It lives because it is open’ (189). Failure is also resistance to historical totalisation, and therefore it offers the possibility of survival as a subjective agent. A life still has the ability to speak to us because it remains secret. Here we have, then, a quite different model of the return of the dead from the struggle for priority of L’Etre et le néant, Les Mouches or Bloom’s version of apophrades. The dead return not as adversaries, not to impose regret or remorse, not to possess us or to be possessed by us, but to communicate from their still-signifying secretiveness. Nearly a hundred years after Kierkegaard’s death, Sartre presents him as actively offering himself in dialogue: ‘But through his work, he gives us to understand [donne à comprendre] his life. We, in 1964, can encounter it, in History, made as a call for understanding [appel à la compréhension]’ (185). What is important here is, I think, the generosity implied in giving to understand, a generosity all but absent from Sartre’s earlier model of the relation between the living and the dead. Kierkegaard speaks to us from a position of secrecy, calling us to participate in the work of understanding as a gift from the dead. Perhaps in this generosity is the kernel of the ethics that Sartre never managed to write. There is no doubt in my mind that Sartre’s presentation of Kierkegaard is also an exercise in self-portraiture, despite everything that separates the knight of faith from the existentialist atheist. Kierkegaard’s adoption of multiple pseudonyms can be seen as an endeavour to cultivate elusive, open identities which cannot be totalised from the perspective of Absolute Knowledge. It is not surprising that such a project should appeal to Sartre, and that he should find ways of enacting it for himself. One such way might be his nearcompulsive inability to complete his own texts. Incompletion is so endemic in Sartre’s work that it looks to be a structuring principle rather than a contingent accident: there is, for example, the unfinished fourth volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, the never-written ethics announced in the closing sentence of L’Etre et le néant, the

Sartre’s Living Dead 65

missing second volume of the Critique de la raison dialectique, the second volume of autobiography hinted at towards the end of Les Mots but never undertaken, and the only partially drafted fourth volume of L’Idiot de la famille. This incompletion may be Sartre’s version of Kierkegaardian secrecy; and through ‘L’Universel singulier’ Sartre is attempting to define his own unresolved legacy, his own possibility of survival as a signifying subject. Sartre’s haunted subject is a different beast from Freud’s; yet from quite separate starting points Sartre and Freud arrive at an insight into the entanglement of the living and the dead. Moreover, Sartre’s lecture on Kierkegaard establishes the link between secrecy and the survival of subjectivity beyond death, which will become a central issue in the following chapters. Can Sartre return from the dead? As he insisted, that is of course for us to decide. But his works are certainly out there, ambiguously available to us, still to be read.

4 Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

If a phantom returns to haunt us, it is to lie: its apparent ‘revelations’ are by nature deceitful.1

The lying ghost The figure of the lying ghost is taken from a short story entitled ‘Une histoire de revenant’ written by the relatively unknown nineteenthcentury French writer Jules Janin. The narrator of ‘Une histoire de revenant’ is an Englishman who recounts how a certain Lord Littleton decides in his thirtieth year to break with his longstanding mistress. She drowns herself in the Thames, and that night returns to tell her former lover that in a week’s time, at midnight, he too will die. In the course of the week, Lord Littleton becomes increasingly anxious, in anticipation that this message from beyond the grave does indeed spell his own demise. A week passes, midnight comes, and nothing happens. The ghost’s words were false. The narrative ends by stressing that this story, albeit true, is nevertheless implausible: ‘It was generally thought that Lord Littleton’s story had little common sense to it, and I agree with the general opinion.’2 What offends common sense here is not that the story affirms the existence of ghosts, but that the ghost should deliver a message which turned out to be false. If the dead return, they must surely have some better purpose than to tell us lies. The ghosts of popular culture serve as messengers and 66

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 67

guarantors of a higher order, promising justice for the righteous and retribution for the wicked. They come to deliver a truth, often an unwelcome truth, and they disappear once their mission has been fulfilled. So Janin’s lying ghost is an outrage because its message of doom turns out to be untrue. The story mocks the conventions of its own genre, and it is partially disowned by its narrator. Janin’s text is based on the story of the second Lord Lyttelton, an English aristocrat who died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 35 in 1779.3 Lord Lyttelton had apparently led a wicked and debauched life. Like many wicked and debauched people he had been a member of parliament until he was unseated for bribery. When he inherited his title on the death of his father in 1773 he was abroad with a barmaid, and he subsequently took his father’s seat in the House of Lords. His life was unremarkable except for its excesses; what ensured his notoriety through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the manner of his death, which made of it what Dr Johnson called ‘the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day’. At the height of the Enlightenment, it seems that Lord Lyttelton was informed by a ghost that he would die at midnight in three days’ time. Three days later, at midnight, he was indeed dead. Some thought that he might have committed suicide, telling the story of the ghost as a final trick on the world. But this suspicion is contradicted by a detail in the story of his death. Because those around him were worried by his increasing anxiety as midnight on the fatal day approached, all clocks and watches were put forward by half an hour so that they registered midnight when it was in fact 11.30. Lord Lyttelton thought he had survived the ghost’s prediction, only to die half an hour later when it was really midnight. If he had intended to kill himself at midnight – so the argument goes – he would have followed the clocks and unwittingly done the deed half an hour early; the spirit world, though, cannot be deceived as to the time by the paltry expedient of changing the clocks. So the demise of Lord Lyttelton serves as a proof that ghosts exist, coming to light fortuitously (or perhaps not) at precisely one of the historical conjunctures when belief in ghosts was supposed to have been overcome. In fact, the visitation three days before his death is neither the beginning nor the end of the return of the dead in Lord Lyttelton’s story. His father, the first Lord Lyttelton,

68

Haunted Subjects

was a minor political and literary figure in the eighteenth century, the author of, amongst other things, a collection of Dialogues of the Dead following the lead of Lucian, Fénelon and Fontenelle. The second Lord Lyttelton’s prehistory, then, already involved voices of the deceased returning to inform the living. And not content to witness a ghost, Lord Lyttelton himself became a ghost to haunt others, as his story would haunt nineteenth-century England and, as Janin’s version of the story suggests, France. One night, Lord Lyttelton appeared to a friend of his, a certain Miles Peter Andrews. Andrews reproached him for coming so late at night and then searched for him in vain through the house and garden where he was staying. The following day he received a message informing him that Lyttelton was dead. So the interference of the dead in the world of the living is everywhere in Lord Lyttelton’s story, as it doggedly obstructs attempts at rationalisation. But what did he actually see on the night of his fateful visitation? Here, the accounts of those close to him, some written many years after the event, are full of contradiction. He may have died in Epsom or Berkeley Square; he may have reported that the ghost appeared in a dream or while he was awake; he saw a young woman and a robin redbreast, or he saw a bird, which may have been a robin or a dove, which became a woman; the woman may have been a deserted lover, or the mother of sisters he had seduced, or someone unknown; the apparition may or may not have been accompanied by a preternatural light or a fluttering sound. For some, such as Dr Johnson, the event may have provided evidence of the spirit world, but quite what the event was which provided this evidence remains clouded in mystery. The Lord Littleton of Janin’s ‘Une histoire de revenant’ is clearly modelled on the historical Lord Lyttelton despite the different spelling of the character’s name and some deviations from sources. In Janin’s version, the ghost which appears to Lord Littleton is that of his abandoned lover. As in source versions, on the day appointed for his death his worried friends advance the clocks by half an hour so that he believes he is still alive at midnight. We might anticipate that he will die half an hour later, but the story in fact ends in anticlimax as the narrator tells his audience that Littleton has survived: ‘he is as well as you and I, Gentlemen; the hour passed without carrying off his Lordship: at the present moment he eats, he drinks, he sleeps, he rides his horse, he has good fortune in everything, and he doesn’t

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 69

have a single mistress, and I advise you to do the same’. The title of ‘Une histoire de revenant’ (A Ghost Story) indicates that the story is about something that returns, that is, something that survives in some (albeit spectral) form even after it should have died. The revenant is literally someone who returns; but it is also (as will be discussed further in the next chapter) a ghost, and therefore in a sense someone who does not return, at least not as a living entity. The ghost of the title is of course Littleton’s mistress; but it is also perhaps Littleton himself, who survives in the story even though he seems doomed, and whose story itself has survived and returns in Janin’s version 55 years after the death of the historical Lyttelton. The story is also about Janin’s survival. Born in 1804, he reached the age of 30 in 1834, the year of the story’s publication. This is reflected in the text by the fact that, whereas the historical aristocrat had been 35 at the time of his death, Janin insists on the fact that his character is in his thirtieth year: ‘he had reached his thirtieth year, when passion turns to reason, when love falters, when the heart beats only at certain times of the day’. Two further references underscore Littleton’s age. In case Janin might have been worrying that his own heart might cease beating at the age of 30, his story reassures him of the possibility of surviving that fateful age. And if ‘Une histoire de revenant’ narrates the survival and return of Littleton and of Janin, it also tells of the unlikely survival of the ghost story as a literary form, not killed off by Enlightenment rationalism or the materialism of a secular society in the process of industrialisation. The ghost and the ghost story return, after all. Yet if the revenant returns, it cannot be as it was in former times. The ghost of Littleton’s lover is even more beautiful than she was in life: ‘she had the same elegant and supple figure, but, good Lord, it was even more svelte!’. Her body on the other hand, when it is fished out of the Thames, is ‘so disfigured, alas, so violet and shrunken by death and so horribly small, thin, dead, shapeless, that her lover would not have recognised her’. She is both the same as she was and unrecognisable; she is both more and less than her living self. This discrepancy between the ghost and its physical remnants reflects the sense that the ghost story itself, if it is to survive, must also be transformed. The ghost story returns, but here it returns as something to be gently mocked. This explains Janin’s most significant deviation from his source: the survival of Lord Littleton. The death of the historical Lord and his subsequent

70

Haunted Subjects

reappearance as a ghost confirmed the reality of the supernatural and could be heralded by Dr Johnson as an extraordinary event. The ghost returns to tell of what no human could know; whether it be a dream or an apparition, a woman or a bird, or a woman who turns into a bird, it delivers a message that can only come from a transcendent source. Underlying the ghost’s warning that Lord Lyttelton is soon to die is a much more important lesson addressed to those of us who live on to hear the tale: do not believe what the rationalists, the sceptics and the atheists are telling you; there is a plan and a moral order, there is a supervising presence which watches over human affairs, and the wicked will be punished. By contrast, the anticlimax of Littleton’s survival in Janin’s story mocks the role of the ghost as supernatural messenger. The wicked Lord Lyttelton of history has been replaced by a less dissolute character, described by Janin’s narrator as ‘an honest and noble gentleman, rich, happy, and capable of controlling his passions’. His only crime, so far as we know, is to abandon a lover; but if that is a sin deserving death and damnation, more of us might be damned than saved. So the warning of death appears as a spurned lover’s vengeance rather than a moral punishment; and in any case the ghost is mistaken or mendacious rather than the messenger of a higher truth. If spirits exist, the story seems to ask, do they really have nothing better to do, no deeper purpose, than to tell us malicious lies? The ghost story survives and returns, but makes a mockery of itself as it does so. The transition from the historical Lord Lyttelton to Janin’s fictional Lord Littleton sketches a process of demystification taking place within the ghost story itself. It withdraws credibility from its own founding beliefs that the spirit world exists and that a higher moral order presides over us and may sometimes communicate with us. To put this in Lacanian terms, the ghost story depends on the fiction of the big Other. The purpose of the psychoanalytic cure is precisely to rid us of this fiction. The cure is complete only when the analysand has learnt to recognise meaningless contingency for what it is, namely meaningless and contingent. In Žižek’s account of the psychoanalytical process, analysis is complete when the analysand has seen the imposture of the big Other: at the end of the psychoanalytic cure, the analysand has to suspend the urge to symbolize/internalize, to interpret, to search for a

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 71

‘deeper meaning’; he has to accept that the traumatic encounters which traced out the itinerary of his life were utterly contingent and indifferent, that they bear no ‘deeper message’. [  ] at the moment of ‘exit from transference’ which marks the end of the cure, the subject is able to perceive the events around which his life story is crystallized into a meaningful Whole in their senseless contingency    4 A century before Lacan, Janin’s text dramatises the ghost story’s selfcure, debunking as a silly fiction the transcendental truth that speaks to us through ghosts. The big Other who dispatches spirits towards us to make us pay for our wickedness is in fact just a deceiver, unable to sustain the moral order. Lord Littleton’s survival marks the failure of his life to achieve the meaningful coherence of a destiny and abandons him to its pure senselessness. At the end, he eats, drinks, sleeps and rides without a care, thus coping admirably with an existence of contingent pleasures. So far, this account of ‘Une histoire de revenant’ depicts it as a sort of self-destruction of the ghost story, as it demystifies the beliefs which make it possible. However, this leaves open the question of why the ghost story precisely survives and returns after it should have died away. I want to suggest that the demystification operating here is shadowed by a gesture of re-mystification which restores some of the ghost story’s credibility. This is where the frame narrative of the story becomes important. The first two paragraphs of ‘Une histoire de revenant’ present the circumstances in which the story of Lord Littleton is narrated. A group of people including an unnamed firstperson narrator (or pre-narrator) are gathered together and begin to talk about ghosts; an Englishman offers to tell a story allegedly well known in London and, on the urging of those present, he proceeds to narrate the main part of the text. At the end of the story the frame narrative is briefly re-introduced and the text concludes with a one-sentence paragraph. This sentence explicitly marks a distance from what has preceded, as the pre-narrator insists that the story lacks common sense. This lack of common sense is not, I suggest, because it tells of ghosts, but because it tells of ghosts who lie. Who could believe such a thing? We might readily accept that a ghost might appear, but not that it should appear to no good purpose or in accord with no higher plan. This would make a nonsense of the

72

Haunted Subjects

whole history of supernatural visitations. So the story’s conclusion, which ironises the foundations of the ghost story, is itself ironised. The text is internally conflicted, mocking belief in ghosts whilst also seeking to maintain their credibility. ‘Une histoire de revenant’ is constructed around a double gesture which sets the conditions of possibility of the modern ghost story. It does not take seriously its own tale of spiritual visitation, so it reproduces it with a final twist (Lord Littleton does not die) which mocks gullible readers seeking messages from beyond the grave. But this self-repudiation marks a crisis for the ghost story which, if fully followed through, would signal its demise; so the story, through its uncanny frame narrative, restores some of the plausibility of the supernatural which the rest of the text had eroded. The ghost story does not believe in its founding presumption that ghosts are messengers of a higher order; but neither does it believe its lack of belief. Its demystification is re-mystified. This kind of double think makes possible modern tales of horror and the supernatural, for example in a film such as The Ring. Both the Japanese and American versions of The Ring adopt a premise which recalls the ghost’s warning to Lord Littleton in ‘Une histoire de revenant’ that he will die in a week’s time. In The Ring anyone who watches a certain videotape immediately receives a telephone call which signals to them that they will die in a week. Unlike the ghost’s warning in Janin’s story, this prophesy turns out to be true. Is the film really trying to warn us that a videotape may be the vehicle of supernatural evil? Surely not. But the fact that we may not believe, or be asked to believe, the film’s premise does not make it any less frightening, as if we believed it without believing it. It produces effects of terror which may originate in fears and fantasies which have survived our conscious rejection of them. Janin’s story of the lying ghost sets up a tension between credulity and irony towards supernatural sources of authority. That tension is, I would suggest, still being played out in modern culture and advanced theoretical thought. The rest of this chapter examines the question of how to respond to messages apparently coming form supernatural sources by looking at the significance of ghosts in deconstruction, mainly in Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, and in psychoanalytic theory, mainly in the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. These thinkers attempt to theorise and to present alternatives

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 73

to the paradigm of the ghost as supernatural messenger, and as temporary, unwanted interruption in the fabric of the real. The truth or falsehood of the ghost’s message is a central issue here. Abraham and Torok’s crucial theoretical and therapeutic innovation is their designation of the phantom as a liar, a purveyor of falsehood in the psychic life of the subject rather than an apparition which restores the truth. For Derrida, the spectre neither lies nor tells the truth in any conventional sense because it does not belong to the order of knowledge; yet Derrida’s spectres command respect in a manner that Abraham and Torok’s lying phantoms never could, so that their versions of haunting are very different from those of popular culture and from each other.

Derrida’s spectres Derrida’s Spectres de Marx is a text haunted by numerous ghosts, as is indicated by the plural of the title and the double genitive, which is both objective and subjective: these are both the ghosts that haunted Marx, appearing with surprising frequency in his texts, and the ghost of Marx himself. Indeed Marx’s ghost is itself plural because his legacy and his continuing presence cannot be reduced to any single or simple body of knowledge. Despite a certain Western triumphalist rhetoric announcing the end of Communism after the fall of the iron curtain, Derrida argues that Marx is still with us. His inheritance is still not settled, and his texts still inform, albeit in ambiguous fashion, our endeavours to conceive of a future in which justice can be instated. In Derrida’s account, if Marx still haunts us it is in part because he was himself haunted. The opening lines of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’,5 offer just one instance of the numerous ghosts to be found in Marx’s texts, as he struggles both with the inheritance of the past and the paradoxical ghosts of an as-yet unrealised future. Marx’s concerns in the nineteenth century turn out to be close to Derrida’s towards the end of the twentieth; and one of the surprising and provocative aspects of Spectres de Marx lies in Derrida’s claim that deconstruction was always in the lineage of Marxist critique even if it did not accept the authority of any doctrinaire interpretation of Marxism. At a stroke Derrida brushes aside the apparently irresolvable stand-off between a Marxist approach which historicises

74

Haunted Subjects

deconstruction and a deconstructive approach which dismantles Marxist historicisation. Deconstruction now turns out to be Marxist, though perhaps only to the extent that it claims for itself the right performatively to transform the Marxist legacy by interpreting it in its own way.6 Marx’s ghosts, though, are not the only ones to appear in Spectres de Marx. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is also never far from the scene. In particular, Derrida repeatedly returns to two moments from Shakespeare’s play. The first is Hamlet’s reference to time as ‘out of joint’, suggesting that the appearance of the ghost reveals the present to be fissured, haunted both by the past and by the future, no longer fully present-to-itself. The other is Marcellus’s injunction to Horatio, as a scholar, to speak to the ghost. Derrida’s endeavour is to do precisely what he suggests neither Horatio nor any other scholar can do: So what seems almost impossible is always to speak of the spectre, to speak to the spectre, to speak with it, therefore most of all to make or to let a spirit speak. And this seems even more difficult for a reader, a learned person, an expert, a professor, an interpreter, in short for what Marcellus calls a scholar. [  ] There is no scholar, there never was one, who is capable of speaking of everything whilst addressing anyone, and especially not whilst addressing ghosts. There was never a scholar who really had dealings with the ghost as such. A traditional scholar doesn’t believe in ghosts – nor in everything that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There was never a scholar who, as such, didn’t believe in the clear distinction between the real and the non-real, the effective and the non-effective, the living and the non-living, being and nonbeing (to be or not to be, according to the traditional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what isn’t, for example in the form of objectivity. Beyond this opposition there is for the scholar only academic hypothesis, theatrical fiction, literature and speculation. (32–3) Reflecting one of his persistent concerns, Derrida refers to the scholar’s reliance on binary distinctions. The ghost confounds scholarly discourse because it disrupts those distinctions. As Derrida puts it elsewhere, the logic of the spectre ‘regularly exceeds all

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 75

oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A spectre is at once visible and invisible, at once phenomenal and not phenomenal: a trace which marks in advance the presence of its absence.’7 So Derrida asks whether it is possible to attend to ghosts whilst remaining a scholar. Can we talk of and to ghosts within the norms of academic, intellectual enquiry, or does any attempt at dialogue with the dead inevitably disfigure those norms so fundamentally that anyone who addresses and listens to ghosts must forfeit the claim to occupy a recognisable intellectual position? In a nutshell, this is the whole programme of hauntology. Is it possible to talk of ghosts without succumbing to the pitfalls of superstition and irrationalism? If Spectres de Marx illustrates the unexpected extent to which Marx’s texts are haunted by ghosts, it also makes explicit the importance of ghosts in Derrida’s own work. In a footnote, Derrida asserts that the logic of spectrality is inseparable from deconstruction, and that it operates in everything he has published since the early 1970s (24).8 The ghost is a deconstructive figure par excellence, and even, Derrida suggests, ‘the hidden figure of all figures’ (194). So, in a later interview, Derrida can claim that ‘Spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is the element of haunting in which deconstruction finds its most hospitable place, at the heart of the living present, in the most lively pulsation of the philosophical.’9 The spectre circulates disconcertingly between apparent opposites: it is both there and not there, neither alive nor properly dead, neither past nor present. It is, then, both a figure of absolute alterity and an instantiation of Derrida’s consistent project to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence.10 Spectre thus becomes one of those special words that motor the work of deconstruction because they defy the logic of binary thought: difference, supplementarity, the undecidable, iterabilty, pharmakon, dissemination, trace, and so on. In this sequence, spectre now appears as a key word, perhaps even the key word, in part because it makes evident the close association of deconstruction with death, the dead, and with mourning. Paul de Man, whose version of deconstruction is in most respects very different from Derrida’s, suggests that prosopopeia, the figure by which speech is attributed to the dead, is the figure of figures in the insanity of language.11 Deconstruction can be understood as the desire to speak with the dead. For de Man this is a sort of

76

Haunted Subjects

inevitable delusion. Derrida, on the contrary, writes of this exchange with the dead as if it were more tangibly real and ethically more urgent. And the stakes are high here, since the spectre is also a figure of the other, of the strange and the stranger, of that which in me is other than myself and that which outside me is more than I can know. It is therefore the spectre which holds open the possibility of an unconditional encounter with otherness, of an undetermined, unanticipated event without which there would be no escape from the endless repetition of the same and no promise of emancipation and justice. In the closing paragraph of Spectres de Marx Derrida suggests that learning to converse with spectres may be the best hope we have, even if they do not (yet) exist: [The ‘scholar’ of the future, tomorrow’s ‘intellectual’] should learn to live by learning not to make conversation with the ghost but to converse with him, with her, to give or return a voice to him, to her, whether this be in oneself, in the other, to the other in the self: spectres are always there, even if they don’t exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (279)

Abraham and Torok’s phantoms In Derrida’s account the spectre becomes a necessary interlocutor, the keystone of a new, as yet unrealised paradigm in which emancipation is linked with the ability to encounter otherness. One striking feature of this elevation of the spectre to a position of privilege is that it takes no account of the very different conception of the phantom in the work of the Hungarian-born psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. This is surprising for two reasons: generally, because (as already noted in Chapter 1) Derrida knows their work well, having written a long article entitled ‘Fors: Les Mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ which appears as an introduction to their reassessment of Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ case study, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups (1976); and more specifically because Derrida’s preoccupation with the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Spectres de Marx was shared by Abraham, as evidenced in one of his final texts, ‘Le Fantôme de Hamlet ou le VIe acte’, published in Abraham and Torok’s collection L’Ecorce et le noyau (1987).12 On the single occasion Derrida refers to Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx it

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 77

is only to cite his own article on their work (24). In ‘Fors’ itself the one reference to Abraham’s paper on Hamlet gets the title wrong, giving it as ‘Le Fantôme de Hamlet ou le Ve acte’.13 This revealing slip completely obfuscates the point of Abraham’s piece. Abraham does not offer a reading of Hamlet, and certainly not of its fifth act; rather, he literally adds an extra act, the sixth act of his title, to the play, written in elegant decasyllables. In his prefatory remarks Abraham argues that Shakespeare’s Hamlet does not end in resolution or catharsis; it ends only because there is no one left to kill. So he writes a concluding act which attempts to bring to light some of the still unexplained tensions of the play. Hamlet, according to Abraham’s added act, was not after all mortally wounded in his duel with Laertes. Before he returns to the stage, his father’s ghost re-appears to urge Fortinbras to take the throne. Finally, though, the reasons for the ghost’s actions are brought to light. Rather than being a victim of a treacherous murder, he was in fact himself guilty of deviously killing his rival in love with poison provided by Polonius. The father’s appearance to Hamlet and in the sixth act to Fortinbras was an endeavour to keep his crime from being revealed. Once his guilty secret is known, he disappears from the scene; Hamlet is proclaimed king, and he goes off with Fortinbras and Horatio to have a drink.14 Abraham’s addition to Hamlet is rooted in his psychoanalytic work with Maria Torok. In their study of the Wolf Man and the treatment of their own patients they came across what appeared to be signs of traumatised behaviour which could not be traced back to any event in the life of the patient. This led to their most radical contribution to psychoanalytic theory: the claim that the patient may be the bearer of someone else’s trauma. The claim is to be explained by reference to two related but distinct terms, the crypt and the phantom, which refer to modes of the survival of the dead in the unconscious of the living. Abraham and Torok describe how the patient may be a cryptophore, the repository of a crypt constructed to preserve loved ones from being radically lost in death. The crypt which contains the dead forms a ‘sort of artificial Unconscious, lodged at the very heart of the Ego’: The existence of such a vault has the effect of blocking up the semipermeable walls of the dynamic Unconscious. Nothing should

78

Haunted Subjects

filter out to the external world. The Ego takes on the role of cemetery guardian. It stands there to survey the comings and goings of the close family members who claim – for a variety of reasons – to have access to the tomb. If it allows the curious, the harmful, the detectives to enter, it will be to lead them to false paths and fake tombs. Those with the right to visit will be the object of various manoeuvres and manipulations. They too will be kept present inside the Ego. You can see that the life of the guardian of a tomb – having to deal with this diverse throng – must be made of malice, cunning, and diplomacy. (254–5) Entirely unconsciously, the Ego assumes its role as guardian of the dead. Moreover, even the unconscious does not fully know what it contains, since its duty is in part to mask from itself its role as guardian. In the crypt, then, the other is buried deep within my own unconscious. In the conscious or pre-conscious, I know neither that it is there nor what it hides. The Ego is both the sentinel and the selfduping repository of the crypt it watches over. Its malice, cunning and diplomacy are all called upon in its complex negotiation with the others within itself. Through the theme of the crypt, Abraham and Torok describe how deceased loved ones may come to inhabit the subject without its conscious knowledge. The crypt, though, still derives from the subject’s own life and experience. The phantom, on the other hand, is a figure through which the subject may come to be haunted by secrets which do not in any direct way relate to its own experience. One patient, for example, has erotic fantasies involving hanging and she refuses to eat meat. It emerges that, completely unknown to her, her grandfather had been a butcher who had abused his eldest daughter and later hanged himself (408–11). The patient carries this secret within her, and she knows absolutely nothing about it. Following Freud, Abraham and Torok assume the possibility of transgenerational communication from one unconscious to another. They do not fully account for the detailed workings of how one subject may inter the contents of another’s unconscious. They suggest, though, that as she learns language the young child may internalise the secrets buried in the discourses she hears, made up of silences and taboos, through which certain words are avoided and others are used in idiosyncratic ways. Through the gaps and euphemisms in the discourse

