Category: Volume 18 – Number 2 – January 2008

Anne-Lise François’s Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience announces on its back cover that it will deal with movements of “affirmative reticence” and of “recessive action.” So what do we make of these deliberately near-paradoxical phrases? Throughout her book, which consists of a chapter gesturing “Toward a Theory of Recessive Action” and three long chapters of literary analysis, François continues to offer carefully worded near-synonyms that together circumscribe the particular kind of experience that she is interested in; we read about a “nonemphatic,” a “self-canceling,” and a “non-epiphanic” “revelation,” about an “affirmative passivity,” or about a “reticent assertion” (xvi, 3, 43, 267, xix). It is easy enough to see that all of these phrases are structured in a similar way: a moment of affirmation goes together with an element that checks the thrust of that affirmation. Yet it is crucial that we do not simply understand the tension between these two conjoined elements as a movement of disappointment or limitation: François insists that we read it in the opposite direction and instead consider this tension as the expression of a “nonappropriative” or “minimal” contentment, as, indeed, an “oddly satisfying reprieve or ‘letdown’” (xvii-xxi). We must, in other words, understand the book’s signature list of near-synonymous near-paradoxes not only as compressed movements of self-restraint or disillusionment, but also as the expression of a capacity to find sufficiency and value in ostensibly non-promising, and potentially disappointing, places. Such admittedly unspectacular experiences of a mildly surprising lack of disappointment, grief, or pain are at the heart of François’s book.
 
These experiences suggest a manifestly non-heroic capacity to, quite simply, make do with less. That Open Secrets phrases this suggestion in a vocabulary that combines more or less familiar theoretical lexicons points to its ambition to articulate its “less is, if not more, then at least enough” ethos as an original theoretical intervention in its own right. The most obvious positions from which the book’s appreciation of “patient or benevolent abandonment” (xx) is to be differentiated are traditional utilitarian ideologies of improvement. Such ideologies measure the value of a given action by looking at what this action materially produces; they go together with an implicit or explicit call to convert all potentialities into an actual yield (François’s paradigm here is the biblical parable of the talents). This ethos is unwilling to credit a desire unless its externalization is actively pursued; it remains blind to experiences that do not enter the public record; it impels us to act upon the knowledge we have. As such, it presents an immensely influential model of action that defines action as “confer[ring] actuality on the previously latent” (16). The unobtrusive movements that François deals with set aside the domination of actualization and production by making room for “experiences that may not want, need, or be capable of louder articulation” (16). The point of these experiences is that they manage to credit the merely private life of desires that are not relentlessly pursued and of wishes that are, for whatever reason, not accomplished. The latency and potentiality of these experiences is not condemned as defective or incomplete–they are simply not considered from the point of view of maximization or fulfillment. François’s main example here is the story of Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). In this novel, the death of the heroine’s husband leaves her free to pursue her passion for the man she loves, a possibility that she rather startlingly leaves unactualized. While doing nothing so heroic as resisting the ethos of production and actualization, the princess manages to render it inoperative.
 
The critique of Enlightenment discourses of utility and improvement has of course long been a staple of literary and cultural studies. What is remarkable in François’s book is that her insistence on the sufficiency of potentiality (independent of its manifest and material actualization) allows her to show that many critical discourses notably deconstruction and the new historicism–simply adopt the primacy of actuality. Where proponents of the Enlightenment only count achieved production and full articulation, these critical perspectives admittedly do consider that there are forces and experiences below the visible surface of things; still, they tend to interpret these things’ lack of visibility too one-sidedly as the result of a violent repression, as an injustice that they then seek to rectify by bringing hidden experiences to light. Like more traditional perspectives, deconstruction and the new historicism (and any number of projects that aim to recover the historical experiences of non-privileged groups) thus fail to consider latency and potentiality as anything other than a defective, imperfect articulation. Intent on recovering hidden meanings and lost histories, they remain unprepared to accept the evidence of experiences that do not require “either the work of disclosure or the effort of recovery” (xvi). Especially in her discussion of the poetry of Dickinson and Wordsworth, François presents poetic instances of apparent indifference, blankness, or “tonelessness” that are, as she argues, not so much the result of the willful suppression of particular historical experiences or of the elision of inexpressible grief, but simply “a form of constative simplicity” (157); these examples indeed produce very little emotional effect, and they convey a sense of energies carelessly spent, but this unremarkableness is a property of these experiences themselves, and emphatically not of the wilful repression of a positive content. As such, they make clear that the revisionist and redemptive zeal of many critical studies misses an admittedly slight but vital dimension of experience.
 
While criticism since the 1970s has confronted the Western tradition by recovering (racial, sexual, cultural, etc.) perspectives that have remained “uncounted” in that tradition, Open Secrets corrects these approaches by showing that their ethos of recovery in its turn fails to count the kind of experiences that do not require the effort of recovery. The reason François’s book does not itself qualify as another work of retrieval is quite simply that the experiences she focuses on escape the opposition between absence and actuality, and thus the movement from loss to recovery. For all their inconspicuousness, these experiences remain outside the very dialectic of loss and retrieval that has been so important for criticism since the 1970s. As critics like Eric Santer and Greg Forter have argued,¹ the categories of loss and absence determine the “melancholic” model of subjectivity that has reigned in many dominant critical currents: so the poststructuralist subject is a linguistic being who lacks the fullness of being, and politicized critical agendas tend to define the subject through the particular losses he or she has endured. François’s correction of this dominant “melancholic” trend is nowhere more clear than in her discussion of the “graveside loiterers” that abound in Wordsworth’s poetry and of Thomas Hardy’s dispassionate poems on the death of his wife; these poems, she writes, stage mourners who abjure “the heroism of loss” (131): “Hardy’s elegist cannot make himself feel the difference between his wife’s absence in life and in death,” and the poem thus only revisits her death in order to affirm that he has “not suffered a loss” (153-54).
 
These “indifferent mourner[s]” or “bearer[s] of weightless loss” (194) recognize that the loss of a life does not always lead to unbearable feelings of guilt or grief (and what is equally important is that this lack of feeling does in its turn not lead to feelings of guilt about not feeling guilty enough). François’s critique of the dialectic of loss and recovery also takes issue with a tendency in much contemporary theory to invest an almost infinite ethical responsibility in the subject who finds him or herself confronted with injustice and loss.² She shows how such an imperative to act and to speak out is complicit with the conception of action as production and articulation. François not only discerns this conception in the standard Western “fantasy of the all-responsible subject” (267), but, more surprisingly perhaps, also in “the numerous tropes of passive agency, singularity, and nonrelation informing postmodern ethical thought” (27). Such an “overemphasis on limitless responsibility and infinite debt” is most famously encountered in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and they tend to “elevate the infinitesimal to the status of an impossible and absolute ideal” (61-64). Because situations that are perceived as not entirely satisfactory or complete are all too hastily interpreted as radically lacking, these perspectives fail to account for those elements of experience that do not require either articulation or actualization, and for those aspects of our response to reality that are experienced as simply adequate and sufficient.³
 
The greatest merit of Open Secrets is the way in which its attention to the intrinsic sufficiency of minimal experiences allows us to appreciate the continuity between many of the dominant critical paradigms in postmodern thought and Enlightenment models of action-as-production. Because these critical paradigms tend to interpret every representational inadequacy as a violent repression, they cultivate the loss of a particular content and attempt to restore it to full actuality. This insistence on full actualization, which these perspectives inherit from the very tradition they criticize, cannot but lead to a disappointment with the real world; the injustices and the losses in this world place a demand upon the subject that it can never hope to meet. Wordsworth’s poet, Hardy’s indifferent mourner, and Lafayette’s princess confront this tradition (and the more recent “tradition” of criticisms of that earlier tradition) with instances that escape its organizing dialectic. They are, François writes, protagonists who “show their colors, sometimes to shocking effect, by what they are prepared to accept and settle on–if not as ‘normal’ then as ‘sufficient’” (65).
 
The truly strange thing about the alternative that François formulates is that the instances she presents are, as the last quote makes clear, at the same time deliberately unremarkable and potentially “shocking.” In order to understand this almost paradoxical combination, we must be aware to what extent we in our critical climate have grown accustomed to seeing in figures of unobtrusive passivity, of unemployment, of désoeuvrement, a subversive or even a messianic potential. When the protagonists of the book claim “the privilege to ignore” (2), I think that we are entitled to see them as notso distant relatives of that unlikely hero of contemporary theory, Bartleby, the Scrivener. Thanks to Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of Melville’s famous story in his influential work on potentiality, we have learned to consider Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” as the expression of an attitude that neither consents nor refuses, but that instead declines the choice between these two options. For Agamben, Bartleby’s deflection effectively renders inoperative the logic that would force him to choose. Bartleby’s potentiality not to participate is thus thoroughly effective as such, without it having to pass into actuality (through, for instance, a form of active resistance). François’s attention to her protagonists’ setting aside of the demands put upon them by ideologies of improvement similarly wants to propose a potential “that is already fully effective and significant as potential and whose value has nothing to do with its being realized” (104).
 
This comes so close to Agamben’s work on potentiality that it is hard to avoid viewing François’s protagonists through the lens of Agamben’s Homo Sacer and to resist attributing to them a radical, even messianic significance. That François yet wants to avoid these claims is most clear when she mentions Agamben’s recent work as symptomatic of the current theoretical compulsion to radicalize negativity (64). Another indication that we should not take the insistence on “affirmative passivity” as part of a messianic politics is the book’s choice of Fanny in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as its clearest example of such a passivity. Fanny, François writes, sits uneasily “between the sense of passivity as submissive acquiescence and that of passivity as privileged leisure” (267); I believe that François intends the explicitly bourgeois and politically tainted status of this example–to which Edward Said, among others, has made us attentive–to keep her theory from being misread as a radical political statement (and the same goes for her candid acknowledgement that the “open secret” in her title, which indicates something that is simply there without lending itself to investigation or affirmation, can be considered as “a trope for the implicit workings of ideology itself” [5]).
 
The care with which François attempts to render the experiences on which she focuses unavailable for political recuperation gives us a better clue to the political import of her book than do Agamben’s grandiose claims for figures of potentiality. The book intuits that what may be required in order to maintain the effectivity of potentiality as such is an active intervention that pre-empts the actualization of potentiality. In a brief passage, François tells us that the book began as a thought-experiment to understand the strange value accorded in environmentalist discourse to doing “as little as possible.” Her example of such a quiet intervention is the practice of tree spiking, in which eco-activists drive ceramic nails into trees in order to discourage logging, because the nails threaten to damage the logging machines. The activist thus attempts to render these trees safe by arming them “with a power to harm that she hopes they will never actually have to use” (37). Apart from offering an example where (a) potentiality (to harm) becomes effective as such, this practice also removes the possibility of using the trees’ wood for industrial purposes (in the same way, I would argue, that François’s book renders her protagonists unavailable for political recuperation). The activists, in François’s words, “give notice of an unrealized x and, just as surely and swiftly, put it irretrievably ‘off limits,’ beyond development” (36); they exemplify a “type of minimally inflected transition from the latency of unactualized, dormant possibility . . . to ‘more’ absolute privation” (38). While this is not the place to discuss all the ramifications of this immunization of (a) potentiality (for abuse), it seems safe to say that it has less to do with the “strong” messianism of Agamben than with the more minimalist “weak” messianism of Benjamin, who wrote that “every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it . . . even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” (391).
 
Although I focus here on Open Secrets‘ theoretical merits, I need to add that François’s readings of literature not only reveal a stunning capacity to concentrate on formal details, but also manage to put forward interpretations that future critics of the works in question will likely have to contend with for a long time to come. François’s choice of texts–a seventeenth-century French novel, three poetical oeuvres from the very long nineteenth century (Hardy, Wordsworth, and Dickinson), and a novel by a writer who is famously hard to periodize (Mansfield Park)–seems almost deliberately to bracket questions of literary history. What interests François is the formal means through which these works make room for “recessive action” and for potentiality in two genres that serve as important ideological tools of the dominant ethos of production and articulation: the novel, which raises the expectation of goal-oriented action and self-improvement, and the lyric, which generally serves as a vehicle for self-expression. François shows how an “antinovelistic conception of experience” (200) is embodied in La Princesse de Clèves through the use of the passé simple, the “tense of completed action,” the tense that locates “the event outside of the person of the narrator,” which contributes to an impersonal style that allows the princess a “release from responsibility” (87, 84, 89). In the case of Austen’s novel, François demonstrates that the novel allows Fanny to escape the ideology of improvement through the use of free indirect speech. This tense “makes available for silent reading experiences that may not want, need, or be capable of louder articulation” without conferring actuality “on the previously latent” (16). By presenting Fanny’s experience through such third-person narration, the novel “relieves Fanny from first-person assertions” (224), in the same way that the passé simple releases the princess from the burden of having to take responsibility for her each and every action. In the discussion of the poetry of Hardy, Wordsworth, and Dickinson, finally, the focus is firmly on the distinction between “narrative telos and lyric inconsequence” (139). François coins a “lyric subgenre,” the “lyric of inconsequence,” which attempts to give shape to a release from narrative expectations and to make room for “the possibilities of nonsequential connection” (154). The poems of Wordsworth, Hardy, and Dickinson that she categorizes under this label “release” temporal difference “from the obligation to produce significant narrative difference” (180). While we can only hope that these literary analyses point the way to further research on the formal means through which other media shape such a release from teleological progression–“temporal” media such as music and film immediately come to mind–it is no small merit of Open Secrets that it so convincingly argues for the possibility of wresting literary media away from their recuperation by ideologies of production and articulation.
 

Ginger: Listen, we’ll either die free chickens or die trying.
 
Babs: Are those the only options?
 

–Chicken Run

All that [the slave] has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake, also. The life which he has, may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks, may not be gained.
 

–Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

What we know of Richard Wright’s biography supports a psychoanalytic approach to his work. His association with the psychoanalysts Frederic Wertham and Benjamin Karpman, as well as the texts found in his library–among them books by Karl Abraham, Helene Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Sándor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Theodor Reik, and Géza Roheim–attest to his familiarity with the field.¹ According to Margaret Walker, Wright remained “intensely Freudian”-indeed, “obsessed with psychoanalysis” (286, 245)–throughout his literary and philosophical career.² The potential of the encounter between Wright and psychoanalytic criticism has nevertheless remained largely unactualized. Instead, what one finds is a catalogue of often reductive readings stubbornly deaf to the complexity and inventiveness of Wright’s literary and theoretical oeuvre.
 
Abdul JanMohamed’s study of Wright is a welcome corrective to this history. In The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, JanMohamed has revised his earlier essays on Wright into a reading that almost covers the prolific author’s entire oeuvre. In comparison with the essays, The Death-Bound-Subject foregrounds psychoanalysis, particularly of the Lacanian variant, as its primary methodological tool. An exemplar of clarity, the study moves chronologically through Wright’s published texts, leaving out only some of his shorter fiction and nonfiction, the travel narratives produced in the 1950s, and the posthumously published novels Lawd Today! and A Father’s Law (the latter came out only in early 2008). Apart from its productive mobilization of psychoanalysis, The Death-Bound-Subject offers an important reassessment of Wright in that it neither disavows nor condemns the troubling insistence with which scenes of graphic (and often misogynistic) violence are replayed in his work. JanMohamed demonstrates that, whereas the reasonable response to the unreasonable repetition of such tableaus of murder, mutilation, and lynching may be to recoil from them, the horror and disgust with which we shield ourselves from the intractable brutality in Wright simultaneously prevents us from observing the hard core of the existence that the author delineates: an existence in which the racialized subject is caught up in, because brought into being through, an endless negotiation with his or her imminent death.
 
If Wright’s readers have been alternately appalled at and frustrated by the relentless negativity of his work–often considered a symptom of the author’s psychic compulsions or the ham-fisted didacticism of his residual communism–JanMohamed shows the absolute necessity of Wright’s insistent attention to scenes of brutality, of physical, social, and psychic humiliation. He explains this focus in terms of Wright’s ongoing negotiation with “the death pact,” a kind of obstinate working-over of the practices binding the enslaved (and, after the abolition of slavery, the racialized) subject to injury, dishonor, and degradation, processes that Orlando Patterson theorizes through the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in Slavery and Social Death (1982). For Patterson, slavery is instituted as “a substitute for certain death,” “usually violent death”; the enslaved subject is a being integrated into the master’s symbolic universe as “a socially dead person” (337, 5). In this death pact of master and slave, the latter’s death sentence what JanMohamed calls his “actual-death”–is commuted insofar as the slave acquiesces to his “social-death.” Only “symbolic-death,” a Lacanian concept that I turn to below, offers a possible way to pry open the slave’s futureless horizon.
 
The Death-Bound-Subject convincingly reads Wright’s oeuvre as a persistent negotiation with the vicissitudes of the death contract. The process begins with his first book, the 1938 short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. JanMohamed demonstrates that the early stories play out repetitions of death, imposed and chosen to varied degrees, in the face of the overwhelming realities of black life under Jim Crow. The series of narratives culminates in “Bright and Morning Star,” which features a self-possessed female character rare in Wright’s work. From this character, Aunt Sue, we move to two of Wright’s most notorious depictions of women: Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears of Native Son (1940). JanMohamed notes the dubious sexual politics that mark Wright’s work throughout and make his debut novel ultimately a failed attempt to break the contract that binds Bigger Thomas to his place. Native Son‘s “brilliant exploration of symbolic-death is compromised by the problematics of sexualization involved in the very process of racialization” (136): the text can attack the master only obliquely, by gruesomely killing Mary and Bessie.
 
Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945), shows how the death pact of racialization is reproduced, and the death-bound-subject constituted, within the family before its being sealed, and his being entombed, by Wright’s subsequent encounters with Jim Crow society. The last three novels, The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1958), explore the subject’s entanglement in racialized Oedipal injunctions. In his reading of these texts, JanMohamed renders indisputable the fact that, in the course of his career, Wright’s thinking of racialized violence and subjection became increasingly psychoanalytic. Despite his successful rebirth through a subway accident in the aftermath of which a stranger’s body is mistaken for his, The Outsider‘s protagonist, Cross Damon, remains enthralled by such Oedipal knots. Because of “the horror of his oedipal desires” (177), Damon does not (dis)solve the death pact any more than does the protagonist of Wright’s next novel, Savage Holiday. Whereas The Outsider explores the paternal function, the all-white cast (give or take a black maid) of Savage Holiday illustrates, according to JanMohamed, one’s entanglement in psychic fantasies that get expressed in scenes of infanticide and matricide.
 
If The Outsider and Savage Holiday trace what JanMohamed calls the subject’s “‘internal,’ oedipal horizon of death” (233), in his final published novel, The Long Dream written after the important detour into travel writing in Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957)–Wright returns to the “external horizon” of the death-bound-subject, the Jim Crow law. Yet while Wright’s previous work constitutes an unwavering negotiation with death, the final novel “puts its emphasis on the (relatively gradual) unfolding and development of life; while its events are punctuated by deathly cataclysms as horrific as any in the previous fiction, its fundamental rhythm is dictated by the tendency of eros to bind with various and sundry objects” (234). In his concluding chapter, “Renegotiating the Death Contract,” JanMohamed takes up where Wright’s final novel leaves off, giving us an outline, through Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, of the death contract and how it can be reinvented by the slave.
 
Apart from its compelling reading of Wright’s oeuvre, The Death-Bound-Subject offers an elegant synthesis of theoretical approaches, guided by Lacan’s commentary on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and complemented, in the concluding chapter, by Marx’s delineation of the “labor process.” Through Marx and Lacan, JanMohamed addresses what he considers the double evasion in Hegel’s account of the master-slave relationship. First, Marx’s materialism necessitates that we understand the struggle as “motivated not simply by the [master’s] refusal to recognize the other’s ‘subjectivity‘; rather, that refusal must be seen as a pretext and a precondition for the attempt to reduce the other to what we might call a ‘subject-commodity’” (276). Second–and here JanMohamed’s critique is analogous to that of political theorists irked by the assimilationist emphasis on the necessity of Sittlichkeit in Hegel’s ethics–Lacan allows one to theorize the slave’s futurity other than through the obedient “work” that may lead to subjective recognition. Work in the Hegelian sense becomes that which seals and sustains the death contract between the slave and the master. In order to avoid his actual-death, the laboring slave, as the death-bound-subject, is preserved but immobilized by social-death, the condition that for Patterson results from the slave’s “natal alienation.” Pace Lacan, JanMohamed calls this the subject’s capture between two deaths, a state of nominal existence that he illustrates with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.” The working slave lives on within the circumscribed temporality of his imminent but repetitively commuted death sentence. He is forced to earn such commutation by acceding to the futureless temporality of labor. Slavery’s dialectics of death offers no hope of a future different from the present state of things.
 
Mobilizing the Freudian concept of Ent/Bindung through J. B. Pontalis’s work, JanMohamed argues that the slave–whose embodiments one finds in Wright’s Jim Crow subjects–is profoundly bound to and by the death drive.³ The felicitous coinage “the death-bound-subject” names both an irresolvable aporia and an all but impossible exit from this dead end. On the one hand, it refers to a subject constituted not through an attachment to life–eros as the process of binding–but through an intimate relation with thanatos, or “a deathly eros” (256), actualized as the subject’s own imminent extinction. Having acceded to social-death in order to avoid his actual-death, the death-bound-subject is one whose (psychic, social, political) mobility is radically circumscribed and whose processes of binding are all but debilitated. As death-bound–shackled between two deaths–the subject emerges in the form of “an aporetic being” (285). The term simultaneously suggests a way out of the death contract by designating the potential in the subject’s orientation toward death. The death-bound-subject as a being bound by death, that is, can become the death-bound-subject as a being bound toward death. Here emerges the risky possibility for the subject to reinvent the binding contract of death. Continuing from where JanMohamed leaves off, one can suggest that this movement toward death is accomplished not by ignoring the law’s validity but, on the contrary, by taking the law’s pronouncements literally. The slave, that is, begins to take the law at its word, much like, according to Lacan, psychotics do: accepting that (as the death pact tells him) he is a dead subject, he is momentarily released, or unbound, from the instinct for self-preservation, which has also moored him to his futureless existence. The insistence on its letter turns the law against itself, inducing in it a loophole, an aporetic self-contradiction. In Lacanese, the slave, making the conscious choice of death, returns the law’s message to the master in an inverted form.
 