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 79

of relatives, a story may be transmitted without ever being openly told or consciously understood. So the haunted subject hides away a secret it never knew. Moreover, because the secret of the deceased is shameful or scandalous, the surviving Ego is called on to obey what Abraham and Torok call an ‘obligation not to know [obligation de nescience]’ (391). It must ensure that it does not know what it knows, and that what it does not know will never become known to others. The key point here is that what the haunted subject’s unconscious hides is not repressed material, or at least not the repressed material of the subject itself. The Ego is inhabited by what Abraham and Torok call a phantom: We call a ‘phantom’, in general, a formation in the dynamic unconscious which has settled there, not through a repression on the subject’s part, but by a direct empathy with unconscious or denied material from a parental object. That means that it is not a formation which has been, as such, the product of the subject’s self-creation through the play of repressions and introjections. It also means that the phantom carried inside it is alien to it. Finally, it means that the various manifestations of the phantom, which we call haunting, are not directly linked to the life of the drives and should not be confused with the return of the repressed. (439) The difficulty posed by the phantom to psychoanalysis comes from the fact that it cannot be analysed by reference to the psychic life of the individual and explained in terms of repression, introjection or phantasm. Whatever the source of these, they are to some extent owned by the subject. The phantom, on the contrary, is not an introjected other which contributes to my own Ego formation; it is radically alien, a dead person who has made itself at home without being invited and without my knowledge. The illness or breakdown to which in some circumstances this phantom can give rise is therefore of a different nature from routine psychological disorder quite simply because the symptoms which I might manifest are not my own. What returns is not, as in Freudian theory, the repressed, but rather the disguised evidence of someone else’s shameful secret. The paradigm which underpins popular ghost stories makes of the apparition a sign of a disturbance within the natural, epistemological

80

Haunted Subjects

or moral order which the living are called upon to repair. The ghost appears, as Žižek suggests, because of an unpaid symbolic debt: a rite of burial or mourning which has not been completed, a duty still to be fulfilled, a crime to be uncovered, or an injustice to be rectified. In as far as it shows that the proper order of things has been disrupted, it also promises that it can be restored; the glitch is only temporary, normal service will soon be resumed. As soon as its role has been fulfilled, the ghost will disappear once more, and the strict divisions between the realms of the living and the dead will be put back in place. Demi Moore will learn to live without Patrick Swayze (Ghost), Juliet Stevenson without Alan Rickman (Truly Madly Deeply), Bruce Willis’s wife without her husband (The Sixth Sense). In Abraham and Torok’s account the ghosts and spirits that have haunted humankind from the dawn of civilisation to the supernatural apparitions of modern film have a quite different significance. Their ghosts are the mediation in fiction of the encrypted, unspeakable secrets of past generations: ‘The phantom of popular beliefs merely makes objective a metaphor working in the unconscious: the burial in the object of a fact which cannot be confessed’ (427). The dead do not return; what haunts us is the actively known injunction not to know which the dead bequeath us. What we suffer from are the symptoms left behind by the secrets of others. This position entails a wholly different account of the appearance of ghosts from that of popular ghost stories in which a damaged order requires extraordinary, supernatural means to be restored to normality. In Abraham and Torok’s conception, the ghost is precisely the problem rather than the initiator of a solution. It is the source of discord and not the means of settling it. The dead who return are pre-eminently those who are ‘struck with some infamy or who may have taken unspeakable secrets with them into the tomb’; and they come back ‘to lead [the living] into some unfortunate trap, into some mechanism that will lead to tragedy’ (426). In films and stories, supernatural apparitions may initially spread fear, but in the end their role is generally curative in that they enable the mending of a fractured order. Abraham and Torok are less sanguine. The ghost is the manifestation of an unspeakable hidden secret entombed inside the subject without its knowledge. It has no interest in allowing that secret to come to light; on the contrary it will ruse against the best interests of the subject it has come to occupy so that the secret

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 81

remains hidden. The ghost is thus a liar, as the passage cited as an epigraph to this chapter indicates: ‘If a phantom returns to haunt us, it is to lie: its apparent “revelations” are by nature deceitful’ (449). This view informs Abraham’s addition of a sixth act to Hamlet. Abraham suggests that the secret revealed by the father’s ghost and the command of vengeance that it brings with it could only be a lure designed to mask a further, unspeakable, shameful secret. Hamlet’s subsequent dithering can then be explained as the sign of a tension between on the one hand the imperative to respect the father’s secret whatever the cost, and on the other hand the need to bring to light the secret which is destroying the subject’s sanity. In Abraham and Torok’s account there is no doubt that in some circumstances the secret lodged inside the subject can indeed be brought to light, even if it cannot easily be done and if its discovery depends upon information gleaned from external sources. The analysand cannot reveal the secret because he or she never knew it, but the ghost may nevertheless be identified and its lies uncovered. In adding a final act to Hamlet Abraham aims to ‘reveal the secret buried in the Unconscious and to produce it in its initial exteriority’; this is done in order to exorcise – the word is used by Abraham – the guilt and shame attached to the secret and to achieve ‘a greater wisdom about oneself and about the universe of humans’ (450). The search for a higher level of knowledge parallels the psychoanalytic process, which seeks out ghosts and aspires to eliminate them by revealing their terrible secrets: ‘To reduce the “phantom” is to reduce the guilt attached to an other’s secret and to speak it in sayable words, defying, getting around and domesticating its (and our) resistances, its (and our) refusals, so it is to accept a higher degree of “truth” ’ (450). This account inverts the situation of the popular ghost story: rather than serving as the messenger of a higher order, Abraham and Torok’s phantoms want to prevent the truth from emerging. But in the right circumstances the real causes of the ghost’s manifestations can and should be known. Moreover, in what were virtually the last words he wrote, Abraham suggested that dissipating even just one single ghost could change the universe for the better: ‘This assures, each time, a small victory of Love over Death’ (452). There is a crucial distinction here between Derrida’s deconstructive spectres, which are outside the order of truth and knowledge, and Abraham and Torok’s actively lying phantoms, which seek

82

Haunted Subjects

to prevent the truth from being revealed. Although the phantom lies, it may nevertheless be possible to restore the truth. This is where psychoanalysis comes into its own. The stories which invoke ghosts as instigating the restoration of order essentially attribute to the supernatural a therapeutic function in relation to the natural order: a primary disturbance is countered by a secondary disturbance which then eliminates its first cause and allows the proper course of things to be resumed. Abraham and Torok take this restorative function away from the ghost, because in their account the ghost is precisely the problem and not the solution; and they re-assign the role of restoring order to the analyst, because the analyst is capable of seeking out the causes of the disturbance of which the ghost is the cause. In Lacan’s famous phrase, the psychoanalyst is ‘the subject supposed to know [le sujet supposé savoir]’: supposed to know (rather than actually knowing) because occupying a position of symbolic authority in relation to the analysand. Abraham suggests a very different formulation; the analyst is ‘the one who does not yet know, but who is capable of learning’ (473). This takes analysis out of the play of symbolic identifications and re-positions it as an epistemological drama. As in Lacan’s version of analysis, the analyst does not actually know; but whereas for Lacan the position of knowledge is a structural lure which the analysand must learn to see as such before the analysis can be complete, Abraham’s formulation suggests that the analyst is in fact capable of coming to occupy the position of knowledge attributed to him or her. From its origins in the texts and the practice of Freud, psychoanalysis had been directly concerned with hauntings and the uncanny, with the ways in which we continue to relate to the dead, and with our hidden endeavours, in love or in hate or both, to preserve or to kill off the traces of past generations. Abraham and Torok’s distinctive contribution to the understanding of psychoanalytic hauntings lies in their conception of the phantom as the traumatic remnant of an ancestor about whom we may have known nothing, and who survives in us because of unatoned crimes which are not our own. It is not the repressed which returns to wreck our lives, but the shame of others. And Abraham and Torok also give back to psychoanalysis the positivist ambition which Freud entrusted to it from the beginning, but which his own case studies only indecisively justify: the truth can be known, and we will be better for knowing it; moreover it is

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 83

possible to cast off the bitter legacy of the dead in order to learn to live with them in love rather than pain.15

Secretive ghosts Why, then, in his long reflections on ghosts in Spectres de Marx and other texts, does Derrida not refer to Abraham and Torok? There were certainly close personal and intellectual ties between Derrida and Abraham. Describing Abraham as ‘my friend’, Derrida says that ‘Fors’ was written ‘in his memory, in homage, and in his absence’;16 and part of Derrida’s La Carte postale was first published in a volume dedicated to Abraham, prefaced by a note in which Derrida seems pleased to quote Maria Torok who had referred to ‘certain encounters, convergences, affinities’ between Derrida’s work and Abraham’s.17 Derrida’s ‘Fors’ confirms that there is a great deal in Abraham and Torok’s work which is value to him.18 Their theory of the crypt and their account of the entombing within the Wolf Man of his father and sister offer a model of a haunted subject in which the boundaries separating self and other, inside and outside, past and present are all radically disrupted; and the way in which language functions in this encryption also shows Derrida the workings of a haunted textuality, as each word or utterance contains within it limitless traces of other words and languages. So, given these connections and similarities, I am tempted to see Derrida’s silence about Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx as a sign of resistance or denial. Their theory of the phantom as liar, as the problem to be solved rather than a welcome herald of otherness, contradicts Derrida’s argument too directly to be taken into account. Derrida does acknowledge that the ghost may not be who it claims to be: ‘An other can always lie, he can disguise himself as a phantom, a phantom can always pretend to be a different one. It is always possible’ (28). The spectre may be never far from falsehood (see 80), but this possibility does not alter the force of the injunction which the ghost, like the Levinasian Other, imposes on the subject: ‘one can only take it at its word. An essentially blind submission to its secret, to the secret of its origin. That’s the first obedience to its injunction’ (28). Derrida’s ghost calls for our submission and obedience, and the fact that it may be misleading or mendacious is simply the risk we must take if we are to encounter otherness. It is important to observe here

84

Haunted Subjects

that the order and the secret with which Derrida’s ghost is associated are very different from their apparent equivalents in Abraham and Torok. In their account the ghost imposes a command of ignorance, which is an injunction not to know, not to seek to reveal, and to hide from others, the secret of the encrypted other; in principle, though, the instruction can be disobeyed and the secret may come to light. In Derrida’s version the secret precedes any division between ignorance and knowledge, and the injunction requires unconditional belief and obedience. By turning the ghost into a figure of the absolute Other, Derrida effectively sidesteps the issue of the truth or falsehood of what it has to say. We are called upon to heed the ghost irrespective of epistemological concerns: It is something that one doesn’t know, and one doesn’t know precisely if it is, if it exists, if it replies to a name and corresponds to an essence. One doesn’t know: not through ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or dead person isn’t a matter of knowledge. At least not for what one believes one knows under the name of knowledge (25–6). The ghost does not belong to the order of knowledge, therefore it makes no sense to ask whether it is lying or not. In fact it is striking that in Spectres de Marx, despite his insistence that we should learn to attend to what ghosts might have to say to us, Derrida pays relatively little attention to the words of the ghost of Hamlet’s father; he has much more to say about the other characters’ responses to its apparition (‘the time is out of joint’, ‘speak to it, Horatio’) than about any message that it may come to deliver, be it true or false or neither. The ghost may be lying, but that seems not to matter. For Abraham and Torok the phantom inevitably lies, because to hide the truth is the entire purpose motivating its return; for Derrida what is vital is to remain open to an encounter with the unstable, unassimilated spectre because it is through such an encounter that something previously unheard of might occur. Derrida’s silence about the difference between his approach and Abraham and Torok’s may in part be because he does not himself fully appreciate its extent and significance. This can be deduced from

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 85

the extent to which, in ‘Fors’, Derrida tends to portray Abraham and Torok’s thought more like his own than it in fact is. In their re-interpretation of Freud’s Wolf Man case study, Abraham and Torok use the Wolf Man’s multilingualism as a key to his dreams and symptoms. They take his German descriptions of his dreams and seek out the like-sounding or like-meaning Russian or English words which, they believe, are encoded generators of manifest narratives. So, for example, in the account of one dream the German word plötzlich (suddenly) is used; this is then translated by Abraham and Torok into Russian as v’droug, which, they claim, can be transferred into English by similarity of sound into the truth.19 By the process of translating meaning and/or sound, any reference in any language to tooth or foot can also be related back to the truth. This procedure of interpretation is, then, an extremely resourceful exercise in multilingual translation in which sound may be as important as meaning in uncovering the occluded sense. In ‘Fors’ Derrida emphasises this labour of translation together with the disturbances of meaning, the hieroglyphs and secrets which engage the interpreter in a restless process of deciphering. A key term in Derrida’s essay is anasemia, coined by Abraham to describe the fundamental difference between psychoanalytic discourse and ordinary language: The language of psychoanalysis does not follow the twists and turns (tropoï) of normal speech and writing. Pleasure, Id, Ego, Economics, Dynamics are not instances of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche or catachresis, they are, by virtue of discourse, products of de-signification, and they constitute new figures, absent from textbooks on rhetoric. These figures of anti-semantics, insofar as they signify nothing other than the return to the source of their ordinary meaning, require a term able to indicate their status and which, for want of anything better, we propose to name by the word anasemia. (L’Ecorce et le noyau, 211) So psychoanalysis is the attempt to trace the ruses, detours and disruptions by which signs always signify something other than what is apparent. In ‘Fors’ Derrida emphasises the aspect of this which most resembles his own notion of dissemination. He takes anasemia to describe an originary disturbance at the very source of meaning rather than an impediment to the restoration of sense which can be

86

Haunted Subjects

overcome. The ultimate object is never a final truth, but another ‘text to be deciphered’; and the final referent is always already encrypted.20 In order to suggest this Derrida concentrates more on Abraham and Torok’s practice as interpreters, who often push plausibility to its limits with their freewheeling inventiveness, than he does to the intellectual framework within which they contain their interpretations. For Abraham and Torok, the purpose of interpretation is to restore a hidden knowledge. Their Introduction to Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups indicates how the following work describes a series of revelations leading to final elucidation: We had the interpretation of the nightmare about the wolves. Better still. All the dreams and symptoms were becoming accessible little by little. [  ] There followed nearly two years enjoying a ‘material’ which no longer had any secrets to deliver. Finally it had to end. But could we be content with a catalogue of deciphered hieroglyphs, however plausibly coherent it might be, and however exhaustive its scope? [  ] We still had to restore to words their value, give reason back to rhyme, truth back to speech.21 Abraham and Torok are not dupes of their own interpretative brilliance. They know that their analysis of the Wolf Man is bound to have a fictional element, and that it can have no therapeutic effect because it is based on texts rather than dialogue with an analysand.22 But the extract quoted above indicates a clear progressive structure in their work, leading from mystification to initial insights, the gradual accumulation of understanding, and at last to what they hope will be a final phase in which secrets are explained and truth is restored. In practice it may always remain the case that the truth remains elusive; but the purpose of interpretation and the therapeutic efficacy of analysis depend upon maintaining the prospect that it may be achieved. The difference between Abraham and Torok’s approach and Derrida’s emerges in a passage from which Derrida quotes in a footnote of ‘Fors’ without drawing out the implications which make

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 87

it incompatible with his position. Here, Abraham is discussing the secret revealed by the ghost of Hamlet’s father: ‘The “secret” revealed by Hamlet’s “phantom” and ordering vengeance can only be a lure. It hides another secret, real and true this time, but having its source in an unspeakable [non dicible] ignominy and which, unbeknownst to the son, lies on the father’s conscience.’23 In this account, the secret masks another secret, but this regression of secrecy is not infinite; it comes to an end in a final revelation. A great deal hinges on what Abraham means here by ‘unspeakable’, or related words used elsewhere by Abraham and Torok such as ‘unsayable [indicible]’, ‘unconfessable [inavouable]’ or ‘unpronounceable [imprononçable]’ (see, for example, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 408–9). In their usage it is clear that what is unsayable can in fact be said. It is unsayable because it is struck with taboo, it is shameful or criminal; but it is not in any sense beyond or outside the capabilities of language. As analysts Abraham and Torok endeavour precisely to find the words to say the unsayable, to open up the crypt, to bring the secret to light and thereby to dispel the ghost. In Echographies, Derrida claims that psychoanalytical discourse from Freud onwards has been dominated by ‘a certain misapprehension about the structure and logic of spectrality, a misapprehension which is powerful, subtle, unstable, but shared with science and philosophy’.24 Although he does not mention Abraham and Torok here, they are surely included in his critique. The consistent desire of science, philosophy and psychoanalysis has been, according to Derrida, to regard ghosts as inevitably harmful and therefore to attempt to get rid of them. The aim of Abraham and Torok is certainly to exorcise the ghost by putting its unspeakable secrets into words, and thereby to bring the ghost back to the order of knowledge. For Derrida the ghost and its secrets are unspeakable in a quite different sense from that of Abraham and Torok; and he wants to avoid the restoration of the order of knowledge and to encounter what is strange, unheard, other, about the ghost. The ghost is ‘a thing which is unnameable or almost: something, between something and someone, whoever or whatever, something, this thing “this thing”, but this thing and not another, this thing looking at us, defying semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy’ (Spectres de Marx, 26). In this passage, Derrida implicitly marks out the differences between himself and Abraham and Torok, and psychoanalysis

88

Haunted Subjects

and deconstruction more generally. The ghost is ‘unnameable or almost’ because it pushes at the boundaries of language and thought. In this context Derrida’s aim is not to reveal the content of the ghost’s secret; rather, he aspires to learn to attend to its mystery, to hear within it the rumbling of what has yet to be understood. The legacy of Marx, as of other great thinkers, lies precisely in its continuing secretiveness. It has not yet been fully understood, settled or exhausted, which is why Marx and his ghosts continue to haunt the present (see 40). The secret is not a shameful knowledge to be revealed (or hidden) so much as an insight into the limitations of what we currently know; Derrida refers to the secret as ‘some impossible testimony which neither can nor should be exposed in a confession, even less in a proof, an exhibit, or a statement of the type S is P’ (154). So the ghost’s secret, like those of Marx, resembles the secretiveness of Kierkegaard, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, is what according to Sartre ensures his survival beyond the grave. The secret enables the continuation of dialogue, even in the absence of a corporeal interlocutor. The return of the dead is not to be understood as something to be avoided at all costs; on the contrary, in Derrida’s most euphoric moments, he describes engaging with spectral secrecy as the very condition of future justice. What Derrida is unwilling to read in Abraham and Torok, and – I would suggest – the reason why he does not read them at all in Spectres de Marx, is the extent to which they attempt to trace disturbed meanings back to knowable causes, to reveal secrets and to dispel ghosts. The scholar, Derrida argues, is someone who wants to arrest the spectre’s speech (34), or, as he shows in his reading of Marx, to summon spectres in order to exorcise them (269). Once the ghost is dismissed, the disruptions to intelligibility can be overcome, normality restored and ‘a relatively stable knowledge’ (270) re-instated. The dominant, consistent gesture that Derrida diagnoses is, then, to be found in the ghost stories and films discussed in Chapter 1, as well as in Marx and in Abraham and Torok: the ghost returns in order to be sent away again; its message is heeded only so that it can be dismissed more effectively. Whether in the name of love (as for Abraham and Torok) or ontology (as for Marx), co-habitation with spirits is not finally to be tolerated. Derrida, on the other hand, wants to allow the ghost to return, both as a legacy from the past which has yet to be settled and as the promise of a future which

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 89

remains to be conceived. Abraham and Torok’s ghosts are liars to be denounced; Derrida’s ghosts cannot lie because they cannot tell the truth, but they may be the mediators of new forms of knowledge. To put it schematically, deconstruction is about learning to live with ghosts, psychoanalysis is about learning to live without them.

The ghost’s law What does all this have to say about the re-appearance of ghosts and of the undead in the post-postmodern culture? Neither for Derrida nor for Abraham and Torok is the ghost an emissary from a supernatural order sent to restore the damaged fabric of the real. The lying ghost, as theorised by Abraham and Torok and as wittily dramatised in the nineteenth century in Jules Janin’s ‘Une histoire de revenant’, is perhaps a suitable figure for a stage of postmodern de-mystification in which the repositories of truth, instruction and moral guidance have to be divested of their authority. The Lacanian analysand has to learn that the ‘subject supposed to know’ in fact knows nothing; the big Other’s most closely kept secret is that he does not exist. Abraham and Torok’s analyst may be a subject capable of learning, but what he or she will learn is that the ghosts of the past must be dispelled if the haunted subject is to move forward into a better future. Psychoanalysis tells us that we are alone, adrift in contingency, and the most intellectually stretching aspect of postmodernity was its endeavour to think through what that might mean. In Derrida’s deconstructive hauntology, on the other hand, we are not quite alone. Even if the ghost does not exist in any ordinary sense, the necessity of attending to it, and to the strange, to the unknown and to the other, is associated with injunctions and commands which are utterly compelling even if the source of their authority is unspecified. The language of responsibility, obligation and justice informs Derrida’s reflection on spectres at every stage. The spectre issues commands which cannot be refused: The spectre is not simply someone we see coming to return, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, spied on, as if by the law: we are ‘before the law’, without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity, where the other is looking only

90

Haunted Subjects

at us, we who are observing it (as one observes and respects the law) without even being able to meet its gaze. From this comes asymmetry, and in consequence the heteronomic figure of the law. The completely-other – and the dead person is the completelyother – watches me, addressing to me, without however replying to me, a prayer or an injunction, an infinite demand, which becomes the law for me: it watches me, it concerns me, it is addressed only to me, whilst exceeding me infinitely and universally, without there being any possibility of exchanging looks with him or her.25 Derrida’s reflection is clearly and hugely indebted to Levinasian ethics. The spectre is completely other, imposing a command on me that acquires the force of law. At the same time there is a Kafkaesque twist here. The phrase that Derrida puts in inverted commas, ‘before the law [devant la loi]’, is the translated title of Kafka’s parable ‘Vor dem Gesetz’, which Derrida has discussed at length.26 We are utterly in the grip of a law which is totally unintelligible to us. But why should the gaze of the Other become law for us, why should we feel any obligation to heed or to obey it? It seems to me that on this issue Derrida’s argument is uncharacteristically weak and tautological. We must obey the call of spectres because we have to, and we have to because we must: ‘And we must reckon [with spirits]. One cannot not have to, one must not not be able to [On ne peut pas ne pas devoir, on ne doit pas ne pas pouvoir] reckon with them, who are more than one: the more than one’ (Spectres de Marx, 18). Derrida is ruthlessly astute in diagnosing the significant blind spots in the discourse of others, but perhaps here he misses the extent to which his own discourse is complicit with the disavowal of postmodern contingency that can also be seen in popular film. Chapter 1 suggested that recent successful films tend to invoke the supernatural world of ghosts in order to reinstate a temporarily troubled order: things may have gone wrong, but we may be reassured by the knowledge that there is some higher authority to watch over us. As will be discussed further in Chapter 7, Derrida is distraught at the possibility that we are left stranded and alone by the death of others, without their tutelary and commanding gaze. So he insists that their gaze is not lost, even if it is inscrutable to us. There is here the survival of a sort of spectralised authority, which is also the authority of the spectre; its status is unknowable but its orders

Lying Ghosts in Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 91

are absolute. There is something watching over us (‘we feel ourselves watched, observed, spied on, as if by the law’).27 This overseeing agency becomes a source of obligations and responsibilities that bind us to one another, to the past and to the future. We are not alone, even if we cannot understand why or how. Derrida’s spectre is a figure of the Levinasian Other, the Other as pure, commanding alterity; but it also edges into becoming the Lacanian Big Other, the despot whose laws we obey only because we cannot rid ourselves of our dependence on it. Slavoj Žižek distinguishes between Derrida’s position and that of Lacanian psychoanalysis by insisting that for the latter it is possible to cancel our ‘primordial indebtedness to the spectral Other’.28 Derrida’s reluctance to cancel the debt and to lay the spectre can be traced back to a fear endemic in the post-postmodern world. More terrifying than the return of ghosts may be the prospect that there is nothing to return, no survival, no resurrection, and no commanding voice from beyond the grave; as Žižek puts it, ‘it is not sufficient to say that we fear the spectre – the spectre itself already emerges out of a fear, out of our escape from something even more horrifying: freedom’.29 Jules Janin’s ‘Une histoire de revenant’, the story with which this chapter began, dramatises this discrepancy between the willingness to give up on the lying ghost and the reluctance to believe that the ghost is not the emissary of a higher order or the mouthpiece of a compelling command. The protagonist Lord Littleton manages cheerfully to survive the harsh lesson that the words of the dead are no more reliable than the words of the living: ‘at the present moment he eats, he drinks, he sleeps, he rides his horse, he has good fortune in everything’. The listeners to the story are less ready to accept this assault on their entrenched beliefs, dismissing it as lacking in ‘common sense’. And the final word is left to the listeners who prefer common sense to the prospect that ghosts might lie. Some belief in a proper order of things has to be retained, even if its authority is uncertain. Living entirely without the Big Other may be too much to ask of us; so, after postmodernity comes, I suspect, the senseless but compelling spectralised authority of the ghost of the Big Other and its populist sibling, Channel Four’s Big Brother. In the Big Brother house the authority of the law exists only in as far as contestants are prepared to make a willing submission to its wilful instructions. Without this submission there is no authority and no programme. It is not

92

Haunted Subjects

necessary to believe that Big Brother has any real existence or power, it is only necessary to follow its rules to the letter. Abraham and Torok wanted to kill off their ghosts in the name of love. Derrida is the philosophical equivalent of the Big Brother contestant, willing to obey the ghost’s commands even if he cannot yet quite discern what they might be. And what returns, with the ghost, is the Big Other, the spectre of authority which we perhaps do not wish to learn to live without.