For JanMohamed, the shift from being death-bound as the state of aporetic immobility to being death-bound as a radical orientation toward an unknown future, articulable only in terms of one’s annihilation, names a minimal but potentially momentous move. In slave narratives, this choice of death, as the inversion of the law, is frequently voiced in the form of Patrick Henry’s revolutionary invitation, “Give me liberty or give me death.”⁴ JanMohamed reads this speech act as the “negation of the negation,” a dangerous sublation of social-death and actual-death: “the only way out of the positivity of social-death . . . is through the appropriation of the negativity of actual-death: if one is not afraid of actual-death or is ‘willing,’ however reluctantly, to die, then it is absolutely impossible to have the structure of social-death imposed on one” (102). His revision of Hegel’s master-slave dynamic is largely consonant with Judith Butler’s understanding of subjection. JanMohamed’s observation that “life’s desire for its own continuity . . . allows it to be appropriated by the threat of death” (119) echoes Butler’s account of subjection in The Psychic Life of Power: “within subjection the price of existence is subordination. Precisely at the moment in which choice is impossible, the subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence” (20). JanMohamed identifies the Lacanian symbolic-death with what Butler calls the possibility for a “metaleptic reversal,” enabled by power’s reiterative structure, in the process of subjection (JanMohamed 287-88).
 
As JanMohamed’s agreement with Butler’s project indicates, his critique of the Phenomenology‘s account of slavery remains firmly in the orbit of dialectics. JanMohamed seeks “to articulate a very different form of the death contract between the master and the slave than that contained in the classic Hegelian paradigm” (38). Yet even though his “anti-Hegelian” ambition (31) is to reconfigure Hegel via Lacan, he conceptualizes what he calls “the dialectics of death” precisely according to dialectical progression, in which “the ‘social-death’ furnishes the given condition or ‘thesis,’ the ‘actual-death’ functions as the ‘antithesis,’ and the ‘symbolic-death’ functions as the potential ‘synthesis’” (17). As the Aufhebung, symbolic-death would “negate th[e] structure by, finally, sublating it–that is, [allowing the subject to] dialectically [overcome the structure] by consciously understanding and, hence, preserving it at a higher level of comprehension” (117). Rather than attempting to take us beyond Hegel, the scrambling of the forced choice between actual-death and social-death by the introduction of the Lacanian symbolic-death constitutes a dialectical revision of the Hegelian schema.
 
As such, JanMohamed does not question, or even acknowledge, the Hegelian orthodoxies of contemporary critical theory. Like Butler before him, he seems to have concluded that Hegel’s momentous work comprises the inescapable ground of theory and politics, one whose inevitabilities we are called to contest only through its own tools, that is, through a subversive inhabitation, or inaccurate repetition, of its laws–the critical gesture par excellence of Butlerian performativity.⁵ One should nevertheless note that this adherence to the Hegelian system goes against Lacan’s more radical critique, in his later work, of the Hegelian dialectic. Rather than looking for a happy twist in the progress of dialectical becoming, by introducing “the symbolic death” into the economy of slaveryor death, Lacan in effect seeks to undo the triangular neatness of Hegel’s schema. JanMohamed’s most frequent Lacanian sources are among the first articulations of Lacan’s later work. Here Lacan moves from the structuralist understanding of the symbolic and imaginary orders to consider the real. This real cannot be sublated; its intrusion into symbolic calculations presents us with a break that is not recuperable by the dialectic. Analogously, Lacan shifts his attention from desire–largely premised on Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel–to the drive, a concept that I would argue is, like the real, inassimilable to the Hegelian system. By insistently glossing the later Lacan through Hegelian formulations (however modified), JanMohamed, like Butler, arguably refuses to yield to or experiment with the break that the drive and the real constitute in the Lacanian system.⁶
 
In the spirit of the kind of “persistence” that is embodied in Antigone, Lacan’s figure for the subject’s irrational choice of death,⁷ one might attempt to follow Lacan by taking him at his word–that is, by pursuing the seemingly impossible move in the (theoretical) game that would break the Hegelian contract of contemporary thinking. In this context, Wright’s short story “Bright and Morning Star” would undoubtedly need to be considered not as an early, failed experiment with the contract of death in Wright’s work (as JanMohamed does), but rather as an inassimilable aberration, one whose monstrosity renders it both unsublatable to progressivist narratives and recuperable for future use. What makes “Bright and Morning Star” eminently suitable for a Lacanian reading is that its protagonist, Aunt Sue, is a tragic heroine in the mold of Antigone. A non-Hegelian psychoanalytic reading of the story might proceed by listening to the unceasing “droning” of the rain in the background of Aunt Sue’s actions–the rain that, as the story’s opening paragraph has it, is “‘good n bad. It kin make seeds bus up thu the groun, er it kin bog things down lika watah-soaked coffin’” (221). This inhuman realm of undifferentiation–at the end of the story, Aunt Sue herself becomes a “drone,” unsupported by any of the forms of faith (Christianity, communism, human relationality itself) on which she has attempted to anchor her symbolic order–is both deadly and generative, not unlike the drive itself, whose “will to destruction” may be synonymous with the “will to make a fresh start,” “[the] will to begin again” (Lacan 212).
 
It is with Aunt Sue, in Wright’s work, that one can consider the centrality of the role of “sexuation” in Lacan’s post-Hegelian theory of tragedy (see Copjec 12-47). Her revolutionary activity of self-destructive veiling–playing an obsequious “nigger woman” (Wright 253), she strikes at the law, knowing that she herself won’t survive her actions allows us to consider Frantz Fanon’s “tragic” heroines, the female guerrillas of “Algeria Unveiled,” in the context of Lacan’s reading of Antigone.⁸ After all, the Ethics seminar took place during 1959-1960, a time marked by the turmoil of the Algerian resistance to the French occupation and its consequent, brutal repression–a crisis that Fanon famously addresses in A Dying Colonialism (1959). Lacan’s suggestion that Antigone anticipates “the cruelties of our time” (240), offering “the image of our modern wars” (266), can clearly be read as references to the Algerian battle.
 
While one may gripe about JanMohamed’s eminently Hegelian (and, in more contemporary terms, Butlerian) reading of Lacan, The Death-Bound-Subject provides a sympathetic and productive reading of Wright’s life-long negotiation with the racist dialectics of death he saw thriving, after slavery’s abolition, under the aegis of Jim Crow. The study’s merit for Wright scholarship should be obvious as we celebrate, in 2008, the centennial of the author’s birth. Unlike in numerous other psychoanalytic readings, Wright’s works function in The Death-Bound-Subject as further provocations for the theoretical framework’s complication and reinvention–consequently allowing JanMohamed to steer clear of what Shoshana Felman some twenty years ago criticized as the tendency of psychoanalytic theories to be “applied” to literary texts. Moreover, at a time when monographs concentrating on a single author are notoriously difficult to publish and market, JanMohamed’s volume provides an incisive example of how, at its best, the single-author book makes a considerable contribution to the broader concerns of literary and critical theory.
 

No art activity is to be understood apart from the codes and practices of the society which contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology.
 

––Victor Burgin, 1972

One of my earliest memories of punk takes me back to the age of thirteen. Unfolding the cover of anarcho-punk band Crass’ album Yes Sir, I Will, I am confronted with the image of horrifically burned Falklands War veteran Simon Weston in conversation with Prince Charles. The caption of their exchange reads: “‘Get well soon,’ the Prince said. And the heroic soldier replied ‘Yes sir, I will.’” Over twenty years have passed since its release, but one can still cite Crass’ recontextualization of Weston’s face, forever marked by Thatcherism, as a prime example of punk visual practice. While many people of a certain age can readily identify Jamie Reid’s various remappings of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait in 1977 (one of the many examples of British artists jamming her Silver Jubilee), Crass’ livid invective is equally confrontational, equally punk: punk and post-punk culture is a “symbol of and an adequate response to the ravaged times” (Sladen 10). As Rosetta Brooks writes, Georges Didi-Huberman argues that “the image as image can be revealed only by a violation of the image. . . . in fact, one is only aware of the image as image by its being violated or cut” (45). Crass’ DIY “violation” displays the uncomfortable slippage between multiple meanings, and the need to affix intent. Are we to read the image to show suffering projected onto the nationalistic project, or should we be taken aback because the Prince’s well-wishes (as symbolic of Empire and stifling class relations) are greeted with a polite, duty-bound reply?
 
The act of disassembling and rearranging the false sanctity of the image, gesture, or utterance demonstrates how ideology “brackets,” as Victor Burgin says. In the Barbicon’s attendant publication to their 2007 show Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, this process is reevaluated through a multidisciplinary survey of the field. The text features works by iconic and lesser-known artists from New York, London, and Los Angeles, and is supplemented with lively essays by Mark Sladen, Rosetta Brooks, David Bussel, Carlo McCormick, Tracey Warr, Andrew Wilson, Ariella Yedgar, and Stephen Willats. The essays, which often read as a conversation between curator, critic of popular culture, and disillusioned kid who rethinks the utility of both box cutter and safety pin, are organized around four central themes (which function with considerable overlap):
 

art with overt political intent that uses the inner city as a symbol of social breakdown; the body as a site to explore transgressive ideas of sexuality, violence and abjection; do-it-yourself aesthetics, collage and appropriation as alternative means of visual communication; and the underground scene as a radical social space and ground for artistic cross-fertilization.
 

(7)

 
Panic Attack! is a highly suggestive title, speaking simultaneously to an agitated individual state and to the clashing forces of chaos and order (categories that, as the essays demonstrate, require each other in order to be meaningful). Panic implies small and large-scale intrusions into the manufactured sense of wholeness that capitalist ideology requires: in its refusals and refutations, punk’s pathogenic threat is fully displayed as an abject mass of disruptive bodies, words and visuals. This is beautifully illustrated in Mark Sladen’s introduction, which reproduces a Throbbing Gristle press flyer as representative of society’s resultant “moral panic” in the face of subcultures (9). The flyer appropriates a quote from Conservative MPP Nicholas Fairbairn who, appalled after seeing COUM Transmissions’ 1976 exhibit Prostitution, states, “These people are the wreckers of civilisation” (qtd. in Sladen 9).
 
The delicious irony of Fairbairn’s statement notwithstanding, it goes without saying that “these people” does not refer solely to Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, but rather to the whole of a group who strove to expose the naturalization of the civilized/barbaric binary on the canvas, image, and body. Punk was still a force to be reckoned with during the reign of Thatcher and Reagan; as the text argues, the policies of Reagan and Thatcher exacerbated the already deep-rooted alienation caused by, in the British context, a highly organized class structure, and in the American, the myth of a classless society.
 

The citizenry first came adrift from a belief in democratic government in the punk years . . . . Such political disillusion is commonplace now, but in the 1970s it was new. In the post-war period people had briefly tasted and believed in the ludicrous notion that the role of democratic government was to move the populace collectively towards equity and civil rights.
 

(116)

 
The rejection of binaries and their reach into the politics of race, gender, sexuality, class and the segregation of urban space activated a movement that sought to disembowel the concept of power itself. Ariella Yedgar’s essay, “The Exploded Image,” elaborates this point; she assiduously documents punk’s Dadaist, Futurist, Surrealist and Situationist influences. Her analysis speaks to an important point: despite the surfeit of information on punk, including numerous academic studies, first-person accounts, archival collections and documentary films, punk is often subject to an oddly reductive analysis, focusing on a limited number of events from an even more limited group of people. It is most commonly explained in terms of music and style, but it also took root in performance, installation art, photography, graffiti, collage, graphic design and assemblage. Panic Attack! expands the definition of punk by examining a wide range of artists who, while not necessarily adopting its commonly accepted definition of fashion sense, most certainly apply its tenets to their work. Further, the ways the political and social intricacies of the artists’ class, race, gender and sexuality result in refusals that are, as McCormick says about media, “symbiotically connected within the social fabric of very particular communities” (95).
 
Photography is an ideal medium in which to examine the importance of place (or the pain of being without place), partly because it works well within a DIY aesthetic (which is given careful attention in Stephen Willat’s essay, “Intervention and Audience”), but also because, as David Bussel contends in “Post-Conceptual Photography and Strategies of Dissent,” it is a medium that can be used actively, rather than “a supposedly neutral form of documentation” (70). He states that
 

the artists broke away from the imperatives of Conceptual and Minimalist art to claim a new ground—the politics of representation—through the redefinition of photography and its potential “uses” for socially engaged, critical intervention. This intervention . . . shifted the terrain of activity for many artists from an “aesthetics of administration” to aesthetic politics as part of a larger shift in the very terms of cultural production itself within the Postmodern condition.
 

(73)

 
A few examples of this strategy stand out. David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-9) is described in Tracey Warr’s “Feral City” as a semi-autobiographical series that draws from “his own experience as a homeless, runaway rent boy,” but obscures a tidy self-referential reading through its subject, a friend in a blurry Rimbaud mask in various locations and states of abjection throughout New York:
 

The impassive pallor of the mask jars with the living flesh of the body shooting up or masturbating. “Rimbaud” is both immersed in New York, taking it all in, and a displaced and dispassionate alien observing it. We expect at any moment that he will break out of his impassivity and give us his observations on this city, this life, but he remains mute and uncommunicative—a mere surface.
 

(118)

 
Andrew Wilson’s analysis of Victor Burgin’s UK76 in his essay, “Modernity Killed Every Night,” is particularly compelling. He states that the series functions as a
 

sequence of images that . . . depict views of Britain’s post-imperial and post-industrial decline. On one level, each of the work’s panels presents a different pictorial gloss on this view: different types of urban spaces that portray a particular take on the projections of national identity; a sense of movement through these spaces in which people are presented as more or less detached; different forms of nostalgia, whether it be the attraction of the picture-book country cottage or the workplace . . . ; and the manipulation of sight through pictorial composition and the rule of the gaze in constructing gendered representation.
 

(145)

 
The commodification of nostalgia and the fictions of national identity are further exemplified in Mark Sladen’s analysis of Gilbert and George’s Dirty Words Pictures (1977):
 

In these works the artists spliced together photographs of subjects that include the dismal remnants of Victorian London and the modern London of tower blocks, the trading floors of the City and the milling multiracial crowds of the impoverished East End . . . . Such images are joined by graffiti that scream out such words as CUNT and QUEER, completing a cursed landscape of London in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
 

(12)

 
The image of “a cursed landscape,” of “cunts” and “queers,” offers an ideal segue to another key aspect in understanding visual practice during the punk era. The text pays particular attention to artists who take the body as a medium, and deploy it as a site of resistance, making public the private messiness of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized subject. Distancing themselves from the “dispassionate neutrality of Minimalism and Conceptualism,” several artists featured in the text work at “rupturing that clean space with the living, breathing, messy body” (119). By displaying the body’s circulation in a vast array of subject/object relations, these artists make the body another weapon in the DIY chest, offering an ironic reworking of the stifling confines of, and elucidating the complex relationships between, femininity and heterosexism. Feminist artists such as Linder, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, and Hannah Wilke are duly represented in the text.
 
The era is also characterized by a powerful insertion of the queer body into contemporary art, exemplified by Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and David Wojnarowicz. Evacuating the pervasive stereotype of punk visual practice as a straight boy’s game, its “mainstream disaffection through bodily adornment . . . [its] reliance upon the visual—its earnest insistence upon the body as a canvas for self-expression-cum-visual terrorism—made it a logical home . . . for the performative, visually strategic tactics of contemporary queer culture” (Rosenfeld). The above excerpt comes from Kathryn Rosenfeld’s “The End of Everything Was 20 Years Ago Today: Punk Nostalgia,” which points to one of the text’s key strengths: while Panic Attack! looks back to an era now over twenty years gone, it offers some salient and decidedly current questions, further demonstrating that punk’s noise is still heard in contemporary art and critical theory. It asks us to rethink how punk was initially analyzed, and how we might rethink it now.
 
The study of youth-based culture is rooted in the important work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which examined primarily androcentric subversions of mass culture in post-war Britain (in the case of punk, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which offered a more semiotic than sociological reading, remains one of the most influential and commonly cited studies of punk aesthetics and politics, a presence that is certainly felt in Panic Attack!). In the last decade or so, there has been a palpable shift away from CCCS’ “heroic” model of subculture, situating subcultural studies as a post-discipline; repositioning it, as Hebdige states, as “neither simply affirmation nor refusal” (35). According to Rupert Weinzierl and David Muggleton, post-subcultural analyses allow us to
 

move from an “inherently” radical notion of subculture, coupled to a monolithic conception of dominant culture, to a position that recognizes the differentiation and multiplicity of points of power in society and the way that various cultural formations and elements articulate within and across these constellations of power in complex and non-linear ways to produce contingent and modificatory outcomes.
 

(13)

 
The move to post-subcultural analysis has also created a space for harsh criticisms of punk as nothing more than another marketing campaign, emphasizing the fact that the relationship between subculture and mass culture may be closer than comfortable, if not entirely codependent. Rosetta Brooks’s “Rip It Up, Cut It Off, Rend It Asunder” addresses this view succinctly:
 

Rather than disrupting or exposing the violence of the commodity in the act of consumption, as many of its followers and a cartload of cultural studies professors would have us believe, punk reinforced the implicit violence of the commodity and the commodity image . . . . It was a deliberate, strategic interruption that recognized the dialectic between violence and pleasure in consumption. Punk’s fashion and music—for those who were responsible for them––were aimed at nothing more than a corner of the market.
 

(48)

 
While Panic Attack! opens up possibilities for conceptualizing punk, it is not afraid, as Brooks’s statement demonstrates, to put limits on a highly idealized era (it also addresses the fact that the explosion of countercultural art in the East Village led to its gentrification, forcing many artists out of their homes and studios). Andrew Wilson’s “Modernity Killed Every Night” offers an effervescent neo-Hebdigian analysis of Malcolm McLaren’s branding of punk, and in particular, his embrace of the Situationist détournment and the appropriation of Richard Hell’s sartorial sense:
 

McLaren’s discovery of Hell as a ‘distressed, strange thing’ gave fuel to his long-standing vision of the creation of a style of refusal that might incorporate both the styled rebellion of rock music and a fashion-inflected poetics of transgression in which the banality of contemporary life became the target for his play of subversion.
 

(147)

 
Wilson describes McLaren’s genealogy and evolution as something traceable only according to “whichever mythology one cares to subscribe to” (146). This telling phrase accomplishes two things: on one hand, it can speak to the reductive analysis of McLaren as metonym of punk, but it also derails the need to affix origins, a seemingly incongruous move when discussing a mode of artistic practice known for its profound distrust of the discourses of truth and empirical verifiability.
 
Carlo McCormick states that “all cultural phenomena leave evidence that remains just a bit too messy or is perhaps even irrelevant to the formal needs of history” (95). While it would be difficult to argue otherwise, the text accomplishes its task of formally documenting and discussing a purposefully combative, messy era. Some may sniff at binding and indexing a text about punk’s contributions to visual practice, but Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years is a highly accessible, exciting, and immediate account of an era whose reverberations are still felt in contemporary art.
 

Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker, recently published a chronicle of twentieth-century music called The Rest is Noise. The book made several bestseller lists and was nominated for a National Book Circle Award. Mr. Ross has appeared on numerous TV shows, even bantering with Stephen Colbert about the foibles of Karlheinz Stockhausen on Comedy Central. Earlier overviews of the twentieth-century classical avant-garde were penned by Paul Griffiths and H.H. Stuckenschmidt, yet both were deemed specialty books intended for a small audience. Ross’s book is bigger in scope and more generous in tone; it makes clear the connections between politics, history, and music that are remarkably of interest to a general readership. Ross hits all the high notes– Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky, Ellington, Ives, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Boulez, Britten, Cage, Messiaen, Ligeti, Reich, and Adams, to name a few–and strings the whole story together in a compelling way that could only happen from the perspective of the twenty-first century. But Ross tells a twentieth-century story and one that is, in many ways, finished.
 
The Rest is Noise sticks to the narrative of what happened inside the concert hall, but there was an awful lot of music and sound that eschewed formal classical presentation, opting instead for the art gallery, the airwaves, or outdoors in nature. Much of this activity, time-based and ephemeral, either went undocumented or was written about in art magazines, obscure journals, or fanzines. When recordings were made, they were generally released on limited-edition LPs or cassettes that were passed hand-to-hand to members of an inside coterie. Over the years, various attempts have been made by university or small presses to gather aspects of these scenes between the covers of a book, most notably Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Douglas Kahn’s Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Robin James’s Cassette Mythos, and Dan Lander and Micah Lexier’s Sound By Artists. But like the proverbial blind man and the elephant, each book was able to describe only a portion of the unwieldy practice that has come to be known as sound art.
 
The term “sound art” was coined by Dan Lander in the mid-1980s and stood as shorthand for much of what happened outside the concert hall. Brian Eno proposed that sound art’s ideal situation was “a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these” (Licht 210). The number of disciplines that fell under this rubric can get obscure and exhaustive: fluxus, minimalism, futurism, new music, transmission arts, sounds by artists, performance art, sound sculpture, turntablism, various strains of improv, no wave, sound poetry, aleatory works, process works, and cassette networks. These are just a few ways of working that have been lumped together as “sound art.” While not everyone agrees exactly what sound art is, there is a general concurrence that the godfathers of the movement include F.T. Marinetti, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp; current prominent practitioners are Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, Christiana Kubisch, and Stephen Vitiello. Alan Licht’s Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories is the first attempt to tame the beast. From the outset, Licht works under one very clear assumption: that for it to be sound art, it must “belong in an exhibition situation rather than in a performance situation” (14). He adds two correlatives: 1) sound art is non-narrative, and 2) sound art “rarely attempts to create a portrait or capture the soul of a human being, or express something about the interaction of human beings” (14). Often, though, these precepts don’t hold up: Licht cites numerous examples of sound art that do, in fact, strongly reflect aspects of the humanism he adamantly denies. He also describes a number of compelling performance-based as well as narrative works. While Licht’s desire to make these assumptions is understandable, it’s clear that he is too much in love with his subject to adhere to them closely. Instead of an ideological narrowing of the field, the book explodes with one rich example after another, giving us an enthusiastic no-holds barred survey of the field. And that’s how this book is best taken. Like Ross, Licht provides the key to an extraordinarily rich terrain in well-organized categories and clearly articulated examples; in that way, this book is destined to be the most comprehensive overview of sound art for years to come. Licht leaves theory and opinion to others, which is a good thing: his knowledge of the breadth of the field is astonishing, pulling together examples ranging from visual arts to filmic sound design into a cohesive–but happily messy–story.
 
The book begins by introducing methods that several early twentieth-century artists used to unhinge sound from the concert hall. These include Kurt Weill’s call for a non-narrative, image-based “absolute radio” and Dziga Vertov’s prospects for a radically disjointed concept of sound and imagine in cinema. The most significant break with tradition comes with the invention of magnetic tape and the rise of Musique concrete following the Second World War. Music is no longer a thing to be notated and performed; rather, the studio replaces the rehearsal space, and one listens at home rather than at the concert hall. By the mid-1960s, even Glenn Gould stopped live performances because he felt that records would make his presence obsolete.
 
Once the significance of the concert hall was irrevocably altered, all sorts of possibilities opened up: nature sounds, electronic sounds, city sounds, and so forth became part of the discourse. Luigi Russolo’s 1913 “Art of Noises” manifesto states: “We have had enough of [Beethoven et al.] and we delight much more in . . . the noise of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages, of brawling crowds” (77), opening up music to the sounds of industry and to mechanical noise. After World War II, artists flee the studio: Olivier Messian takes to the fields to transcribe birdsong and John Cage incorporates the sounds of everyday life into his compositions. But, Licht warns, “it’s important to note, however, that for all the boundary pushing, it’s significant that Cage, Wolff, and Stockhausen are still thinking in terms of a performed concert with an audience, not music as a free-standing installation that would attract visitors” (75). It takes another decade or two–well into the 1960s–to get to that “free-standing installation,” by which time contemporaneous movements in visual art become as much of an influence on sound art as does musical discourse. Licht gives numerous examples of sound artists who, during the 1960s and the following decades, literally took their practice outdoors and let the elements of nature perform on them. One of the most fascinating was Gordon Monahan’s Aeolian Piano, which consisted of several fifty-foot piano wires strung between two wooden bridges and played by the wind. The artist David Dunn synthesized electronic tones in the range and rhythm of a mockingbird and then played the recording to a live mockingbird, all the while recording its sympathetic responses. More well-known figures like La Monte Young and John Cale went the urban route, inspired by telephone wires and hums of power generators, the outcome of which inspired both Young’s Theater of Eternal Music and Cale’s work with The Velvet Underground.
 
The second half of the book wrestles with the complex relationship between sound and the art world: What to do with artists who make sounds? Is it art? Is it music? Licht examines both the production and reception of these works and his answer is inconclusive: its beauty, he feels, is its resistance to categorization. Riding a delicate line between disciplines, it’s both music and art. But there are obstacles. In a recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia, sound artist Christian Marclay curated a group show called “Ensemble.” In the gallery’s vast hall, he placed dozens of objects created by visual artists that made sound, all turned on and going at the same time, resulting in a fabulous cacophony. During an informal gallery talk, Marclay discussed the itinerant nature of these works. He claimed that in a group exhibition, artworks that make noise are frowned upon, not only by the other artists in the show, but by the gallery workers who are forced to live day in and day out with these sounds. Marclay’s stated intention was to put them all in the same room turned up to a loud volume and let them scream, proud to be loud. Marclay, generally held up as a poster boy for the genre of sound art, refuses to couch his own practice in either discipline: one night he is attending an opening of his sound-invoking objects in a museum, the next he is DJ-ing those same sounds in a nightclub.
 
Licht carefully traces the intertwined histories of art and sound, beginning with Kandinsky’s admiration of Schoenbergian theories, moving to the hard-to-pin-down multimedia works of Andy Warhol, finally through the New York School and into the present. What emerges is a richly detailed tapestry in which categorical imperatives begin to crumble. What emerges, instead, is a celebration of possibility. Painting, surprisingly, plays a big role in sound art. What is the difference between painting and sound? The conceptual artist Brian O’Doherety seems to have an idea: “The composer’s surface is an illusion into which he puts something real–sound. The painter’s surface is something real from which he then creates an illusion” (Licht 136). Painting and sound are rarely spoken of in the same sentence but, in fact, have a history of influencing each other, most notably in the downtown New York scene of the 1950s, where Abstract Expressionist methods of painting heavily influenced the New York School of composers such as Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. Licht tells us that during the twentieth century, many visual artists were making musical compositions on the side. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, created a number of aleatory compositions for voice, piano, and orchestra. The stuff of myth, none were ever performed during his lifetime. (They since have been recorded and are occasionally performed.) Kurt Schwitters wrote a number of sound poems, most famously his Ursonate (1922-32), yet in the enormous Catalogue raisonné of his works, no mention is made of this activity. (After Schwitters’s death, tapes of him performing his Ursonate surfaced, and today there are dozens of versions of it.) Art Brut pioneer Jean Dubuffet’s musical explorations, on the other hand, were known by a wider audience. Using a number of unconventional instruments, electronics treatments, and pitches, Dubuffet gave license for a number of new musical ideas to the next generation. Many of these ideas found their way into the sounds of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s.
 
In 1961, John Cage published Silence, whose interdisciplinary approach opened the floodgates for experimentation. From Fluxus to Conceptualism, from Judson Church to Happenings, almost every innovative art movement of the 1960s–be it in theater, music, dance, art, or literature–claimed to be driven by Silence. Joan La Barbara says, “its initial impact on me was a shock of recognition; its calming effect made me feel that I was not alone in the universe” (Goldsmith 126). Nor has the book’s influence lessened as time has gone on. Robin Rimbaud a.k.a. Scanner claimed Silence to be
 

a catalyst, a liberation of a teenage mind, possibilities, engaging with sound on another level, concrete text, nomadic ideas shifting and shaping a juvenile imagination. The value of ideas in themselves, hermetic thoughts to engage the mind, concepts embossed that have never left me. I still regularly re-read extracts at random from this invaluable tome.
 

(126)

While Cage is given a cursory treatment by Ross–who chooses to focus on Boulez or Stockhausen instead–he is the protagonist of this story.

 
By the 1970s, sound had touched every aspect of the art world and art had touched every aspect of the sound world. Licht covers this fertile period starting with the performances of Laurie Anderson and the recordings of painter and filmmaker Jack Goldstein. The story moves on to the art world-produced LPs of Philip Glass and Charlemange Palestine (Glass was such an unknown at the time that only tiny gallery-based labels would put his stuff out). And when experimental artists enter the rock world, heady times occur: curator Diego Cortez features in the Mudd Club bands made up of art world denizens Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, James White, Sonic Youth, and DNA. In the 1980s, more crossover occurs: Jean-Michel Basquiat produces hip hop records and David Wojnarowicz performs in a punk band. By the 1990s, you’ve got musician Kim Gordon and visual artist Jutta Koether collaborating on paintings one night and performing music together the next. And it’s not just happening in New York: a bunch of former RISD art students form the Fort Thunder collective in Providence, which fuses visual art, theater, performance, and rock ‘n’ roll. The roster of unusual figures mentioned includes Captain Beefheart, Yoko Ono, Roxy Music, Mayo Thompson, The Red Krayola, Art & Language, the Raincoats, Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Julian Schnabel, Rodney Graham, and Fischerspooner. Along the way, we encounter other questions: What is sound sculpture? Licht takes a stab: “it is not instrument-making but sculpture that is made with an inherent sound-producing facility in mind” (199). Examples of sound sculpture described and shown in photographs include Harry Bertoia’s beautiful wind-driven metal sculptures, Robert Rutman’s homemade steel cello, and Yoshi Wada’s room-sized bagpipes.
 
In the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of video art challenged some lingering notions of cinema’s sense of narrativity and sound. Licht says,
 

just as music broke from the concert hall setting towards the end of the twentieth century, single-channel video installation likewise took the moving image, which before had to be experienced in a theater setting at a specific time, and made it a continuous attraction, that could be dropped in on at any time during gallery hours . . . Just as many sound artists do not have a background in music, many video artists do not have a background in film.
 

(204)

Examples of videos that have strong soundtracks include works by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill. These works question the video/sound art divide. Licht extends this question to Hollywood, citing Walter Murch’s audio work on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as a work of sound art. In recent high-profile museum exhibitions featuring sound art, many works lack a visual presence. Why are these works housed in a museum? Didn’t Glenn Gould’s prophecy come true? Wouldn’t it be better enjoyed in the comfort of one’s home on a good stereo? The answer is yes and no. When placed in the museum setting, many works maintain an historical continuity to traditions such as minimalism in the visual arts. Lines of speakers reference the sculptures of Donald Judd; wires strewn across the museum floor and walls are reminiscent of the gridded paintings of Agnes Martin or the scattered pieces of a 1960s Barry Le Va’s sculpture.

 
Licht concludes by making his key point: “Between categories is a defining characteristic of sound art, its creators historically coming to the form from different disciplines and often continuing to work in music and/or different media” (210). How different this is from the main figures in Alex Ross’s book, all of whom came from the academy and stayed planted firmly in the music world. Unlike the straight lines of the classical music world, sound art is a messy business, with borders bleeding into one another, often created by people who have no training in what they’re doing. The field of sound art feels completely contemporary, alive, truly embodying the word “experimental.” This book, then, is a roadmap to where sound is headed in our century: beyond music, between categories.
 

Seizing the amateur naturalist’s field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produced a provocative and haunting work that takes the shopping cart as its subject. While the project might well be read as an amusing and insightful parody of the taxonomic and stylistic ticks and obsessions of a series like the Peterson Field Guides for everything from freshwater fish to the night sky, Montague goes far beyond this, providing rather a startling meditation on the interstices of consumer culture and urban spaces in both his book and a companion website.
 
While critics of consumer culture regularly offer detailed, entertaining histories and analyses of what and where consumers buy, they more often than not focus on well-worn icons, from plastic packaging to big-box architecture. Cultural critics can turn to dozens of books on shopping malls, for instance, each with vivid illustrations, meticulous analyses, and dour pronouncements. This work is often valuable but it is rarely surprising, even when it takes such playful forms as Montague assumes; for instance, Delores Hayden’s recent A Field Guide to Sprawl offers a blunt, thorough critique of contemporary suburban planning from the naturalist’s perspective.¹ In contrast, Montague provides no critical apparatus at all in The Stray Shopping Carts of North America, yet his considering consumer culture through the shopping cart is itself a profoundly surprising and pointedly critical gesture. What emerges is a naturalist’s investigation of contemporary urban consumerism and spatial practices dissected through the liminal form of the shopping cart. A visceral sense of play and shock animates this particularly canted perspective, calling to mind the effects pioneered by Walter Benjamin.
 
The book begins with an utterly earnest explanation of its classificatory system, in which carts are either “Class A: False Strays” (carts that will return to the store) or “Class B: True Strays” (carts that will not return). Montague proposes for each class a fascinating series of types that describe various situations and states. There are 11 types of false stray, from the “A1 Close False” (a cart on the edge of a store’s parking lot) to the “A 11: False Group” (carts at a dwelling adjacent to a source store). The real fascination of the book, however, is with the true strays, of which there are 22 types, beginning with the B1, “Open True.” Much of the taxonomic ingenuity of the book is dedicated to describing as completely as possible “shopping carts in different situations and considering the conditions and human motives that have placed carts in specific situations” (6). In the first two sections, the book provides definitions and photographs of all 33 subtypes. The bulk of the text then presents scores of “Selected Specimens,” photographs of carts taken primarily in Buffalo, New York, as well as an entire section entitled “The Niagara River Gorge: Analyzing a Complex Vandalism Super Site.” Montague assures readers that “none of the photographs in this book were staged; all shopping carts were found in situ” (7).
 
The illustrations in the “Selected Specimens” have little or no comment beyond designations of the relevant types and the occasional caption clarifying the context, but there is a profound critical force. Many of the types describe carts found in what Montague names “Gap Marginalization” and “Edge Marginalization” to describe “a cart situated in a vacant lot or ditch, between buildings, behind a building, in a doorway, under a bridge or overpass, or in any manner of vacant public gap between properties” (44). The eye is thus drawn into these strange seemingly dead or uninhabited spaces at the edges of parking lots, behind strip malls or apartment buildings. Such spaces are usually unnoticed, or certainly not the visual focus of either urbanites themselves or even most artists or critics taking cities as their subject. Even authors who have celebrated such odd urban green spaces, notably William Upski Wimsatt’s Bomb the Suburbs,² don’t provide the wealth of images Montague has amassed. The images of carts abandoned, decaying, or used for various purposes invoke with quiet insistence the decidedly absent and ghostly people who use them. The carts are thus Peirceian indexes, a fossil record of an army of poor urban consumers and homeless gleaners who, without access to cars, must steal shopping carts to move their purchases and gleanings, often from strip malls and big-box stores to their distant homes in the city centers or the overgrown gap spaces in which they live. The photographs that illustrate these types thus become what Benjamin names dialectical images, “a way of seeing that crystalizes antithetical elements by providing an axes for their alignment” (Buck-Morss 210). The axis here is the form of the naturalist’s guide, which presents image after image of the shopping cart—the very icon of consumer desire—embroiled in the improvisations of those most disenfranchised by this culture of consumption.
 
The sheer number of photographs is overwhelming, and the book makes clear that at least in Buffalo and surrounding areas, the shopping cart is a ubiquitous feature of the landscape. A dialectical critique is encoded into many of the subtypes. For instance, type “A3 Bus Stop Discard” is illustrated with a photograph of carts overturned at a stop without seats or shelter where poor consumers use them as makeshift benches before boarding mass transit. Such an image underscores the sheer time and labor that consumerism demands of those with the least economic power who must negotiate an urban environment built on the premise of automobility. This kind of critique appears again and again as we are presented with images of carts singly or in groups behind modest houses and apartment buildings. The relationship of the shopping cart to these consumers is fascinating. Consumers or gleaners never “buy” the carts themselves, and thus these examples of stolen, repurposed, modified and vandalized carts reveal strange gaps in the processes of consumption and of urban traffic. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes that consumers “trace ‘indeterminante trajectories’ that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move” (35). Montague’s photographs vividly capture a record of such movement, in which it seems that shopping carts, rather than people, “circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order” (35). Left abandoned in ditches next to highways, decaying in creeks, the carts force us to look beyond the proper spaces of the city.
 
Beyond the most clearly dialectical images and types in the book, there is a wealth of urban surrealism. The “B13 Complex Vandalism,” defined by “the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart” (42), are surely the strangest and most intriguing images in the book. The definition of this type is accompanied by a photograph of an empty swimming pool behind a seven-foot fence. In the pool stand two stray carts. The book offers no theories about how they came to rest there. One is left to imagine the motives of whoever took the trouble to hoist the carts over the fence and set them upright in the deep end. Beyond such surreal images, one is simply struck by the form of the cart, which is thoroughly defamiliarized by the book. Because so many carts are damaged in some way, or obscured by mud, snow, foliage, or decay, what leaps out is the ubiquitous lattice of their basket, and turning from one page to the next one is reminded of the grid, arguably the ur-form of twentieth-century art. The empty shopping cart becomes a transient and evolving meditation on what Rosalind Krauss describes as the key form of modernism. She writes that within the grid’s “austere bars,” we hear “no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water—for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object” (158). As Krauss puts it, “the absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but more importantly its hostility to narrative” (158). One is tempted to see the grids of these carts as a parable of emptiness and commodity fetishism, for their form is meant to mutely transfer only the fullness and utopian promise of the commodities they contain, briefly supporting them in their transit through the store; the cart is understood as a purely negative space we long to fill, a negative emblem that supports the fundamental emptiness of the commodity form into which we consumers project our desires. Thus the most unnatural of forms, the cart’s latticed basket, is revealed as a force of history in its decay, an allegory of the contradictions of consumer culture.
 
The field guide frame forces us to see these carts as living creatures, and in the photographs it does seem as if they are drifting across plazas or hurling themselves in front of trains, as though they moved through the world singly or in herds as natural and living creatures. This produces a powerful estranging effect, and it dramatizes our own status as the objects of the vast and inhuman machinations of commodity culture, in which consumers are the objects of the ghostly forces of capital. Moreover, in recent years, the shopping cart has become the icon of consumerism, even where the physical form no longer exists. Websites almost universally use the term and visual icon of the shopping cart to mark the point-of-purchase. The shopping cart has become pervasive in our experience both of mass-market retail and of virtual incarnations of every class, to the point where consumerism itself is ideologically naturalized through this form. As a profoundly dialectical image of this process, the most fascinating photographs in the book are the examples of “B21, Naturalization,” which present carts that are decaying in urban wilds, literally becoming integral elements of the landscape. The photographic illustration of this category presents a “specimen [that] has been buried by silt and is encrusted with zebra mussels” (50). Rusting carts, covered in mud or leaves, buried in the ground so only the latticed side appears, or caught in stands of trees, shot through by leaves and branches, abound in the book. These images enact what Benjamin names fossil and allegory. In his essay “The Idea of Natural History,” Theodor Adorno writes: “For radical natural-historical thought, however, everything existing transforms itself into ruins and fragments, into just such a charnel-house where signification is discovered, in which nature and history interweave and the philosophy of history is assigned the task of their intentional interpretation” (121). Ranked in rows and rolling through aisles under sanitary florescent lights, these carts and all they represent are opaque. Their significance and imbrication in the commodity system is far more tellingly disclosed in just these images of naturalization, and in this form of the field guide, where nature and history produce the friction for a profane illumination.
 

“But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive.”
 

–Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

French novelist Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre is obsessed with les années noires of the German occupation and Vichy regime.¹ Since he debuted in 1968 with the angrily hysterical pastiche of 1940s French antisemitism, La place de l’étoile, Modiano has become one of the most prolific and celebrated writers on the contemporary French scene. His works—including Les boulevards de ceinture (1972), Rue des boutiques obscures (awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978), and Chien de printemps (1993), to name only a few of his approximately 30 novels—recreate shadowy atmospheres of wartime deception, disorientation, danger, fear, and claustrophobia. And, typically, they end on notes of radical undecidability—so much so that French historian Henri Rousso wrote in 1994 that, for Modiano, “the Occupation has lost all historical status. It is a puzzle that must above all not be pieced together, as truth filters through the empty spaces” (Rousso 152; my translation). Much of Modiano’s writing seems to embody the schizophrenic loss of historical consciousness and experience that, however differently, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and others have argued to be a defining feature of postmodernity.² Or, to adopt Dominick LaCapra’s diagnostic idiom, we may see in Modiano’s stylized novelistic iterations of France’s involvement in the Shoah the symptomatology of an interminable “acting out.” While wartime “memory” is arguably Modiano’s central, obsessional concern, in so much of his work it appears unmoored from its historical referent. Taken together, Modiano’s works seem doomed serially to reconstruct France’s wartime past as a nebulous atmosphere of anxiety. Modiano evokes the past exquisitely, but as seductively terrifying, and irresolvable. In this, Modiano’s novels are paradigmatic of the close relationship prominent theoreticians of trauma such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman have posited between trauma and literature: according to trauma theory, literature inscribes—even more, it embodies and transmits—trauma because it responds to events that it can only gesture toward obliquely and cannot represent.³
 
Modiano’s 1997 hybrid text Dora Bruder—it draws on biography, autobiography, documentary, memoir, and detective novel (and this list could be extended)—continues Modiano’s tortured personal involvement with the past, in particular with France’s war years; however, the book also marks an emphatic turn toward a more direct engagement with history and referentiality. One can read Modiano’s reorientation as part of a wider engagement in France with Vichy and the Shoah during the years he was at work on Dora Bruder. A series of scandalous disclosures and public trials fueled an intense new phase in France’s confrontation with its ambiguous past: the discovery in 1991 at the Ministry of Veteran’s Affairs of a file of some 150,000 names and addresses compiled during the occupation and used by Parisian police to round up Jews;⁴ the projected trial and then, in June 1993, the murder of René Bousquet, the head of French police during the peak years of deportation, 1942-43; the 1994 trial for crimes against humanity of Paul Touvier, an intelligence officer under Klaus Barbie in the pro-Nazi paramilitary Vichy police force, the Milice; and the scandalous re-emergence of Shoah denial with the publication of Roger Garaudy’s Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne in 1996.⁵
 
Modiano’s interest in Dora Bruder and, eventually, the book bearing her name, both begin with an encounter with the archive. In the book’s opening sentence, Modiano informs us that eight years prior (we later learn it was in 1988) he came across a missing persons announcement in the wartime paper Paris Soir, dated 31 December 1941. The announcement, ostensibly placed by Dora’s parents, functions like a horrific version of the fait-divers that launch so many detective narratives. The annonce so interpolated Modiano that he spent eight years trying, as it were, to answer it by searching for traces of the girl’s existence. Dora Bruder relates and self-reflexively meditates on this layered quest to recover Dora Bruder from her terrible anonymity. The scant information that Modiano ultimately recovers amounts to a few biographical tidbits: Dora Bruder was the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; she ran away in December 1941, at age 15, from the Catholic boarding school where her parents had managed to install her without the knowledge of the Jewish Affairs police; she returned briefly to her home in April 1942 and then ran away again for a few weeks; finally, she was interned, first in the Tourelles prison, and subsequently at the deportation camp Drancy. There she was reunited with her father Ernest Bruder. From Drancy, father and daughter were deported together to Auschwitz on September 18, 1942. Five months later, Dora’s mother Cécile Bruder was likewise put on a convoy to Auschwitz. Against claims that Modiano radically subverts the very notion of historical truth, Colin Nettelbeck rightly stresses that “[t]he reader of this work can have no doubt, at the text’s end, about the real, historical existence of Dora Bruder or about the terrifying simplicity of the world that sent her to her death” (Nettelbeck 248).
 