5 The Ghosts of Auschwitz: Charlotte Delbo

Is the witness always false? This chapter uses some of the insights from Abraham and Torok’s analysis of the phantom in a reading of the Holocaust testimony of Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, in particular her remarkable short text Spectres, mes compagnons. Criticism that draws on the work of Abraham and Torok has attempted to uncover secrets embedded in texts, sometimes with spectacular success.1 My suggestion in this chapter is that the secrets of Delbo’s Spectres, mes compagnons remain secret because they are not the narrator’s or author’s, but the unknown secrets of another. So Delbo’s haunted text is, I suggest, inhabited to a degree the witness cannot fully grasp by secrets which are not her own. The key issue here is the extent to which the witness can understand her own testimony. The ghosts which haunt testimony may represent an impairment in self-understanding. Abraham and Torok raise the question of the truthfulness of the witness in one of the chapter headings of their book on Freud’s Wolf Man, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups: ‘Is a witness always false? [Un témoin estil toujours faux?]’. They describe the dilemma of the Wolf Man when he is asked by Freud to confirm that the famous dream of the wolves actually took place in his childhood. In Abraham and Torok’s interpretation, the dream bears witness – falsely, according to Freud and Wolf Man’s family – to his father’s sexual abuse of his sister. For the adult Wolf Man, to testify that the dream occurred in childhood is to confirm that he had made false allegations in 93

94

Haunted Subjects

the past; but to deny it would be to retract his earlier claims, and so also to confess that he was an unreliable witness. As Abraham and Torok summarise his dilemma, ‘for him all testimony, whatever it might be, was tantamount to a lie’.2 However truthful he attempts to be, he is condemned to ensconce himself in the position of false witness because he does not control the meaning of his own testimony. The problem of the witness’s impaired understanding of her own testimony is compounded by the presence of ghosts. Here also, the reading of Delbo undertaken draws on the work of Abraham and Torok. As we saw in the previous chapter, in Abraham and Torok’s account the phantom is not to be understood as a return of the repressed, or at least not of material repressed by the person haunted by the phantom. Rather, they posit the operation of unconscious, transgenerational communication, so that the secrets and crimes of past generations can be deposited in the unconscious without the subject ever having been conscious of them. So the phantom is the other within the self, inaccessible to introspection or analysis because the subject does not even know that it is there. Moreover, the consequences of haunting on the life of the haunted subject may be disastrous. The phantom’s residence in the unconscious results from an injunction to maintain secrecy over some unspeakable crime, so its interventions and ruses are designed to protect a terrible secret. The phantom, then, is a liar, it does not return to restore the truth but on the contrary to prevent some shameful secret from being discovered. Recent trauma studies, following the lead of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, have made familiar the notion that traumatic experiences are lived as if they were happening to someone else, so that they do not seem to belong to the traumatised subject.3 Abraham and Torok take this a step further. The trauma which affects me may indeed literally be someone else’s, since it arises from the unconscious re-activation of an other’s experience: We tend to assimilate trauma to an orgasm-like experience originating in the rapid opening of the Unconscious. Yet it is not certain that such an orgasm, even as an analogy, is involved in trauma. On the contrary, what is more probable is that there is an opening, real or fictive, of the Unconscious during or after the trauma, with the power to awaken a phantom which is working away inside it.4

The Ghosts of Auschwitz 95

In trauma the unconscious is momentarily unlocked; this provokes the phantom into activity and it may threaten entirely to overwhelm the self. Traumatic symptoms are the signs of a struggle to ward off this invasion, to keep the ghost and its terrible secrets safely locked away. This conception has potentially radical consequences for hauntology as well as for trauma studies. The disappropriation of experience through trauma is effected literally because the traumatised and haunted subject becomes prey to someone else’s distress. The witness, then, has good reason – indeed she has no option other than – to give false testimony. The truth of her experience is unavailable to her because it belongs to someone else. In what follows I use Abraham and Torok’s insight in a reading of Delbo’s Spectres, mes compagnons. This entails two significant departures from the psychoanalysts’ approach. First, the ghost which inhabits the self is for them typically a parent or an ancestor, whereas Delbo’s text suggests that the ghosts may come from other sources. This is in line with some recent psychoanalytical work, which suggests that the phantoms may be transmitted between adults in love, or even between analyst and analysand.5 Second, for Abraham and Torok the secret which the ghost seeks to keep hidden is at least in principle ultimately knowable if evidence is supplied from other sources; in the case of a short, unfinished text, the secret is bound to remain secret, perhaps traceable in some of its effects but not finally to be revealed as a determinate content.6 The potential difficulty of establishing the truth of testimony is implied in the epigraph to Delbo’s first book, the first volume of her Auschwitz et après trilogy, Aucun de nous ne reviendra. Here, she expresses an uncertainty about the status of the following text: ‘Today, I am not sure that what I have written is true [vrai]. I am sure that it is truthful [véridique].’7 This distinction between true and truthful can evidently be taken as acknowledging that the text may not be literally and totally true in all its details, but that it is truthful in its intention and the experiences it conveys. Nicole Thatcher, however, argues against this reading, suggesting that true here does not mean objectively true, but rather true to the subjective experience of events; so to be truthful is to give an account which is entirely in accordance with the facts, even if it fails to convey some part of the victim’s experience.8 This is apparently supported by Delbo’s discussion of the epigraph in her posthumously

96

Haunted Subjects

published La Mémoire et les jours. Here, she explains that the words she uses come from what she calls her ‘external memory [mémoire externe]’ rather than the ‘profound memory [mémoire profonde]’ or ‘memory of the senses [mémoire des sens]’ which is not accessible to language; so that although she is not lying, neither does she convey the full truth of lived experience.9 In a careful analysis of some of the difficulties involved in Delbo’s distinction between true and truthful, Thomas Trezise proposes a rather different account from Thatcher’s, suggesting that Delbo’s distinction ‘points to that which, in testimony, exceeds its narrowly construed historiographical value’.10 On this reading, the failure to be entirely true marks the potential of testimonial texts to go beyond the merely historical or factual record and move towards a more profound truth. It may not be possible (or desirable) to resolve the difficulties posed by Delbo’s epigraph, but in any case it certainly raises questions about what it means for testimony to tell the truth. It implies that something is missed, even if nothing is falsified. The epigraph suggests, perhaps, that the author or narrator cannot simply tell the truth because she does not fully possess the meaning of her own testimony. The text may also intimate the presence of secrets of which it knows nothing, so what it obliquely bears witness to is not what it thinks it bears witness to. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of offering truthful testimony and keeping the ghost’s secret, between an injunction to know and the injunction not to know, the text’s truth may reside in secrets that its author did not wittingly put there. It may contain more than it knows. The witness is false, and therein lies her truth. The ghosts which accompany Delbo to Auschwitz in Spectres, mes compagnons are precisely that which is in her other than herself; and they make of her text a haunted narrative unable fully to grasp its own significance or to appropriate the trauma which inhabits it.

Spectres, mes compagnons and the impossibility of return Spectres, mes compagnons takes the form of a letter addressed to the theatre director and actor Louis Jouvet. Delbo had met Jouvet in the mid-1930s when she interviewed him for a young communist newspaper.11 Two days after the interview she received a letter from

The Ghosts of Auschwitz 97

him offering her a job as his secretary. She worked for him until after the Occupation, accompanying him to South America in 1941 when he took his theatre company on a tour there. In September 1941, together with some other members of the theatre company, Delbo decided to return to occupied France to join her husband Georges Dudach in the Resistance. Jouvet tried to dissuade her, apparently even withholding her passport and telling her there was no boat. Jouvet and the remnants of his company would not return to France until after the liberation. Delbo spent only three-and-a-half months in France before she and her husband were arrested and imprisoned. She was allowed to visit Dudach for a final time on the morning of his execution in May 1942. She was deported to Auschwitz in a convoy of 230 female political prisoners, whose lives and deaths she would meticulously record in Le Convoi du 24 janvier. Of the 230 women, 39 would return alive, an unusually high proportion. In Le Convoi du 24 janvier, Delbo suggests that this is because the close and supportive personal bonds formed between the women in prison and on the train to Auschwitz radically increased their chances of survival.12 After nearly a year in Auschwitz she was transferred to Ravensbrück, where she remained until its liberation in April 1945. On her return to France she again worked briefly for Jouvet, but she could not continue because the physical demands of a busy theatre company were too much for her. She subsequently worked for the United Nations and at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) with the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre; and she also established herself as an author, most notably of the trilogy Auschwitz et après and of a series of plays dramatising aspects of the deportation and other issues of contemporary political importance. She died in March 1985, having never remarried. In just over forty pages Spectres, mes compagnons describes scenes from Delbo’s imprisonment, deportation and return to France. It alludes briefly to her final meeting with her husband, referred to here by his initial G.; and it ends by describing her recovery from the listlessness which affected her on her return to France. Her recovery, though, is described as ambivalent because it reawakens her to the painful memories of her dead husband. At this point the text breaks off, and a final sentence informs us that the death of its addressee Jouvet in 1951 prevented it from being completed. So the letter expresses grief for a dead person (Georges Dudach), and it is addressed

98

Haunted Subjects

to a dead person (Louis Jouvet). There is a curious discrepancy between the relative importance of their respective deaths in thematic and formal terms. The death of Dudach is not described at length in the text, though its thematic significance is major; the death of Jouvet has no apparent thematic importance, but formally it is the key event which undercuts the text’s ability to communicate with its primary addressee. The intentions motivating the text may still be legible within it, but they cannot be successfully realised when the person to whom they are addressed has died. As a communicative act, then, the letter necessarily fails. By addressing her text to someone incapable of reading it, Delbo reflects the common anxiety of Holocaust testimony that what it says is unintelligible because there is no shared language linking author and reader and no possible exchange between them. So although Jouvet’s death plays no thematic role in Spectres, mes compagnons, it transforms the text into a message that cannot be delivered. Delbo’s book expresses grief for a dead person (Dudach) and it is addressed to a dead person (Jouvet). It is also about the dead, or the not quite living, since its most striking feature is the appearance of what are described as ghosts, the spectres of the title. Throughout Delbo’s writing there is a rich and anguished play on the vocabulary of life, death and return in ghostly form. The use of the words revenir (to return) and revenant (someone who returns, or a ghost) is particularly important. The title of Aucun de nous ne reviendra insists that none will return from the camps. The fact that the text is written at all seems to contradict this, yet a poem sequence from Une connaissance inutile, the second volume of the Auschwitz et après trilogy, suggests that the prisoners may not have returned after all: I am returning [Je reviens] from another world in this world that I had not left and I do not know which is true tell me have I returned [suis-je revenue] from the other world? For me I am still back there every day a little more

The Ghosts of Auschwitz 99

I die again [je remeurs] the death of all those who died and I no longer know which is true of that world of the other world back there now I no longer know when I am dreaming and when I am not dreaming.13 Whilst asserting that the speaker has returned, the poem also problematises the very possibility of return; and in the process it confuses the distinctions between here and there, this world and the other world, dream and reality, and life and death. The apparent nonsense of ‘I die again [je remeurs]’ is motivated and explained when death is conceived not as a single event, but as something always to be repeated, so that the survivor dies the deaths of those who have not survived. So returning is a mode of not returning, living is a mode of dying. Une connaissance inutile ends by referring to ghost stories that we would be better off not believing: And then better not to believe in them in those stories of ghosts [revenants] you will never sleep again if ever you believe them these returning spectres [ces spectres revenants] these ghosts [ces revenants] who return [reviennent] without even being able to explain how.14 The revenant is both someone who returns and someone who cannot fully return because she has died; she returns only in the form of a dead person, of someone who has survived her own death in the diminished form of the living dead. The paradoxes of revenance can

100 Haunted Subjects

be related to the sense of many survivors of the Holocaust and deportation that, appearances to the contrary, they have not survived their experiences. At the end of Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit, for example, the narrator looks into a mirror and sees a corpse; or in Jorge Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la vie the narrator insists that he died in Buchenwald: ‘For I had not really survived death, I had not avoided it. [  ] All in all, I was a ghost [un revenant].’15 Later in the text he describes himself and his companions as revenants: ‘For death is not something that we had brushed, come close to, from which we have escaped, like an accident from which you might emerge unharmed. We have lived it    we are not survivors, but ghosts [revenants]    ’16 Like Delbo when she makes the impossible claim ‘I die again’, Semprun is deliberately paradoxical in insisting that death is lived. The boundaries between life and death have been erased. The ghost as revenant, as both what returns and what cannot return (‘I had not really returned’),17 what survives and what has died, is a perfect image of this survival-in-death and death-in-survival.18 The traumatised subject is also a haunted subject; and some texts relating to historical tragedies other than the Holocaust suggest that this may be true more generally. The ghosts of Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie or La Femme sans sépulture represent a haunted subjectivity and a haunted present in modern Algeria directly comparable to Delbo’s haunted post-war France. In Djebar’s writing the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence and its bloody aftermath has not yet been worked through. Likewise, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved the ghost returns in part because the scars of slavery are not healed. Ghosts still roam amongst us because the past is not settled; the dead are not quite dead and the living are not fully alive. The spectre as revenant, both returning and not returning, is one of the meanings associated with the term in Spectres, mes compagnons. In a passage which also appears in Mesure de nos jours, the third volume of the Auschwitz et après trilogy, Delbo describes the experience of return from captivity.19 In the concentration camps all sense of reality is corroded, the real is de-realised, the living lose the ability to distinguish between life and death. The survivors occupy a different world: On the return journey, I was with my comrades, the survivors from amongst my comrades. They were sitting close to me in the plane and, as time began to move faster, they were becoming pallid,

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

101

more and more pallid, losing colour and form. [  ] I was watching them being transformed under my eyes, becoming transparent, becoming spectres.20 The narrator feels herself being drawn into this spectral existence: ‘If I confuse the dead and the living, with whom am I?’ (43). On her return to France she is ‘in a suspended existence’ (44), floating ‘in a present without reality’ (45). Her survival is a state resembling that expressed most dramatically by Mado in Mesure de nos jours: ‘It seems to me that I am not alive’; ‘I died in Auschwitz and no one can see it’.21 Like the narrator of Spectres, mes compagnons, Mado is haunted by ghosts amongst whom she believes she may belong: ‘the room was invaded by the spectres of our companions’.22 So the spectres of Spectres, mes compagnons are to some extent the ghosts of dead friends and comrades who continue to haunt the survivor. This sense is consistent with Delbo’s other texts, and with Holocaust testimony and the literature of trauma more generally. However, one of the surprises of Spectres, mes compagnons is that this is in fact the least important use of the term in the book; the spectres which accompany the narrator turn out not to be principally her dead or surviving companions from Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Moreover, their appearance to her pre-dates her experience of Auschwitz. In the text the spectralisation of the real is not attributed to the concentration camps because it is already underway before the narrator’s deportation. The narrator is first visited by what she calls spectres whilst she is still in a French prison. The ghosts which appear to her are all characters drawn from literature: Fabrice del Dongo from Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, Phèdre, Electre, Ondine, Antigone and, most importantly, Alceste from Molière’s Le Misanthrope. Alceste accompanies the narrator on the train to Auschwitz; he apparently leaves her when she arrives at the camp, but he visits her again when she is back in France. In a densely suggestive liminary note dated 10 October 197223 and signed Charlotte Delbo, the use of the word spectre is explained: The poet’s creatures are not physical creatures, that is why I call them spectres. They are more true than creatures of flesh and blood because they are inexhaustible. That is why they are our friends,

102 Haunted Subjects

our companions, those thanks to whom we are bound to other humans, in the chain of beings and the chain of history. (5) These literary ghosts are our friends because they are mediators between ourselves and others. They are what binds humans to one another and to history. So they are in a sense more real than real people, ‘more true than creatures of flesh and blood’, because without them people would have no means of relating to one another. Moreover, the truth of these characters resides in their essential inexhaustibility: ‘They are more true [  ] because they are inexhaustible.’ Their truth consists precisely in their spectrality, the fact that they cannot be definitively incarnated in flesh and blood; in other words, their truth lies in the fact that their truth will never be revealed. This is echoed in the main text when the distinction is drawn between characters in novels and characters in plays. Here, the narrator explicitly raises the question of secrets and the issue of whether they will ever be fully revealed: ‘Characters in a novel tell us their secrets. Characters in a play seem to hide nothing but they keep their secret’ (11). Perhaps there is an echo here of Delbo’s already-quoted epigraph from Aucun de nous ne reviendra: ‘Today, I am not sure that what I have written is true. I am sure that it is truthful.’ The speaker has no intention to deceive, but the truth may nevertheless be withheld. There remains an untouchable core of secrecy which ensures that nothing is hidden but not all is revealed. The truth is to be traced in what always remains unsaid rather than in what is said. There is then a connection here between ghosts, stage characters and survivorwitnesses: none lies, but none tells the truth either, their truth resides in their secrecy not in their revelations.

Jouvet’s ghost There is a hint in these comments that the text is not quite saying everything that it might, and indeed that what is unsaid might be more significant, closer to the truth, than what is said. Despite the implication that the full truth remains unspeakable, might it nevertheless be possible to glean from the text a little more than it openly proclaims? In what follows I shall suggest that the secret of the ghost or the witness may be inviolable, but that its mute workings on the fabric of the text, its silent inflection of the testimony, may

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

103

still be glimpsed. Despite the plural of Spectres, mes compagnons, and despite multiple visitations recorded here, there is, I shall argue, only one ghost encrypted in this text, albeit a ghost which is itself fractured and multiform with its own secrets to harbour and its own reasons for keeping them, that of Louis Jouvet. Jouvet’s spectral presence can already be seen in Delbo’s liminary comments on her literary ghosts, since they directly echo Jouvet’s conception of stage characters with which Delbo, as his secretary, was well familiar. Indeed, one of her roles was to transcribe and type up the courses in acting he gave at the Conservatoire national d’art dramatique.24 So these words, signed and given as Delbo’s own, are already haunted by Jouvet’s presence. The same haunting can be seen if we look at the spectres which visit Delbo. These spectres are not a random selection of literary characters; they can be grouped together in two distinct series, which I shall call the incest series and the Jouvet series. The incest series contains Fabrice del Dongo, Phèdre, Electre and Antigone. These characters have some sort of erotic or quasierotic or at least dangerously close attachment to a family member: Fabrice to his aunt Gina, Phèdre to her stepson Hippolyte, Electre to her father,25 Antigone, who is of course the daughter of Oedipus, to her brothers. These attachments, if not actively incestuous, nevertheless suggest an unrealised incestuous investment which prevents the characters from forming or maintaining successful conventional relationships. The Jouvet series contains Electre, Ondine, Dom Juan and Alceste. The first three of these are the lead characters in some of Jouvet’s most successful productions from the 1930s and 1940s, in which he also acted. His production of Giraudoux’s Electre, in which he played the role of the beggar, was performed 183 times; his production of Giraudoux’s Ondine, in which he played the unfaithful and doomed lover Hans, was performed 311 times; and after the Second World War he directed and played the lead role in Molière’s Dom Juan 200 times.26 Jouvet died before he could fulfil his aim of directing Le Misanthrope and playing Alceste in a full production. However, Jouvet did give a series of courses on Alceste at the Conservatoire national d’art dramatique in April and May 1940, courses which survive only because Delbo transcribed them.27 The two most important of these ghosts in Spectres, mes compagnons are Ondine and Alceste. Giraudoux’s Ondine tells of the love between Hans and Ondine, a supernatural water spirit. Hans dies because he

104 Haunted Subjects

betrays Ondine, and at the end of the play Ondine is condemned to forget all about him when she returns to her home under the water. Delbo’s dramatisation of her last meeting with her husband in the one-act play Une scène jouée dans la mémoire has echoes in it of the last meeting of Hans and Ondine, as the pair confront their imminent, definitive separation and the inevitable death of the male lover. In Spectres, mes compagnons the narrator explicitly puts herself and her husband in the roles of Ondine and Hans as she alludes to their final meeting in his prison cell on the morning of his execution. She is distressed that she, like Ondine, may forget her husband. However at the end of the book, after her return to France and as her memories of her husband begin to return to her, she distinguishes between her position and that of Ondine; she is devastated by her husband’s loss: ‘His memory was so painful that I envied Ondine’ (50). Ondine can forget but Delbo’s narrator cannot. Earlier, the narrator had stressed another crucial difference between Hans and her husband: ‘But Hans had to die because he had betrayed, and G. because he had not betrayed’ (24). The narrator and G. are linked to Ondine and Hans by the poignancy of loss, but in other respects their situations are quite different. It is surprising, then, that the narrator associates her own position so directly with Ondine’s. By identifying with Ondine, the narrator hints that betrayal is part of her story even when, or perhaps because, she explicitly insists that her husband had not betrayed; and it may be that she also hints that forgetting or repressed memory also plays a role in her text. It is possible that the betrayal, which is such an important part of Ondine’s story, is not committed by her husband. Explicitly, Hans is linked with the narrator’s beloved and doomed husband; but this explicit link is shadowed by the much stronger association between Hans and Jouvet, who was Hans’s first and greatest theatrical incarnation. So Hans can be identified with Jouvet at least as much as with the narrator’s husband. In consequence, the pain of loss which the narrator expresses through Ondine is simultaneously a sign of grief for her husband and for Jouvet; and the presence of the ghost insinuates implications in Delbo’s text which are quite at odds with what seems to be its overt message. To whom is the text’s declaration of love addressed, to the husband or to Jouvet, or to both? Moreover, whilst the narrator insists that her husband was not a traitor, the presence of Ondine in her text suggests that betrayal and infidelity

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

105

may after all have been an element in her story of doomed love. The text hints at dramas of which it says nothing openly. The sense that more is going on here than is made explicit is compounded by the suggestions of inappropriate, incestuous desire that can be glimpsed in the appearance of ghosts belonging to what I called the series of incest. Out of the shadows of this text emerges a view of love as shameful, incestuous, forbidden, and as betrayal. Molière’s Alceste is even more significant in Spectres, mes compagnons than Ondine, and he is explictly linked with Jouvet. Alceste appears on the train to Auschwitz when all the other ghosts have deserted the narrator. To be with her Alceste has foresaken Célimène and the desert to which he retires at the end of Le Misanthrope, and he has also abandoned Jouvet. For the narrator, Jouvet is the natural person for Alceste to be with: ‘But why leave Jouvet, the one who could let you live again, who could re-incarnate you in our age?’ (29). ‘Yes, I have left Jouvet’, Alceste confirms (30); and later the narrator expresses her flattered incomprehension that Alceste should choose to be with her rather than Jouvet: ‘That you should flee Célimène, I can understand – and yet that is very difficult to understand – but Jouvet? What grievances do you have against him?’ (34). A few lines later, however, as Alceste in turn deserts the narrator at the gates of Auschwitz, he is directly identified with Jouvet, as the narrator recognises in him the movement of Arnolphe from Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes, another of the roles famously taken by Jouvet in his own production in the 1930s and performed by him 675 times:28 I saw him disappear with a rapid step, a step which looked a little like that of Arnolphe as he enters the stage with his cape over his arm, his hat like a first-class hearse, a step which looked a little like that of    But how was it possible, so much resemblance in one movement? And Alceste disappeared suddenly, as when someone turns a corner in the street. It was Jouvet disappearing around the corner of the rue Caumartin. (34–5) So Alceste both is and is not Jouvet, he is separate from him but also identified with him. There are in fact signs that he is a sort of idealised Jouvet, one who comes closer to how the narrator wants him to be than the real person. In the first piece of reported dialogue with

106 Haunted Subjects

Jouvet recorded in Spectres, mes compagnons, the narrator addresses her employer in formal terms as vous whereas he uses the familiar tu form (‘you [vous] asked me:/ - Are you [tu] afraid’, 9). With Alceste this disparity immediately disappears: ‘I realised then that I was saying tu to Alceste, quite naturally, as when one falls in love and conventions cease to exist. I understood that it was because I was quite suddenly aware of an intimacy which had already existed between us for a long time’ (27). The narrator hopes that this intimacy may indeed be love:29 As I spoke with him, I wondered, and the question became obsessive: ‘But why, then, has he accompanied me?’ [  ] Could he be in love with me? I asked myself the question humbly. Of course it was impossible. Me, after Célimène? How could I believe it? Yet    Why shouldn’t he be in love with me? Célimène’s nature was frivolous and inconstant. I was quite the opposite, serious and terribly faithful, so close to Alceste in his need for the absolute, that slightly absurd, demanding side of him which almost makes him ridiculous. It was possible that he loved me after all, it was consistent with that part of him which fled into the desert. (28) At the end of this reflection the narrator concludes that Alceste feels friendship for her rather than love, and she decides in consequence that friendship is a more elevated bond. But the very fact that she contemplates the possibility of love between Alceste and herself is distinctly odd, given that she has only just said farewell to her husband. With her husband’s death comes a loss of the sense of being loved which she almost immediately seeks to regain through her attempt to persuade herself that Alceste might love her. Alceste is, then, both Jouvet and a substitute for the husband; the husband’s role is occupied by a ghost who is also a stand-in for her employer. So Jouvet is simultaneously the addressee of the letter, the ghost which haunts it, and a possible surrogate for the husband whose death the letter mourns. The figure and function of Alceste in Spectres, mes compagnons are, then, ambiguous: he is both separate from and identified with Jouvet, representing the narrator’s former employer and also potentially substituting for her dead husband. The most substantial question concerning Alceste is the problem of why he deserts her at the gates

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

107

of Auschwitz and then comes back to her on her return to France. Lawrence Langer has suggested that Alceste is the last of the ghosts to abandon the narrator because, as the most misanthropic of them, he is the least terrified by the horrors to come. However, Auschwitz is too terrible even for him, and it is utterly inconceivable within the frameworks and values of the literary canon to which he belongs: Molière’s misanthrope, whose ambition and resolve had been to leave mankind and migrate to the desert, reveals the limits of his literary existence and the cultural milieu that gave birth to him when he is unable to tolerate the desolation that greets his eyes as he leaps from the boxcar in Auschwitz. The gulf dividing art from life reasserts itself here; culture had creative options [  ] that abandoned human beings do not. Alceste’s vaunted ideal of solitude has nothing to do with the atrocities of the deathcamps, which would make his moderate brand of misanthropy blush.30 However, Langer’s eloquent reading fails to explain why other ghosts do nevertheless visit the narrator whilst she is in Auschwitz: Electre, Dom Juan, Antigone, Ondine, and even briefly Oriane, the Duchesse de Guermantes from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Neither does Langer account for an intriguing inconsistency in the text. The narrator claims that she saw Alceste leave her on arrival at Auschwitz (‘I saw him disappear with a rapid step [  ] I knew that Alceste had fled, and would not return’, 34–5) but Alceste denies this when he speaks to her after her return to France: ‘- I had not left you. It was you who did not want to return. I was in the kingdom of shadows all the time that you were there yourself. I am only returning from there because you are returning [Je n’en reviens que parce que tu reviens]’ (49). Alceste claims not to have left her at all, or to have left her only because she left him. In these inconsistencies it is possible to see an unresolved formation involving both accusation and exculpation: you were wrong to leave me, and you did not leave me, we were always together, and in fact it was I who left you. One factor behind this accusation is perhaps Delbo’s sense that Jouvet was wrong to try to prevent her from returning to France to work for the Resistance, and wrong not to do the same himself.31 Alceste-Jouvet is the narrator’s friend, perhaps a possible lover, but he has also betrayed her, refusing to pay the high price that she would pay for her political

108 Haunted Subjects

and moral convictions. At this point there resurfaces the distinction drawn earlier between Ondine’s lover Hans, who betrayed her, and the narrator’s husband who was not a traitor. Alceste, like Hans, is both the perfect, idealised lover and someone who betrays, who is unworthy of trust. Through the inconsistencies in the text concerning Alceste’s presence or absence in Auschwitz, it is possible to see the need both to disclose and to disguise his treachery, the injunction both to know and not to know. When the narrator asks Alceste why he has accompanied her rather than staying with Jouvet, she seems bewildered by his choice and wonders what bone of contention there might be between Molière’s character and the actor: ‘What grievances do you have against him?’ (34). It seems now that this question is far from rhetorical. The figures who cluster around Jouvet are associated with an amalgam of desertion, betrayal and transgressive desires. Spectres, mes compagnons is haunted by the presence of its addressee, Jouvet, though the narrator herself does not seem fully to realise the extent to which he pervades the text. Moreover, as he is repeatedly associated with inconsistencies and unanswered questions, it is implied that he, not she, holds the key to the text’s unsolved riddles. The first dialogue between Jouvet and the narrator in the book establishes him as someone who interrogates others but keeps his own secrets to himself: It was whilst we were listening to the night that you asked me: – Are you afraid? – Afraid? Me? No. Why? – You are not afraid? – No. Why should I be afraid? You are afraid of a danger you sense or see. What danger is there? – You are never afraid, at night, for example? I’m not talking about danger, I’m talking about fear. No, I didn’t understand then what fear you were talking about. (9) Jouvet plays the role of questioner and repeatedly refuses to respond to the questions posed to him in return (‘Why? [  ] Why should I be afraid? [  ] What danger is there?’). The narrator senses in what he says a core of fear which does not yet correspond to anything within her own experience. And although, as she goes on to say, she

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

109

would have many reasons to feel fear, she remains unsure that she ever experienced quite what Jouvet seems to be suggesting (see 10). From the very beginning, then, the text refers to an anxiety, perhaps a trauma, which is not the narrator’s own, which will remain unexplained, alien to her own experience, and shrouded in secrecy. If the subsequent narrative links it with incest and betrayal, its secret remains nevertheless inviolate. It impinges on the narrator’s life and emotions, it comes to occupy and to haunt her mind and her text, but it is never fully owned, and never coherently integrated into a consistent thematic framework which would explain and justify its presence.