Modiano’s turn in Dora Bruder exemplifies the epistemological and ethical challenges of relating to the Shoah and its legacy that Marianne Hirsch and others have theorized in the concept of “postmemory.” Postmemory describes the relationship that children of survivors of collective traumas (in particular the Shoah) maintain to the traumatic event, which they know only second hand. The term “postmemory”
 

is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. That is not to say that survivor memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor re-create.
 

(Hirsch, “Projected Memory” 8)

At the present historical juncture, in which we find ourselves positioned–in James Young’s apt phrase–“at memory’s edge” in relation to the Shoah, when our memory of that catastrophe necessarily becomes vicarious and (hyper)mediated, many have found Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” useful.⁶ A chief aim of this article is to advance our understanding of the workings of postmemory—its potentialities, and, as I see it, inescapable risks as an ethical and critical practice. To do this, I find it useful to distinguish the dynamics of postmemory from those of trauma, to which they can easily be assimilated.⁷ Although postmemory and trauma share much, as phenomena and as theoretical interventions they rely upon and imagine quite different relationships to representation, referentiality, and the archive. If, in Caruth’s phrase, “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own . . . history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), the “traumatic” mode of transitivity by which we become implicated in the traumas of others operates on the basis of the collapse of representation. The transitivity implied in the very term postmemory, in contrast, requires representation, however limited and ambiguous. Because it is so proximate to, yet also fundamentally different from, the dynamics of the trauma paradigm, postmemory as a phenomenon and an ethical and critical practice can point toward ways of continuing an engagement with many of the central concerns of trauma theory—our responsibility vis-à-vis effaced others, and how to read their traces; the dangers of appropriation and of totalizing knowledge, among others—while also avoiding some of the dead-ends and the egregious ethical implications for which trauma theory has been criticized.⁸

 
This is not to suggest that postmemory, for its part, can ever escape the irreducibly problematic nature of its epistemological and ethical enterprise. As he searches for traces of the lost girl, the author-narrator of Dora Bruder explores Paris as an archive in a way that I argue is both paradigmatic of postmemory and highly evocative of, and indebted to, surrealist epistemo-esthetic experimentation. A certain surrealist openness or disponibilité to chance, coincidence, and the irrational are integral to the techniques and experimental epistemology through which Modiano pursues his labor of recovery. The book carries on an implicit and explicit dialogue with key surrealist works, authors, concepts, and practices, even as Modiano’s historical distance from interwar surrealism and its central aspirations demarcates his own particular postmemorial predicament. These profound, and perhaps uneasy, ties between the workings of postmemory and surrealism in Dora Bruder might usefully provoke anyone who would want to domesticate postmemory to fully consider its strangeness: part of my argument is, indeed, that to pursue the work of postmemory is, in some sense, to behave like a surrealist. More importantly, it is crucial to examine Dora Bruder‘s proximity to surrealism because this proximity illuminates some of the most fundamental aspects of Modiano’s postmemorial project, and of postmemory in general.
 
Despite its all-out assault on bourgeois so-called normalcy (and with it, so much “normal” representation and experience), interwar surrealism affirmed (“madly”) the possibility of representing the unrepresentable and experiencing the unexperiencable. As Maurice Blanchot observed in 1945, despite its “nonconformist violence,” “today, what strikes us is how much surrealism affirms more than it denies . . . . above all it seeks its Cogito” (Work 86). By rejecting in principle any a priori limit to experience or representation, surrealism models both an ethos and a set of techniques rich in promise for Modiano as he struggles to move beyond what we can call the traumatic logic of his earlier literary project. Closely related to interwar surrealism’s faith in the possibility of representing and experiencing across a would-be insurmountable divide, moreover, is the way in which it consistently refers subjectivity to an outside (to Paris as a topography of the unconscious, to the found object or the marvelous coincidence, or to language as an exterior realm with a magic life of its own, for example). Surrealism’s operation at an experimental seam between interiority and exteriority motivates Modiano’s engagement with it in his turn to postmemory in Dora Bruder. The postmemorial subject, too, is referred to, indeed constituted in, historical remnants, or the archive: one way to characterize postmemory as a project is precisely as the attempt to forge a relationship between an interiority (memory) and an exteriority (post).
 

Trauma, Postmemory, and the Archive

 
In its limited and more or less clinical definition, as a phenomenon that affects the descendents of Shoah survivors, postmemory is a useful term for a range of cases that involve the inter-generational after-effects of traumatic experience, and for numerous works of autobiography, auto-fiction, fiction, and autobiographical criticism that are structured around such dynamics, such as Art Spiegelman (Maus), Georges Perec (W, ou le souvenir d’enfance), Henri Raczymow (Un Cri sans voix), and Marianne Hirsch.⁹ Outside a clinical or autobiographical context, however, the concept becomes problematic. Hirsch grants that people who are not children of Shoah survivors can speak “from the position of postmemory” (“Projected Memory” 8).¹⁰ For Hirsch,
 

postmemory is not an identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as one’s own, or, more precisely, as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story.
 

(8-9)¹¹

While such an opening of the concept makes it more available as a “space of remembrance” and as a critical posture, it also positions postmemory between being a descriptive or analytical term and an ethical imperative (one “should” identify with the victims).¹² Moreover, widening the scope of the concept in this way raises multiple questions. When, how, and to what degree can anyone choose to adopt the position of postmemory? And how can one distinguish such a choice from the predicament of those who find themselves, in the term’s more restricted definition, “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth”?¹³

 
To distend the notion of postmemory too far entails the risk that it might become as inflated a term as “trauma.” The attraction of both “trauma” and “postmemory” for many whose subject positions bear no clear relationship to either phenomenon surely has a great deal to do with a particular “postmodern” historical juncture, marked, as so many theoreticians of postmodernity have argued, precisely by the attenuation of historical sensibility. That is, children of Shoah survivors experience postmemory—a mediated encounter with a traumatic reality—at the same time as many people “in general” maintain a relationship to history only through the mediation of stereotypes and simulacra. The Shoah (and, more perversely, Nazis) frequently become signs par excellence of (lost) historical reality, even as this “reality” is experienced through representations like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). Many Shoah films (and films about Nazis) thus become “nostalgia” films in Jameson’s sense.¹⁴ One might suspect in the wider “postmemory” of the Shoah a symptom of a generalized experience of the loss of, and nostalgic longing for, historical moorings. As Karyn Ball has argued, trauma theory proved attractive to many academics in the 1980s and 1990s in large part because it seemed to provide a nuanced way to maintain a claim on historical experience in the wake of poststructuralist challenges to naïve recourse to authentic experience (Ball 2 10).¹⁵
 
Postmemory shares with trauma a structural ambivalence about where it begins and ends, which only compounds the likelihood of the concept’s becoming inflated. If trauma theory insists that trauma can never be “simply one’s own” (Caruth), it can be likewise impossible to say whose memory postmemory is, since postmemory is memory that, by definition, is not one’s own. Yet while it is certainly possible to understand postmemory as a variation on trauma, it is also possible, and more useful, to distinguish them. If a certain super-transitivity lies at the heart of both trauma and postmemory, the mechanism differs in each case. The subjective excess of the traumatic event, the fact that, as Caruth insists, it inscribes itself “literally” in the unconscious means that it may be experienced only in its iterations—both by the subject who was originally traumatized, and by others.¹⁶For Caruth, it is precisely because trauma is never “simply one’s own” that it becomes historical, that it inevitably implicates others.¹⁷ Trauma, then, becomes exceedingly transitive—different traumas inevitably become “entangled”—a key term for Caruth—because the negative centers around which they pivot, while they can never merge into identity, can never be neatly distinguished one from the other, either. It is the failure of reference and of subjective experience, which trauma theory takes as axiomatic, that renders it structurally impossible to sort out whose trauma trauma is. What subjects of trauma “share” is a structural alterity, or lack (and thus why “share” must be written in scare quotes: because they share it to the extent that they never had “it” in the first place).
 
Several critics have remarked that the essential negativity at the core of trauma theory tends to level historical and subjective specificity.¹⁸ LaCapra argues that trauma theory (specifically Felman’s treatment of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah) elides historical reality in favor of the Lacanian real, “and the result is an absolutization of trauma and of the limits of representation and understanding. Trauma becomes a universal hole in ‘Being’ or an unnamable ‘Thing,’ and history is marginalized in the interest of History as trauma indiscriminately writ large” (History and Memory 111). What traces of traumatic experience signify, in the final analysis, is precisely what they are not and by definition cannot be: alterity, absence, excess. To be sure, trauma theory is deeply concerned with ethics, above all with the imperative to listen, in Caruth’s articulation, “to the voice and to the speech delivered by the other’s wound” (Caruth 8). Yet as Debarati Sanyal argues in a trenchant critique,
 

[Trauma theory’s] repeated emphasis on a “crisis of representation” runs the risk of treating history as “contentless form.” The dislocation of the event’s particularity and of the traumatized subject’s specificity has fostered a dehistoricized, catastrophic vision of history that may become a cultural master narrative in its own right. Further, trauma theory’s focus on aporetic modes of knowledge and representation also assumes—too swiftly—that nonidentitarian articulations of history and subjectivity are inherently ethical. It may be true, in theory, that a recognition of history as “traumatic entanglement” opens us up to another’s history, and perhaps even a history of otherness. However, in critical practice, this ethics of entanglement can turn into a violent appropriation of otherness.
 

(12)

Postmemory can readily be elided to traumatic memory because both are belated encounters with events one has not experienced. Yet postmemory’s specific mode of historical exploration implicitly contests the epistemological and representational aporias axiomatic to trauma theory. Postmemory and trauma often produce strikingly similar effects because they mirror each other: each inverts the other’s relationship of interiority to exteriority. The traumatic kernel, the unconscious “object” of traumatic memory, constitutes an internal exteriority. In Caruth’s influential formulation, it is “unclaimed experience” that one carries within oneself as part of the internal exteriority of the unconscious archive, or what Derrida in Archive Fever calls a “prosthesis of the inside” (19).¹⁹

 
Postmemory, on the other hand, is a sort of exterior interiority: there is something “out there” beyond one’s own experience that nonetheless seems uncannily intimate. Postmemory is not only (like all memory to some degree) mediated by, but is in fact constituted in interpellation by objects, documents, narratives, meaningful silences, topographies and, arguably paradigmatically, photographs. Postmemorial subjectivity forges unstable and irreducibly ambiguous relationships between self and other, a present and a past, an interiority and an exterior archive of traces into which it cannot not insert itself. If a failure of representation initiates traumatic subjectivity, postmemorial subjectivity fabricates itself in the equivocal margin of representation’s success. The postmemorial archive is experienced as a realm of presences, no matter how fragile and fragmentary. And although what is arguably most present in the postmemorial archive is, inevitably, absence, postmemory works to return to absence a margin of specificity that trauma theory tends to erode. For absence needn’t be generalized; it, too, has its own facticity.
 
If it is trauma’s negation of representation and experiencing subjectivity that insures that it will—can only—return, postmemory must be sustained by an active investment, a work of recovery. It requires, as Hirsch says, “projection, investment, and creation” (emphasis added).²⁰ As the subject of postmemory engages with sites, artifacts, and narratives that mediate another’s traumatic experience, he or she becomes involved in an ethically complex, delicate, and ambivalent game of, on the one hand, assimilating the traces of the other’s trauma and, on the other hand, resisting the temptation of appropriative identification.²¹ Moreover, in the creative activity of filling in a radically incomplete memory and discovering a secret not one’s own, the postmemorial subject does not simply explore a given archive, for the archive is, precisely, never simply given. Its edges remain difficult to establish; the archive may be nowhere, and is potentially anywhere. In what we could broadly call postmemorial literature, we frequently witness personae who search, interrogate, and experience sites, traces, and “clues” as though they were archives. Postmemorial “archivization” can at times deal less with the recording of memory traces than with perceiving or constituting certain places, narratives and artifacts as (virtual) traces of “one’s” postmemory.²² In this way postmemory can discern an archive where none may “actually” exist.²³
 
Sanyal and others have been right to point out that trauma theory is wont to perpetrate violence of its own in the name, paradoxically, of respecting alterity. In contrast, if postmemorial projects confront the manifest and inescapable ethical and epistemological ambiguity that mark their every step, they can work against the violence of trauma theory’s grand claims. Postmemory as an ethical and critical project is filled with very real risk, but at its best is intricately concerned with—is to a great degree the concern with—this very risk.
 

Klarsfelds’s Memorials

 
In an often-cited preface to his interview with the French Jewish cultural figure Emanuel Berl published in 1976, Modiano writes: “He [Berl] returns from far away. He faced the century’s peaks and valleys. It was by no means a century of calm. Facing Berl, I return to my preoccupations: time, the past, memory. He reanimates these preoccupations. He encourages me in my project to create for myself a past and a memory with the past and the memory of others” (Berl 9; my translation). Dora Bruder continues Modiano’s postmemorial project to create for himself “a past and a memory with the past and the memory of others,” yet approaches questions of history and memory far more directly (if still intricately) than do his works of fiction, including those in which he inserts real historical personages.²⁴
 
Modiano addresses his ambivalence about the obliqueness of his literary responses to the Occupation and the Shoah in a November 1994 Libération article marking the publication of Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (Memorial of the Deported Jewish Children of France).²⁵ Modiano relates that Serge and Beate Klarsfeld’s earlier Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France) of 1978 had transformed his understanding of himself as a writer:
 

[Klarsfeld’s 1978] memorial showed me what I didn’t dare truly countenance straight on, the cause of a disquiet [malaise] that I had not been able to express. Too young, I had written a first book in which I toyed [rusais] with what was essential in an attempt to respond in a casual manner to the antisemitic journalists of the Occupation, but this was a way of putting myself at ease [comme pour se rassurer], like playing clever when one is afraid, whistling in the dark. After the appearance of Serge Klarsfeld’s memorial, I felt like a different person. I now knew what sort of disquiet I felt.
 
At first, I doubted literature. Since the driving force behind it is often memory, it seemed to me that the only book that needed to be written was this memorial that Serge Klarsfeld had made.

If the Klarsfelds’s 1978 memorial awakened doubts in Modiano about the worth of his own indirect, displaced, or “literary” treatment of the Shoah, the 1994 photographic children’s memorial precipitated a similar crisis. Intimately connected to Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants, Dora Bruder responds to this crisis by going farther than any previous Modiano text in the direction of what we might call anti-literary memorialization.

 
In his Libération article, Modiano quotes in full the missing person announcement that launched his quest to recover information about the girl, as he would later on the opening page of Dora Bruder. He writes of the Bruder family: “These parents and this young girl who were lost New Year’s Eve 1942 and who, later, all three disappeared in the convoys to Auschwitz, do not cease to haunt me.” Modiano also expresses the hope that, through Klarsfeld, he might be able to learn something of Dora Bruder. Though the Klarsfelds list Dora Bruder in their 1978 memorial, she was not included in the first, 1994 edition of the Mémorial des enfants, as they did not know her birth date (and thus whether or not she was a child deportee). But Modiano’s hope would be fulfilled. Modiano received photos of and details about Bruder from Klarsfeld on several occasions over the following years.²⁶ Klarsfeld was able to discover and include in the updated 1995 edition of the Mémorial des enfants a photograph of Bruder and her parents, as well as Bruder’s date and place of birth, last known address, and that she was deported from Drancy.²⁷ In a letter of June 20, 1995, Modiano thanked Klarsfeld for a copy of the new edition with Bruder’s picture, and refers to the book as “the most important in my life” (“le plus important de ma vie”) (La Shoah 538).
 
The importance of this “most important” book in Modiano’s life was, in a manner of speaking, subtracted from his own sense of self-presence. Modiano writes in the Libération article:
 

Some family photos, Sunday, in the country, with a big brother, a little sister, a dog. Some photos of young girls. Photos of friends, in the street. Smiles and confident faces—whose annihilation will make us feel a terrible sensation of emptiness until the end of our lives. This is why, at times, we no longer feel completely present in this world that has killed innocence.

The feeling Modiano expresses of being haunted and dominated by a present absence is a central characteristic of postmemory, and the final passages of Dora Bruder echo these remarks. The narrator refers to twilight moments in Paris when Bruder’s reality seems more present than his own, when her absence becomes so palpably present as to overwhelm him and his environment (119/144).²⁸ Indebted as it is to Klarsfeld’s photographic memorial to the deported children of France, however, Dora Bruder remains a different sort of project. If this, like the Klarsfelds’s earlier memorial, brought Modiano to doubt the worth of “literature,” Dora Bruder is an attempt not simply to overcome this doubt and keep writing as before, nor to fall silent, as though Klarsfeld’s photographic memorial were somehow sufficient, but rather to write in a different way, or something other than “literature.” It is fitting that in his Libération article Modiano recalls his debut novel La Place de l’étoile, which he now feels to have been insufficient (“je rusais,” “trop jeune”).

 
Modiano leans heavily on interwar surrealism in his attempt to renegotiate his relationship to the history of les années noires and to the institution of French literature in Dora Bruder. Modiano’s engagement with surrealism in Dora Bruder has a precedent in his keen interest in various twentieth-century French literary schools and projects in Place, from antisemitic writers like Charles Maurras, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline to other icons of French literature like Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, and also in that seminal experimenter, Montaigne. In Dora Bruder and Place, Modiano returns to modalities of twentieth-century French literary experimentation to explore possible relations to the past and to the canon. With Place, Modiano tries to break into the French literary tradition; with Dora Bruder, he renegotiates the place he has come to occupy within it. The identity crisis that manifests itself in Raphaël Schlemilovitch’s casting about in literary discourses of the early 1940s figures Modiano’s own as he enters the French literary scene in his early twenties. The problem of authorial identity that Modiano’s engagement with surrealism in Dora Bruder helps negotiate is now how to write otherwise than as the novelist he had become. Place articulates rage at the Shoah via hysterical pastiche, the repetition of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes that Modiano finds in wartime writing. Dora Bruder leans on surrealism less as a corpus than as an ethos and a set of practices that open up complex ways of coaxing absence into intelligibility, bridging self and other, present and past.
 
Dora Bruder resists the generic and disciplinary constraints of conventional historiography by being so thoroughly overdetermined by subjective needs. It is not traditionally literary because it so strains to achieve historical recovery. In this way, Modiano’s project is paradigmatically postmemorial. Juxtaposing Dora Bruder with Modiano’s attempt to fictionalize Dora Bruder in his 1990 novel Voyage de noces (Honeymoon) highlights the differences between the (albeit always interrelated) fictional and (post-)memorial alternatives Modiano grappled with in response to the murdered girl, and neatly demonstrates how for Modiano, in this case, the fictional approach remained inadequate.²⁹Voyage de noces (like many other Modiano narratives, including Dora Bruder) superimposes the Occupation years, the 1960s, and the narrator’s contemporary 1990s. Like the narrator of Dora Bruder, the narrator of Voyage finds himself walking in traces of Dora’s fictional double, Ingrid—but here the fictional Ingrid survives and meets the narrator on different occasions. In contrast to his displaced and fictionalized treatment of Dora Bruder in Voyage, in Dora Bruder Modiano draws on the very stuff of historical research. He incorporates oral interviews, letters, police and school records, birth certificates, and photographs—to such an extent that the narrative at times yields to inventory. Modiano’s archive does not stop there, but extends to unconventional forms of archival experimentation. Although a profoundly historical book, Dora Bruder is not a work of history.
 
The postmemorial nature of Modiano’s project is evident in the way that his own personal and familial history inflects, and at times subverts, his work of historical recovery: the micro-historiographical undertaking frequently bleeds into autobiography. Dora Bruder serves as a vehicle for transference and mediates between the different periods of Modiano’s own existence and pre-existence: the 1940s of her youth, the 1960s of Modiano’s, and the 1990s when Modiano was at work on Dora Bruder.³⁰ A number of Modiano’s novels deal with shadowy figures based on his father Albert Modiano, a Jew who survived the Second World War underground in Paris, thanks in part to murky connections to the black market and possibly to collaborators.³¹ In Dora Bruder Modiano writes of his failed attempt to visit his dying father (12-13/17-18). Estranged since Modiano’s late adolescence, the two never reconciled; and Modiano is finally unable, for whatever complex reasons, to find his father in a Kafkaesque maze of hospital corridors. Whether or not this particular scene is fiction or fictionalized, the narrator’s search for Dora in the powerfully but ambiguously mnemonic space of Paris prolongs Modiano’s failed—so interminable—search for his father and his father’s obscure, haunting wartime experience. Dora’s attempts to run away—Modiano fixates especially on Dora’s “missing” months—allow him to revisit his own difficult relationship to his father and his own adolescent fugues. Even Dora’s last name “Bruder” inscribes a faint trace of Modiano’s younger brother Rudy, whose childhood death from leukemia affected Modiano profoundly, and who appears in one form or another in many of Modiano’s novels.³² The text’s deep and demanding personal inscription, the overwhelming needs Modiano brings to his encounter—at times, indeed, near-identification—with Dora Bruder make it an intricate, ethically risky and courageous balancing act between retrieval and appropriation of the other.³³ It is a complex negotiation of historical occurrences through personal memory and vice versa.
 

Looking Back with Surrealism

 
Postmemory and surrealism share a fundamental preoccupation: how to push against and exceed the limits of positive evidence so as to establish correspondences between interior and exterior realities.³⁴ In one of his redefinitions of surrealism, Breton writes in 1931: “I hope [surrealism] will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness” (Communicating Vessels 86). The question of how subjects can discover themselves in the exterior world gained importance for Breton in the course of the 1930s to become a central preoccupation of Mad Love (1937), in which Breton theorizes a “manner of seeing . . . that, as far as the eye can see . . . recreates desire” (Mad Love 15). Such desire-driven attention is apt to discover the trouvaille, the marvelous exterior revelation of subjective desire, the found object in which “alone [we can] recognize the marvelous precipitate of desire” (13-15). Dora Bruder‘s indebtedness to and dialogue with surrealism is important to the way Modiano’s postmemorial archive mediates between subject and object “madly,” by actively ambiguating the distinction between interiority and exteriority.³⁵
 
The topoi of surrealism—haunting, violence, absurdity, uncanny coincidence, characters adrift in place and time, and a pervasive and slightly deranged atmosphere evocative of an elusive “elsewhere” of existence—recur in Modiano’s oeuvre. Yet Dora Bruder draws more from surrealist anti-literary practices than do his novels, precisely because it places so much emphasis on referentiality and the paradoxical project of (re) discovering subjectivity in various forms of exteriority. Modiano evokes surrealism and surrealists more or less explicitly in Dora Bruder on numerous occasions.³⁶ More crucially, Dora Bruder seems unmistakably a post-Shoah re-writing of Breton’s Nadja.³⁷ Like Nadja, Dora Bruder is an autobiographical work in which a narrator tries to discover his identity through an obsessive “detective” pursuit of a young woman who hovers between presence and absence and who seems to emerge from and vanish back into Paris’s streets, as though from a secret and elusive beyond. Both texts inscribe complex relationships to Parisian topographies, and rely on photography’s status as a multi-faceted representational medium that approaches absolute referentiality yet provokes intense imaginary and affective investment.³⁸ Even more important than these explicit references and implicit intertexts is Dora Bruder‘s experimental epistemology, its openness or disponibilité to the irrational in the quest to discover “impossible” connections between inside and outside worlds.
 
Modiano’s profound investments in Dora Bruder and her story lead him to distend the parameters of the conventional archive and to venture into experimental forms of subjective and affective “evidence.”³⁹ The narrator repeatedly senses Dora’s presence in streets. Modiano also seeks a connection with Dora by literalizing his obsession with the atmosphere of Occupation France in a way that, however tentatively or even illusorily, bridges her physical presence and his (and our) own. So as to gain at least some knowledge of Dora during her fugue, for example, Modiano researches (and rehearses) the weather conditions in Paris during her four “missing” months. The meteorological report/reverie, which includes bombs alongside rain, snow, and hail, is startlingly intimate in the way it evokes Dora. She becomes a fragile body—perhaps cold and wet—somewhere in Paris (73-74/ 89-90).
 
In a striking passage, to take just one further example, Modiano describes the near-epiphanic sensation he experiences while watching a film made and circulated during the Occupation, namely that the gazes of its original viewers, including perhaps that of Dora Bruder, had somehow, as if chemically, left their imprint on the film stock and were now looking back at him.
 

In the summer of 1941, one of the films made under the Occupation, first shown in Normandy, came to the local Paris cinemas. It was a harmless comedy: Premier rendez-vous. The last time I saw it, I had a strange feeling, out of keeping with the thin plot and the sprightly tones of the actors. I told myself that perhaps, one Sunday, Dora Bruder had been to see this film, the subject of which was a girl of her age who runs away. She escapes from a boarding school much like the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. During her flight, as in fairy tales and romances, she meets her Prince Charming.
 
This film paints a rosy, anodyne picture of what had happened to Dora in real life. Did it give her the idea of running away? I concentrated on details: the dormitory, the school corridors, the boarders’ uniforms, the café where the heroine waits after dark…. I could find nothing that might correspond to the reality, and in any case most of the scenes were shot in the studio. And yet, I had a sense of unease. It stemmed from the film’s peculiar luminosity, from the grain of the actual stock. Every image seemed veiled in an arctic whiteness that accentuated the contrasts and sometimes obliterated them. The lighting was at once too bright and too dim, either stifling the voices or making their timbre louder, more disturbing.
 
Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation—people from all walks of life, many of whom would not have survived the war. They had been transported toward the unknown after having seen this film one Saturday night, which had been a reprieve for them. While it lasted, you forgot the war and the menacing world outside. You were huddled together in the dark of a cinema, watching the flow of images on the screen, and nothing more could happen to you. And, by some kind of chemical process, all of these gazes had materially altered the actual film, the lighting, the voices of the actors. That is what I had sensed, thinking of Dora Bruder and faced with the ostensibly trivial images of Premier rendez-vous.
 

(6566/79-80; translation modified)

This passage is representative of the way that research informs so much of the fabric of Dora Bruder, even when Modiano does not highlight it (Modiano knows that Premier rendez-vous first played in Normandy; knows when it came to Paris; has screened it multiple times). Such inquisitiveness exemplifies the desire to recover any fragment of Dora Bruder’s possible experience, and prepares the hallucination that ensues, which, importantly, is a fantasy of indexicality. The narrator so wishes to connect with Dora Bruder and her “moment” that he first finds himself scrutinizing the movie set as though it corresponded to (her) reality, and then imagines that the various gazes of the film’s original viewers had “materially altered the actual film.” The narrator’s quest for connection via the referential trace is reflected here (as elsewhere in Dora Bruder) in pronomial ambiguity. The French on (“one,” “they,” or “we,” or as it is rendered here, “you”)—”On oubliat, le temps d’une séance, la guerre et les menaces du dehors . . . . on était serrés les uns contres les autres, à suivre le flot des images de l’écran, et plus rien ne pouvait arriver” (80)—allows the narrator to include himself in the phenomenon he describes. He, too, is borne away by the flow of images and in his own way pulled into the experimental space of the film, where he commingles briefly with its historical viewers. This is not so much a moment when representation and referentiality fail, as a fantasy of their mad success. Much like the surrealists before him, who tended to view all barriers as in principle surmountable, given the right method, technique, frame of mind, experiment, or sheer accident, Modiano remains remarkably open to this uncanny encounter.

 
Modiano’s postmemorial project engages with Parisian topographies in ways that likewise recall the surrealists’ experiments and experience in the city.⁴⁰ Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement, where Bruder lived with her parents, is home to the quintessential surrealist archive, the famous Saint-Ouen flea market. James Clifford observes that:
 

The world of the city for Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, or for Breton in Nadja . . . suggested beneath the dull veneer of the real the possibility of another, more miraculous world based on radically different principles of classification and order. The surrealists frequented the Marché aux Puces, the vast flea market of Paris, where one could rediscover the artifacts of culture, scrambled and rearranged.
 

(542)

The Paris-Soir announcement that opens Dora Bruder (placed by M. and Mme Bruder of 41 Boulevard Ornano) elicits the narrator’s childhood memory of the nearby flea market: “I had long been familiar with that area of the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets” (3/7).⁴¹ The flea market serves as the mnemonic-topographical gateway through which Modiano passes to begin his postmemorial work of recovery. Through this quintessential surrealist site the narrator discovers his first personal association with Dora Bruder.

 
In a postmemorial version of the surrealists’ notion of le hasard objectif, or objective chance, Modiano becomes conscious of several uncanny parallels between his life and Bruder’s, nearly all mediated by Parisian sites and neighborhoods they both knew.⁴² Disparate periods of Modiano’s life, and even periods preceding Modiano’s life, become juxtaposed in a temporality that defies time’s arrow:
 

From day to day, with the passage of time, I find, perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into another. That of 1965 and that of 1942.
 
In 1965, I knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But now, thirty years on, it seems to me that those long waits in the cafés at the Ornano crossroads, those unvarying itineraries—the Rue du Mont-Cenis took me back to some hotel on the Butte Montmartre: the Roma or the Alsina or the Terrass, Rue Caulaincourt—and the fleeting impressions I have retained: snatches of conversation heard on a spring evening, beneath the trees in the Square Clignancourt, and again, in winter, on the way down to Simplon and the Boulevard Ornano, all that was not simply due to chance. Perhaps, though not yet fully aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her parents. Already, below the surface, they were there.
 

(6/10-11)

The intricate postmemorial fusion of presence and absence makes possible the nachträglich “recognition” of the traces of the Bruder family. They are “already there” precisely, if paradoxically, in their absence—as the haunting absence that in subterranean ways structured Modiano’s experience, identity, and preoccupations already in the mid-sixties, before he came to associate it, retroactively, with them. Thus Modiano’s itineraries—what we could call a form of “automatic walking”—retroactively reveal uncanny correspondences between his desire and Dora Bruder’s history. Once she becomes a figure for Modiano’s absent memory, Dora Bruder can indeed be said to have already—as it were always already—been there. Modiano inserts Dora Bruder and her parents into a space that his own absent center has made available. However, this communing between absences—his and theirs—marks the beginning of a long and meticulous process in which Modiano uses all his resources to glimpse the lived experience of the lost girl.

 
In the way that Modiano’s narrator approaches Dora Bruder in and through the city of Paris, he is an incarnation of the surrealist flâneur, albeit, as Marja Warehime observes, with a difference.⁴³ In the places Dora Bruder lived and the streets she walked—or that he imagines she walked, for he cannot be certain—the narrator seeks, and feels he experiences, her traces. Modiano’s Paris, like Breton’s, is a city of residues—names, images, and languages that vanish but can nonetheless be grasped by way of uncanny coincidences and startling epiphanies. But whereas for Breton such merveilles du quotidien mark a threshold to a magic realm of anarchic plenitude, what uncannily guides Modiano’s itineraries is the presence of absent memory in search of a referent. Modiano’s Paris is above all a layered, archeologically stacked topography of memory. Thus there is an important temporal structural difference between Breton’s and Modiano’s flânerie: whereas the surrealist coincidence privileges a phenomenon of simultaneity or near-simultaneity, Modiano’s postmemorial flâneur drifts between the present and earlier temporal strata. If he seems to take inspiration from surrealism’s affirmation of the possibility of communication between inside and outside, self and other, he directs it to the service of recovery across a would-be absolute historical rupture.
 
The difference between Modiano’s preoccupation with topographical expunction in Paris and the versions of this preoccupation we encounter in Baudelaire, and later in the surrealists, underscores Modiano’s more emphatically historical orientation. Baudelaire ruminates in an acutely melancholic mode on the Hausmanization of le vieux Paris in poems such as his 1857 “The Swan.”⁴⁴ The surrealists estheticize to an extreme their relation to the vanishing Parisian arcades and other sites of a self-metabolizing urban modernity. By contrast, the specific instances of urban erasure on which Modiano dwells are forms of calculated political amnesia, the topographical analogues of the systematic destruction of police records of the French authorities’ rounding up and deportation of Jews. He frequently evokes the sense of emptiness he feels in various demolished areas, notably a section of the Marais neighborhood, where Eastern European Jewish immigrants lived between the world wars. Of the new structures erected there, Modiano writes:
 

The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the concrete the color of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have not been content with putting up a sign like that on the wall of Tourelles barracks: ‘No filming or photography.’ They have obliterated everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.
 

(113/136)

Modiano implies that specific agents have conspired to effect the amnesia that this architecture manifests, and they stand accused.

 
Like Parisian topographies, the photographs to which Dora Bruder refers pivot the two distinct registers that alternate in the work: dispassionate documentation, on the one hand, and profound cathexis and investment on the other; or “hard” archival evidence and highly subjective, affective, and even phantasmic elements of a distended postmemorial archive. The photographs simultaneously anchor Dora Bruder in referentiality and provide a space for transferential investment and risk-filled ethical imagining.⁴⁵ Modiano describes a range of photographs in Dora Bruder, including nine photos of Bruder herself or her family. Neither French edition (nrf Gallimard and Gallimard folio) nor the 2000 Harvill Press edition of Joanna Kilmartin’s elegant translation (The Search Warrant) reproduce any photographs, while the original 1999 Berkeley edition of Kilmartin’s translation reproduces three.⁴⁶ Since this edition provides no information about the decision to include the photographs and does not comment on their ambiguous status in Modiano’s book, it is impossible to know on what basis the decision was made to include or exclude photos in a given edition. In lieu of such information, it is also impossible to identify in the “absence” of photographs from the original French editions a gesture akin, for example, to Roland Barthes’s famous withholding of the winter-garden photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida. It bears recalling, however, that a photograph of Dora Bruder and her parents had been published in the 1995 edition of Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants, two years before the publication of Dora Bruder, so at least one of the photographs Modiano describes—and by extension all of them—are in this sense referentially “secure”; they by no means facilitate the same sort of play, or end in the same sort of representational aporia, that photographs so frequently do in Modiano’s wider fictional oeuvre.
 
Like surrealism, Dora Bruder is ambivalent about the role of photographs. As Dawn Ades writes, Man Ray’s and others’ technical experimentation equivocates the status of the photographic referent.⁴⁷ Yet surrealists at the same time exploit precisely the medium’s referential quality. Most notably, Breton in Nadja deploys photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard in all their referential banality as an antidote to the despised institutions of bourgeois literature and art.⁴⁸ The ontology of the photograph that Barthes elaborates sees in photography an “umbilical” connection to referential reality. Both the widely felt “truth” of photography and the particular theoretical elaboration Barthes gives this intuition have contributed to the privileging of photography (most notably by Hirsch) as the medium par excellence of postmemory. Modiano comments that a particular photo “is in complete contrast to those already in my collection” (74/90). This photo—”sans doute” the last taken of Dora Bruder, according to the sometimes doubtful narrator—is also most proximate to the months she ran away, the period in which Modiano is most deeply invested, though it is not clear if it was taken before her flight or after her return. Modiano recognizes a certain defiance in Dora Bruder’s regard (74/90). This Barthesian punctum both inspires and reaffirms his celebration of the margin of agency Dora had in her own defiant attempts at escape before her definitive erasure. In this way, photography’s referential-imaginary dualism authorizes Modiano’s interpretation of Dora Bruder’s irrecoverable but seemingly proximate existence.
 
The collision of indexical reference and subjective fantasy and identification that occurs in the space of photographs contributes powerfully to Modiano’s drama of how the postmemorial subject’s inside relates to the historical outside. Photography’s referential weight tends to explode diegetic containment so as to implicate authors, and not only narrators. One can understand the ethical questions that then arise by briefly setting Modiano’s citation of photographs in Dora Bruder against the widely theorized relationship between narrative and photography in the work of German writer W.G. Sebald.⁴⁹ Sebald’s highly autobiographical narrators are typically self-effacing. In a manner of speaking, they become “ganz Ohr,” mere facilitators of narratives of others.⁵⁰ The Modiano narrator of Dora Bruder, on the other hand, remains flagrantly present. While one can read the narrative vanishing act in Sebald as a commitment not to appropriate the other’s voice,⁵¹ a paradoxical form of appropriation can occur not only when one drowns out the other’s voice, but also when one effaces oneself and abdicates the responsibility to acknowledge and reflect on one’s subject position vis-à-vis the other. Sebald’s narrators frequently vanish into their subjects’ stories and effectively sidestep the crucial task of confronting, in any explicit or sustained way, themselves—their relations to recent history and their investments in the stories they mediate. Importantly, Sebald’s tendency to equivocate the status of photographic reference goes hand in hand with his narrators’ strategies of guarding their anonymity. Sebald’s problematic authorial self-effacement highlights by contrast the way Modiano grapples throughout Dora Bruder with his subject position as it relates to the story he is trying to recover and tell. While Modiano’s subject position is by no means without ethical risks, his frankly “over-invested” interest in, and at times phantasmagoric identification with, Dora Bruder highlights those very risks. Indeed, I would argue, the text dramatizes an irreducible level of moral risk and ambiguity as a condition of possibility for the labor of recovery Modiano nonetheless embraces.
 
Modiano writes several times of his patience in the eight-year process of tracking down information about Dora Bruder, but also draws attention to the ambiguous nature of his “patience,” which at times merges with a wish to defer knowledge that might contradict cherished fantasies. The invitation from the head of a public school Bruder may have attended to come and check the register elicits this response: “One of these days, I shall. But I’m of two minds. I want to go on hoping that her name is there. It was the school nearest to where she lived” (10/14). The narrator’s “patience”—”But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain” (10/14)—permits him to persevere in his search for traces of Dora Bruder, but shows equally his need to prolong, defer, and luxuriate in that very search.⁵² Indeed, Modiano’s ambivalent “patience” can be seen as a postmemorial relative of the “idleness” (désoeuvrement) that Breton celebrates in Nadja: the aimless drifting and non-purposeful comportment that facilitates his access to Nadja and/as the surreal. As the narrator of Dora Bruder, Modiano then becomes the sort of unreliable detective who narrates so many of his novels.⁵³ This postmemorial ethical ambiguity is sustained through the very end of the book, where Modiano describes the period of Dora’s “missing” months—about which he hasn’t been able to recover any details—as “her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépot, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her” (119/144-45). Modiano’s obvious identification with Dora—as well as the pronomial shift from “her” (“son secret”) to a generalizing “vous,” “you,” which easily shades into an implied “me” (“tout ce qui vous souille et vous détruit”)—raises the question of just whose secret this is. Is it really her secret, or has Dora Bruder become Modiano’s precious secret that no one can take from him? Irreducibly, I would argue, both. Modiano labors to wrest Dora Bruder’s particular absence from a more generalized, anonymous one; and it paradoxically becomes his precious secret to the extent that he can return it to her, make it hers.
 
As we have seen, Modiano’s drama of his subjectivity’s relation to the postmemorial archive of Dora Bruder closely links his project with Breton’s conception(s) of surrealism. Yet Modiano’s tenuous residence in a world that has “killed innocence” equally throws into relief the gulf between his postmemorial undertaking and the surrealists’ central aspirations. The surrealists sought to liberate subjectivity and imagination, yet the Shoah exceeded the imaginable. It became almost de rigueur for post-war intellectuals to delimit their own historical, intellectual and ethical positions through a reckoning with surrealism; one recalls, for example, how Jean-Paul Sartre critiqued surrealism in his 1948 What is Literature? (180-198), as did Albert Camus in 1954 in “Surrealism and Revolution,” and Theodor Adorno in his essay of the same year, “Looking Back at Surrealism.” Certainly, surrealism stands out as one of the most fertile and innovative intellectual and esthetic movements of the interbellum period. But, more crucially perhaps, what so fused the Second World War and surrealism in these thinkers’ minds is the way surrealism flirts with violence. Maurice Nadau and James Clifford, among others, stress that surrealism, at its inception, responds to the horrible violence of the First World War, to which European morality and culture had lent the appearance of rationality and respectability.⁵⁴ Instead of advocating non-violence, however, the surrealists champion (mostly imaginary) forms of violence thought to be so extravagantly preposterous and grotesquely ludic as to disrupt bourgeois business as usual. Most infamously, in the second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929, Breton defines the simplest surrealist act as “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd” (Manifestoes 125).In the wake of World War Two, the surrealists were called to account for their celebration of irrational violence—to be sure somewhat unfairly. Sartre characterizes Breton and the surrealists as disaffected, politically ineffectual bourgeois solipsists, fascinated by apocalyptic violence (“they want to destroy everything but themselves,” “they were all fascinated by violence, wherever it might come from”) (190-91). Adorno notes that “After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force” (87). In 1954 Camus characterized Breton’s definition of the simplest surrealist act as “the statement that André Breton must have regretted ever since 1933” (93).
 
However, what accounts for the most fundamental difference between the surrealist and postmemorial subject is the confidence the interwar surrealists had in the fulfillability of their goals and not, finally, the problematically violent means they sometimes imagined enlisting to fulfill them. Breton & Company always understood surrealism’s revolutionary orientation—whether defined as a revolution in consciousness, esthetics, or as in ambivalent solidarity with an anticipated proletarian revolution—to be driven by dynamic positive forces, untapped energies immanent in the subject and the social, capable of redeeming individuals and society from their tragic repression. In Modiano’s post-Shoah use of surrealism in the service of postmemorial reconstruction, the sovereign surrealist subject constituted in the plenitude of its desire yields to a subject constituted in relation to fragile traces and palpable absences. The surrealists’ confidence in the paradoxical immanence of the surreal is replaced by an ambivalently patient dedication to a delicate labor of at best partial recovery.
 
Blanchot writes in 1945 about surrealism in post-war France:⁵⁵ “There is no longer a school, but a state of mind survives . . . . Has surrealism vanished? It is no longer here or there: it is everywhere. It is a ghost, a brilliant obsession. In its turn, as an earned metamorphosis, it has become surreal” (Blanchot, Fire 85). For Blanchot, surrealism remains “always of our time” (97) because the profound dilemmas and contradictions in which it got caught—above all, the paradoxical dialectic between the assertion of radical esthetico-intellectual freedom, on the one hand, and commitment to socio-political realization on the other—continue to haunt “us.” Blanchot’s posture of surprise, looking back, at the surrealists’ naïve faith in subjectivity and representation, however, already announces a theoretical enterprise that would help set the terms and limits of French engagement with the deeply vexed war years. Dora Bruder is not a surrealist text but rather, in its own way, a ghost of surrealism. Yet if surrealism returns with a difference in Modiano’s postmemorial project, it returns in a form that—however tentatively and ambivalently—affirms surrealism’s affirmations, the very aspects of interwar surrealism that Blanchot’s postwar critique deftly lays to rest.
 