The secrets of testimony So does the haunted text bear false witness? I would venture now that the witness cannot be other than false if she does not know what she is bearing witness to. In Spectres, mes compagnons, and perhaps in testimonial literature more generally, there are at least two acts of witnessing: to the narrator’s own experiences, and to experiences which are not her own, into which she has no insight, and which her text registers only abstrusely and uncomprehendingly. The ghosts which haunt her are linked with fears, desires and betrayals which pre-date her deportation, and which belong to others, or another, however much they also come to inhabit her narrative. The death of Jouvet disturbs the narrator’s capacity to communicate what she wanted to her chosen addressee, and this perhaps serves as a figure for the haunted text inhabited by the secrets of others. Delbo’s writing suggests that secrecy as much as revelation is a key characteristic of testimonial literature. Her text preserves its right to say whilst not saying; it does not disclose or even know everything that might be hidden within it. The secrets of spectral others impinge on the vulnerable self and ensure that its testimony is only ever part of the full story, and perhaps not even the most important part. Derrida associates respect for the other’s secret with an ethics and politics of singularity, and he assigns to literature a privileged role in the preservation of secrecy. This secrecy does not consist in the dissimulation of something that could have been said; rather, it is in the nature of the literary text to constitute a singular instance which both calls for and resists further elucidation.32 As previous chapters

110 Haunted Subjects

have suggested, this account of textual secrecy must be distinguished from Abraham and Torok’s theory of phantoms. As psychoanalysts, Abraham and Torok aspire to uncover the presence of ghosts and to unmask their secrets in order to dissipate them. The possibility of achieving this depends upon the discovery of information from sources other than the analysand. The analysand cannot reveal the phantom’s secret because he or she literally does not know it; but in principle the secret can and should be uncovered. The deconstructive version of secrecy is quite different because it is an underlying structure rather than something with a content that can be disclosed. Perhaps, though, the difference is not so great when, as in Delbo’s case, the text hints at the presence of secrets but offers absolutely no prospect of bringing them to light. The witness is false because the text is not fully her own, its spectres suffuse it with their unquiet words. And allowing the ghosts to roam, letting them insinuate rumours of which she knows nothing, may finally be why this false witness nevertheless has something of the true about her.

6 Speaking with the Dead: De Man, Levinas, Agamben

Can the dead speak to us? Is it possible to envisage some sort of mediation between the worlds of the living and the dead without lapsing into mysticism and wish-fulfillment? This question, which has been touched upon throughout this book, is the principal subject of the next two chapters. Barbara Johnson poses a version of the question when responding to the death of Mary Joe Frug, a murdered professor at the New England School of Law. Professor Frug’s final article was left suspended in mid sentence at the time of her death. Reading this final sentence, Johnson asks, ‘How does this gap signify?’.1 The question is not ‘What does this gap mean?’, which would imply that the gap has a determinate meaning which can be ascertained; rather, the question ‘How does the gap signify?’ asks about the interpretative effects it produces, and about how it offers itself to be read beyond any intentional meaning. Death is an interruption of the production of meaning; it curtails our dialogue with the deceased as it removes their ability to speak to us. Levinas describes this vividly in the lectures he gave in his final year of teaching, which are published as La Mort et le temps: ‘Death is the disappearance, in beings, of those expressive movements which made them appear living – those movements which are always responses. [  ] Death is the without-response [le sans-réponse].’2 The other is a producer of signs to which death puts an abrupt end. However, Johnson suggests that the gap left behind as the final message of the deceased may still signify. Death does not suspend our expectation, or our hope, that those who have gone may nevertheless speak to us in some way. Their words would come to us 111

112 Haunted Subjects

from an alterity more radical even than that of the living other; though the danger, of course, is that what the dead say may be only a projection of what we want to hear. This chapter looks at how three thinkers – Paul de Man, Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben – attempt to listen to the voices of those who are deprived of speech by death. In each case, the possibility of hearing from the dead entails not so much a belief in life after death as a revision of what it means for the surviving subject to understand, to speak and to respond. The discussion of Agamben picks up the discussion of Holocaust testimony from the previous chapter; and it will become clear that, particularly in Agamben’s case, restoring speech to the voiceless risks becoming a theft or imposition of meaning rather than a response to radical otherness. At the end of the chapter I shall suggest what it might mean to attend to the signs of the dead on the basis of some brief comments on Didier van Cauwelaert’s novel, Corps étranger.

De Man and prosopopeia In his article ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ Paul de Man’s discussion of prosopopeia revolves around the possibility of speaking with the dead. Prosopopeia is the figure by which, for example, poets address and lend their voice to something or someone inanimate, such as an ancestor or literary precursor, so that a sort of dialogue with the dead can be established. As de Man puts it, prosopopeia is ‘the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech’.3 De Man is categorical that the speech of the dead is a fiction. A little later he refers to ‘the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave’ or, quoting Wordsworth, the ‘tender fiction’ that the worlds of the living and the dead can be harmoniously united (77). However, as he demonstrates in his reading of Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs, the fiction is a dangerous one. The threat inherent in prosopopeia is that, by making the dead speak, the living are, as de Man puts it, ‘struck dumb, frozen in their own death’ (78). Their living agency is diminished when part of their own power of speech is handed over to the dead other. As we have seen in previous chapters, too close commerce with the dead diminishes the life of the living.

Speaking with the Dead 113

Moreover, in de Man’s account the dangerous fiction of prosopopeia may also be unavoidable because it is a figure of the linguistic process in general, as it strains to produce intelligibility where in fact there is none. The final lines of de Man’s essay suggest that language is a source of inevitable mystification: Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a de-facement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. (81) Here, de Man describes the exact coincidence of restoration and deprivation, figuring and disfiguring, causing and veiling. By imposing a fiction of agency prosopopeia de-faces the dead at the very moment it gives them face (etymologically, as de Man indicates, prosopopeia means to confer a mask or a face); and just as the dead are falsified, so is everything else as well. Language is figuration, figuration is disfiguration, and disfiguration is the necessary and deluded condition of intelligibility. Prosopopeia is, then, not one trope amongst others, but what de Man elsewhere calls ‘the master trope of poetic discourse’, or ‘the very figure of the reader and of reading’.4 In reading we expect the text to speak to us and we expose ourselves to the insane cycle in which intelligibility, and along with it ourselves as sense-making subjects, is posited, transformed and evaporated, as de Man suggests in ‘Shelley Disfigured’: And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat – that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.5 In de Man’s account prosopopeia is the fiction that something or someone other than ourselves can speak. De Man’s position certainly does not endorse the possibility of actually dialoguing with the dead, as it is entirely clear that their words are imposed by the living. At the same time, the fiction of an exchange with the dead and

114 Haunted Subjects

of a possible harmony and mutual intelligibility between separate worlds is a mystification inherent in language. The ‘madness of words’ is such that sense is made by defacing and defiguring, and this process is entirely unavoidable. So by succumbing to the fiction that the dead may speak, we give voice to the haunting within ourselves which ensures that we also are deprived of our own voice. Through de Man’s discussion of prosopopeia two key points emerge which will be developed in the following readings of Levinas and Agamben. First, he makes it explicit that the words of the dead are provided by the living, that there is no real exchange with the utter alterity of the dead. Second, in the process of attending to the words of the dead, however erroneous or mystified this might be, our own subject position is disturbed. The place of the living is displaced and the speaking voice is dispossessed as it endeavours to achieve an exchange with its others. Moreover, this disruption of our speaking position is also what permits us to speak, since there is no way out of the ‘madness of words’. For Agamben and Levinas, the exchange with those who have no voice has some more plausible reality outside de Man’s vertiginous linguistic predicaments; but they can maintain this only by replicating de Man’s move of fundamentally disrupting the stability of the subject’s speaking position.

Levinas and the dead Other Levinas’s lectures on death, delivered during his final year of teaching in 1975–1976 and published as La Mort et le temps in 1991, are remarkable as a rare record of his activity as a teacher and also because they contain his longest and most explicit discussion of Heidegger since his early work in the 1930s and 1940s.6 Heidegger, especially the Heidegger of Being and Time, which Levinas consistently cited as one of the most important works in the history of Western philosophy, had remained a crucial influence on his thought. But Levinas had also distanced himself from Heidegger, principally for two related reasons. Philosophically, Levinas could not find an adequate ethical dimension in Heidegger’s work; and personally, he found it hard to forgive his former teacher for his pre-war membership of the Nazi party and post-war silence about German atrocities. Levinas devotes a large part of La Mort et le temps to an analysis of Being and Time. His lecture course ended in the same year as Heidegger’s death; and

Speaking with the Dead 115

it is precisely on the subject of death that Levinas takes issue with Heidegger, as if interrogating his teacher’s words on death were a way of reviving a dialogue long after any direct relationship had ceased.7 Heidegger discusses the question of death in sections 46–53 of Being and Time. Heidegger begins the discussion by suggesting that, because Dasein is being-with-others (Mitsein mit Anderen) we can encounter death when the other dies. In mourning, and in our continuing care for those who have died, the dead remain with us in some sense, as our being-with-others becomes being-with-the-dead (Mitsein mit dem Toten). But in this being-with-the-dead, there is no real co-existence with the dead, as the deceased person is not actually present in a shared world. As Heidegger puts it, ‘Being-with always means beingtogether-with [Miteinandersein] in the same world. The deceased has left our “world” and left it behind’.8 From this it follows that we do not actually experience the death of the other because we do not participate in the loss of being which the dead suffer. We can be present at the death of the other, but we do not experience it ‘in the genuine sense [im genuinen Sinne]’ (239). This leads Heidegger to argue that in death there is no relationship with the other: No one can take the other’s death away from him. Someone can indeed ‘go into death for another’. But that always means: to sacrifice oneself for the other ‘in a particular matter’. Such dying-for    can however never mean that thereby in the slightest sense the other’s death is taken away from him. Each Dasein must always take dying upon himself. Death is, in so far as it ‘is’, essentially always my own. (240) Heidegger concedes that I might be affected by the death of the other in mourning, or that in some circumstances I might die in the place of the other; but I cannot take away or experience the death of the other. Indeed, dwelling on the other’s death may be a reassuring form of inauthenticity, since it distracts me from the knowledge that my own being is being-for-death, and that the only death that concerns me ontologically is my own. So death has nothing to do with beingwith-others and everything to do with my own being. Death is my ‘most proper, categorical, unsurpassable possibility’ (250). My death is my own, indeed it is that which is most my own. Heidegger repeatedly uses the

116 Haunted Subjects

superlative eigenst, own-most or most proper to me, in reference to death. What affects me most properly, most authentically is the death which is entirely my own. Death, then, is something that happens to me, and nothing about the death of the other concerns me in a genuine sense. Heidegger does not rule out the possibility of some sort of afterlife, but in his account there is no dialogue or relationship with the dead because their world and mine are no longer shared. The dead are no longer with us. This is precisely the position that Levinas argues against when, on the edge of retirement, he resumes his dialogue with the dying Heidegger. He counters Heidegger by insisting that death does not dissolve all relation with the other, and that it is not only my own death that concerns me authentically. Love, for example, is ‘strong as death’ according to the Song of Solomon;9 and in love I discover that the other’s death matters more to me than my own: ‘What is called, in a rather dubious term, love is par excellence the fact that the death of the other affects me more than my own. Love for the other is emotion over the death of the other. It is my welcoming of the other, and not anxiety over the death that awaits me, which is the reference to death’ (121). The disagreement between the two philosophers derives in part from the fact that Levinas’s conception of the other is quite different from Heidegger’s. Being, for Heidegger, is being-with-others; but as his discussion of death indicates, others are nevertheless excluded from what is most authentically my own. They accompany me, share my world, but not to the extent that they intrude into my most authentic being-for-death. For Levinas, on the contrary, the relationship with the other plays a constitutive role in my existence, so there is no aspect of my experience or my possibilities in which it does not participate. No exclusion of the other from my own-most possibilities is conceivable. For Heidegger, the dead other is no longer with us; for Levinas the other is always with us. Because the other is susceptible to death, she or he may of course die; but this does not mean that the other ceases to impinge on the world of the living. So in this account, death is, after all, a relation with the other. Because I am invested with responsibility for the other, the death of the other is necessarily my affair. Just as the living other made me who I am, then so does the other after his or her death. Levinas describes the self as the survivor of the death of the other, and in so far as it is

Speaking with the Dead 117

a survivor, it continues to be determined by its relationship with the deceased. This does not yet mean, however, that the other can speak to me. The living other is a source of expressive movements, of signs and responses. Death puts an end to the other’s capacity to make me the addressee of its signifying acts, so that, as already quoted, ‘Death is the without-response’ (10). At the same time, the absence of the other’s response does not curtail all relation and return me to an identity unaffected by the other’s existence. Levinas refers to the excessive response provoked in some by the death of Socrates recounted in the Phaedo: ‘some cry more than is seemly, cry without measure: as if humanity were not exhausted by measure, as if there were an excess in death’ (10). Through this excess it is discovered that, even if the other is no longer alive to serve as a source of expressive signs, the death of the other does not simply restore meaning as the prerogative of being, or identity, or the Same. This is the crux of Levinas’s disagreement with Heidegger. The only death which authentically concerns Dasein is its own; in Levinas’s account the self is constituted by the living other and by the dead other. And because the dead other continues to constitute me as its survivor, it serves as a source of meaning from beyond the grave: ‘But doesn’t the relation with the other and with the other’s death lead back to another source of meaning? Dying, as the dying of the other, affects my identity as Self, it makes sense in its breaking of the Same, its breaking of my Self, its breaking of the Same in my Self’ (15). Death, then, terminates the other’s ability to speak to me. But this non-response turns into another source of meaning. Constituted as a survivor, the self is no more the entire source of its own identity and its meanings than it was when the other was alive. The dead may not speak in any literal sense, but they do signify, since the survivor continues to be the uncomprehending addressee of signs which cannot be attributed to any living subject. Death is both nonsense and a breach which opens up sense to unsuspected possibilities. Levinas suggests that ‘death indicates a meaning which surprises’ (16), and the surprise of this meaning is its crucial aspect. Since it does not come from any identifiable intentional subject, it cannot be anticipated or known in advance. The death of the other is a pure question mark; it consists in ambiguity and enigma, scandal and crisis (16), an opening onto what cannot reply (24). This is not exactly a dialogue; it does however maintain the possibility of some kind

118 Haunted Subjects

of signifying relationship with the dead, even if that relationship is understood as a breach within meaning rather than the availability of determinate, intended messages. Like de Man, and as we shall see like Agamben, Levinas establishes the possibility of attending to signs from sources outside the self on the basis of a profound modification of the status of the speaking, interpreting subject. The dead still signify because they constitute me as survivor of their death. Is it possible, though, for the survivor to bear witness to the experiences of those who did not survive, so that their now-unspeakable messages are not irrevocably lost? This is a question with which Agamben deals in his book Remnants of Auschwitz.

Agamben and the testimony of the dead In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive Giorgio Agamben asks how it is possible to bear witness to Auschwitz.10 As Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman had argued in their hugely influential book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, the Shoah was an ‘event without witnesses’ because those who were present were either destroyed or deprived of their ability to bear witness.11 Agamben quotes, apparently approvingly, Elie Wiesel’s view according to which ‘Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely. [  ] The past belongs to the dead’.12 So the dead of Auschwitz cannot speak and their experience is irremediably cut off from us. Agamben takes the figure of the Muselmann as the extreme illustration of the impossibility of testimony. Muselmann, which literally means ‘Muslim’, was a word used in Auschwitz and some other camps to describe prisoners whose vital force had ebbed away. Agamben quotes the words of Jean Améry, an Auschwitz survivor who describes the Muselmann as ‘the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions’ (41). It is not known for certain why the word Muselmann was used; suggestions discussed by Agamben include what he claims to be the literal meaning of Muslim (‘the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God’), the characteristic sitting posture

Speaking with the Dead 119

shared by Muslims and some prisoners, the similarity between the swaying motions of the Muselmänner and Islamic prayer rituals, and – more improbably in Agamben’s view – the confusion of Muselmann with Muschelmann, ‘shell-man’ (45).13 In any case, the Muselmann becomes a key figure for Agamben. As with much else in Remnants of Auschwitz he follows Primo Levi on this point. In The Drowned and the Saved Levi insists that ‘we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses’; what he calls ‘the complete witnesses’ are the Muselmänner, but they by definition do not tell of their experiences because they either died or returned mute. They do not tell of their experiences ‘just as no one ever returned to describe his own death’.14 Agamben’s statement of the impossibility inherent in testimony takes the form of a commentary on Levi’s description of the Muselmann: The witness usually testifies in the name of justice and truth and as such his or her speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet here the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority. The ‘true’ witnesses, the ‘complete witnesses’ are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. They are those who ‘touched bottom’: the Muslims, the drowned. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony. And yet to speak here of a proxy makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be transmitted. They have [quoting Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz]15 no ‘story’, no ‘face’, and even less do they have ‘thought’. Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness. But this alters the value of testimony in a definitive way; it makes it necessary to look for its meaning in an unexpected area. (34) This paragraph shows how Agamben’s account of the Muselmann and of the lacuna within testimony derives directly from his reading of Levi. In what Agamben calls ‘the phenomenology of testimony’ which he learns from Levi, testimony is a process that involves at least two subjects: ‘the first, the survivor, who can speak but who

120 Haunted Subjects

has nothing interesting to say; and the second, who has “seen the Gorgon”, who “has touched bottom”, and therefore has much to say but cannot speak’ (120). Here, it appears that the Muselmann has both ‘nothing to say’ and ‘much to say’. His ‘nothing’ is simultaneously a great deal. Rather than a message or lesson, the Muselmann makes manifest – to recall Barbara Johnson – a gap or lacuna which signifies but does not mean. The relationship between the surviving witness and the dead or mute Muselmann involves the same substitution of voices found in prosopopeia. The dead may have much to say, but their words are a fiction created by those who speak in their place. The living speak on behalf of the dead. Agamben again quotes Levi who describes the death of a child in Auschwitz and comments that ‘he bears witness through these words of mine’ (38). The survivors lend voice to the dead; in the words of Agamben, quoting Levi, they speak ‘in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony’. So the Muselmann is the true witness who cannot bear witness. The survivor speaks for him, and in the process bears witness to the lacuna inherent in testimony. How is this lending of voice different from an imposition of voice? In de Man’s prosopopeia the dialogue of the living and the dead entailed substitutions and reversals whereby, if the dead could not truly speak, then neither were the living fully alive as the secure source of their own words. Agamben’s argument entails a similar disruption of the assured position of the speaking subject. The Muselmann is a subject in disarray, and so is the survivor. In a crucial philosophical detour, Agamben argues that the experience of desubjectification coincides with and is part of subjectification; the appropriation of language is also an expropriation, the living being can never fully occupy the vacant place of the speaking subject. One consequence of this is that, as Agamben puts it, ‘every author [is] a co-author’ (150). His own book demonstrates this graphically; it is a multi-voiced work made up of numerous, sometimes lengthy quotations from a variety of sources, as well as passages of commentary where Agamben develops the words of others rather than speaking unequivocally in his own name. The experience of the Muselmann, then, is an extreme instance of the desubjectification constitutive of the experience of being a subject, and what testimony reveals is precisely this experience.