Conclusion

 
Modiano’s postmemorial project in Dora Bruder offers no easy way out of the ethical quandaries involved in Shoah memory. In stressing its affinities with surrealism, my aim has been both to illuminate this project’s specific mechanisms and modalities, and to underscore their irreducible risk, and strangeness. Dora Bruder dramatizes a postmemorial labor that can only be pursued via an irresolvably problematic relation to an unstable—haunted and haunting—archive. Yet for all its real risks, and in some sense because of them, Modiano’s project can provide a productive counterpoint to a range of reflections that variously construe the Shoah as ineffable: among others, the trauma theory of Caruth and Felman; Lyotard’s ruminations on Auschwitz in The Differend and elsewhere⁵⁶ ; and Blanchot’s various, oblique treatments of the Shoah. Perhaps the most powerful iteration of the Shoah’s unspeakability on today’s critical horizon is Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999).⁵⁷ After its initial, overwhelmingly positive reception, Agamben’s text has received a growing amount of incisive criticism: for leveling historical specificity; for generalizing a condition of culpability; and for silencing real witnesses in favor of an essentially linguistic (and highly estheticized) theory of subjectivity whose relation to the Shoah and its victims verges on gratuitous, if not instrumental.⁵⁸
 
Because Agamben evokes the archive as a central concern of his post-Auschwitz ethics, the way his theoretical elaboration in fact works relentlessly to efface the archive can illustrate a troubling tendency evident, in one form or another, I would argue, in all the various discourses of Shoah ineffability. Agamben’s bracketing of the archive also helps to throw into relief the more nuanced openness to historical experience that Modiano models in Dora Bruder.
 
Agamben claims to explain a paradoxical structure of subjectivity at the heart of Auschwitz, which pivots on the irreducible interdependence of the inhuman and the human, desubjectification and subjectification, silence and speech. But if the lesson that Agamben would have us learn from Auschwitz—or from the fetishized (or in J.M. Bernstein’s view, “pornographic”) figure of the muselman⁵⁹—is that the subject is constituted in its own desubjectification, then it should throw up a flag that Agamben can discover versions of the paradox of desubjectified subjectivity in such a wide range of philosophical and literary discourses: for example, Martin Heidegger’s and Emanuel Levinas’s reflections on shame; Derridian deconstruction; Emile Benveniste’s work on the dynamics of enunciation; the relation of the authorial “I” to the corpus of any number of writers including Rilke, Keats, Ingeborg Bachmann, Fernando Pessoa, and Giorgio Manganelli; and in reflections by Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Binswanger, among others. It is fairly clear, in short, that Agamben does not need to involve—and in fact does not meaningfully involve—the Shoah and its victims in his ethical reflections, but rather merely points to the desubjectified muselman as exemplary of “the hidden structure of all subjectivity” (128), a structure he finds not so much in Auschwitz as, seemingly, everywhere he looks.⁶⁰
 
Agamben’s ethics would situate the speaking subject in a relation to the impossibility of speech, yet it has the effect of insulting such speech as is possible—precisely because it is possible. “[T]he survivor, who can speak,” Agamben tells us, “has nothing interesting to say” (120). Derrida’s concept of “anarchivic” desire, which he develops in Archive Fever to rethink the Freudian death drive as it relates to the archive, helps lay bare the destructive thrust of Agamben’s particular version of respect for ineffable alterity.⁶¹ In a sense, what the death drive-as-archive fever strives to do is “ingest”—consume or possess—the archive: the desire is to eliminate it as an exterior substrate of memory so that one may “return” to a purportedly pure, unmediated origin (91).⁶² Clearly, Agamben pursues no plenitudinous origin or a site of self-present speech. On the contrary, Agamben’s muselman figures the subject’s irreducible ethical relation to the abjected, the non-human remainder deprived of speech. In defining all subjectivity as paradoxically constituted in abject desubjectification, however, Agamben reduces the ethical relation to the structure of subjectivity itself; subjectivity, inherently, is this (impossible but inescapable) relation. History becomes absorbed into a mode of subjectivity that, however theoretically sophisticated, remains hermetically sealed, self-contained. While Agamben argues vigorously against the self-presence of speech, he effectively demarcates a negatively “pure” realm—of silence, alterity, lack—that excludes and derogates the archive of Shoah testimony as ethically irrelevant by definition.
 
Agamben virtually defines his conception of “testimony”—the ethical relation between the occurrence and non-occurrence of speech—as that which remains uncontaminated by any residue of “mere” facts, memory, or other banalities of the archive: “Testimony . . . guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive—that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of language, it escapes both memory and forgetting” (158).⁶³ Agamben reduces the German genocide to “Auschwitz,” “Auschwitz” to the figure of the muselman, and the muselman to the silence to which the language of the witness refers inherently: beyond any possible dynamics of memory and forgetting, and in excess of facticity, referentiality, the archive. Even as he purports to be working out an ethics in relation to a radically historical event, Agamben’s abstraction away from the event and its archival traces is so total that ultimately, in his words, “to be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same” (158). The speaking subject bears witness to the inability to speak by virtue of its “own” inherent structure: “the constitutive desubjectification in every subjectification” (123). The conceptual purity Agamben achieves comes at the high cost of dismissing the archive as ethically irrelevant, as so much “noise,” as it were, that could only distract from the irrecoverable silence of the “essential” witness to whose mute remains Agamben’s post Auschwitz ethics continuously refers the speaking subject. In this way, commitment to the violently silenced becomes, itself, violently silencing, and Agamben forecloses on the traces that remain of the very victims of the Shoah that he would place at the center of his re-thinking of ethics after Auschwitz.
 
Instead of basing an ethics on the referral of speech and representation to essential silence, Modiano’s postmemorial pursuit insists, sometimes “madly,” that an encounter with the archive can alter ethical subjectivity. Dora Bruder is the account of such an encounter and such a mutation. Postmemorial subjectivity in general, and Modiano’s in Dora Bruder in particular, engages with and becomes ambiguously enmeshed in an archive of traces, even as it continuously redefines and experiences anew its, and the traces’, equivocal boundaries. Dora Bruder negotiates a relationship to silence, to be sure, but the silence is never pure. Equivocal “noise” haunts Modiano’s Paris. His work of postmemorial recovery in the city where he lives and in which Dora Bruder lived is, finally, a commitment to remaining open to an idiosyncratic, murmuring archive of fragmentary traces, but traces nonetheless.⁶⁴
 

Rien est ce q’il y a, et d’abord rien delà….¹
 

–Maurice Blanchot, Une Scène Primitive

 
Let us imagine, along with Levinas, that the all too obvious opposition of being and nothingness is not our only destiny, and let us suppose, moreover, that there is “something” otherwise than being, which is not, strictly speaking, nothing. In line with the Levinas orthodoxy, the otherwise-than-being will prima facie refer to the transcendent relation to the other, the ethical excess, and the final liberation of an existent from her tie to essence, the Spinozan conatus essendi. Nonetheless, nothing is less seamless or less secure than the transition from being to the ethical relation beyond being. An unavoidable risk associated with such an adventure without return to the same is that the otherwise-than-being is not a homogeneous field, since it entails both the ethical approach to the Other and a de-personalized, absolutely impersonal rustling of the there is (Il y a), which remains after the dissolution of hypostatized existence, of everything that is in being. Henceforth, it will be impossible to maintain a neat separation between these two senses of the otherwise-than-being that is other even to itself, in keeping with the Levinasian figure of alterity that is wholly other both in its form and in its content. While the ethical relation is anticipated in the anonymity of the there is, the trace of which it always retains, this residue itself poses a persistent threat to this relation ready to revert, at any moment, into the other avatar of what “is” beyond being. I call this double possibility terror of the ethical.
 
Not only the ethical relation, but being itself stands in the shadow of the there is. To resort to an allegory, we could picture being as a wrinkle in the fabric of infinity. This fabric, which is not to be confused with Spinoza’s substance, appears or is given to us only in and through its pleats (and, therefore, as a negation of its infinite character), in a mode of givenness that precludes all “metaphysical speculation” on the question of being’s limits. Levinas, on the contrary, recommends taking the analytical path that feigns the smoothness of infinity, “feigns,” in other words and in the best of phenomenological traditions, “the disappearance of every existent” (Difficult 292). The reductive return to the irreducible there is, still enthralled with Husserl’s imaginary exercise in Ideas I that, just before World War I, aims to establish who or what outlives the annihilation of the world, irons out the pleats on the fabric of existence. It laughs with the terrible rumbling laughter in the face of the dull seriousness of the work of being, or the being of work, that really makes the existent disappear; even as the existent inscribed in its existence lays claim to and masters its being or its work, it suddenly dissolves behind the translucent screen of representation. This rumbling laughter, without anyone who or anything that laughs, not only precedes inscription, mastery, representation, and possession, but also succeeds them in a virtual threat to swallow up the systems of meaning they laboriously construct against the background noise of “existence without existents.” If it signifies anything at all, the rustling of the there is should be taken as a sign of the incomplete separation of sense from non-sense, a reminder of the constant danger that the latter will overflow the former, a proof that it is impossible to derive pure sense as a corollary to pure consciousness, and a mark of a certain depersonalization, or defacement, that is both promulgated by and deferred in being, sensation, and labor.
 
Levinas’s theoretical feigning of destruction testifies to the impossibility of committing a “perfect crime”—or of imagining, simulating, or premeditating such crime—that would succeed in eliminating all phenomenologico-criminological evidence and all traces of the wiping out of traces (“The Trace” 357). When nothing is left, there is still or already “something”: not Husserl’s “pure consciousness,” but the nocturnal and anonymous rustling of the there is (Existence 58; Hand 30). Henceforth, the infinity of the there is will traverse and trouble every event of, in, and beyond being, infecting and inflecting sensation, labor, the face of the Other, and the ethical encounter. It will invade uniqueness with anonymity, seduce the I to desecrate and eliminate the face of the Other, and fill the ethical relation itself with the terror of ceaseless giving, which cannot be harnessed or domesticated for some determinate purpose. In each case, it will be necessary to question the goodness of the Good warped by the rustling of the there is and to ask whether the hazards of transcendence beyond being are justified by this goodness.
 
Being, then, is produced as a fold in the fabric of infinity, which Levinas diligently unfolds, first into the rustling of the there is, and second, into various attributes of ethics such as metaphysical desire, the encounter with alterity, and transcendence. The fact of folding is what he terms “hypostasis”: “the event by which existent contracts his existence” (Time 43). Hypostasis is the existent’s attempt to separate itself from non-sense, to break with the anonymity of existence via the founding of interiority, and, eo ipso, to nourish its inter-estedness in the perseverance in essence. Conversely, in ethical transcendence, the infinite alterity of the Other exceeds the finitude of the I and of the relations with the world it sustains, while the interestedness of the existent is replaced with the disinterestedness of what lies beyond essence (Otherwise 5). Hypostasis is enframed or delimited by two terms that are, themselves, unlimited and that, in this de-limitation, partake of one another: the there is and the infinity of the ethical.
 
The finitude of essence manifests itself in essence’s activity or activation, in the essentialization that modifies “without alteration” (Otherwise 29-30). If we are to read Levinas closely, “without alteration” must be understood in the sense of “without alterization.” Despite its unremitting modifications—and here a reference to Spinoza’s Ethics will be more than justified—essence is devoid of the alterity of the Other who is not the other of the Same. But as soon as essence unravels and comes apart, the psyche experiences an “alteration without alienation” (Otherwise 141), where the hold of the infinitely Other on the Same alters its very sameness. Beyond sense and consciousness, the I is obsessively moved and inspired to assume its responsibility for the Other and for the responsibility of the Other for the third, who is the anonymous Other of the Other. Having shed the vestiges of mastery and contract, the ethical is ineluctably infected with the “altered” infinity of the there is, where the face of the Other becomes a passageway to all the other Others.²
 
Keeping abreast with the thrust of the “modification without alteration,” we will observe that what is happening in the pleats of infinity includes sense and labor. But the pleats themselves are a “happening,” an event of being, in which being comes to be when comprehension “does not invoke . . . beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation” (Levinas, Basic 9). The emergence of the name against the noisy background of the nameless (the name that remembers its origin and carries the fatal impulse of namelessness, reducing the interlocutor to silence) crumples the infinite, even as it inscribes itself on this crumpled body. The partial negation that attaches itself to the naming of beings is the negation proper to mastery and possession that repeat, in a diluted form, the violence of the there is.³ The name both designates and erases the named, simulating the nameless. Biblical Adam’s first act undoes the very creation it supplements. This is not yet the kind of an event for which Derrida would reserve the term “the economy of violence,” since partial and total negations are absolutely incommensurable with one another and with the remainder of any destruction that resurfaces in the there is. The work of being is the redoubled work of the negative that struggles on two fronts: against the unnamed singularity of the Other and against the nameless generality of the void. And it is those two fronts that merge in the movement of the ethical beyond being, setting it on the open-ended path toward absolute alterity.
 
Sensation—and, above all, vision—is made possible by the forgetting of the nameless generality of the void (Totality 190). Yet the panoptic gaze, the extreme case of vision, reintroduces that which is forgotten. It belongs to the spectator who transforms what is seen into a spectacle, that is, into a completely present, fully assembled and representable being. And precisely because this gaze folds being into itself, it cannot be seen. The spectator pays for this mastery with obscurity; one withdraws behind one’s gaze and eliminates oneself, in short, renders oneself liminal. Invalidating the laws and the evidence of traditional phenomenology, vision is no longer the unity of the seeing and the seen. The open monstrous eye is the night staring into the night that unwittingly taints the work of representation with an absence that yawns in the midst of the painstakingly assembled and synthesized presence.
 
Nor is Levinas’s face of the Other given to vision. In the unutterable condition of the absolute denuding, it withdraws into the nocturnal realm no phenomenological light can illuminate and, maintaining the memory of the there is, expresses a trace of threatening facelessness. Still, it would be wrong to assume that the face is merely secretive and invisible, for its self-expression overrides both vision and blindness. To the extent that it reverses the relation of hypostasis with the summons to face the Other as a Master “who judges me” (Totality 101), the judgment of the face inverts the meaning of the intentional act, reconfigures the relation of visibility into the infinity of Others who watch me through the Other, and, thereby, inflects the Other’s gaze with the trace of the there is. While the effaced and forgotten face is infected with the originary facelessness, its judgment leaves the I at the mercy of absolute exteriority. The singularity of the face joins forces with the generality of facelessness and shifts the horizons of being and presence. The pleats of infinity are everywhere ready to fade away.
 
Labor, in Levinas’s sense of the term, is another position of non-transcendent mastery,⁴ where the grasp of nameless matter “as raw material” “announces its anonymity and renounces it,” both exciting and stilling “the anonymous rustling of the there is” (Totality 159-60). In a twist analogous to the elimination of the spectator, the renunciation of the anonymity of matter announces the anonymity of the one who labors (or writes) and comes to pass behind one’s work, disappearing behind the produced sign. The author or the doer is able to emerge victorious from the fight against the resistance of anonymous matter only by becoming the anonymous force behind creation, the force whose will, intentionality, and consciousness merge with the night of the there is. Here Levinas agrees with a certain Marx for whom work is the consummation of the worker’s being. But to consume even the ashes of this consummation, as Levinas seems to demand in Otherwise Than Being (50), is to work for the Other. Outside of the sociological and political-economic category of exploitation, to work for the Other is to take radical generosity to a new height of my disappearance behind my work, so that no return, no reflux of gratitude, may be expected from the recipient. This is, no doubt, what Spivak has in mind when she reads Virginia Woolf’s pledge to work for the ghost of Shakespeare’s sister “even in poverty and obscurity,” noting that “we have to work at that word ‘work,’ elaborate it” (35). And indeed, there is no work that does not ultimately result in the obscurity of the worker whose interiority withdraws the moment the work is finally produced. As the passage for the work, the worker comes to pass behind it (or else, dies in the work) and, reaching the threshold of being, reverts into the other of the Other—the non-identical, unidentifiable, anonymous phantasm.
 
Sense and labor inhabit the cleft between “the event [of death] and the subject to whom it will happen” (Time 77). Through them, the subject relives the agony of this cleft, in which the postponement, the infinite deferral of finitude, collides with the perpetual eventalization of the event. Paradoxically enough, the ultimate violence of death is infinitely postponed in the operations of consciousness and in operationality as such (Heidegger’s Besorge, concernful dispersion in the world): in what still has time in the face of passing away (Totality 224) and in what, at the same time, interminably accomplishes this passing in the form of the subject’s disappearance behind the sign and the gaze. Death is deferred in that which dies, not in the anxiety experienced in its anticipation—this is the oldest mimetic defense, permitting one to become what one fears. In order to “become” the there is, however, the existent must relinquish its substantiation, undoing the achievements of hypostasis. The transcendence of sense and labor approximates this becoming and stands for a de-scendence and dissolution back into the impersonal existence where the I does not survive its passage to the beyond. The itineraries of work and the gaze lead back to the silent Neuter of history and optics (Totality 91, 246), if not even further to the absolute impersonality of the there is.
 
In analogy to the sense bathed, from all sides, by the overwhelming stream of nonsense (Otherwise 163), labor futilely resists the elemental signification of non-possession (Totality 131). The de-substantiation of the I, its melting away into the Neuter, that transpires in the gaze and in the product of labor, as well as the noisy monotony of non-sense and the element, challenge and ultimately flatten subjective, conceptual, and ontological borders. But in addition to the pleats of being, labor, and sense, infinity folds upon itself, disclosing the site where ethical responsibility incorporates the there is. This fold of infinity upon infinity, this crease holding the absent center of Levinasian philosophy, this “alteration without alienation” requires further analysis and elaboration.
 
The territory “Beyond the face” mapped out in Section IV of Totality and Infinity and immanently traversed in the transcendent face of the Other anchors the facelessness of the void elongated into the third, that is, into the neutral and neutralizing alterity of the Other’s Other. The unique Other, refractory to concepts and categories, is not Buber’s Thou (Proper 32) but what I would like to designate as the inter-face of ethics and politics/justice. The crux of the interface is that il y a is transcribed into illeity in the face of the Other, into the s/he-ness of the Other that opens the dimension of sociality and refuses the clandestinity of unjust love showered on one human being (Totality 213). Anachronistically, the third precedes the I and the Other (the first and the second) and, demanding justice at the heart of ethics, threatens de facto to nullify the ethical relation by integrating the election of the irreplaceable I and the incomparable face of the Other into the procedures of conceptuality, comparison, and totalization. The demand for justice does not exclude the prospect of reinstating a modified version of the anonymity of the there is in the very heart of ethics. But, for Levinas, the apparent betrayal of the ethical is not the opposite of ethics. The inter-face of the third in the face of the Other non-synthetically binds together the conjuncture and the divergence of the ethical and the political.
 
Illeity in the Other is the figure of the Other in the Other, infinity in infinity, “oblivion in oblivion,” “sky blue in blue sky” (Jabès 26).⁵ The anonymity of the unique, namelessness in the proper name, is not a departure of the identical from itself in the hope of a subsequent self-recovery that defines the work of consciousness (Time 52). On the contrary, it denotes the fullness of the trace awash with itself so that no dialectical negativity and overcoming of negativity would be required for its enunciation. If both the form and the content (not to mention the “identity”) of the Other boil down to its alterity [L’Autre est Autrui] (Totality 251; Totalité 281), then the Other in itself is other not as a tautological confinement in a hermetically sealed (though autochthonous) entity but as the modality of accommodation, welcoming the infinity of Others in the Other. The finite difference (faiblesse) of the Other is disseminated in this unfathomable hospitality; Illeity in the Other “is” the fold of infinity.
 
The anonymity of the unique resists the will to name at any price, which—for Levinas-refers to (a certain variety of) evil. This does not mean, however, that pure anonymity without uniqueness is the embodiment of the good. In its shadow, I can try to hide and evade my responsibility to and for the Other. But when I avow this responsibility, my avowal verges on the erasure of the name—hence, on another kind of anonymity—in “Here I am,” which is my response to the immemorial election, whereby I am called to the aid of the Other. But who, precisely, utters these words? Is the singled-out I named or nameless? The ambiguity of the I is captured in Bruns’s suggestion that the “‘I’ is a name without a name, parentheses in the regime of signs that cannot be filled by death” (185). “Here I am” is an elliptical expression of “Here I am, despite my death,” despite the deferred anonymity that does not know any uniqueness. Although the uniqueness of the name without a name wards off the fulfillment of death, it does not preclude the agony of dying in me, which corresponds to the anonymity of the unique within the Same. In the name without a name, the I “does not come to an end, while coming to an end” (Totality 56), unsaying the said, and expiring for the Other. Before the empirical “regime of signs,” the signifyingness of signification encrypts the I as the sign given to the Other in the proximity that endows with meaning the uniqueness and the anonymity of the I in spite of its death (Otherwise 115).
 
The threshold of existence, where I say “Here I am” and am summoned to justify myself or to live an inner life of apology in the Greek sense of the word (Totality 240), is crossed in the exilic deliverance for-the-other (Otherwise 138). “Here I am” is the response affirming the immemorial demand of the Other. Even so, the threshold is internal to the I who is interiority turned inside out. In contrast to the effects of the panoptic gaze and of labor, my justification intended for the Other does not detach me from the sign offered. On the model of Husserl’s intentionality that structures consciousness as openness to its object, as the configuration of transcendence in immanence, interiority is nothing but a movement toward the outside, an aspiration toward the Other, which remains irreducible within the depths of interiority itself.
 