Speaking with the Dead 121

In this context, the survivors who speak in the place of the Muselmann are not merely imposing their own words on those who cannot speak, because they do not themselves occupy a secure speaking position which they can claim as their own. Testimony is thus strictly unassignable; it cannot be attributed either to the survivor, who speaks of experiences which are not his own, or to the Muselmann, who does not speak at all. The twist in this is that despite everything the Muselmann turns out to bear witness after all, as Agamben puts it, ‘in some way’: Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness. (120) Agamben has now reversed the scenario of prosopopeia, in which the living make the dead speak. Agency has passed over to the dead because it is, in this account, ‘the speechless one [who] makes the speaking one speak’. It is not the living who ventriloquise the dead, but on the contrary the dead who speak through the mouths of the living. The dead may after all communicate with us, even if what they communicate is only their (and our) desubjectification. Because the speaking position is vacant, it is never fully or only occupied by the living survivors. De Man regarded the attribution of agency and speech to the dead as a fiction, albeit a necessary and unavoidable one bound up with the ‘madness of words’. Agamben turns de Man’s fiction into a reality by describing testimony as the place where the speechless ones return in the language of the living. However, Agamben’s account of testimony is less than compelling because it relies on two highly questionable decisions. The first is to take Auschwitz as the paradigmatic camp, the one which encapsulates in an extreme form the dilemmas and situation of all the others. The use of the word Auschwitz to stand for the whole concentrationary experience rather than Holocaust (a term that Agamben categorically rejects) or Shoah is now so commonplace that the interpretative decisions it involves are all but masked. If Agamben

122 Haunted Subjects

had chosen instead a camp such as Buchenwald, where the prisoners were more politicised and systematic murder was not practised, he might have come up with a quite different account of testimony. The second dubious decision is the unquestioning acceptance of Levi’s designation of the Muselmann as the ‘complete’ or ‘true’ witness. The Muselmann becomes, as it were, the paradigmatic prisoner in the paradigmatic camp. Although Agamben quotes from numerous other sources, he takes as established Levi’s equation between the ‘true’ witnessing of the Muselmann and the inability to speak. Indeed he sticks to this view even when his own evidence directly contradicts it. Remnants of Auschwitz closes by quoting at length from the testimonies of prisoners who were themselves Muselmänner (166–71). But rather than challenging the account of the Muselmann as the witness who cannot speak, Agamben insists on the contrary that it ‘fully verifies it’ (165). So, whilst he claims that he is ending his book by leaving to the Muselmänner what he calls ‘the last word’ (165), he in fact preemptively deprives them of the possibility of saying anything that might modify his description of their inability to bear witness. After all, the Muselmänner ‘have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be transmitted’ (34). Agamben accepts Levi’s account of the Muselmann and goes even further than him in making the Muselmann the ‘core’ of Auschwitz (51) and the key to understanding it (52). This goes along with the assertion that ‘all witnesses speak of [the Muselmann] as a central experience’ (52). On the surface this statement is simply untrue. Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, for example, collects together the testimony of numerous witnesses, but not one refers to the Muselmann. Moreover, it is hard to evaluate Agamben’s claim since from the context it is not clear whether he is saying that all witnesses speak of the Muselmann, or that all those who speak of him speak of him as a central experience; and it is also unclear whether Agamben here is talking only about survivors of Auschwitz, or of what he calls ‘those camps, like Auschwitz, in which concentration camp and extermination camp coincide’ (51), or whether he is referring to survivors of the whole concentrationary system. In any case, Agamben’s argument that the Muselmann is ‘inscribed in every testimony as a lacuna’ (81) is in its way irrefutable. He can be present as

Speaking with the Dead 123

a lacuna whether or not he is actually mentioned because his literal absence from a testimony could always be explained as a significant omission. Agamben’s use of Auschwitz as the paradigmatic camp, his false or dubious generalisations about the Muselmann and his partial use of his own sources justify the account of testimony which he brilliantly elaborates in the course of Remnants of Auschwitz. But that account also marginalises and excludes other experiences of the camps in as far as it denies them validity as ‘true’ or ‘complete’ witnessing. On this issue as on so much else, Agamben follows Primo Levi. Levi describes how, of the three principal categories of prisoners – Jews, criminals and political prisoners – it was the political prisoners who proved to be the most successful historians. He offers a number of explanations for this: the camps were a political phenomenon, the political prisoners had a cultural background which enabled them to interpret what they saw, they understood testimony as an act of war against Fascism, and they had access to statistical data and tolerable living conditions which enabled them to write and preserve notes.16 Levi does not demean the work of such survivors, but he suggests that their accounts are partial and that they miss something essential: ‘At a distance of years one can today definitely affirm that the history of the Lagers has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralysed by suffering and incomprehension.’17 Whilst not dismissing the value of political testimonies, Levi insists that survivor-witnesses did not fathom the camps ‘to the bottom’, otherwise they would either not have survived or they would not have been able to bear witness. To my mind it is not self-evident why the experience of non-survivors should be in any sense more fundamental or essential than that of survivors; but Agamben follows Levi to the point that important alternative accounts of the camps are simply not considered. I am thinking for example of the work of Communist writers such as David Rousset, Robert Antelme or Jorge Semprun, all of whom were arrested as members of the French Resistance and deported to Buchenwald. All of them returned from Germany with the conviction that the concentrationary system could be understood and recounted from the standpoint of political struggle. Even if the political faith of each of those authors would be sorely tested

124 Haunted Subjects

in the years following their return, they suggest a quite different view of testimony from one based exclusively on the figure of the Muselmann. From this point of view the career of Semprun is particularly interesting. His first three books about his experiences in Buchenwald – Le Grand Voyage (1963), Quel Beau Dimanche! (1980) and L’Ecriture ou la vie (1994) – chart the protracted disintegration of his initial Marxist understanding of deportation as a consequence of the struggle against capitalism. In all these books the figure of the Muselmann is completely absent. It is only in his most recent book on Buchenwald, Le Mort qu’il faut (2001), that the Muselmann appears and acquires a central role in Semprun’s interpretation (and now: in his recollection) of his experiences.18 This could of course be taken to prove Agamben’s point that the Muselmann is inscribed in every testimony as a lacuna: for the first fifty years that followed his return from Buchenwald, Semprun was still not ready to face the true significance of the Muselmann, who was therefore present in his writing as a significant absence; only in the new millennium can Semprun finally confront the true centrality of the Muselmann in the concentrationary experience. However, another interpretation is also possible. Semprun, like Agamben, is a great admirer of Primo Levi.19 It is possible that, now he can no longer subscribe to the political interpretation of the camps adopted in his earlier writing, his understanding of his own experience has been significantly inflected by his reading of Levi; indeed, it may also have been influenced by a reading of Agamben, whose Remnants of Auschwitz was published in French translation in 1999, two years before Le Mort qu’il faut. In an interview given in 2000 Semprun criticised Agamben’s theory of testimony for pushing Levi’s comments in The Drowned and the Saved too far: ‘It’s a very dangerous position because it comes close to the denial of experience. The initial idea is banal, “the true witnesses are those who get killed”, but this is taken further and guilt is added. It’s the Stalinist thesis: if you survived, you must be in some way an agent of the Nazis.’20 But in the same interview, anticipating Le Mort qu’il faut of the following year, Semprun follows Levi in insisting on the significance of the Muselmann in the camps: ‘I will take this obliterated experience as a starting point because everything I have read forces me to come back to it.’21 So it may be that in according such importance to the figure

Speaking with the Dead 125

of the Muselmann Semprun and Agamben are both drawing on Levi and in the process both contributing to a new mythologisation of the Shoah. In testimony, according to Agamben, the survivors speak in the place of the dead, they are made to speak by the dead rather than imposing their words upon them. This is possible because no speaking position is ever fully and uniquely ‘owned’ either by the living or the dead, so that testimony has (at least) dual authorship. Muselmann and witness are, Agamben says, ‘coextensive and, at the same time, non-coincident; they are divided and nevertheless inseparable’ (151). There is, however, a marked contrast between the deeply insecure speaking position that this entails and the assurance of Agamben’s own writing. The final lines of his Preface, for example, oscillate between modesty and certainty, as Agamben describes the aims and scope of his book: For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves. Indeed, I will be satisfied if this book succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way – perhaps the only way – to listen to what is unsaid. (13–14; my emphasis) Agamben is explicitly restricting the claims for his book, but this restriction is underpinned by a considerable self-confidence. The book deals with ‘the decisive lesson of the century’; and as it offers ‘perhaps the only way’ of listening to the unsaid. There is an evident tension between the caution of ‘perhaps’ and the exclusiveness of ‘the only way’. Agamben is claiming that it is possible to listen to the unsaid, and that he knows how to do it. Despite the polyphonic quality of Remnants of Auschwitz, the position from which Agamben speaks and writes turns out to be more secure than that of his other desubjectified subjects. And this raises again the question of whether the dead speak only in the words imposed on them by the living. Agamben argues that this is not the case because of the inseparable noncoincidence of survivor and Muselmann. But his argument is contrary

126 Haunted Subjects

to his performance, as he forcefully tells us how to listen to the voices of the dead and what to make of them. If anyone is ventriloquising the Muselmann here, it is Agamben and not the survivor-witnesses he cites in support. He arrogates for himself precisely the assured authority over the entire field of testimony which he leads us to believe had been invalidated by the experience of the Muselmann. Letting the dead speak turns out be another way of not attending to them.

Signs of the dead Levinas suggested that if there was any meaning to be had from the dead, it would be ‘a meaning which surprises’ (16). However brilliant Agamben’s discussion is (and it certainly is brilliant), he follows Levi so closely that he is unable to take on board the variety of nuanced positions suggested by the other voices that his text revives. In other words, he is not sufficiently surprised, and the dead speak only selectively, if at all. Levinas indicates that the dead communicate through unanticipated signs which change who we are, perhaps without our knowing. To illustrate what this might mean, I shall look finally, and briefly, at Didier van Cauwelaert’s novel Corps étranger. After six months in a coma, the lover of van Cauwelaert’s narrator dies. Shortly after her death he receives a letter addressed to him under a pseudonym he had used to compose his only novel more than twenty years earlier. The letter is from a young, female reader who admires the novel and wants to establish contact with its author. The narrator immediately believes that this unexpected return from his past is a sign or a message from his dead lover, and he begins to assume the imaginary persona of the author he might have become if he had taken a different path in his life. As he begins to live out two alternative existences, he is soon no longer sure which is the real and which the imagined identity. The message from the dead has changed him and given birth to a new, internally riven self. The final twist to this novel comes in the closing pages when we discover that the narrator is himself dead, killed in an absurd car accident. His position as narrator turns out to be strictly impossible. If the dead do not speak to us, they certainly do not write books either. The novel thus dramatically illustrates de Man’s contention that reading is prosopopeia in that it attributes a voice to the dead

Speaking with the Dead 127

and maintains the fiction that they may speak to us from beyond the grave. When we read we cultivate the possibly deluded belief that we can attend to sources of meaning which will surprise, shock and change us. One way of hoping to speak with the dead would be, then, quite simply to read, in the anticipation that the text signifies in disruptive and unpredictable ways and that the signs of the dead cannot be determined in advance by what we expect from them. In this respect it is irrelevant if the biographical author of a text is alive or dead, since the text always comes to us as if from the dead. This injunction to read is of course far from simple to obey. Quite apart from the fact that the places where we work and teach have less and less time or respect for reading, I am not sure that, even in theory, we are capable of the openness to surprise that this reading programme requires. And yet it may be the condition on which we can continue to speak with the dead. We saw in Chapter 3 that it is Kierkegaard’s unresolved secrecy, his continuing availability to the vigilant reader, that kept him alive for Sartre; and as the next chapter will demonstrate, it is precisely insofar as texts remain to be read that Derrida can maintain some possibility of dialogue with the dead. The signifying gaps through which the dead might speak do not only occur in books, of course. In fact, if we knew where to find them, they would already be lost to us because they would be moulded by our expectations. Listening to the dead, in the sense suggested by de Man, Levinas and Agamben, entails attending to signs which irrupt as a surprise, and which signify without any ascertainable signifying intention. They cannot be anticipated or foreseen, and they cannot be attributed to a conscious subject. They may be anywhere that we do not expect them. Perhaps they are all around us.

7 Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there. I never stop analysing the phenomenon of ‘survival’ as the structure of surviving, it’s really the only thing that interests me, but precisely insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem. And at bottom it is what commands everything – what I do, what I am, what I write, what I say.1 I knew from the beginning, I will not be able to speak today, to find, as one says, the words.2

Mourning and melancholia Derrida’s Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (2003) can be regarded as a sort of sequel to Spectres de Marx (1993). It is an odd sort of sequel, admittedly, since most of the memorial essays and funeral orations collected within it actually predate the earlier work in composition and first publication; but it is a sequel nonetheless because it follows on from the closing injunction of Spectres de Marx to allow past and future ghosts to roam, to speak to them in the hope that they may respond. In Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde Derrida places himself amidst his own ghosts, a growing throng of dead colleagues and friends. He addresses them, quotes them and calls on them to maintain a dialogue, knowing that they cannot. Across these varied and uneven texts, some obviously pained, some more classically academic 128

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

129

in form and tone, the speaking subject comes across as someone deeply susceptible to friendship and the poignancy of loss which is its inherent condition and risk.3 Each time, the death of the other is a renewed death of the self, indeed it destroys the world, completely and uncompromisingly, as Derrida explains when he glosses his title: the other’s death, not only but especially if it is someone you love, does not announce an absence, a disappearance, the end of some or other life, that is the end of the possibility for a world (which is always unique) to appear to some living person. Each time death declares the end of the world in totality, the end of any possible world, and each time the end of the world as a totality which is unique, therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite. (9) The subject is a fragile, shattered survivor of total, irrevocable destructions; its own death is in temporary abeyance though already at work within it, foreshadowed in the multiple losses occasioned by the death of others. Derrida’s book is entirely bound up with the work of mourning, conceived here not as a process delimited in time but as interminable and impossible, already begun and never to be ended. This chapter discusses the status and situation of the survivorsubject haunted by the ghosts of the past, as instantiated in Derrida’s sometimes powerfully moving Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Since that book is at least as much a work of mourning as it is a work about mourning, grasping the status of the haunted subject cannot be separated from the problem of the text itself, with its meanderings, repetitions, teasing allusions and partial confidences. It is my hypothesis here that the text withholds as much as it brings forward, and that it may not always itself fully know what it is withholding and why, so that the haunted subject of Derrida’s text eludes self-comprehension to the precise extent that it is entangled in un-comprehended or semi-comprehended dramas of mourning for lost others. In simpler terms, the text never quite says, or knows, enough, and it is in this not-quite-saying/knowing-enough that it is most eloquent about the condition of the surviving subject seeking to relate to the beloved deceased. A first illustration that more may be going on in the text than is directly stated can be taken from Derrida’s discreet description of himself as melancholic. This occurs in a text first published in

130 Haunted Subjects

Libération in 1998 shortly after the death of Jean-François Lyotard. Derrida recalls, or thinks he recalls, words written for the same newspaper in 1995 after the death of Gilles Deleuze, when Derrida notes the passing of what he cautiously calls his ‘generation’ of French thinkers: I think I can remember having said that I could feel that from now on we were quite alone, Jean-François Lyotard and I, the only survivors of what people think they can identify as a ‘generation’ – of which I am the last-born, the most melancholic of the group [le plus mélancolique de la bande], there is no doubt about it (they were all more cheerful than me). (257) The quotation begins with a reference to memory, or to what Derrida thinks he may remember, and which he therefore implicitly concedes he may be remembering wrongly. In fact the passage to which he refers does not quite say what he thinks he remembers saying, and interestingly it also begins with the question of memory: And then I remember the memorable Nietzsche conference in Cerisy, in 1972, and then so many other moments, which make me, probably with Jean-François Lyotard (who was there as well), feel quite alone, surviving and melancholic today in what is called in that terrible and slightly false word a ‘generation’. Every death is unique, no doubt, and therefore exceptional, but what can you say of the exceptional when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to Deleuze, there is multiplied across the same ‘generation’, as if in a series – and Deleuze was also the philosopher of serial singularity – all these ends like no other? (237) In attempting to recall the earlier passage, the Lyotard piece echoes it but does not precisely repeat it, though it does recall the earlier article’s own act of recalling, as Derrida thinks back to a text that thought back to earlier times. In their very textual form, then, the passages rehearse the issues of seriality and singularity which are their overt themes. Does not the insistence that each death is unique, and that each death destroys the world completely, become less tenable when death is repeated across a whole generation? We may be devastated utterly by one loss, but can we really carry on repeating the

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

131

experience and be equally utterly devastated with each successive loss? Do not we risk merely repeating ourselves, thus denying the absolute uniqueness of each death? And does not Derrida’s text risk repeating itself, as time and time again it tries and fails to find new, different words to express each new loss? Deleuze may have been, as Derrida says, the philosopher of ‘serial singularity’, but he has died; and perhaps what has been lost along with him and others is the very feasibility of responding in always new, singular ways to the lengthening series of deaths. What is left is only the memory of a now dwindling, falsely unified ‘generation’. Each death is singular and unique, but each death risks resembling those that preceded it, and Derrida knows that he cannot do other than betray their uniqueness. It is intriguing also that in both of these passages Derrida describes himself as melancholic. In the earliest passage he calls himself ‘surviving and melancholic’, and in later text he heightens the pathos to become ‘the most melancholic of the group’. At the time of writing he is of course the most melancholic because he is the sole survivor of the generation, the only one left to be melancholic and the one with the most to be melancholic about, since he has lived through the deaths of all the others. Melancholia is an aspect of his survival. It is striking, though, that Derrida’s essays, which have so much to say about mourning, are virtually silent when it comes to melancholia. The terms mourning and melancholia have been almost inevitably linked to one another at least since the great essay Freud first published in 1917, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In this context Derrida’s description of himself as melancholic cannot be conceptually innocent. It comes overburdened with a heavy intellectual baggage, and I would suggest that two reference points here are likely to be particularly significant: Freud’s original essay, and the reworking of it in the thought of Abraham and Torok, which (as discussed in Chapter 4) is well known to Derrida. So what is Derrida saying or, perhaps more importantly, what is he not saying, in this discreet, almost casual and certainly easily overlooked reference to melancholia?4 If it is fair to assume that Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia is at least to some extent lurking in the background of Derrida’s text, Derrida’s description of himself as melancholic acquires distinctly surprising resonance when we look back at Freud’s treatment of the topic. The distinguishing

132 Haunted Subjects

mental features of melancholia, according to Freud, are ‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in selfreproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’;5 the melancholic describes himself ‘as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature’; and Freud surmises that in these self-reproaches the melancholic may have come pretty near to understanding himself (255). It would clearly be a mistake simply to apply Freud’s account of melancholia to Derrida’s melancholic subject. This is in part because the whole Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholia is disturbed by Derrida’s version of mourning as interminable, impossible, and always already begun. For Freud, mourning can normally be brought to an end after what he calls ‘a certain lapse of time’ (252). It is a readily comprehensible reaction to the loss of a loved one which gradually loses its traumatic force as the grieving subject learns to detach its affect from the deceased. Melancholia, on the other hand, occurs when for some reason the normal process of mourning is blocked; affect remains attached to the lost object and time’s healing properties do not function to the expected degree. So in Derrida’s revision of this conceptual scheme, his mourning is already a little closer to Freudian melancholia because the prospects of restricting the process to a demarcated period are impeded. Derrida’s mourning subject is already to some extent a melancholic subject, its pain will not be assuaged by time. However, if Freud’s account of the melancholic mentality cannot simply be applied to Derrida, it cannot simply be dismissed either; moreover, there are further aspects to the distinction between mourning and melancholia which may be directly relevant here. It is not merely that mourning can be temporally circumscribed according to predictable patterns whereas melancholia cannot. Mourning is a response to the loss, usually the death, of an object of love; in melancholia, on the other hand, ambivalence is at least as much a factor as literal loss. Freud describes ‘countless separate struggles’ over the love object, involving love and hate, as the subject seeks both to detach itself from the object and to maintain its libidinal attachment (266). Moreover, the source of the subject’s melancholia is not always self-evident, as Freud insists: ‘one cannot

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

133

see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either’ (254); or in some cases, the melancholic may know ‘whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him’ (254). So whereas in mourning the loss is fully conscious, in melancholia it is withdrawn from consciousness, and what consciousness is aware of in the work of melancholia is thus, in Freud’s words, ‘not the essential part of it’ (267). The melancholic, then, is to some extent a (self-)deceiver, intent on hiding the truth; what she says is not what her unconscious means: The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable, in whatever sense she may mean this. There is no need to be greatly surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among those that have been transposed back. These are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible. (257) Chapter 4 dealt with the figure of the lying ghost; we now encounter its counterpart, the lying melancholic, a character who masks, distorts, tells part of the truth in order to keep the whole truth hidden, a haunted subject who misinforms because she cannot do other than misinform herself, who accuses herself of failings she believes others to have and accuses others of failings which may be her own. The suspicion that this sort of complexity haunts Derrida’s references to himself as melancholic is reinforced if we look at Abraham and Torok’s adaptation of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In their ‘Deuil ou mélancolie, introjecter-incorporer’ and related essays, Abraham and Torok offer their revision of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in the light of their notions of the crypt and the phantom, which were discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. In the current context their comments on two issues which had perplexed Freud are particularly relevant: why is the source of the melancholic’s condition often difficult to identify, and why does the melancholic seem not to be ashamed of the terrible character flaws of which she accuses herself? Abraham and Torok respond to the first question by reference to the crypt, which the subject establishes deep within itself in order to maintain the belief that the deceased beloved is still alive. Whilst

134 Haunted Subjects

the crypt serves its function of keeping the dead alive, protected by the surviving subject in its most secret recesses, then melancholia does not yet commence. There is no need to mourn what the crypt ensures has not been lost; so if melancholia is a refusal or inability to mourn, its onset is delayed so long as the crypt is intact. It begins only when the crypt begins to crumble, as its role of preserving and hiding away the lost object starts to break down. This occurs, according to Abraham and Torok, ‘often after the death of some accessory object which served as a support’.6 In other words, a second loss may awaken the pain of which it is not the original cause. The bewilderment felt by both melancholic and analyst over quite what it is the subject has lost arises because the actual cause of grief far pre-dates the occasion on which melancholia becomes manifest. The melancholic subject is mourning some other loss than the one it says and thinks it has suffered. So melancholia begins when the crypt begins to crumble. At this point, according to Abraham and Torok, the entire ego becomes a crypt, masking under its own traits the object of hidden love. Faced with the imminent loss of its internal support, the core of its being, the ego will fuse with the internalised object which it will imagine to be forlorn without it, and it will begin openly to display interminable ‘mourning’. It will hawk around its sorrow, its gaping wound, its universal guilt – without, however, ever stating the unspeakable (which is invaluable). (273) Taking desperate measures to preserve its lost idyll, the subject begins to identify with the dead beloved. But the melancholia which is now expressed is not the subject’s grief over the lost object; rather it is what the subject imagines the object to be feeling over the loss of its beloved. In other words, there is a rapid shift in speaking positions here, so that it is the dead object not the surviving subject who is speaking in the discourse of melancholia. To answer Freud’s question, the subject does not feel ashamed of the reproaches it makes because it is not the subject speaking: ‘When I am melancholic, I put on stage, so that its extent can be recognised, the object’s mourning for having lost me’ (274). In fact the subject can feel proud that its beloved object should be so devastated at its loss. In the terms discussed in Chapter 6

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

135

melancholia turns out to be a form of prosopopeia. The dead speak, they express their grief at having lost us, and we are not implicated in their self-reproaches. As I have already indicated, it would be simplistic just to impose these accounts of melancholia onto Derrida’s passing references to himself as melancholic; but the resonance of those comments in the work of Freud, Abraham and Torok also makes it difficult to take them as merely casual. The shift in Derrida’s self-description as ‘surviving and melancholic’ (237) to the superlative ‘I am [  ] the most melancholic of the group’ (257) also hints at a pride behind the sadness: I do not do things by halves; if I am melancholic I am the most melancholic. Speaking of the other members of his ‘generation’, now all dead, Derrida says that ‘they were all more cheerful than me’ (257). They may have been merrier, but Derrida has the last laugh because he has outlived them all. From a Kleinian perspective, there may be in the subject’s grief the traces of a sadistic triumph, because the loss of the object is also my victory over it; its death serves to confirm the fact that I am still alive.7 Whereas mourning may be a ‘normal’ response to bereavement leading to eventual detachment from the beloved deceased, melancholia is a more violent theatre of struggle and ambivalence, in which, as Freud puts it, ‘hate and love contend with each other’ (266). Two elements of this discussion are important for the rest of this chapter. First, there is the possibility that in melancholia, in some sense, the dead speak; unable to give up its attachment to what has been lost, the melancholic subject makes itself the forum where living and dead converse, though there may be a devastating price to be paid for this in terms of the subject’s own stability. Second, the original source of melancholia may not be what the melancholic believes or says it to be; the melancholic subject may delude itself as much as it deceives others, it may not know or understand quite what it is saying precisely at the moments it seems to be most frank. The question remains of why the melancholic subject takes the risk of inflicting such damage on itself, and here again Abraham and Torok make a suggestion which throws an interesting light on Derrida’s writing. The surviving subject must keep the dead alive because it believes the dead person is privy to some secret knowledge or enjoyment, what Torok calls ‘a precious thing, the lack of which maims the ego’ (241). The dead take something with them that we can never recover or

136 Haunted Subjects

fully own. This is echoed repeatedly in Derrida’s Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde through references to the secrets of the dead. The poet and philosopher Max Loreau takes with him ‘a secret, one of the absolute secrets of this life’ (126); people glimpsed in Althusser ‘a secret, a secret which was inexhaustible for us, perhaps, but also, in a quite different way, a bottomless secret for him’ (148); Deleuze may have been trying to say something ‘which perhaps remains for us still secret’ (238); and Lyotard is described as ‘in a certain way for ever unknown and infinitely secret’ (270). The dead guard over a secret which is variously described as absolute, inexhaustible, bottomless and infinite. They know something that they will not say and that we can never share. Or perhaps the secret is so enigmatic because not even the dead ever knew, really, their own secrets. And there is a further complication to this. When the discourse of melancholia is understood as both deceptive and self-deluded, the attribution of secrets to the dead may itself be a sleight of hand. The secrets may be not so much those of the lost object as of the surviving melancholic subject. They may be not so much what has been taken away as what the text carefully guards over, kept impenetrable even when the subject seems to lay bare most boldly its loss and pain. The melancholic subject has something to say other than what it says, and it will never say it. In melancholia speaking positions are unstable and unreliable, and at least in Abraham and Torok’s version the dead speak in the place of the living. This question of who is speaking, of how and whether the dead survive in the discourse of the living is one of the major concerns of Derrida’s text, and one which is inevitably inflected by the complications invoked by the almost-too-casual references to melancholia.

Letting the dead speak Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde is, then, a text or a set of texts dominated by a struggle with words. Derrida cannot produce a discourse of mourning that encapsulates the singular, secretive existence of his lost friends. His memorial essays seek to access and to convey the individual death and the intractable memories of the deceased, but they are also plagued by a sense of the impossibility of such a project, of separating the demands and affects of the speaking subject from those of the singular object. Promising no resolution

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

137

to the process of mourning, Derrida occupies instead a melancholic position incapable of ever being fully conscious of the sources, nature and extent of his own sense of loss and isolation. Neither the living nor the dead will reveal their secrets in an idiom we might understand. The book, then, wrestles with a number of interrelated problems all concerned with language, intelligibility and secretiveness: how to speak of the dead, how to speak to the dead, and how to let the dead speak to us. The question of how to address the dead is raised with particular poignancy when Derrida writes about Jean-François Lyotard. Derrida describes the desire to discover and to invent a language capable of sustaining a dialogue with the dead; but having barely expressed this desire he stumbles over a first hurdle since he does not even know whether to address Lyotard with the informal tu or the formal vous (271). The issue is particularly acute because, as Derrida goes on to say, the two philosophers had always used the vous form of address with one another, even though their circle of friends and colleagues all adopted the tu form. The question of how to address the dead is, then, an extension of the question of how to address the living, how to address the future-dead whilst they are still alive. Derrida explains that his use of vous with Lyotard is not merely a sign of what he calls ‘the constitutional difficulty I have to use tu’, or a desire to maintain a polite distance. He recounts how, when he and Lyotard were criticised for using the vous form with one another, Lyotard described the practice as ‘our sign of recognition, our secret language’ (273). It is attributed to a private language which Derrida is all too willing to embrace: But no, if it might be the sign in some way of a respect which maintains a distance, the exceptional nature of this ‘vous’ gave it on the contrary a sort of transgressive value, as if it were a secret code that only we two could use. [  ] This ‘vous’ belonged to a different language, as if it gave access, in grammatical contraband or in contravention of normal usage, to an idiomatic signal, to the shibboleth of an intimacy which was hidden, clandestine, coded, restrained, kept discreetly in reserve, silent. (273–4) Here Derrida transforms distance into intimacy, public language into private idiom. What seems most formal, most available to the scrutiny

138 Haunted Subjects

of others, is reinvested with singular meaning so that it is in fact impenetrable by the public gaze to which it had seemed destined. Speaking to the dead, like speaking to the living, entails adopting a secret language to which others, and perhaps even the speakers themselves, do not have full access. This secret language may not even be perceived as secret, by others or by its speakers, because, whilst being secret, it is also absolutely identical to publicly available discourse. There is no fantasy here of an Adamic language seamlessly adequate to its meanings and referents; rather, Derrida is adumbrating and trying to bring about an internally disputed language which is at once a public oration and a private idiom. It may be heard and read by others, published and legible to all, whilst also remaining self-doubting and self-veiling, secretive, opaque, allusive, over-determined and under-explained. By addressing lost friends Derrida endeavours, as he puts it, to ‘tear the veil towards the other’ (80), to open up the self to the other and the living to the dead. Derrida refers to ‘the dead other in us but other’ (80). The dead others may survive only within us, they live on only insofar as we preserve them, but they are no less other for that, they are that which is in us other than ourselves, the insistent truth that there is no subject untouched by alterity. Derrida’s wager is that the dead other is not merely the captive of the surviving self, that he or she is not preserved only as the now-compliant, passive object of memory. Derrida cites Levinas’s description of death as entailing an experience for the survivor of being ‘without-response’ (245). The dead cannot speak to us, but if they are not simply to be lost, that is, lost as other, lost in their otherness, then they must retain some residual agency. This is what Derrida desperately wants to affirm. The dead are gone; we have no means of addressing them other than selfdeluding rhetorical fictions, and there is no way for them to respond. But could there be an idiom for speaking with the dead even so, could the interrupted dialogue nevertheless be a dialogue still? Just as there is no pure language in which to address the dead, Derrida does not offer any prospect of a simple exchange with them. For him, to let the dead speak requires a self-probing, multi-layered textuality which both strains to give voice to the dead other and remains maximally lucid in face of the impossibility of the endeavour. The subjects of Derrida’s memorial addresses and essays were all critics, poets or philosophers, so all were in one way or another writers.

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

139

Recourse to and frequent quotation of their words offers one way of maintaining their voice within Derrida’s text. However, Derrida is aware that quotation is not in itself an exchange. He indicates in his essay on Barthes that trying to preserve the voice of the other leaves the mourning subject in an impossible situation: Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand to say nothing which comes only from oneself, from one’s own voice, to keep silent or at least to let what one says be accompanied or preceded, in counterpoint, by the friend’s voice. Then, in the fervour of friendship or gratitude, in approval as well, to be content to quote, to accompany what comes from the other more or less directly, to allow the other to speak, to efface oneself before the friend’s words and before the friend, to follow. But this excess of fidelity would end by saying nothing, exchanging nothing. It goes back to death. It sends back to death, it sends death back to death. On the contrary, avoiding all quotation, all rapprochement even, so that what is addressed to Barthes or speaks of him should really come from the other, from the living friend, there is the risk of making him die again, as if you could add death to death, and in this way make it indecently multiple. There remains to do both and not to do both at the same time, to correct one infidelity by the other. (71–2) The double infidelity described here is the tension at the core of all the essays in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Speaking only in one’s own words kills off the dead for a second time; speaking in their words terminates dialogue, and kills them just as surely. Repeatedly, as in the above passage, Derrida refers to the indecency of speaking to, about and for the dead. That indecency is nevertheless the founding condition of his essays. There is no happy balance between the two forms of betrayal he describes, just the hope that a vigilant oscillation may avoid the pitfalls of either extreme. Maintaining a dialogue with the dead means keeping their texts alive, which entails preserving them from premature closure. The texts of the dead are still unread in the sense that their full resources have not yet been brought to light, their capacity to generate fresh insight is not yet exhausted. And so the dialogue with the dead, for Derrida, involves a return to their writings, not in order to understand them for the final time

140 Haunted Subjects

but to demonstrate that they can still surprise us with unexpected potential for meaning. Their legacy is assured, and they are in some sense still alive, precisely to the extent that they remain open to interpretation.8 In this respect Derrida echoes Sartre’s comments on Kierkegaard, which were discussed in Chapter 3; yet Derrida speaks with greater poignancy because of his more direct emotional investment in those who have died. So Derrida’s endeavour to address the dead and to let the dead speak back involves a complex, over-determined idiom which is at once both public and intensely private; and it entails a questioning and self-questioning textuality which mingles the words of dead others with close, but always partial and incomplete, commentary from the surviving speaker. Throughout Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde Derrida displays a remarkable capacity for loyalty and friendship, and a brave openness to the pain of mourning that is part of the price of friendship. An aspect of the distress which repeatedly irrupts into the text is the knowledge that its endeavour to let the dead speak will inevitably fail and that the idiom in which it might occur is rooted in the surviving subject’s desire rather than the dead object’s continuing agency. Moreover, a further terrible possibility stalks Derrida’s memorial essays. Addressing the dead may be, for the melancholic survivor, a less endangering alternative to an open exchange with the living; the exposure of the living self to the dead other may compensate for earlier missed encounters. I have already quoted Derrida’s reference to his ‘constitutional difficulty’ of using the tu form of address (273), but he seems – almost – to approve of tutoiement in speaking to the dead (see 241) and he adopts it himself when he addresses the dead philosopher Louis Althusser (see 145–6). This may suggest that a distance towards the living is the reverse side of Derrida’s readiness to open himself up to the dead. The unconditional debt to and responsibility for the dead that he repeatedly describes may be contracted because we have not fulfilled our promises to the living. The memorial address to Louis Althusser begins by describing a promise to call him that could not be fulfilled because of his death (145); and other essays refer time and time again to things unsaid during the dead friend’s lifetime. In his ‘Adieu’ to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for example, Derrida describes his regret for not having said enough, being impeded by ‘the modesty of silences [la pudeur des silences]’ (251); or after the death of another

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

141

philosopher, Gérard Granel, he refers to the irreparable ‘vertiginous power of the non-said’ which came between them, and he concludes with a self-accusation: ‘Will I ever be able to reconcile myself with my own silence? I had, I ought to have had, so many things to say to him, to ask him, to let my friend know – at the very least to say that I so like having been, a little, his contemporary’ (319). Addressing the dead becomes a means of making up for what went unsaid between the living; the memorial speech mourns, in part, past silences that are now irretrievable. A moving illustration of this is provided in the closing paragraph of the memorial address to Paul de Man. Derrida recalls an occasion in Chicago in 1979 when he overheard his son discussing music with de Man. The paragraph is punctuated by references to the unsaid and to the barely said. Derrida knew that music was important to de Man, ‘although he rarely spoke of it’ (104); he realised in the course of the conversation that de Man had experience as an instrumentalist, even though ‘he had never told me’ (105). What made the conversation memorable and affecting is that it turned to a discussion of what in English is called the soundpost of an instrument, and which in French is called its âme, a word that also refers to the human soul. The closing words of the address describe Derrida’s emotion: I didn’t know why I was so strangely moved at the time, obscurely overwhelmed by the conversation I was overhearing – perhaps because of the word ‘âme’, which always tells us at the same time of life and death and which makes us dream of immortality, like the argument of the lyre in Phaedo. And I will always regret, amongst so many other things, never having spoken about it with Paul again. How could I know that one day I would speak about that moment, about that music and about that soul without him, in front of you, who will forgive me for doing it so badly at the moment when everything already hurts, hurts so much? (105) The address ends with regret for what went unsaid between living friends. The unsaid is spoken only when its real addressee, here Paul de Man, is no longer capable of hearing it or responding. The listeners or readers of Derrida’s text are put in the position of onlookers, witnessing a message which was not intended for them, but which they alone are in a position to receive. The living audience, the vous of

142 Haunted Subjects

the final sentence, is both invited in to the exchange by the sharing of the anecdote and excluded from the exchange because the only response it solicits is from the now dead de Man. All that Derrida expects from his listeners is that they will forgive him for speaking so badly, for failing to achieve the goal of creating an idiom to which the dead other might actually respond. We are, we might think, redundant bystanders with no role to play in an impossible dialogue.

Haunted subjects Throughout Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde the issue of what there is to be said about the deceased is always bound up with the problem of enunciation: who is speaking to whom, and how can one speak of the singular other in a public discourse? The text’s intense awareness of its own impossibility, or what it repeatedly refers to as its indecency, becomes its overwhelming topic. The dead are killed again as the text ceaselessly rehearses its desire and its inability to make them speak, to draw them into a successful exchange. In the process, also, the position of the speaking and writing subject is fractured and displaced. This is illustrated in Derrida’s short ‘Avant-propos’, in which he explicitly disowns the following work. The proposal to collect together Derrida’s memorial addresses was originally made by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault for an American book published in 2001 as The Work of Mourning. Derrida contends that ‘this book is their book, before all else it is their work, the work of the two of them’; and he insists that Naas and Brault should be regarded as ‘the true authors of this work’ (10). So Derrida is not the author of his own book. This act of disowning is more than an elegant compliment or expression of gratitude to Naas and Brault because it ties in precisely with the sense of dispersed subjectivity that the essays describe and enact. The texts become a site in which their own authorship is put into question, and in which the unsaid may be as important as the said, the forgotten and the unknown may be as resonant as what is remembered. The desperate, frustrated desire to let the dead speak thus inevitably has disruptive effects on the status of the speaking and writing subject, when his words are suffused and inhabited – haunted – by those of so many others. In part, Derrida’s endeavour to address the dead and to let them speak is a continuation of his engagement with the Cartesian

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

143

understanding of subjectivity which has been evident in his writing at least since his essay of 1964, ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’, reprinted in L’Ecriture et la différence. Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum seems to promise a subject which, even if it can be certain of nothing else, can at least be assured of its own existence. Derrida’s perspective is more Levinasian in that he conceives the subject as constituted by its exposure to others; there is no self-standing, self-sufficient subject prior to its encounter with alterity. Derrida explains this in an essay in homage to Louis Marin: Whenever I can say cogito, sum, I know that I am an image for the other and watched by the other, even and especially by the mortal other. [  ] Louis Marin is watching me and that is why, for him, I am here this evening. He is my law, the law, and I appear before him, before his word and his gaze. In my relation to myself, he is here in me before me and stronger than me. (199) Here is another instance of what was noted in Chapter 4 in relation to Spectres de Marx: Derrida describes himself as being watched by the dead other and appearing before him as if before the law. Here again, he posits the priority of the other over the subject. At the very moment when it says ‘I am’ the subject is already an object for the other, even if that other is mortal, and even if that other is, like Marin, dead. There is in Derrida’s account no separation between my relation to myself and my relation to the other, because the other is always already part of, prior to, and in excess of the subject: ‘in me before me and stronger than me’. This presence of the other both inside and outside the self disturbs the psychoanalytic model of mourning which, according to Derrida, depends on interiorisation, either in the form of incorporation or introjection (see 197). This model depends upon a spatial metaphor which separates inside from outside. Derrida’s version, on the contrary, refuses this clear separation and conceives the other as the founding law of the subject. The singular other is mortal, and its death serves to radicalise the position of alterity from which it constitutes me as (surviving) subject: This indicates an absolute excess and an asymmetry in the space of what takes us back to ourselves and constitutes the ‘being-in-ourselves’, the ‘being-ourselves’, in anything other than

144 Haunted Subjects

a simple subjective interiority: in a place open to an infinite transcendence. The one who watches us in ourselves – and for whom we exist – is no longer, he is completely other, infinitely other, as he always was, and death has more than ever handed him over, delivered him, distanced him, in this infinite alterity. (200) From this point of view it does not matter whether the other is alive or dead. Its death only accentuates what it already was: infinitely other. The subject is always unbalanced, self-exceeding, constituted as a space open to alterity. So whether or not it is knowingly in mourning, its very existence is grounded in loss and self-loss. If Derrida’s memorial essays grieve over numerous dead friends, they also signal that death already inhabits the Cartesian cogito. Agreeing with Barthes, Derrida concedes that the utterance of Edgar Allan Poe’s M. Valdemar, ‘I am dead’, is literally impossible (94–6); but he also suggests that the subject’s self-assertive ‘I am’ also implies ‘I am dead’, and that the traces left behind by the subject always assert that ‘I died’: ‘It’s the time, the grapho-logical time, the implicit tempo of all writing, all painting, all trace, and even of the presumed presence of all cogito ergo sum’ (196).9 Derrida argues that friendship is always bound up with mourning because, from its very beginnings, we know that friends will be separated by death, that one will die before the other. Here, he takes the logic of that argument a step further. Mourning is not only inherent in the friendship of self and other, it is equally inherent in the subject’s self-relation. Its self-presence is fissured by its knowledge of its own death, so as it mourns the other (in this passage, Louis Marin) it also mourns itself: ‘we can only mourn for him by mourning ourselves, by making ourselves the mourning for ourselves, I mean the mourning for our autonomy, for everything that might make of us the measure of ourselves’ (200). Opening up the subject to the other may be, in the Levinasian perspective that Derrida generally adopts, an eminently ethical move, but it also condemns the subject to inevitable and impossible mourning both for the other, who has died or will die, and for the subject, now inhabited by the past and future deaths which constitute its most intimate core. In Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde Derrida touches only rarely on the subject’s self-mourning, and there is good reason for this. Explicitly and repeatedly, his texts struggle against the indecency

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

145

of diminishing the singularity of the other’s death, portraying each bereavement as the utterly catastrophic destruction of an entire world; yet the response to each new death runs the terrible risk of resembling the one before. Even collecting the essays together may have the effect of highlighting their resemblance to one another rather than the difference and uniqueness which the grieving subject seeks to preserve. There is, then, a tension which I think is never resolved, and perhaps not resolvable, between singularity and seriality, between the desire to mourn each loss in its own way and the anxiety that mourning is always too much the same. This reduction to sameness is disastrously exacerbated if it is suggested that what the subject mourns when it responds to the death of the other may in fact be its own death, the ‘I am dead’ which Derrida finds lurking behind the Cartesian cogito. Here the spectre of melancholia reemerges. In Freud’s account the source of the melancholic subject’s suffering may be difficult or impossible to disinter. The essays of Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde imply that loss may be always different and always the same; and what the grieving subject does not fully know, or is unwilling to admit that it knows, is that its grief is always to some extent for itself. Letting the dead speak may be the bereaved subject’s most profound desire, and Derrida pursues this desire earnestly as he opens his texts up to the words and voices of others, always trying to maintain the possibility of a dialogue with the dead. In the process he enacts a particularly poignant version of Barthes’s ‘death of the author’, in a double sense: his text is, as he admits and insists, not his own (‘So this book is their book’, 10); he denies that he is its author; and in giving voice to the dead he exposes the subject to the knowledge that it is inhabited by the dead, and by death, and that it is its own death that it must and cannot mourn. Derrida’s subject wards off this bitter insight; but it can never entirely suppress it so long as it persists in its endeavour to maintain a dialogue with the dead and thereby positively seeks out the voices of the dead within itself. This position is melancholic because any temporal process leading to recovery is blocked, the subject will never succeed in dissociating itself from the loss or losses by which it is afflicted and constituted. There is, though, yet a further twist to this version of melancholia. In the final section of this chapter we shall see that Derrida seeks to redeem it by characterising it as a properly ethical response to bereavement.

146 Haunted Subjects

An ethics of melancholia At the end of his brief ‘Avant-propos’ to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde Derrida says that if he dared to propose ‘a real introduction’ (11) to the book, it would be another of his works, Béliers. Le Dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème. The two books were published simultaneously by the Editions Galilée. Béliers is a lecture given in memory of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer; and, as another of Derrida’s memorial essays, it could have been included in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, though it would have added significantly to the length of a book that already contains over 400 pages. Many of the issues raised in Béliers directly reflect the concerns of Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde: the desire to maintain some sort of dialogue with the dead and to let Gadamer speak by quoting his published works, the sense that the dead are still present in those who survive them, the belief that friendship is bound up with mourning from its very first moments, the insistence that each individual death destroys the world completely. However, by not including the lecture in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde and by describing it as that book’s ‘real introduction’, Derrida gives Béliers a rather different status from his other memorial essays, implying perhaps that it makes explicit something which remains implicit in the collected essays and which situates them more effectively. In the current context, to my mind what sets Béliers apart from Derrida’s other tributes to the dead is its heightened readiness to confront the issue of melancholia as distinct from mourning. Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde can be regarded, as I argued above, as a melancholic book; but thematically it is about mourning, with melancholia being only mentioned in apparently casual asides. In Béliers, on the other hand, melancholia is named in the second sentence, and on numerous subsequent occasions. Derrida refers to ‘an ageless melancholy’ which is mingled with his affection for Gadamer.10 Although we are likely to assume that the melancholy is Derrida’s, this is not entirely explicit in the context, raising the possibility that it should not be attributed to any individual but rather that it subsists in the bond that links self and other. If melancholy is not the property of a particular subject, then Derrida goes on to suggest that it cannot be entirely explained by any particular event or moment in time: ‘This melancholy, I won’t say that it is

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

147

historical. If, in any case, through some event which is still difficult to decipher, it corresponded to some history, it would be in a way which is singular, intimate, almost private, secret, still in reserve’ (9). So the temporality of melancholy is not that of chronological time. Although death makes it worse, it is impossible to distinguish between ‘what dates from the death of the friend and what preceded it by such a long time’ (10). Indeed, Derrida states that at his first meeting with Gadamer in 1981 he was invaded by ‘The same melancholy, a different one but the same one also’ (10). So melancholy is not the consequence of any event in the history of a friendship, rather it precedes all events, it is at the very least co-extensive with friendship and perhaps even prior to it. When Derrida goes on to say that melancholy is tied to the ‘Inflexible and fatal law: of two friends, one will see the other die’ (20), he is reproducing the argument of his Politiques de l’amitié, except that what there is discussed in terms of mourning is here re-conceived as melancholy.11 It is striking that Derrida now makes melancholy a key term in his discussion, a move which draws attention all the more to the avoidance of it in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In the final section of Béliers the question of melancholy resurfaces, this time in a more theoretical mode. Derrida’s discussion begins with a summary of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: According to Freud, mourning consists in carrying the other within oneself. There is no world any more, it is the end of the world for the other at his death, and I welcome this end of the world into myself, I must carry the other and his world, the world in myself: introjection, the internalisation of memory (Erinnerung), idealisation. Melancholia would mark the failure and the pathology of this mourning. (73–4) As Derrida suggests here, in the classic Freudian analysis melancholia comes about when the normal process of mourning is blocked. However, at this point, Derrida departs significantly from Freud by introducing an ethical, rather than pathological, perspective: But if I must (it’s the very core of ethics) carry the other in myself to remain faithful to him, to respect his singular alterity, a certain melancholia must still protest against normal mourning. It must

148 Haunted Subjects

never be resigned to idealising introjection. It must be enraged against what Freud says about it with calm assurance, as if to confirm the norm of normality. The ‘norm’ is no more than the good conscience of amnesia. It allows us to forget that to keep the other within oneself, as oneself, is already to forget him. That’s where forgetting begins. So there must be melancholia. (74) I propose that this passage can be read as Derrida’s self-commentary on the two references to melancholia in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde quoted at the beginning of the present chapter. Melancholia, here, is ripped away from pathology and transferred to ethics, and in the process an abnormal state or character flaw is re-designated as the only proper relation to the dead other. In mourning, the other is taken into the self, idealised, and therefore effectively forgotten in order to assure the easy conscience of the survivor. ‘Normality’ consists in expunging the otherness of the dead other, consigning the other to a second death so that life can continue undisturbed. The ‘abnormal’ melancholic position, on the other hand, entails a refusal to terminate the process of grieving; the dead other-in-the-self cannot be subsumed into the survivor’s re-found autonomy. The only way of not killing the dead again is, then, to protest against the amnesia of mourning and to accept melancholia as an ethical obligation to the deceased other. In the above passage Derrida invests melancholia with an ethical rather than pathological significance. But we might ask how successfully he can simply abstract this theoretical position from the psychoanalytic tradition which conceives of the melancholic as someone who does not fully understand her own loss, and through whom voices speak which are not in her command. In this chapter it has been suggested that Derrida’s memorial essays are inhabited by secretiveness, by the unsaid or the not-quite-said. This is in part why they can be regarded as melancholic texts; and we might wonder how far Derrida’s reclaiming of melancholia as an ethical position itself conceals something unspoken. His comments provide a fascinating new conception of melancholia, but there is perhaps also an implicit self-aggrandising undercurrent here. If he is, in his own words, ‘the most melancholic of the group’ (Chaque fois unique, 257), then this presumably also makes of him the most ethical of his group. Yet to claim an ethical position in this manner, even if only implicitly, must

Derrida’s Haunted Subjects

149

be itself unethical, because it asserts a priority of the self over the other, and all others, which this version of ethics precisely repudiates. The melancholic subject, in asserting that it is also the ethical subject, invalidates its ethical status, loses what gave value to its melancholia, and so perhaps has reason to become even more melancholic. There is no way out of these complexities, and they constitute the very fabric of Derrida’s endeavour to maintain a dialogue with the dead. What is impressively bold about both Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde and Béliers is Derrida’s willingness to expose the contradictions of his endeavour. He wants to let the dead speak, but knows there is no idiom in which they can do so; he wants to grieve each death in its unique singularity, but knows that repetition and seriality risk weakening the claims of the singular at every moment; he wants desperately to preserve dead others from oblivion, but knows that we may be bound, always, to kill them again by the very means we adopt to keep them with us. Derrida’s texts demonstrate an astonishing capacity for friendship, and for openness to the grief that the death of friends brings with it. They show an absolute refusal to give up on what has been lost and a desperate desire to let the dead speak. Here again, however, Béliers hints at a disturbing possibility, which Derrida calls ‘a terrifying hypothesis’ (20): perhaps the survivor is more attentive to the voices of his friends when they are dead than he was when they were living. The essays are full of regrets for friendships that were neglected, and for things which were left unsaid and which now cannot be said to their proper addressees. In their willingness to explore contradiction, regret and their own flawed idiom Derrida’s texts expose themselves to the unpredictable scrutiny of the reader-other, who may be moved, irritated, bored or sceptical, and who might find pockets of sense which Derrida had not intended. Derrida’s renunciation of the authorship of his own work is not an empty gesture; it is on the contrary fundamentally bound up with his attempt to offer the text to others, both living and dead, who might take it up in a real exchange, of which the parameters, direction and outcomes cannot be foreseen in advance. And in this respect, his disparate, repetitive, intriguing, sometimes self-indulgent texts mimic the conception of the haunted subject as inhabited by voices, by spirits of the living and ghosts of the dead and the not yet born, who will not and must not be brought into uniformity. The dead cannot perhaps literally speak, but something other than

150 Haunted Subjects

myself speaks in me. Derrida argues that the exposure to the other is both melancholic and ethical because it involves not inflicting a second death on the deceased, yet he knows that this a fraught and perhaps impossible path to tread. The final chapter returns to this issue by looking again, in a broader theoretical and cultural context, at the ethics of living with the dead and the need to bury them once and for all.

8 Burying the Dead

Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.1 The nineteenth-century revolution must let the dead bury their dead if it is to appreciate its own significance.2 Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t let the dead bury the dead: that makes no sense, it is impossible. Only mortals, only the living who are not living gods can bury the dead.3 In effect, the dead are dead. And, as Marx recalls following the Gospels, we let, we can always want to let, the dead bury the dead. But that changes nothing about the law of return, I mean here the return of the dead. The fact that the dead no longer exist doesn’t mean that we have finished with spectres. On the contrary. That’s when mourning and haunting burst out.4 Am I dead or alive?5 Why do the dead return? This book has been concerned with a double impossibility: we seem to be as incapable of getting rid of them once and for all as we are of keeping them with us in any productive exchange. Chapter 1 indicated that history has marked a number of moments when ghosts, spirits and the undead should have been banished once and for all: the Reformation, at least for Protestants (according to Keith Thomas); or the Enlightenment, with its attempt 151

152 Haunted Subjects

to put an end to superstition. Of the authors discussed in this book, Sartre would seem to have accomplished the Enlightenment aim of laying ghosts to rest since he dismisses any sort of spectral survival as pure nonsense; yet in his works the dead are still with us because we inhabit the world which they made and we must re-interpret and remake it as best we can. If the tradition of countless dead generations is, as Marx put it, ‘an incubus to the mind of the living’,6 this does not mean that for him the incubi or ghosts of the past should be understood in a literal sense. Christ’s words to a disciple who wanted to bury his father telling him to ‘let the dead bury their dead’ mark a potentially decisive break with the hitherto existing pact with the dead; they suggest that the duty to the living and the not-yet-born takes precedence over the debt to the past: ‘go thou and preach the kingdom of God’. Nearly two millennia later Marx echoed Christ’s words by calling again for the dead to bury the dead by forging a revolution of which the significance does not lie in the past. But the dead will not be forgotten so easily. Derrida reminds us that the dead cannot bury the dead. The fact that they are no longer with us does not mean that we are rid of them. And Lacan’s obsessional neurotic poses a question which creates further turmoil over the issue of who can, should or could bury whom: ‘Am I alive or dead?’ And so the dead keep on returning. Ghosts, vampires and zombies circulate more freely than ever in our films and books; Abraham and Torok inaugurated a psychoanalysis of the phantom in which the secrets of the dead haunt the minds of the living; and Derrida’s hauntology has persuaded numerous critics to attempt to be more attentive to the spectral others who surround and inhabit us. In each case, whether the presence of the dead or the undead is desired or dreaded, they return because our business with them is unfinished. The ghost story recounted by Pliny (discussed in Chapter 1) provides an early version of how ghosts disappear once their affairs on earth have been settled and when they have been properly dispatched. According to a medieval French proverb, ‘les mors as mors, les vis as vis’ (the dead should keep with the dead, the living with the living). The living and the dead have their separate domains and there should be no commerce between them. However, the maintenance of due separation requires us to bury the dead in a fitting manner. The living fulfil their debt to them by ensuring they are buried and grieved according to due process. For so long as this is not done, they will return to haunt us.