But it will prove unfeasible to distill the purity of the ethical from the interiority that turns inside out in its exposure to the Other. The noise of the boundless element transmitting the rustling of the there is keeps resounding in the dwelling it has never evacuated, just as the anarchy of obsession has never left consciousness alone, for both are always already broken into. The idea of the immanent enunciation of the transcendent threshold underpins Levinas’s project to solve the problem of unjust transcendence in which the existent did not survive its passage to the beyond, and to “personalize” transcendence such that the I would not be lost in it, such that uniqueness would be able to span the dead time of anonymity. Granted: transcendence in the face of the Other (Basic 27) keeps the promise of justice for the I, for the Other, and for the third. And yet, having traversed this gap, the unique both keeps and loses itself as it emerges clothed in the name without the name, in the quasi-anonymity of the I, both in service of and aligned with the Other and the Other’s Other.
 
Besides saying “I,” how is it possible to orient oneself toward the anonymity of the unique? Levinas terms such an orientation “prayer.” Rejecting both the thought that names creation and ontological thought, the I invokes the Other in a prayer (prière) that undergirds discourse (Basic 7). Instead of following the path of consciousness that sets up the name in the anonymity of the night (Levinas Reader 32), this invocation seeks the anonymity of the night in the name. A bracketing and reduction of the name, it unsays the said and reconstitutes it in the saying. For the invisible and the inaudible to manifest themselves non-phenomenally, the facelessness in the face and the namelessness in the name must be able to speak. And yet, the extreme fragility of the not-yet-speech, of prayer, of the breath drawn before the first word is uttered—fainter than a whisper—beneath and beyond discourse, spells out a constant self-undermining of the invocation tempted to name the anonymous, be it the night, the void, or illeity. The names of alterity name something other than alterity. “Only the Void is entitled to vouch for the Void” (Jabès 65).
 
Prayer is the decomposition of the said that attends to the Other in the presence of the I, implores the Other to listen, to remain an interlocutor in the relation without representation—”an irreplaceable being, unique in its genus, the face” (Totality 252). A being “unique in its genus” is not merely something or someone belonging to an absolutely singular genus, the non-idealizable and the unrepeatable par excellence. It is, more precisely, a being unique in its anonymity, which is to say, the one who silently refuses the imposition of the generic name that suffocates the alterity it names and no less vehemently rejects pure namelessness.
 
The non-givenness of the fullness awash with itself, the self-erasure of the trace on the other side of namelessness and the name, marks the face. The overdetermined etymology of the face offers some clues to the strange convergence of anonymity and uniqueness I am sketching out here. The Hebrew word for the face, panim, shatter(s) the unity of the face in indicating a certain multiplicity in the plural ending -im. Panim is/are unique in the derivation of multiplicity outside of conceptual differentiation. The third in the face of the Other does not stand for a latecomer who disturbs the ethical with the demand for justice, nor for a mere conjunctive, synchronous addition to the Other, nor for another example of the Other deduced from the same mysterious genus. Rather, the third is part and parcel of the originary non-phenomenal formation—a formation lacking the formalism of form—of panim, which preserves the exceptional separation within its genus. The face, so understood, expresses the anarchic order of multiplicity.
 
The French word for face, visage, also retains the overtones of order, albeit in a slightly different context. Associated with the verb viser (to aim at), it upsets the Husserlian notion of intentionality. In the face, it is not a consciousness that directs itself toward its objects, but the order of the face exposed to the I: “The order that orders me to the other does not show itself to me, save through the trace of its reclusion, as a face of a neighbor” (Otherwise 140). That which aims at me so as to order (in the double sense of commanding and organizing—hence the military connotations of Autrui highlighted by Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” are more pertinent than ever before) me to the Other is anonymous to the extent that it is not embodied in the Other and does not follow the logic of a manifestation or a phenomenon. But, at the same time, the order’s intentionality is unique because it calls upon me and no one else to face the Other in response to my pre-discursive prayer, which attends to alterity in anticipation of the unexpected command. The self-expression of the face of the Other is a prayer answered more profoundly than any vocal revelation.
 
Levinasian “caress” is also a prayer—this time, a prayer that has become flesh. Swerving from the initiative of discourse, the caressing hand without the eye is fixated on the pre-discursive abjuration of intentionality. It touches the “impersonal dream” (Totality 259), wholly absorbed in the anonymity of the Beloved, wholly attuned to what-is-not-yet peering through the transcendence of the continuum potentiality/actuality. Here the anonymity of the caress inflects the correlation of prayer and discourse and arrests saying in its track, forestalling its relapse into the said, or into the anonymity of the there is. This inflection experienced, for instance, in the sealed dyad of lovers uproots illeity from the face of the Other and, at once, re-situates it in the multiplicity of fecundity which is not allowed to “dissolve into the anonymity of the there is but . . . go[es] further than light . . . go[es] elsewhere” (Totality 268). In the autotelic movement of the caress, self-absorbed anonymity denounces itself by internalizing (inflecting) all light without yielding a reflection.
 
To be sure, Levinas distinguishes between the “night as anonymous rustling of the there is” and the nameless “night of the erotic,” extending alongside the first night (Totality 258). Ostensibly more personal and familiar, the second kind of darkness yields intimacy without distance, an ecstatic meltdown of boundaries between the I and the Other, who do not yet make their theatrical appearance in the first kind of night. Still, the indeterminacy of the nocturnal complicates the efforts at a conceptual differentiation. Without a clear line of demarcation, one night passes into the other, as the vicissitudes of the nameless and the anonymous, of the denuded and the unveiled, entwine. Instead of marked borders, there are only wrinkles and pleats that migrate, vanish, and reappear, as the fabric is worn and worn out. The interpenetration of the two nights is another sign for our inability to ward off and to quarantine the rustling of the there is. The prayer-flesh is, like the self-expression of the face, a prayer answered in the absence of any perceptible response or revelation and materialized in the night of corporeity. The “ambiguity of love” awakened in this night is more serious than the laughter, raillery, and indecency denouncing language (Totality 260), for caressing the wound, the hand without the eye suffers the suffering of the other and in the same breath pre-meditates, before and beyond the interference of consciousness and of knowledge, the murder of the Other, or the wholesale transformation of the other into an open wound. But, of course, any premeditation is necessarily belated. The caress is already a post-meditation, an afterthought, and therefore a sign of guilt. The other is already dead (or else, has already withdrawn, has gone elsewhere) when the illeity of the third that animates it is excluded from the dyad of lovers, or when the face is horribly disfigured, owing to the fateful modification in its originary non-phenomenological formation. The caress reaches nothing but the corporeity of a sentient corpse and wistfully strokes the wounds of rotting flesh.
 
With the already dead, the pleats of infinity gather solemnly—as if attending to the deceased—in the uniqueness of anonymity. The normalizing reversion to the uniqueness of anonymity is, first and foremost, history’s fruitless approach to subjective interiority forced to manifest itself outside of the immediacy of expression, in the obliqueness of works (Totality 67). Such an incursion on the part of objectivity entails both more and less than the rustling of the there is. More than the there is, historical existence is differentiation and individuation in the trace of the absent existent imprinted in the works left behind. Less than the there is, it brings forth its chroniclers, survivors, and witnesses of the past and, thereby, falls short of the complete destruction of every existent. The historian’s unspoken dream is to caress pure illeity extricated from hypostatized existence and locked in a mute but phenomenally demonstrable s/he-ness of the dead other. Unlikely allies, phenomenology and history share the project of describing the other.
 
Conceptualized in terms of the uniqueness of anonymity, the verbs “to see,” “to labor,” and “to be” come to represent a non-substantive concentration of a “field of forces” in language (Time 48). With this conceptualization, Levinas takes Nietzsche’s side in a thinly veiled anti Hegelian argument that envisages existence neither as subject, nor as substance, but as the anonymous deed detached from any doer (25). The lateness of the doer’s fabrication into the fabric of doing hints at the logical priority of the there is followed by the event of the hypostasis. The uniqueness of anonymity (of the spectacle, or of the being/product of labor) bears the trace not of the existent’s eye or hand, but of her disappearance. In each case, however, the trace of disappearance refers to writing, which is to say, to the concurrence of the “limination” of the writer behind the sign and the resistance of the sign to the anonymity of the there is. It is this verbal concentration of a field of forces that gives rise to the economic par excellence, where the liminal writer pays with a newly gained anonymity for the uniqueness of the text.
 
The murderousness of the caress invites the conclusion that, after all, a certain version of Hobbesianism is correct—even for Hobbes’s arch-antagonist, Levinas—in that there is no murder that is not preemptive. The act of killing aims at the face, at that which is “exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill” (Ethics 86). Aiming at the face (now read as visage) one attempts to skew the asymmetry of the face-to-face in the direction of a quid pro quo, to target intentionality that essentially and from the very first aims at me and is intended toward me as an ethical order, or, perhaps, as an evil design, which I cannot decipher, make sense of, aim back at. More importantly, it is absolutely impossible to know which extreme the Other has chosen. This impenetrable night of not-knowing is frightening, but what is even more terrifying (what provokes the first murderous thought) is not the face per se, but the facelessness of the face,⁶ containing like a series of Russian dolls the trace of illeity harboring the residue of the there is in the face of the Other. The facelessness dwelling in the face infects the ethical order with the persistent delusions and suspicions of evil design famously raised in Descartes’s Meditations. Preempting the Other’s self-expression, the murderer seeks to uncover the Other’s ostensibly murderous plan, to completely “void” the silent void of another interiority, to expose the forever hidden in the exposure of the face, to reveal the menacing trace of the there is, in other words, to phenomenologize the Other. All this can be accomplished when the Other is “purged” of her otherness, when the murderer is able to exclaim, “Here I am, despite Your death!,” when the eliminated other is, thus, confined in the sign of the there is given to the I and, predictably enough, confirming the worst of my fears that come true in metaleptic, misguided violence mistaking the surrogate (the face) for the true target (facelessness).
 
But the impossibility of murder is inscribed in the very face of the Other (Basic 16) and, more pogniantly, in the trace of the there is which it harbors, transmitting, like a seashell, the murmur and the laughter of impersonal existence that returns after every negation. First, the logic of total negation that drives the murderer would be undone in the successful outcome of its “operation,” in which the there is remains as the indestructible trace of absolute destruction. The violence of the unlimited negation (Totality 222) would find its insurmountable limit in the sole target it can posit. The second limitation of murder would emanate from the face’s auto-referentiality, self-expression, and self-signifyingness (Totality 51) that allot the status of secondary supplements to ethical imperatives and written laws. If we read between the lines of the ethical asymmetry and the self-erasure of signification in the face of the Other, we will discover that the Other cannot become an object of my outrage, nor even another subject analogous to me, without being converted into something other than the Other. Any murderer who hits a target will invariably miss the Other.
 
With regard to the second limitation of murder: the self-signifyingness of the face defies all horizons of meaning-bestowal, even as it signifies [se signifie] only itself (Totality 140). The horrifying and indifferent void of facelessness in the face of the Other comes into my purview only as sheer non-sense, as a foreign, thoroughly forgotten, and indecipherable hieroglyphic sign of the immemorial past. Against the background of this unfathomably dense non-sense, the delusional wish to negate the Other interprets and, indeed, embraces murder as a function of sense. The truth of this ostensibly outlandish interpretation hides in the fundamental connection of murder with the prototype of phenomenological comportment, namely, the act of seeing.
 
For vision to take place, every place must be abandoned for the empty, leveled, and homogeneous space, which already wrinkles the fabric of infinity, preparing the stage for the anticipated spectacle. The procedure for converting a place into deserted space hinges upon the emptying, or “voiding,” of the shadows’ abstruse fullness with the triumphant ray of light: “The light makes the thing appear by driving out the shadows; it empties space. It makes space arise specifically as a void” (Totality 189). Repressing non-sense, sense tired of avoiding the void, which stubbornly recoils into itself, confronts—quite bluntly—the excessiveness of this impenetrable, mute menace. Vision rebels against the void, but in the course of this rebellion creates the monstrosity of a transparent and unwelcoming, placeless void of its own that co-originates with light itself. Mimetic preemption recurs. While murder is a function of sense derived from the spasmodic urge to level and to nullify, it mimetically falls back on that which has been leveled and “renounces comprehension absolutely” (Totality 198). The murderer’s clasped hand is empty, since, a mere sweaty palm apprehending itself without the Other, it clutches nothing but a vortex of air. Here is the grasp that puts an end to the intentionality of grasping, sense that annihilates sense, light that extinguishes light.
 
The void of the there is and of illeity is not filled with darkness in the same way that voided space oozes light. The spatiality that enables vision is defined by the ever-expanding horizons of luminosity, postponing the fall of darkness whose ominous signs consign the gravity of vision to a dialectical child-play. Seen on the horizon of luminosity is the Other’s silhouette robbed of the face (Basic 9), which is but the non-expandable horizon of the horizon. In its turn, the void of the there is knows no horizon, no expansion or contraction, no dialectical fort-da of light and shadow; it disallows even the quasi-Cartesian hypothesis that “only I and this black void have ever been” (Beckett 304). As such, murder occupies the non-place of difference between the two voids and attacks each of them with the weapons of the other. On the one hand, the act of murder breaches the horizon of luminosity by subsuming vision and comprehension under the blindness it borrows from the there is. On the other hand, this very act mirrors the lesser violence of vision, reflecting the light of perverse signification onto illeity hidden in the face of the Other. Exposure and closure, but also vision and blindness, intersect in the unbridgeable disjuncture of the void that divides the two voids and characterizes the aporetic situation of murder.
 
In a frantic attempt to void the Other, the murderer strikes at the finite difference (faiblesse)—the uniqueness and the exposedness of the face—and blends it with the infinity of anonymity and materiality from which the face arises. The absencing of the face and the presencing of a “trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of . . . excess” (Otherwise 93) are two interlaced dimensions of the absolute profanation, revealing “more than nothing in the trace of lack” (to paraphrase Levinas). Ironing the pleats of infinity, murder brings time to a standstill, confines it to the atemporal instant thick with suspense, in which no happening—not even murder—is feasible. Or, more precisely, murder invalidates itself in the course of its own execution. It is necessarily inoperative insofar as its “success” dilutes, in anonymity without uniqueness, the field of verbal forces conducive to any action, including murder itself, and bars the existence of the doer and of the deed alike. The voiding of the Other is the negation of the execution, as well as the paralysis of the executioner “no longer able to be able” (Time 74), prevented from exclaiming, “Here I am, despite Your death!”
 
The “existential density of the void itself, devoid of all being, empty even of void” (Levinas Reader 35) is the unfolding of infinity in an avalanche of the there is, from which the murderer cannot retreat. In contrast to the luxurious byproducts of historiography that can, at least, study the works in the absence of those who brought them about, murder does not generate survivors alongside its victims, but abolishes, at least in principle which echoes Kant’s moral philosophy, the event of hypostasis by which existents (including the murderer himself) contract their existence. Although it seeks to escape from the horror of the there is (Levinas Reader 33), this self-defeating act is irrevocably trapped in a voided presence, in the aftermath, but also the antecedence of the desperate erasure (read: integration, totalization) of the I and the Other. It appears that the effects of this erasure may be remedied or avoided in the construction of a more “humane,” less restrictive totality. Yet the edifice of any totality is visibly sallied with the blood of sacrificial victims: yours, mine, the Other’s, that of the Other’s Other, and so on. The voided avoidance of Benjamin’s divine violence—bloodless and expiatory (Reflections 300), corresponding, mutatis mutandis, to Levinas’s notion of the ethical—is the only alternative, if it is still possible to speak of alternatives in this context, to such an edifice. But, though bloodless, the ethical is not free of violence. It therefore behooves us to retrace the trace of the there is in the ethical and, perhaps, the foreshadowing of the ethical in the there is.
 
While Levinas refers to the there is as the subject of Existence and Existents, he distances this term from the “joy of what exists” and the sort of exuberant abundance of giving signaled in the Heideggerian es gibt (Ethics 47). Elsewhere he comments that “none of the generosity which the German term es gibt is said to contain revealed itself between 1933 and 1945″ (Difficult 292). Fair enough. In the period just before and during World War II, the plentitude of es gibt reverts into the bareness of il y a. A de-subjectivized remainder of Husserl’s annihilation of the world invades Heidegger’s existential world-formation. But, to complicate things somewhat, does not es gibt—literally, “it gives”—already stand for the terrible generosity of existence, of apeiron which by definition gives itself without end before and after there is an existent, let alone a recipient, capable of assuming this gift? Would the subsequent emergence of a “recipient” who is not afforded the right to refuse the gift of existence even when its burden becomes unbearable, not belie the utter terror of this generosity? And would not this terror be magnified by the dreadful hospitality of being offered without an exit: a mute but relentless insistence that the “guest,” to whom being is given, must accept, prior to any decision or calculation, the (unacceptable) gift of dwelling—and stay?
 
The terrible hospitality of es gibt, the extreme openness of the closure in which the existent dwells, is unmatched even by the anonymity of the unique. It prefigures the very essence of generosity. The impossibility to assume this radical generosity imposed on the existent, to inherit it directly from what—the it, das Es—gives, is the condition of possibility for generosity as such, since no true gift can institute an economy, or be repaid. At the heart of this impossible possibility is the non-mediate inflection of the there is in the face of the Other that both defies all horizons of meaning and bestows meaning on my existence in spite of my death (Otherwise 115). Inflected in the face of the Other, the light of meaning passes to the hither side of reflection, expression bypasses manifestation, in sum, existence is given and not given, exposed and opposed to the violence of acceptance. This interminable suspension of the finality of giving and receiving—the suspension perturbing the economy of hypostasis, or the ideal conditions of possibility for the process by which the existent folds and binds (but in each case, as Levinas says, “contracts”) his existence—is not a simple withholding, or a custodial protection of what es gibt dispenses so freely, but, on the contrary, the infection of metaphysical desire with the “never enough” of the there is that conditions the inordinate “generosity nourished by the Desired” and divorced from the certainty of satisfaction (Totality 34).
 
The bizarre kinship between the there is and metaphysical desire is what impels the inexhaustibility of the ethical relation even there where all material resources of/for giving have been depleted. The I situated in proximity to the Other does not offer something extraneous to itself, but neither does it offer itself in the martyrdom of self-sacrifice, since the ethical is defined by “having been offered without any holding back and not a generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act” (Otherwise 75). From the standpoint of consciousness, the effects of passivity, in which I have been offered to the Other, redouble and resonate with the terror of the there is. Besides the painful fact that the subject’s decision to listen or not to listen to the call of the Other is not taken into account, it now appears that generosity itself is “reserved” for the Other and for the there is. My offering involuntarily responds to the prior immemorial reception of something (existence, meaning in spite of my death, etc.). I cannot recompense, of the common root that renders both my terror and metaphysical desire uneconomical, “inordinate,” overwhelming.
 
The terrifying feature of the face of the Other, the facelessness of that face that suddenly transforms the Other into my worst enemy, shares more than a mere trace of the there is with “existence without existents.” Like the anonymity of the there is, it forces me to turn inside out, this time not only in a confirmation of my anxiety that I will be stripped of my power “to have private existence” (Levinas Reader 33), but because of the dynamics of signification, in which I am the-one-for-the-other (Otherwise 79). The facelessness of the face is an inflection of anonymity in uniqueness, a glimpse of the finite difference (faiblesse) of the Other that ethically translates my fear of him into my fear for him, and my feeling of being trapped in essence into the glory of election. Broadly understood, this translation presupposes my “fear for all the violence and usurpation my existing, despite its intentional innocence, risks committing” (Entre 149). Ethics does not repress or stifle the primordial terror of the there is, but capitalizes on its boundlessness and on the passivity it introduces into my existence⁷.
 
An unsettling question should arise before us at this point, namely, what determines the difference between two contrasting reactions to the finite difference of the Other: the pre-meditation of murder and my fear for the Other. Why does the caress disfigure the Other, while signification is moved by and for the Other in response to finite difference? To recall the clandestine force of the caress is to be transported back (and forth) to the ambiguous territory beyond the face. What the caress encounters is faceless corporeity, the body already transfigured into a corpse, time already elapsed—hence, its voluptuous impatience (Totality 260). The caressing hand perpetually runs out of time. On the other hand (but this is no longer a matter of the hand), the signifyingness of signification is given to the “facialized” Other who stands for the preoriginary multiplicity of Others, demanding language and justice. And this is the heart of the question. An insufficient, facile, but not incorrect answer would be that the face with its facelessness “is” what makes all the difference in my response to finite difference. But how? I would like to put forth a tentative hypothesis that the face is a site where the infinity of silent spaces (the there is) is temporalized. In other words, the face retains the terror evoked by the spatial infinity prior to hypostasis, all the while mixing this terror with its postponement that opens the dimension of temporality in the suspension of spatiality.⁸ The facelessness that animates the caress is a much closer replica of the there is than the facelessness concealed in the face of the Other. Unlike the former, the conjunction of facelessness in the face, of anonymity in uniqueness, leaves just enough time to fear for the Other and “to come to the assistance of his frailty” (Totality 256). And the by-product of this temporalization is the movement of signification.
 
“Terror of the ethical” thrives on the equivocacy of the genitive form. Is it the terror proper to the ethical qua ethical, or is it the terror ethics harnesses and appropriates? Are we afraid of the ethical? Can this terror account for the constitution of the ethical, or does it, on the contrary, inflect, impede, and, perhaps, reroute the ethical movement of the Same to the Other, thereby terrorizing the fragility of the ethical? Or, to put it differently, is this terror foreign to ethics? If so, could it, despite its foreignness, bind to the body-host of the ethical like an infection that interrupts the (otherwise) “smooth” functioning of the organism?
 