Burying the Dead 153

This ‘unfinished business’ model of haunting is manifested in contexts as diverse, and as related, as Pliny’s letter, ghost stories or films (Ghost, Truly Madly Deeply, The Sixth Sense), psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, and Derrida’s desperation to establish a dialogue with the dead. The surviving subject either desires or fears, or desires and fears, that death should not be an end. It is, then, not enough to die once, since the first death is not quite terminal enough. The ghost is gone but not yet gone; vampires may have been killed, but they are also undead, neither dead nor not dead, awaiting a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) death that will send them definitively into oblivion. The notion that death needs to be followed by a ‘second death’ before it is final has biblical sources. The Revelation of St John refers to the ‘second death’ that awaits ‘the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars’.7 On Judgement Day they will be dispatched once and for all, whereas the virtuous will be resurrected, their death being only a passage to eternal life. St Augustine of Hippo, in his City of God, develops this theology of the second death; indeed, in his version it turns out that the second death is in fact the third death, and the only real one. Man’s separation from God through original sin is his first death and his bodily demise is his second death. But neither of these deaths is final; it is only the ‘second death’ of Revelations (that is, in Augustine’s scheme, the third death), which will kill the sinner once and for all. By the grace of God he might be redeemed, so the death occasioned by original sin and the death of the body may turn out to be preludes to everlasting life.8 In more recent, secular contexts the notion of the second death and the status of the dead as ‘between two deaths’ has been adopted by Lacan and Žižek. Moreover, following a curious quirk according to which supernatural tales with little or no obvious Christian content continue to echo Christian paradigms, modern stories of ghosts and vampires depend upon this idea that death is not final until it has been supplemented by a second death. In Pliny’s story, laying the dead man to rest properly allows him finally to leave the domain of the living. Burying the dead serves as a way of ensuring that they are indeed fully dead; it is the second death without which the first one is incomplete. In more recent stories as well, ghosts will haunt the living until their business with them is complete, at which time they can

154 Haunted Subjects

undergo their second death and die for real. The vampire also has died once, but must be killed again before it can escape the space ‘between two deaths’ and progress from being undead to dead. Indeed, there is a suggestion in some vampire stories that, just as the vampire does everything to avoid its second death, it also longs for it. When Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is killed, we are told that ‘there was in the face a look of peace’.9 The dead and the undead are, it seems, glad to be killed again because finally they can be at rest. Our duty to the dead, then, is to kill them again, to allow them to complete their business on earth, to bury them, so that at last we can be rid of them. And this also would seem to be our duty to the living: we bury the dead in order to cohabit fully with those who are still alive, not sharing our space with those whose business with us is now finished. Killing the dead again is precisely what Derrida wanted to avoid, in his anxious desire to find in their legacy a potential for renewed exchange. Nevertheless, consigning the deceased to their second death is the covert imperative behind most, I would suggest nearly all, narratives of the dead and the undead. The vampire must be killed again in order for it to die definitively, the ghost of Hamlet’s father must deliver its message and be avenged so that it can rest in peace, the apparition of Pliny’s story must be buried properly for its rite of passage to be completed. The role of ghosts in modern narratives of mourning illustrates particularly well the way in which the dead return in order to be dispatched again, and this time for ever. The character played by Juliet Stevenson in Truly Madly Deeply is visited by the ghost of her former lover, who remains with her until she has completed the process of mourning and is ready to begin a new relationship. The case of the character played by Patrick Swayze in Ghost is complicated by the fact that there is other unfinished business to settle, since his murderer has to be identified and punished; but by the end of the film his role has been fulfilled and he can be released as Demi Moore is now able to mourn and to move on. These examples precisely reflect, endorse, popularise and reinforce what Freud calls ‘the normal affect of mourning’.10 The ghost’s return is part of a transitional period only, and the norm to which Freud alludes requires that the period of haunting should be restricted. Freud goes on to insist that ‘although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment’.11 So mourning

Burying the Dead 155

is normal; it entails deviations from normal behaviour, but it also leads back to normality in the not-so-long run. It departs from the norm temporarily, in order to return to it. The appearance of ghosts in Truly Madly Deeply and Ghost is just the same: the irruption of the supernatural disturbs normality, but it occurs only so that the norm – the proper moral and emotional order – can be re-asserted in the end. The business of the dead with the living must be completed; only then can they be buried and they will leave us alone. In this context Derrida’s harsh judgement on mourning, and his preference for melancholia on ethical grounds as expressed in Béliers, makes sense: the ‘normal’ process of mourning entails killing the dead again; only by interrupting the process and accepting the condition of interminable melancholia do the dead remain with us. Is this a price we can afford, or bear, to pay? The French historian Philippe Ariès influentially characterised the modern period, dating from the early twentieth century, as the age of ‘forbidden death [la mort interdite]’.12 We die in hospital rather than at home, we no longer routinely see dead bodies, and everything that recalls death and dying is removed from the public arena. But death must have its place, as Roland Barthes argues in La Chambre claire (1980): ‘For Death, in a society, has to be somewhere; if it is no longer (or less than it was) in the religious domain, it must be elsewhere.’13 Barthes suggests that the modern post-religious relation to death may be best captured in photography; but the prevalence of the returning dead on television, and in film and literature may mean that other media have at least as significant a role to play in the evolving displacement of our ambivalent desires to cling on to and rid ourselves of the dead. Whilst death may be, as Ariès insists, banned from our ordinary lives, we can encounter the fictional dead on a daily basis by switching on the television, going to the cinema or opening a novel. In the widespread representations of the supernatural on our televisions and in our cinemas, it seems that something culturally significant is occurring, something related both to the burgeoning of various forms of fundamentalism across the world and to the recent success of reality TV shows. In these we are threatened and reassured with the knowledge that, in every moment of our lives, we are being watched, judged and, usually, found wanting. In a variety of forms we are witnessing the resurrection of the Lacanian Big Other.

156 Haunted Subjects

The ungrounded realities of postmodernity are being supplanted by the increasingly desperate readiness to embrace some sort of external authority, however absurd, senseless, violent, wilful and humiliating it might be. Even Derrida looks to spectres as a source of commanding law requiring unconditional obedience, as was observed in Chapter 4. The function of ghost stories seems in part to be to reassure us that there is something outside ourselves, some sense or order that surpasses us even as it remains impenetrable to us. We are not alone, and the truth is, as the X-Files insists, ‘out there’ rather than locked within ourselves. So, recent appearances of the dead and the undead correspond to a need to engineer for ourselves more comfortable conditions after the fluid values of postmodernity. These more comfortable conditions certainly also have a nightmarish quality. To be haunted or stalked by the dead is associated with horror; to be under the eye of a watchful, punitive God means that not one of our misdemeanours will go unnoticed; to have our every movement recorded by the Big Brother cameras means that no foible or quirk will go unmocked. But the price is one that people seem all too willing to pay. There is no shortage of applicants for reality TV shows or for potential suicide bombers. So the sense that the dead still walk among us may be linked to the re-emergence of various forms of religious and pseudo-religious belief, which can be seen in the rise of mainstream fundamentalisms as well as in New Age movements and even alien sightings. What these all have in common is that they reject the perceived isolation, fragmentation and relativity of the postmodern condition in favour of the conviction that we are not alone, that there is some force transcending our individual existence and potentially endowing it with meaning. Modern stories of ghosts and vampires have done little to renew the well-established paradigms of supernatural tales. Whether they be benevolent or evil, the dead and the undead appear amongst us in order to be dispatched again as quickly as possible. The ghost’s unfinished business should be finally concluded; the vampire should be destroyed. There is here a double gesture: we want the dead to return to assure us that there is some higher order overseeing our lives, but we don’t want them to tarry unduly because our business is with the living. So the dead return, for good or ill, in order to be buried a second time, and this time properly. Their second death also serves to disambiguate the domain of the survivor. The undead and

Burying the Dead 157

the living dead throw into turmoil the categories of presence and absence, past and present, life and death. If the dead are not quite dead, perhaps the living are not quite living either. Once the dead are finally dispatched, we can be fully alive again. When the ghost has been exorcised, its business concluded or its demise mourned, or when the vampire has been staked, the survivor can respond to the obsessional neurotic’s question, ‘Am I alive or dead?’, with a confident ‘I am alive’. I am alive because the dead are dead. When I began working on this book I was struck by what I then thought was an intriguing continuity between the ghosts and undead of recent successful films and some aspects of high theory. Now, though, I am more aware of the discrepancy between them, despite the fact that they superficially share interests. Unlike the popular fictions which restore the due separation between the living and the dead, the haunted subjects discussed in this book leave the obsessional neurotic’s question unresolved. The tidy restoration of moral and epistemological orders is resisted, as is the clear delineation of the domains of the living and the dead. Deconstruction and psychoanalysis, as my subtitle suggests, are of paramount importance here. I have not attempted to trace all the links that there are or there might be between them, nor to apply them as fixed interpretative methods. My interest is more in their shared, unsettling and uncanny readiness to reflect on the gaps and inconsistencies in our discourses, to hunt out the fault lines in our knowledge, and to encounter with the utmost boldness the ambivalence lurking within our loves and desires. Of the many ghosts that haunt this book, Derrida, Abraham and Torok are the most notable, not only because their work is explicitly discussed in several chapters, but because of the enabling influence of their work. For them, it is possible to talk about the dead, sensibly and rationally, even if their (and our) secrets never fully come to light. They provide ways of thinking about how, in trauma, sadness or fond memory, we live with the dead. In popular narratives, then, the commerce with the dead is characteristically a transitional phase leading to their ultimate and proper disappearance. In the texts and films on which this book has concentrated, order is not tidily restored. Rather, the reappearance of the dead, of ghosts and vampires, operates in them as a breach in the fabric of the real which is not easily mended. Freud’s death drives or Abraham and Torok’s lying ghosts introduce death into the very

158 Haunted Subjects

heart of life, just as Feuillade’s Vampires have infiltrated every level of respectable society; Sartre’s revolutionaries find their struggle defined by the works and acts of the dead; Delbo’s survivor, addressing and addressed by her ghosts, is not so sure that she has survived, and Agamben strains to hear the words of the voiceless in the texts of the living; Levinas and Derrida seek to maintain a dialogue with the dead other in the intimacy of the bereft subject. And through it all, De Man grimly warns that even if the messages of the dead are our deluded projection, by lending our voice to them we are ‘frozen in [our] own death’.14 Am I alive or dead? When the dead are allowed to speak, the obsessional neurotic’s question becomes not so much an aberration as the defining anxiety of the haunted subject. A consequence of this is that the ambiguity which characterises the deceased, ghostly object (is it present or absent, dead or alive?) becomes a foundation of haunted subjectivity. Cartesian doubt was employed to provide absolute certainty about the doubter’s existence as thinking subject. Žižek describes how Lacan takes this a step further and makes doubt into the subject’s defining quality: ‘I am only insofar as I doubt.’15 What Žižek calls ‘the subject of doubt and suspicion’16 finds in its indeterminate status its minimal ontological consistency. It cultivates uncertainty rather than trying to resolve it precisely because its irresolution is essential to its being, as Žižek argues: ‘ “officially”, he strives desperately for certainty, for an unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous answer, which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate, oscillating status’.17 This avoidance of resolution might summarise the work of Derrida in particular, but also deconstructive criticism and hauntology more generally, and the haunted texts and films discussed in detail in this book. Abraham and Torok’s lying phantoms blight the lives of the living; but they cannot be easily exorcised even when their secrets are revealed, because they have become part of the subject’s constitution. Derrida’s hauntings are less disastrous than Abraham and Torok’s, but also less susceptible to exorcism. The subject is haunted even before it is bereaved; its engagement with others already exposes it to the reality of loss. I can no longer be sure whether my words are my own or those of someone who has died or will die, I cannot tell whether I am visited

Burying the Dead 159

by past or future ghosts or by my own imaginings. The appearance of ghosts in fiction and theory perhaps corresponds to our most persistent needs, fears and desires: the need to believe that something of us and of what we love will survive; the fear that the dead are all around us or, alternatively, that we have been deserted by them; and the desire to know that we are not alone, that we are free to follow our own path but that something nevertheless watches over and accompanies us. And adrift in the uncertainty of it all, I do not know for certain whether I belong to the world of the living of the dead. Am I dead or alive? To keep open the neurotic question may be a small act of resistance against the incursion of too much certainty. While our ghosts still roam we might know less than we think. And they might help us to lie hopefully restless in our living graves.

Notes

1

Introduction: The return of the dead

1. Žižek, Looking Awry, 23. Full references to works cited are given in the Bibliography. In quotations emphasis and ellipsis are as in the original unless otherwise indicated. Translations are my own except where English-language editions are cited. 2. Ibid., 22. Castricano also refers to this passage at the beginning of her Cryptomimesis, 5. I am indebted to Castricano’s book and to others such as Rabaté’s The Ghosts of Modernity, Wolfreys’ Victorian Hauntings and Castle’s The Female Thermometer for numerous references and insights which have influenced my thinking on the topics discussed in this book. 3. Ibid., 23. 4. Pliny, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, 204. 5. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 597. 6. An interesting exception to this is the Nicole Kidman film The Others, directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Contrary to the other examples cited here, this film maintains the fissure in the real created by the appearance of ghosts by setting against each other two parallel worlds, those of the living and the dead, which occasionally intersect but which neither fully coincide nor become entirely separate. 7. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 100. 8. On Augustine’s view on the return of the dead and its influence on medieval theology, see Schmitt, Les Revenants, 31–43. 9. Ibid., 42. 10. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 589. 11. Quotations from the correspondence between Spinoza and Boxel here and below are taken from Spinoza and Boxel, ‘Une idée des spectres’, at http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article367.html. 12. Entries from the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert, Diderot and others are taken from the online resource at http://portail.atilf.fr/encyclopedie/. 13. Huet, ‘Deadly Fears’, 222. 14. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, available online at http://www. voltaire-integral.com/Html/00Table/4diction.htm. 15. Huet, ‘Deadly Fears’, 222. 16. Castle, The Female Thermometer, 8. 17. Ibid., 161. The phantasmagoria to which Castle refers here were ghostshows from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which ghosts were made to appear by the use of magic lanterns. 160

Notes 161

18. Ibid., 171. 19. See Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même    ’ , in Clefs pour l’imaginaire. The fetishist’s version of the formula is ‘I know that Mother doesn’t have a penis but all the same I believe that she has’. For discussion of the formula, see Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 245–53. 20. Throughout this book the word spectre is used in Derrida’s sense as discussed in his Spectres de Marx; phantom is used to translate Abraham and Torok’s fantôme; and ghost is used as a more general term incorporating the other two words. It should be said, though, that this involves attempting to apply a stricter terminological consistency than the authors themselves adopt. 21. Michael Sprinker, ‘Introduction’, in Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Spectres de Marx’, 2. For political responses to Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, see the essays in Ghostly Demarcations; see also Spivak, ‘Ghostwriting’, and Laclau, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’. 22. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations, 39. 23. For Abraham and Torok’s joint work, see L’Ecorce et le noyau and Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups; for Torok’s later work, see Rand and Torok, Questions à Freud, and Torok, Une vie avec la psychanalyse. 24. Derrida, ‘Fors: Les Mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Abraham and Torok, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, 7–73. 25. Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 427. 26. For a review of work in this area, see Nachin, Les Fantômes de l’âme, 175–202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil d’amour; Dumas, L’Ange et le fantôme; Tisseron, Secrets de famille; Tisseron et al., Le Psychisme à l’épreuve des générations. 27. For criticism drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, see for example Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative; Rand, ‘Invention poétique et psychanalyse du secret dans “Le Fantôme d’Hamlet” de Nicolas Abraham’, and Le Cryptage et la vie des oeuvres; Tisseron, Tintin chez le psychanalyste, and Tintin et le secret d’Hergé. 28. See for example Buse and Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History; Castricano, Cryptomimesis; Holland, ‘The Death of the Other/Father: A Feminist Reading of Derrida’s Hauntology’; Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity; Royle, Telepathy and Literature, The Uncanny, and ‘This is Not a Book Review: Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative’; Tomlinson, ‘Assia Djebar: Speaking to the Living Dead’; Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. For critical discussion of Derrida’s hauntology, see Žižek, ‘Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology’. It should be stressed that interesting work is being done on ghosts which does not draw explicitly or significantly on the work of Derrida or Abraham and Torok; see for example Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature.

162 Notes

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 32. Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 452. Derrida, Papier machine, 398. Rashkin, Family Secrets, 161–2. Royle, ‘This is Not a Review’, 34. Rashkin, Family Secrets, 12. Royle, ‘This is Not a Review’, 35. Castricano, Cryptomimesis, 142. Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, 1–3. Castricano, Cryptomimesis, 30. This is discussed further in Chapter 4. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 652. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 92. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 204. Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, 95. Ibid. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, 364. Ibid., 365. Ibid. For insightful discussion of the importance of, and ambivalence towards, the supernatural and the occult in the development of psychoanalysis, see Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 147. For Derrida’s comments on the passages from ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ and ‘The “Uncanny” ’ discussed in the text, see respectively Mal d’archive, 138–40, and Spectres de Marx, 273–6. Derrida’s engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis more generally extends over his whole career. In addition to works already cited, see ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, in L’Ecriture et la différence, 293–340, La Carte postale, Résistances de la psychanalyse, Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse, and his discussion with Elizabeth Roudinesco in De quoi demain    For a thorough and sceptical account of the development and later treatment of the theory of the death drives, see Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt. On Derrida’s reading of Freud, see also Dufresne, Killing Freud, 72–83. For his reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, see Derrida, ‘Spéculer – sur “Freud” ’, in La Carte Postale, 275–437. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 132. Durfresne, Killing Freud, 75. For attacks on Freud and psychoanalysis drawing on recent scholarship, see Dufresne’s Tales from the Freudian Crypt and Killing Freud. Some of the same material is reviewed from a position more sympathetic to Freud in Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars. For discussion of this claim, see Davis, After Poststructuralism, especially 152–77, and Eagleton, After Theory. Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt, 144.

Notes 163

57. Ibid., 165. Critics become ‘the greatest propelling force in an everexpanding economy of psychoanalytic desires. Their “resistance”, however justifiable, promotes only more and more growth, a reaction formation called the psychoanalytic Cause.’

2

Vampires, death drives and silent film 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Derrida, Echographies, 135. See Barthes, La Chambre claire, for example 151–2. Derrida, Echographies, 135. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 47. From a sociological point of view, Edgar Morin also makes a link between film and death; see Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire, 42–51. As early as in 1896 Maxim Gorky described the spectral quality of film after attending a screening of the Lumière Cinematograph: ‘It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre’ (quoted Frampton, Filmosophy, 1). For this point, see Butler, ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City’, 200. In general, Butler’s article has played a major role in my understanding of Les Vampires, as has Callahan’s essential book, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade. On Feuillade’s film, see also Abel, ‘The Thrills of Grande Peur’, and Leplongeon, ‘Les Vampires de Feuillade, une logique de transition’. See Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 13. Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, 61. Subsequent references are given in the text. Cavell, The World Viewed, 150. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, 364. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 275. Ibid., 295. On the role of speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, see especially Derrida. ‘Spéculer – “sur Freud” ’, in La Carte postale, 275–437. Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt, 17. For discussion of the death drives, see Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 371–8, and Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 157–88. Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt, 34. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 292, 307, 308. Abraham, in Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 431. Torok, in Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 421. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 387. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 13; Abraham, in Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 431. Now that Les Vampires is available on DVD, it is to be hoped that it will become better known and more widely studied. Modern cinemagoers are most likely to have come across it via Olivier Assayas’s film Irma Vep (1996), which recounts a failed attempt to remake Feuillade’s masterpiece, with Maggie Cheung playing the role of an actress (called

164 Notes

35. 36. 37.

Maggie Cheung in the film) employed to reprise the role of Irma Vep. The famous figure-hugging black costume worn by Irma Vep is updated into a latex suit bought from a sex shop. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 292. Ibid. There is, in fact, some ambiguity over whether The Spectre, the title of episode four, refers to the Grand Vampire or to Moreno. At first it appears that the Grand Vampire is the Spectre, since he is operating under the name of Mr Treps, a near anagram of spectre. However, later in the episode it is suggested that he may not be the Spectre at all. When Mr Metadier apparently returns to work after he has been murdered, an intertitle, presumably representing the thoughts of Irma Vep, describes him as ‘The Spectre’. It turns out that it is in fact Moreno, who in the following episode himself becomes a ghost when, after his apparent suicide, he rises from his deathbed covered in a white sheet. On Guérande as interpreter, see Butler, ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City’, 209–10. See Callahan, Zones of Anxiety; on Musidora and Irma Vep, see in particular 38–43, 73–116. Butler, ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City’, 204, 206. Butler comments that ‘Irma Vep could almost be said to lend an anagram of her name to the Vampires rather than the other way around’ (‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City’, 196). This suggestion was made to me during a seminar at Northwestern University. I am grateful to the participants for enlightening discussion of the film. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 381. Žižek, Looking Awry, 121. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 294. See Butler, ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City’, 208, 213. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 381. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 311. On the techniques by which the film creates consistency in chronology and space, see in particular Leplongeon, ‘Les Vampires de Feuillade, une logique de transition’. Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, 279. See Žižek, Looking Awry, 59. Perez, The Material Ghost, 127. Subsequent references are given in the text.

3

Sartre’s living dead

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Sartre, Les Mouches, 154–5. Sartre, Les Mots, 209. Sartre, L’Etre et le néant, 599. Subsequent references are given in the text. Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, 79. Subsequent references are given in the text.

Notes 165

5. Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances, 165; quoted in Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, 93. 6. The allusion is to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Portable Kark Marx, 287: ‘Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ A note to the text observes that ‘Generations of scholars have been unable to find this remark in Hegel’ (287). 7. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 250. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Jeux sont faits, 26. Subsequent references are given in the text. 9. For this example, see Sartre, L’Etre et le néant, 540. 10. Quoted in Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears, 181. 11. I am grateful to Elizabeth Fallaize for pointing out the potential significance of qui perd gagne at the end of the film, and to Christina Howells for helpful references. 12. Beckett, Worstward Ho, 7. 13. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15–16. 14. For full discussion, see ibid., 139–55. 15. Ibid., 141. 16. Sartre, Les Mouches, 141. 17. Žižek, Looking Awry, 23. 18. Sartre, Les Mouches, 156. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 198. 21. Sartre, ‘L’Universel singulier’, in Situations, IX, 153. Subsequent references are given in the text.

4

Lying ghosts in deconstruction and psychoanalysis 1. Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 449. Subsequent references are given in the text. Although some of the papers collected in L’Ecorce et le noyau were written by Abraham or Torok individually, I attribute views expressed in the book to both of them, unless the authorship of specific papers is relevant to the discussion. 2. Quotations from Janin’s ‘Une histoire de revenant’ here and later in the chapter are from http://www.bmlisieux.com/litterature/janin/histoire. htm. I found the story by typing ‘revenant’ into a search engine, thereby encountering the fascinating role that can be played by the Internet in bringing the (works of the) dead back to us. 3. Details of Lord Lyttelton’s life, the stories surrounding his death, and the quotation from Dr Johnson are taken from Andrew Lang, The Valet’s Tragedy, and Other Stories (1903), available online thanks to Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/vlttr10.txt. 4. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 94–5. 5. Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Portable Karl Marx, 203.

166 Notes

6. See Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 222. Subsequent references are given in the text. 7. Derrida, Echographies, 131. 8. Derrida makes similar claims elsewhere; see for example Marx en jeu, 57–8: ‘There have been spectres everywhere in my texts, for decades. In them spectrality has always been, how to say, a subject of reflection.’ 9. Derrida, Echographies, 131. 10. This point is made eloquently by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, ‘Anachrony and Anatopia: Spectres of Marx, Derrida and Gothic Fiction’, in Buse and Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, 128: ‘Non-present presence, pre-originary anteriority: in the spectre’s defiance of space and time, Derrida finds the embodiment of his most consistent project, the deconstruction of the metaphysical desire for presence and origin.’ 11. On prosopopeia, see de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 67–81. De Man’s views are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6. 12. Nicholas Royle also comments on Derrida’s surprising lack of reference to Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx; see Royle, ‘Phantom Text’, in The Uncanny, 280: ‘Given the amount of attention he gives to their work in other writings, Derrida’s apparent silence on Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx, and in particular his silence about Abraham’s so-called theory of the phantom, and even more particularly Abraham’s theory as expounded specifically in relation to Hamlet, seems rather remarkable.’ For discussion of some of the differences between Derrida’s and Abraham and Torok’s conception of the ghost, see Royle, The Uncanny, 281–3. Derrida briefly discusses Abraham and Torok’s notion of the phantom in one of his interventions in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance. 13. Derrida, ‘Fors’, 47. 14. On Abraham’s extension of Hamlet, and for an excellent introduction to and application of Abraham and Torok’s thought, see Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative; on Hamlet, see 21–30. 15. On Freud’s failure as a therapist, and the suggestion that he may have been impeded by shortcomings in his self-analysis, see Rand and Torok, Questions à Freud, 179–277. 16. Derrida, Résistances de la psychanalyse, 87. 17. See Derrida, La Carte postale, 313. 18. On the connections between Derrida and Abraham and Torok’s Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, see Royle, Telepathy and Literature, 29–33. 19. Abraham and Torok, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, 149. 20. See Derrida, ‘Fors’, 39, 33. 21. Abraham and Torok, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, 79. 22. Ibid., 81–2. 23. Abraham, in Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 449, quoted in Derrida, ‘Fors’, 47. 24. Derrida, Echographies, 31. 25. Ibid., 135–7. 26. See Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, Acts of Literature, 181–220.

Notes 167

27. Derrida, Echographies, 135. 28. Žižek, ‘Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology’, 27–8. 29. Ibid., 27.

5

The ghosts of Auschwitz: Charlotte Delbo 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

See Chapter 1 for discussion. Abraham and Torok, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, 198. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 412. Claude Nachin, Les Fantômes de l’âme, for example 11, 123–4. This is an important difference between my approach and that adopted in Rashkin’s Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, the most thorough application of Abraham and Torok’s work for the analysis of literary texts. Rashkin tries to find and reconstruct the secrets encrypted in the haunted narratives she examines, and these secrets generally turn out to be family dramas. She does observe, however, that uncovering secrets encrypted in narratives leads to further enigmas which themselves remain inexplicable (161). In this chapter it is not my aim to reconstruct the secrets which are perceptible in Delbo’s text, nor to restrict them to family dramas. Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra, 7. See Thatcher, A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation, 30–2; see also Thatcher, Charlotte Delbo: Une voix singulière, 81–4. Delbo, La Mémoire et les jours, 14. Trezise, ‘The Question of Community in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After’, 870; for discussion of some of the problems raised by the distinction between true and truthful, see 869–73. Thatcher observes that Spectres, mes compagnons was first published in English translation, and that this version did not include the address to Jouvet and the conclusion referring to him; for this, and other differences between the earlier version and the definitive French text, see Thatcher, Charlotte Delbo: Une voix singulière, 130. See Delbo, Le Convoi du 24 janvier, 17. Delbo, Une connaissance inutile, 183–4. Ibid., 191. Semprun, L’Ecriture ou la vie, 24. For the incident in Wiesel’s La Nuit, see 121. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 126. Semprun is playing on words here: revenir is to return, but also to get over something (‘je n’en reviens pas’, I can’t get over it). So ‘je n’en étais pas vraiment revenu’ means both ‘I hadn’t really returned [from Buchenwald]’ and ‘I had never really recovered from it’. Trezise makes a similar point in ‘The Question of Community in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After ’, 863: ‘The very ambiguity of the

168 Notes

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

word “return”, the ambiguity of the survivors’ “us” itself [referring to the title of Aucun de nous ne reviendra], pertaining as it does neither to the dead nor to the living, explains at least to some degree the frequency with which the experience of survival is characterized by a language of spectrality or ghostliness.’ Spectres, mes compagnons, 41–8, corresponds to the opening section of Mesure de nos jours entitled ‘Le Retour’, 9–18, except that the final paragraph of ‘Le Retour’ is not reproduced in the later text. Delbo, Spectres, mes compagnons, 42. Subsequent references are given in the text. Delbo, Mesure de nos jours, 47, 66. Ibid., 55. This date adds to the confusion surrounding the timing of the text’s composition and preparation for publication. The end note is dated 1975, three years later than the liminary note. It informs us that the text was interrupted by Jouvet’s death in 1951, yet as already observed Spectres, mes compagnons also incorporates material from Mesure de nos jours, published in 1971. Thatcher also draws attention to problems concerning the dating of the book’s composition, concluding that, ‘dated 1975 (and published in 1977 as a book), the letter’s claim that it was started before Jouvet’s death in 1951 is impossible to verify’ (A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation, 72). For Delbo’s account of her work with Jouvet, see ‘Les Leçons de Jouvet’. In Giraudoux’s Electre Egisthe tells Electre that she is grieving her dead father ‘not like a daughter but like a wife’, to which she responds: ‘I am my father’s widow, in the absence of others’ (Electre, 44). These details are taken from Loubier, Louis Jouvet: Le Patron, 402, 407. See Jouvet, Molière et la comédie dramatique, 9–39. Is it too fanciful to suggest that Alceste, the key figure in Spectres, mes compagnons, links together the two series of ghosts because of the rhyme of his name with incest? Nicolas Abraham recounts an analysand’s dream in which, in his interpretation, the word Alceste (a kind of plant) evokes incest; see L’Ecorce et le noyau, 410. Those to whom I have suggested this connection in relation to Delbo’s text have been unconvinced. See Loubier, Louis Jouvet: Le Patron, 402. I suspect that there is here an element of rivalry with and hostility towards Madeleine Ozeray, Jouvet’s lover and a leading actor in his company. The narrator’s assumption of the role of Ondine effectively usurps Ozeray’s position, as it was she who played Ondine to Jouvet’s Hans in his production of Giraudoux’s play. I have not been able to discover whether Ozeray ever played Célimène in Le Misanthrope, though she did correspond with Jouvet about the role and was herself compared to Célimène; see Ozeray, A toujours, Monsieur Jouvet, 232–3. Is Delbo’s narrator implying that she would be a better partner for Jouvet than Ozeray? Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, 60.

Notes 169

31. After the war Jouvet’s tour quickly came to be regarded as an act of opposition to Vichy France, partly through Jouvet’s association with Delbo as a Communist member of the Resistance and victim of deportation. However, there were (and are) those who were more suspicious of the politics of the tour which was, at least initially, officially sponsored by the Vichy regime. For thorough analysis of the historical evidence, see Rolland, Louis Jouvet et le théâtre de l’Athénée; on the use of Delbo to establish Jouvet’s image as a resistant, see 32–4. 32. See Derrida, Papier machine, 398, quoted in Chapter 1.

6

Speaking with the dead: De Man, Levinas, Agamben

1. Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction, 38. 2. Levinas, La Mort et le temps, 9–10. Subsequent references are given in the text. 3. De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 75–6. Subsequent references are given in the text. For discussion of prosopopeia in de Man’s work, see Derrida, Mémoires pour Paul de Man, 47–50. 4. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, 48, 45. 5. De Man, ‘Shelley Disfigured’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 122. 6. For discussion of Levinas’s reading of Heidegger on the topic of death, see Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine, especially 170–88. 7. Heidegger in fact died on 26 May 1976, five days after the completion of Levinas’s lecture course. 8. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 238. Subsequent references are given in the text. 9. Song of Solomon 8:6, quoted in Levinas, La Mort et le temps, for example 119. 10. Agamben’s book has rapidly become an important reference point in discussions of testimony and the Holocaust. However, it has also been subject to trenchant criticisms; see especially Mesnard and Cahan, Giorgio Agamben à l’épreuve d’Auschwitz, and Eaglestone, ‘On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust’. 11. Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, xvii. 12. Quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 33. Subsequent references to Agamben’s work are given in the text. 13. For criticism of Agamben’s etymology of Muslim, and of his view of the Muselmann in general, see Benslama, ‘La Représentation et l’impossible’, especially 69–78. For discussion of Agamben’s use of the Muselmann, see also Eaglestone, ‘On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust’, especially 57–9. 14. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 63–4; quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 33. 15. Agamben gives his source as Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. 16. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 7.

170 Notes

17. Ibid., 6. 18. For further discussion, see Davis, ‘Jorge Semprun’, especially 1150–1. 19. See, for example, L’Ecriture ou la vie, Chapter 8, entitled ‘Le Jour de la mort de Primo Levi’. 20. Semprun, ‘L’Art contre l’oubli’, 13. I am grateful to Libby Saxton for drawing my attention to this interview. 21. Ibid., 12.

7

Derrida’s haunted subjects

1. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, 88. 2. Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 145. Subsequent references are given in the text. 3. For discussion of Derrida’s essays, see Brault and Naas, ‘Compter avec les morts: Jacques Derrida et la politique du deuil’, published as an Introduction to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 15–56. 4. It is striking, for example, that Brault and Naas, in ‘Compter avec les morts: Jacques Derrida et la politique du deuil’, discuss Derrida through the optic of mourning, but not of melancholia. 5. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 252. Subsequent references are given in the text. 6. Abraham and Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, 273. Subsequent references are given in the text. 7. See ibid., 246. 8. For this sense of legacy in Derrida’s writing, see for example his discussion of Kant in Du droit à la philosophie, 82. 9. For an earlier version of the argument that ‘I am’ implies ‘I am dead’, see Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène, 107–8. 10. Derrida, Béliers, 9. Subsequent references are given in the text. 11. See for example Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 31: ‘To survive, that is another name for a mourning of which at least the possibility is always present. For one does not survive without wearing mourning.’ For discussion of the link between friendship and mourning in Derrida’s essays, see Brault and Naas, ‘Compter avec les morts: Jacques Derrida et la politique du deuil’.

8

Burying the dead 1. Luke 9:60. 2. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Portable Karl Marx, 290. 3. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 277. 4. Derrida, Echographies, 148. 5. The obsessional neurotic, according to Lacan. 6. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Portable Karl Marx, 287.

Notes 171

7. Revelations 21:8. 8. On the different kinds of death, see Augustine, The City of God, books 13 and 14. 9. Stoker, Dracula, 484. 10. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 251; my emphasis. 11. Ibid., 252; my emphasis. 12. Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident, 61–72. 13. Barthes, La Chambre claire, 144. 14. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 78. 15. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 69. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. Ibid.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard, ‘The Thrills of Grande Peur: Crime Series and Serials in the Belle Epoque’, Velvet Light Trap 37 (Spring 1996), 3–9. Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976. ——, L’Ecorce et le noyau, Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978; second edition, Flammarion, 1987. Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999. Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, Denis Diderot, et al., L’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, at http://portail.atilf.fr/encyclopedie/. Ariès, Philippe, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident: Du Moyen Age à nos jours, Paris: Seuil, 1975; Points edition. Atwood, Margaret, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey, London: Dent, 1945; 2 volumes. Barthes, Roland, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980. Beckett, Samuel, Worstward Ho, London: John Calder, 1983. Benslama, Fethi, ‘La Représentation et l’impossible’, in Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, Paris: Seuil, 2001, 59–80. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brault, Pascale-Anne and Michel Naas, ‘Compter avec les morts: Jacques Derrida et la politique du deuil’, in Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, Paris: Galilée, 2001, 15–56. Brogan, Kathleen, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Butler, Kristine, ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials’, in Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham (NC) and London: Duke University Press, 2002, 195–220. Callahan, Vicki, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 172

Bibliography

173

Castricano, Jodey, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Montreal and Kingston–London–Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Chanter, Tina, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Chion, Michel, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Davis, Colin, ‘Jorge Semprun’, in S. Lillian Kremer (ed.), Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and their Work, Vol. 2, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 1146–51. ——, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2004. De Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ——, The Resistance to Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Delbo, Charlotte, Le Convoi du 24 janvier, Paris: Minuit, 1965. ——, ‘Les Leçons de Jouvet’, La Nouvelle Revue française 159 (March 1966), 561–3. ——, Auschwitz et après I: Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Paris: Minuit, 1970. ——, Auschwitz et après II: Une connaissance inutile, Paris: Minuit, 1970. ——, Auschwitz et après III: Mesure de nos jours, Paris: Minuit, 1971. ——, La Mémoire et les jours, Paris: Berg International Editeurs, 1995. ——, Spectres, mes compagnons, Paris: Berg International Editeurs, 1995. ——, Une scène jouée dans la mémoire, suivie de Qui rapportera ces paroles?, Aigues– Vives: HB Editions, 2001. Derrida, Jacques, L’Ecriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967; Points edition. ——, La Voix et le phénomène, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. ——, ‘Fors: Les Mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976, 7–73. ——, La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au–delà, Paris: Flammarion, 1980. ——, Mémoires pour Paul de Man, Paris: Galilée, 1988. ——, Du droit à la philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 1990. ——, ‘Before the Law’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 181–220. ——, Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Paris: Galilée, 1993. ——, Politiques de l’amitié, Paris: Galilée, 1994. ——, Mal d’archive, Paris: Galilée, 1995. ——, Résistances de la psychanalyse, Paris: Galilée, 1996. ——, Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse, Paris: Galilée, 2000. ——, Papier machine, Paris: Galilée, 2001. ——, Béliers. Le Dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème, Paris: Galilée, 2003. ——, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, Paris: Galilée, 2003.

174 Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies: De la télévision, Paris: Galilée/Institut national de l’audiovisuel, 1996. Derrida, Jacques and Elizabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . Dialogues, Paris: Fayard, 2001. Derrida, Jacques and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Derrida, Jacques, Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent, Marx en jeu, Paris: Descartes et cie, 1997. Djebar, Assia, Le Blanc de l’Algérie, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. ——, La Femme sans sépulture, Paris: Albin Michel, 2002. Dufresne, Todd, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ——, Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Dumas, Didier, L’Ange et le fantôme: Introduction à la clinique de l’impensé généalogique, Paris: Minuit, 1985. Eaglestone, Robert, ‘On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust’, Paragraph 25:2 (2002), 51–67. Eagleton, Terry, After Theory, London: Penguin, 2003. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Forrester, John, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and its Passions, Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Frampton, Daniel, Filmosophy, London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. 4, The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. ——, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Ego and the Id, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11, The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. ——, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, and Civilization and its Discontents, in Civilization, Society and Religion, Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, Vol. 12, The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ——, Totem and Taboo, in The Origins of Religion, Vol. 13, The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. ——, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, and ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in Art and Literature, Vol. 14, The Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Giraudoux, Jean, Electre, London: Methuen, 1961. Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979; fifth edition. Holland, Nancy, ‘The Death of the Other/Father: A Feminist Reading of Derrida’s Hauntology’, Hypatia 16:1 (2001), 64–71. Huet, Marie-Hélène, ‘Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet’s Vampires and the Rule Over Death’, Eighteenth-Century Life 21:2 (1997), 222–32.

Bibliography

175

Insdorf, Annette, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kie´slowski, New York: Hyperion, 1999. Janin, Jules, ‘Une histoire de revenant’, at http://www.bmlisieux.com/ litterature/janin/histoire.htm. Johnson, Barbara, The Wake of Deconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Jouvet, Louis, Molière et la comédie dramatique, Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Laclau, Ernesto, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, Diacritics 25:2 (1995), 86–96. Lang, Andrew, The Valet’s Tragedy, and Other Stories (1903), at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/vlttr10.txt. Langer, Lawrence, Admitting the Holocaust, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Laplanche, Jean, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, Paris: Flammarion, 1970. Laplanche, Jean and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. Leplongeon, Nathalie, ‘Les Vampires de Feuillade, une logique de transition’, in Jean Gili, Michèle Lagny, Michel Marie and Vincent Pinel (eds), Les Vingt Premières Années du cinéma français, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1995, 261–8. Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz and the Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. Stuart Woolf, New York: Summit Books, 1986. ——, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel, La Mort et le temps, Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991; Livre de Poche edition. Loubier, Jean-Marc, Louis Jouvet: Le Patron, Paris: Editions Ramsay, 2001. Mannoni, Octave, Clefs pour l’imaginaire, Paris: Seuil, 1968. Marx, Karl, The Portable Karl Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Mesnard, Philippe and Claudine Cahan, Giorgio Agamben à l’épreuve d’Auschwitz, Paris: Kimé, 2001. Morin, Edgar, Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire, Paris: Minuit, 1956. Morrison, Toni, Beloved, London: Chatto and Windus, 1987. Nachin, Claude, Le Deuil d’amour, Paris: Editions universitaires, 1989. ——, Les Fantômes de l’âme: A propos des héritages psychiques, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Ozeray, Madeleine, A toujours, Monsieur Jouvet, Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1966. Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pliny, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, trans. Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, The Portable Poe, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 268–80. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Ghosts of Modernity, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Rand, Nicholas, Le Cryptage et la vie des oeuvres: Etude du secret dans les textes de Flaubert, Stendhal, Benjamin, Stefan George, Edgar Poe, Francis Ponge, Heidegger et Freud, Paris: Aubier, 1989.

176 Bibliography

——, ‘Invention poétique et psychanalyse du secret dans “Le Fantôme d’Hamlet” de Nicholas Abraham’, in Serge Tisseron et al. (eds), Le Psychisme à l’épreuve des générations: Clinique du fantôme, Paris: Dunod, 1995, 2000, 79–96. Rand, Nicholas and Maria Torok, Questions à Freud: Du devenir de la psychanalyse, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995. Rashkin, Esther, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Rolland, Denis, Louis Jouvet et le théâtre de l’Athénée, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Royle, Nicholas, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ——, ‘This is Not a Book Review: Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative’, Angelaki 2:1 (1995), 31–5. ——, The Uncanny, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’Etre et le néant, Paris: Gallimard, 1943; Tel edition, 1980 printing. ——, Huis clos, suivi de Les Mouches, Paris: Gallimard, 1947; Folio edition. ——, Les Jeux sont faits, London: Methuen, 1956. ——, Les Mots, Paris: Gallimard, 1964; Folio edition. ——, Situations, IX, Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Les Revenants: Les Vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Semprun, Jorge, Le Grand Voyage, Paris: Gallimard, 1963. ——, Quel Beau Dimanche!, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1980. ——, L’Ecriture ou la vie, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. ——, ‘L’Art contre l’oubli’, interview with Marie-Laure Delorme and Guy Herzlich, Le Monde des débats, May 2000, 10–13. ——, Le Mort qu’il faut, Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Spinoza, Baruch de and Hugo Boxel, ‘Une idée des spectres: Correspondance entre Spinoza et Hugo Boxel, 1674’, at http://www.vacarme.eu.org/ article367.html. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Ghostwriting’, Diacritics 25:2 (1995), 65–84. Sprinker, Michael (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida, London: Verso, 1999. Stoker, Bram, Dracula, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Thatcher, Nicole, A Literary Analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s Concentration Camp Re-Presentation, Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. ——, Charlotte Delbo: Une voix singulière. Mémoire, témoignage et littérature, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tisseron, Serge, Tintin chez le psychanalyste: Essai sur la création graphique et la mise en scène de ses enjeux dans l’oeuvre d’Hergé, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1985.

Bibliography

177

——, Tintin et le secret d’Hergé, Paris: Hors Collection/Presses de la Cité, 1993. ——, Secrets de famille: Mode d’emploi, Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1996. Tisseron, Serge, Pascal Hachet, Claude Nachin, Nicholas Rand, Jean-Claude Rouchy and Maria Torok, Le Psychisme à l’épreuve des générations: Clinique du fantôme, Paris: Dunod, 1995, 2000. Tomlinson, Emily, ‘Assia Djebar: Speaking to the Living Dead’, Paragraph 26:3 (2003), 34–50. Torok, Maria, Une vie avec la psychanalyse, Paris: Aubier, 2002. Torok, Maria and Nicholas Rand, ‘L’Inquiétante étrangeté de Freud devant L’Homme au sable de E.T.A. Hoffmann’, in Serge Tisseron et al. (eds), Le Psychisme à l’épreuve des générations: Clinique du fantôme, Paris: Dunod, 1995, 2000, 23–48. Trezise, Thomas, ‘The Question of Community in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After’, MLN 117:4 (2002), 858–86. van Cauwelaert, Didier, Corps étranger, Paris: Albin Michel, 1998. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) at http://www.voltaireintegral.com/Html/00Table/4diction.htm. Wiesel, Elie, La Nuit, Paris: Minuit, 1958; 10/18 edition. Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London and New York: Verso, 1991. ——, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge (MA) and London: The MIT Press, 1991. ——, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 1993. ——, ‘Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology, London and New York: Verso, 1994, 1–33. ——, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, London and New York: Verso, 1996. ——, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London and New York: Verso, 1999. ——, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kie´slowski Between Theory and Post-theory, London: The British Film Institute, 2001. ——, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge (MA) and London: The MIT Press, 2003.

Index

Abel, Richard, 163 Abraham, Nicolas, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 26, 27, 63, 66, 72, 76–89, 92, 93–5, 110, 131, 133–5, 136, 152, 157, 158 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 112, 114, 118–26, 127, 158 Althusser, Louis, 130, 136, 140 Amenábar, Alejandro, 160 Améry, Jean, 118 Antelme, Robert, 123 Ariès, Philippe, 155 Assayas, Olivier, 163–4 Augustine of Hippo, 4, 153 Barthes, Roland, 20, 130, 139, 144, 145, 155 Beckett, Samuel, 57 Benslama, Fethi, 169 Bloom, Harold, 14, 58–9, 60, 61, 64 Boxel, Hugo, 5–6 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 142, 170 Brogan, Kathleen, 161 Buse, Peter, 161 Butler, Kristine, 163, 164 Cahan, Claudine, 169 Callahan, Vicki, 163, 164 Calmet, Dom Augustin, 6–7 Capra, Frank, 48, 49, 55 Caruth, Cathy, 15, 94 Castle, Terry, 7, 160 Castricano, Jodey, 12, 13, 160, 161 Cavell, Stanley, 24 Cheung, Maggie, 163–4 Chion, Michel, 21 Christ, 4, 152

de Man, Paul, 14, 75, 112–14, 118, 121, 127, 141, 142, 158 death, 11, 17, 18, 22, 40–1, 51–3, 60–1, 111, 113, 114–18, 129, 130, 131, 145, 153 death drives, 17, 18, 24–7, 33, 34, 35, 37, 43, 61, 158 deconstruction, 8, 14, 17, 18, 75–6, 88, 89, 157 Delannoy, Jean, 44, 50 Delbo, Charlotte, 19, 93–110, 158 Aucun de nous ne reviendra, 95–6, 102 Une connaissance inutile, 98–9 Le Convoi du 24 janvier, 97 La Mémoire et les jours, 96 Mesure de nos jours, 100, 101 Spectres, mes compagnons, 93, 95, 96–109 Deleuze, Gilles, 130, 136 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20–1, 36, 43, 44, 45, 46, 63, 72, 73–6, 77, 81, 83–92, 109, 127, 128–50, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 Béliers. Le Dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème, 146–50 La Carte postale, 83 Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 128–50 Echographies, 87 L’Ecriture et la différence, 143 ‘Fors: Les Mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, 9, 13–14, 76, 77, 85, 86–7 Papier machine, 162 Spectres de Marx, 8, 10–11, 19, 45, 72, 73–6, 83–92, 128, 143

178

Index

Descartes, René, 143 Djebar, Assia, 100 Dreyer, Carl-Theodor, 21 Dudach, Georges, 97, 98 Dufresne, Todd, 18, 25 Dumas, Didier, 161 Eaglestone, Robert, 169 Eagleton, Terry, 162 Enlightenment, 6, 7, 16, 67, 69, 151–2 Fallaize, Elizabeth, 165 Felman, Shoshana, 118 Fénelon, François, 68 Feuillade, Louis, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28–36, 42, 158 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouvier de, 68 Forrester, John, 162 Foucault, Michel, 130 Frampton, Daniel, 163 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 14–17, 18, 19, 22–7, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 43, 61, 65, 76, 79, 82, 87, 93, 131–3, 134, 135, 145, 147, 154, 157 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 17, 24, 25–6 Civilization and its Discontents, 35 ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, 15 The Ego and the Id, 24, 27, 33, 35 The Interpretation of Dreams, 14–15 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 22, 131–3, 147, 153 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, 22–3 ‘On Transience’, 22 Totem and Taboo, 15 ‘The “Uncanny”’, 16 Frug, Mary Joe, 111 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 146, 147 ghosts, 1–19, 20, 42, 44, 45–6, 50, 51, 56, 66–92, 93, 95, 96, 98–109, 128, 129, 133, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159 see also phantoms; spectres

179

Giraudoux, Jean, 103 Gordon, Avery, 161 Gorky, Maxim, 163 Granel, Gérard, 141 Hamlet, 3, 74, 76, 77, 81, 84, 87 hauntology, 8–14, 43, 44, 45, 75, 89, 152, 158 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 45, 50, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 39–40, 45, 51–2, 61, 114–16, 117 Hergé, 10 Herzog, Werner, 39 Holland, Nancy, 161 Holocaust, 19, 93, 100, 121–2 Howells, Christina, 165 Huet, Marie-Hélène, 6, 7 Insdorf, Annette, 49 Jameson, Fredric, 9 Janin, Jules, 66–73, 91 Johnson, Barbara, 14, 111, 120 Johnson, Samuel, 67, 68, 70 Jouvet, Louis, 96–7, 98, 102–9 Kafka, Franz, 90 Kidman, Nicole, 160 Kierkegaard, Søren, 44, 62–5, 88, 127, 140 Kie´slowski, Krzysztof, 47, 48, 49, 57 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 30, 70–1, 82, 89, 91, 152, 153, 156, 158 Laclau, Ernesto, 161 Lang, Andrew, 165 Langer, Lawrence, 107 Lanzmann, Claude, 122 Laplanche, Jean, 27 Laub, Dori, 118 Lazarus, 4 Lefebvre, Henri, 97 Leplongeon, Nathalie, 163 Levi, Primo, 119–20, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126

180 Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, 9, 19, 40, 41, 83, 90, 91, 111, 112, 114–18, 126, 138, 140, 144, 158 Loreau, Max, 136 Loubier, Jean-Marc, 168 Lucian, 68 Lyotard, Jean-François, 130, 136, 137 Lyttelton, Thomas, 67–8, 70 McMullen, Ken, 20, 166 Mankievicz, Joseph, 21 Mannoni, Octave, 8 Marin, Louis, 143, 144 Marx, Karl, 8, 17, 50, 73, 74, 88, 152 melancholia, 19, 129–30, 131–6, 145, 146–50, 155 Mesnard, Philippe, 169 Molière, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108 Moore, Demi, 80, 154 Morin, Edgar, 163 Morrison, Toni, 100 mourning, 4, 19, 129, 131–3, 135, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 154–5 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 21, 30, 37–42 Musidora, 31 Naas, Michael, 142, 170 Nachin, Claude, 161, 167 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, 130 Ogier, Pascale, 20, 21, 36 other, otherness, 9, 13, 52, 60–1, 62, 75, 76, 83, 84, 89, 90, 91, 112, 114–18, 129, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152, 155 Ozeray, Madeleine, 168 Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, 166 Perez, Gilberto, 39–40 phantoms, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 26, 27, 58, 73, 76–83, 84, 87, 93, 94, 110, 158 see also ghosts; spectres Pliny, 2, 152, 153

Poe, Edgar Allan, 36, 144 prosopopeia, 75–6, 112–14, 120, 121, 135 Proust, Marcel, 107 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 160, 161 Rand, Nicholas, 10, 161 Rashkin, Esther, 10, 12, 161, 166, 167 Resnais, Alain, 47 Rickman, Alan, 80 Rolland, Denis, 169 Romero, George, 1, 18 Rousset, David, 123 Royle, Nicholas, 11–12, 166 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19, 40, 43–65, 88, 127, 140, 152, 158 Les Chemins de la liberté, 64 Critique de la raison dialectique, 65 L’Etre et le néant, 43–7, 52–3, 54–5, 60–1, 62, 63, 64 Huis clos, 44 L’Idiot de la famille, 65 Les Jeux sont faits, 19, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50–7, 58, 63 Les Mots, 44, 60, 65 Les Mouches, 59–60, 61, 62, 64 ‘L’Universel singulier’, 43, 62–5 Saxton, Libby, 170 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 4 secrets, secrecy, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 63, 64, 65, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 102, 108, 109–10, 127, 135, 136, 137, 157 Semprun, Jorge, 100, 123, 124–5 Shakespeare, William, 74 spectres, 6, 11, 13, 14, 21, 48, 73–6, 81, 83, 89–90, 92, 98–102, 110, 156 see also ghosts; phantoms Spinoza, Baruch de, 5–6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 161 Sprinker, Michael, 8 Stendhal, 101 Stevenson, Juliet, 80, 154

Index

Stewart, James, 49 Stoker, Bram, 30, 37, 154 Stott, Andrew, 161 Swayze, Patrick, 80, 154 testimony, 93–6, 109–10, 118–26 Thatcher, Nicole, 95, 168 Thomas, Keith, 2, 5, 151 Thurschwell, Pamela, 162 Tisseron, Serge, 10, 161 Tomlinson, Emily, 161 Torok, Maria, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 26, 27, 63, 66, 72, 76–89, 92, 93–5, 110, 131, 133–5, 136, 152, 157, 158 Trezise, Thomas, 96, 167–8

181

uncanny, 7, 16, 36, 82 vampires, 1, 6, 7, 21, 30, 32, 37–42, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157 van Cauwelaert, Didier, 112, 126–7 Voltaire, 6 Wiesel, Elie, 100, 118 Wilder, Billy, 21 Willis, Bruce, 1, 3, 80 Wolf Man, 9, 76, 77, 83, 85, 86, 93 Wolfrey, Julian, 12–13, 160, 161 Wordsworth, William, 112 Žižek, Slavoj, 1–2, 3, 34, 48–50, 59, 70–1, 80, 91, 153, 158, 161 zombies, 1, 18–19, 152