The non-ontological force, the “weak power” with which the ethical, the saying without the said, and a host of other Levinasian terms resist any intentio recta—any correct, rightful, right approach as well as the directness of phenomenological intentionality—will prevent us from taking up these questions head on, from offering something like the finality of a response, from determining the indeterminate. But this is not to say that these questions must stay unanswered. If we keep track of Levinas on the methodological course of feigning or simulating a response whose substantiality and content are inseparable from the act of feigning, then, perhaps, we will be on our way to the impossible epistemic adequation to the non-adequation of the ethical. To feign a response is to defer a response, to respond with a “perhaps” and, above all, with an “as if” (Derrida, “The Future”). Perhaps, then, terror is neither proper to, nor is harnessed by the ethical. Perhaps, regardless of all talk concerned with the straightforwardness of the faceto face, the subject of ethics can work (in the fullest, most elaborate sense of “work”) as if there were an inflection, diverting labor from the Other, as if it were all done “for nothing” (Otherwise 74), as if this work were lost before it could reach the Other. Perhaps, also, the ethical interruption of this work is responsible for the “smooth” performance of the ethical, for its diversion from the obdurate temptation of the caress. Perhaps—finally—terror is neither foreign nor innate to ethics, but stands for a marker of its improbable boundary, where the indeterminate unfolding of being’s pleats is equally surprised with the return of the there is and with the absolutely new but persistent and irreducible event of metaphysical desire, the encounter with alterity, and transcendence.
 

Introduction

 
Even though Bruno Latour is renowned for appropriating anthropological resources to study Western technoscientific norms and practices, he has been criticized for ignoring colonial and postcolonial history.¹ In light of such assessments, it appears significant that Latour has come to depict the failed actions of a fictional Westernized Brahmin named Jagannath as an allegory about the limits of ideology critique.² We believe that a useful way to analyze Latour’s invocation of Jagannath is to contrast his approach to literature with the style of postcolonial criticism favored by such figures as Edward Said (and others).³ This juxtaposition can establish a framework for attending to topics whose import extends beyond Latour scholarship, notably: (1) assessing the epistemic implications of using literature to intervene into meta-philosophical debates about the limits of ideology critique and its underlying logic concerning fetishized objects and primitive beliefs, (2) discussing the political and aesthetic effects that can arise from using the technology of the modern novel for the allegorical purposes that Latour has in mind, and (3) suggesting better ways for Science and Technology Studies (henceforth, STS)⁴ to collaborate with Postcolonial Studies.⁵ Latour develops the concept of the “factish” in order to distinguish the limits of ideology critique.⁶ In his deployment of this term, he misses the opportunity to engage work in postcolonial studies that has questioned ideology critique by considering alternative and multiple modernities rather than a single monolithic regime.⁷ By examining how Latour’s interest in ideology critique brings him to Jagannath’s tale, we can argue for the relevance in his work of occluded literary and cultural detail. By doing so, we comment on Latourian analysis from a vantage point that resonates with the fuller implications of Said’s work, thereby positing a critical space for a dialogue between STS and postcolonial studies.
 

Ideology Critique, Literature, and the Juggernaut of Reason

 
Latour does not discuss ideology critique in order to enlarge its available definitions.⁸ Rather, he aims to uncover a discursive formation to which all modern critics have allegedly adhered, regardless of how they define ideology and its associated concepts. According to Latour, the “very precise mechanism” of this formation circumscribes uniformly the manner by which the varieties of modern criticism have tried to debunk their respective objects of religious and secular mystification. What Latour tries to establish, therefore, is nothing less than the “modernist’s psycho-social profile” (Pandora’s 276, 277).⁹
 
As depicted within this framework, the primary goal of modern criticism has been to liberate the public from false beliefs. In the period traditionally referred to as “early modernity,” critics appealed to “transcendent” scientific facts in order to demystify religious convictions. Their goal was to demonstrate that religious experience untainted by politics does not exist; intuitions concerning “God” were asserted to be the result of social discipline that is imposed by groups that benefit from its deployment. In “late modernity,” however, critics shifted their focus. By appealing to the causal relations emanating from “society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism,” critics attempted to demystify the transcendent basis of scientific authority (Latour, “Why Has Critique” 229). In this transition between periods of modernity, scientists have gone from being the agents to the objects of critique,¹⁰ but their underlying discourse remains the same: normative guidance is legitimated by the critics’ appeal to “false consciousness” and to “hidden reality.”¹¹
 
In order to explain why the modern approach to criticism is problematic, Latour pursues a literary trajectory and analyzes Jagannath’s tale.¹² Jagannath’s story appeared in the seventies, a time in which “Marxism was posing a real threat to democratic socialism because of a profound change in people’s attitudes to certain Gandhian notions about the self, society, and history” (Nagaraj vii). At the end of Pandora’s Hope, Latour appropriates Jagannathanth’s failure to liberate his village’s untouchables from the oppression of the caste system for didactic purposes. He claims that it illustrates the way ideology critique fails to accurately capture how, why, and when power is abused: ideology critique distorts how authority comes to be overly esteemed; ideology critique imputes “extravagant beliefs” to whatever group is taken to be oppressed; ideology critique leaves the group that it perceived to be oppressed without adequate grounds for liberation; ideology critique distorts the relation between critic and the object of criticism; and ideology critique accusatively “destroys a way of arguing.” Latour thus treats Jagannath as the personification of the modern critic’s deleterious influence on modern intellectual and political history. Jagannath’s activities are supposed to demonstrate that the modern critic fails to appreciate that an artifact only becomes a powerful idol after an iconoclast attempts to demystify it:
 

Actually, as Jagannath’s move beautifully illustrates, it is the critical thinker who invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role. Neither the aunt nor the priest ever considered the saligram as anything but a mere stone. Never. By making it into the powerful object that must be touched by the pariahs, Jagannath transubstantiates the stone into a monstrous thing–and transmutes himself into a cruel god . . . while the pariahs are transmogrified into “crawling beasts” and mere “things.” Contrary to what the critics always imagine, what horrifies the “natives” in the iconoclastic move is not the threatening gesture that would break their idols but the extravagant belief that the iconoclast imputes to them.
 

(Pandora’s 270-71)

The central point Latour conveys in this passage is that the modern iconoclast illegitimately dismisses diverse forms of social belief and practice by inventing a misleading concept, the “fetish.” The modernist’s conception of the fetish does not register relevant underlying social and political practices that exist apart from the condition of belief imputed to the native by the critic.¹³

Placing Jagannath in Context

 
Although we have thus far been discussing Latour’s invocation of Jagannath’s tale as an analysis of literary fiction, Latour never makes this identification explicitly.¹⁴ The bibliography at the end of Pandora’s Hope does not inform us of crucial features; its title, language, and author go unlisted. Furthermore, Latour introduces the reader to Jagannath as if he were familiarizing us with the actions of a real person:
 

His name is Jagannath, and he has decided to break the spell of castes and untouchability by revealing to the pariahs that the sacred saligram, the powerful stone that protects his high-caste family, is nothing to be afraid of.
 

(Pandora’s 268)

As it turns out, Jaganath’s tale is extracted from the novel Bharathipura.¹⁵ Written in Kannada–one of the Dravidian South Asian vernaculars–in 1974, its author, U.R. Anantha Murthy, remains a prominent figure in the literary world of Kannadan and Indian vernacular letters. What Latour interprets is but a fragment of the novel that first appears in English in Another India, a collection of translated vernacular Indian literature.¹⁶

 
The translations of prose and poetry that appear in Another India were originally composed in one of the dozens of vernaculars used in the subcontinent. The editors, Nissim Ezekiel and Meenakshi Mukherjee, primarily attempted to showcase the complexity and richness of Indian vernacular letters and to counter the disproportionate emphasis placed on Anglophonic “Indian” writing in Europe and North America. Such an ambition was prescient with respect to future debates. In 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, Salman Rushdie would contend that the only writing of substance in South Asia was composed in English:
 

The prose writing–both fiction and nonfiction–created in this period [the fifty years of independence] by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time. . . . The True Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind.
 

(50)

Latour’s readers, however, are never apprised of this significant tension in South Asian literature (and in much writing characterized as “postcolonial”).¹⁷ Consequently, the significance of translation and the problem of incommensurability in Jagannath’s tale are never addressed. For example, there is no mention of the parallels between Jagannath’s inability to comprehend the Dalit and the postcolonial Indian writer’s dilemma of choosing from amongst the various possibilities for political identification and representation that different languages–notably local vernacular and the colonial tongue–afford.

 
Latour begins by informing the reader that “His name is Jagannath,” but his analysis of Jagannath’s story does not focus on its linguistic, historical, and etymological contexts. That the protagonist has this particular name is significant; it is replete with powerful associations in South Asian religious experience. The Temple of Jagannath in Puri, Orissa, celebrates a popular and mischievous avatar of Vishnu/Krishna and is a major pilgrimage site for many of South Asia’s Hindus.¹⁸ The reference to Jagannath (Sanskrit for “ruler of all the world” or “ruler of the universe”) draws associations to a figure revered by millions of South Asians. Significantly, this avatar of Vishnu is celebrated for his transgressive qualities; he is a cunning and lusty trickster. There is also an important etymological relation between a juggernaut and Jagannath. Although the name Jagannath is drawn from the temple in Puri, its European usage refers to religious spectacle. According to European travelers’ tales, during the Rathayatra Festival zealots would throw themselves underneath the giant wheels of a chariot towed by pilgrims to the temple gates.¹⁹ The “juggernaut” has long harbored characteristic features of Orientalist exoticism: its European legacy conjures irrationality and religious fanaticism in order to mark the Indian as “other”–a function that India has served in various European imaginaries, dating from at least Europe’s early modern period onward. As the English-educated, Kannada-speaking Brahmin, Jagannath thus carries in his name associations that reverberate in these contexts of South Asian religio-cultural consciousness and Anglophonic etymology.²⁰ Similarly, linguistic resonances relating to debates over Indian modernity can be found in Bharathipura, the novel’s title. The subject of caste has for many become synonymous with the “Indian condition,” and tales of uplifting the downtrodden from caste entrenchment have come to be seen as paradigmatic of the possibility of modernizing India. These issues have been rendered into numerous aesthetic forms–the subject of novels, films, and philosophical tracts–both inside India and abroad.²¹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the title of Murthy’s novel, Bharathipura, establishes a metaphorical relationship between a specific geographical site, Bharathipura, and the Indian nation as a whole. Bharat is the ancient Sanskrit name for “India,” and pura means village. Roughly translated, Bharathipura designates the “Village of India.” Thus, an element of general social critique via the microcosm of the village is prominently featured for the reader even before any of the novel’s plot is revealed.²²
 
Finally, as a work written for a Kannadan audience and only recently translated in its entirety, Bharathipura addresses several key issues raised within Anglophone postcolonial studies. The question of the significance of composing in the so-called colonizer’s language is a vibrant and contentious feature of postcolonial societies that concerns the manner in which categories such as “literature” and the “literary” are negotiated. Untranslated vernacular literary “traditions” consciously experiment with the problem of how to accommodate the enormous cultures of book and print that arose in connection with the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century introduction of European print technologies. The language communities served by these vernaculars together constitute a diverse, national entity: a heterogeneous India where Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, and fifteen other vernaculars are recognized as languages appropriate for literary expression. Thus, if the umbrella term “nation” can be used to refer to postcolonial India, it is only in the context of a sovereign nation that is learning to accommodate substantial regional and linguistic differences.²³ In this context, Murthy’s decision to write in Kannada is deliberate. Like many Indian literati, he works in more than one language. In fact, Murthy’s 1966 doctoral degree in comparative literary studies is from the University of Birmingham: three years earlier, the renowned Center for Cultural Studies was established at Birmingham by noted Marxist scholars Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. The complex treatment of varied Marxist/Socialist positions over the course of Bharathipura speaks to Murthy’s familiarity with contemporary “Western” scholarship, as well as to the prominent place of Marx amongst India’s own intellectuals and politicians. The English language translation of the entire novel was not available until 1996, more than two decades after Bharathipura’s first appearance in print.
 
What the excerpt of Bharathipura Latour reads occludes, and what the novel’s cultural texture helps focus, is Murthy’s critique of liberal ideas of cultural authenticity. At the beginning of Bharathipura, Jagannath recalls going to the University of London to study. Once there he uses his charisma and intelligence to seduce women with “revolutionary” zeal:
 

What had he done for five years in England? . . . He had become a magnetic existentialist . . . . His black eyes, olive complexion, his tone of voice . . . all of these he had used with superb sleight-of-hand. He turned liberal, a reader of The Guardian. Reason–simple. Liberal rhetoric helped him justify his aimless drifting ways. He favoured free love because he wanted several women without commitment. . . . He wanted to be free, and so dubbed life itself absurd. He assumed a variety of personalities so as to conceal his innermost appetites. Bluntly speaking, his life was one continuous debauchery. A masquerade.
 

(28-29)

But as his failing relationship with Margaret, a half-English/half-Indian woman, falls apart, Jagannath becomes motivated to abandon his charlatan ways and aspires to transform himself into someone who is “creative” and “authentic.” He returns to Bharathipura, believing that if he can liberate the village pariahs he will acquire the allure of a political revolutionary and thereby win back Margaret’s love: “He would write to her after he became more substantial. And for him to become that, the untouchables, who lived like birds or animals, should muster enough courage to take that first step into the Manjunatha temple. Their rebellion would bring him authenticity” (38).²⁴

 
Jagannath’s intervention is a failed act: his exercise in liberal largesse is grotesque, perverse, and utterly narcissistic. Back in India, Jagannath’s efforts to lead the pariahs out of their “ignorance” is hotly debated in the town and beyond. Undeterred by the skeptics, Jagannath eventually forces the issue upon the untouchables and the local community. At the end of the novel, he leads several drunken pariahs into a temple on a festival day only to find that their entrance is not considered blasphemous because the temple’s sacred lingam is missing.²⁵ In a plot twist, the reader is apprised that the priest’s physically and mentally abused son had exacted revenge on his cruel father the night before by digging up the lingam and casting it into the river–an act that resonates in Lingyat belief. When the thousands of faithful, who have come for the festival, hear what has happened, they conclude that although removing the lingam defiles the temple, it is a justified action; it occurred in order to stop the greater defilement that would have been caused by the pariahs. Although readers are privy to the psychological motivations of the priest’s son (much as they are to Jagannath’s), the worshippers are not duly informed; as a result, they appeal to indigenous beliefs to explain Jagannath’s failed actions, a move that allows their belief-system to remain intact. By contrast, the reader is aware of what motivates the novel’s protagonist and has the opportunity to consider the relation between personal psychology and social revolution. Murthy’s construction of this scenario allows for the modernist critic’s intervention to be absorbed by indigenous belief, a facet of Jagannath’s move that Latour’s analysis does not encounter and therefore address.
 

Representing the Unrepresented?

 
Latour, reading an excerpt of the novel, misses these dimensions of its plot and so its critique of liberal ideology. The broader implications of the novel’s politics of inclusion and marginality are also conveyed by its style. Narrative voice is so important to Murthy’s project that any analysis of Bharathipura that fails to engage with the ways it articulates multiple and competing points of view remains incomplete. While a range of characterization extends to a variety of different social groups–a feature reinforced by their access to narrative voice and point of view–this privilege is not extended to the untouchables. Many social and ideological positions are represented in the novel (the Brahmin ascetic, the Marxist politico, the corrupt Monk), but the untouchables, whose contested position within Indian society is the central plot device, are not represented as speaking for themselves. As indicated in the excerpt, and established more fully in the novel, Jagannath’s tale of failed cultural translation is exemplified by the very absence of Dalit narrative consciousness. But, unlike Marx’s formulation concerning Europe’s peasants, this lack of representation does not arise solely from the Dalit‘s lack the agency to represent themselves.²⁶ Rather, this particular Kannadan novel achieves its literary coherence by addressing the issue of untouchability through the objectification of the Dalit. Whereas some critics contend that this act of reification subjugates the untouchables further, we can perhaps better view Murthy’s literary strategy as one that highlights how dominant groups, even ones with emancipatory liberal intentions, find it difficult to view the “other” apart from their own projections and include the “other” on terms that do not exceed self-interest.²⁷
 
In this respect, Murthy’s literary and political aims are perhaps best understood in the context of the modern novel as a literary technology. Since the nineteenth-century, historical realist fiction has been used as an instrument that enables competing vantage points to negotiate their partial and situated perspectives against the reader’s God’s-eye view–a disembodied perspective through which all of the personal and institutional machinations that are central to the plot of the novel are perceived as transparent.²⁸ In the tradition of Marxist historical realist fiction, it is expected that the reader be left with a new view of social reality, one that is less ideologically distorted and that presents avenues for political action. In this context, the possibility of revolutionary activism links literary representation with political praxis: the reader is given the impression that as a result of understanding the novel, he or she is better placed to engage with injustice and ideological mystification. Indeed, the reader can feel transformed: he or she is no longer an ordinary social agent, but instead has become enlightened about matters of personal complicity vis-à-vis class complicity.
 
Although Bharathipura belongs to the genre of social realism, it is not Marxist; self-consciously Kannadan, Bharathipura relies upon the heteroglossic potential of the novel to suggest that caste politics at the local level cannot be altered when action is justified by non-local norms. Specifically, the reader is made to observe how modern critique and traditional beliefs confront one another: at novel’s end, traditional beliefs appropriate and circumvent critical intervention. While the Marxist realist tradition of the novel is invoked, Bharathipura defies the expectations of a genre that revolves around issues of domination and injustice. Because an untouchable consciousness is absent in it, the novel–as a genre and a form–seems to be rendered ineffective for adequately addressing the exclusion of minoritarian voices. In this reading, such an impasse offers an ironic, high-modernist perspective on the tropes of caste and untouchability in postcolonial India. Far from inciting the reader to revolution, Bharathipura seems to suggest that while the literary imagination has the potential to deflate overly zealous critical ambition, it cannot establish a direct course of action for citizens to pursue. If any of the diverse South Asian readers are implicated by the untouchables’ plight, the novel remains silent on why this is the case and what should be done to redress it. By not giving the Dalit representation, what the novel suggests ultimately is that until the Dalit represent themselves, “we” cannot represent them either. Their naming, as in the case of Dalit in modern Indian history, must occur through acts of self-naming. The impetus for Dalit representation must come from within communities of the excluded and enter into the larger body of civil society–a society that must be able to refashion itself in order to accept, and adapt to, Dalit inclusion in the postcolonial Indian nation-state.²⁹
 

Latour and Postcolonial Theory

 
It is tempting to compare Latour’s discussion of Jagannath to Said’s intervention into V.S. Naipaul’s politics of demystification in “Among the Believers.”³⁰ There Said takes issue with Naipaul’s portrayal, regarding his visit to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, of the West as “the world of knowledge, criticism, technical know-how, and functioning institutions” and of Islamic culture as “fearfully enraged and retarded dependent [sic]” (114). Said’s position is that so long as Naipaul is, through his “acquired British identity,” prejudiced to see the world in this way, it is impossible for him to perceive or learn anything new: “What he sees he sees because it happens before him and, more important, because it already confirms what, except for an eye-catching detail, he already knows. He does not learn: they prove” (116, 113). The crucial point, one that is central to both Latour’s and Said’s respective analyses, is that neither an empathetic nor an epistemic connection to “otherness” is possible if the observer mistakes projected for genuine native beliefs. Recall Latour’s contention that “it is the critical thinker who invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role” (Pandora’s 270). Said reminds us that so long as Naipaul remains within the space of “carefully chosen” and “absolutely safe” places to visit, so long as he fails to “live among them” and “risk their direct retaliation,” so long as he fails to be like Socrates and “live through the consequences of his criticism,” he can only present characters that “barely come alive” in landscapes that are “half-hearted at best” (116).
 
Despite these parallels between Latour and Said, important differences mark their approaches to literary analysis. By the time Latour publishes Iconoclash, it becomes clear that he is not familiar with the complete Bharathipura. The one-page discussion of Jagannath in Iconclash includes a reference to Murthy and his novel, but nothing to explain why Pandora’s Hope presents an incomplete citation. Although Latour goes so far as to claim that Jagannath’s tale is “at the origin” of the Iconoclash exhibition-discussing the inspirational value of Jagannath at the level of personal origin–he does not discuss the issue of cultural origins: he does not say why Kannadan writers were grappling with the limits of ideology critique in the 1970s. This occlusion allows us to distinguish between Said’s intervention into Naipaul and Latour’s intervention into Murthy. Although Latour connects his use of Jagannath’s tale to his project of “letting beliefs regain their ontological weight,” the fact remains that for Latour, India is imaginary at best–a phantasm connected solely with a literary fragment that, when taken out of context, bears unexamined but significant ethnographic traces.
 
We contend that the type of scholarship Latour exhibits in the context of his appropriation of Jagannath is problematic and relates to the questionable strategies he uses to solidify the disciplinary identity of STS by attempting to prematurely settle the question: what kind of expertise entitles one to speak authoritatively about science and technology, and in which contexts and for what purposes? As our discussion of Murthy demonstrates, the limits of ideology critique are already being established in South Asia during the early 1970s. By contextualizing that which is left out of Latour’s reading, we can register an “East” that is not essentialized and objectified. In recognizing the specific conditions that have contributed to the text’s production and circulation–its literary and “translated” status, its original production and consumption as a vernacular as opposed to “national” language, and its deliberate positioning with regard to contemporary intellectual and political life both in South Asia and in Europe–we can register more than an East that serves to put on display the hubris of the modernist critic. Indeed, in light of our contextualization, Latour’s deployment of Jagannath would be even more persuasive in that the use and abuse of ideology critique in South India highlights the heterogeneity and complexity of resistance to the supposed universalism of modernist reason. Once again, postcolonial instantiations of modernities, as opposed to the Eurocentric uniformity of a singular modernity, reveal the negotiations taking place in situ.³¹ As in the laboratory, decoding the practices of particular villages highlights the degree to which they cannot be abstracted out of their historical time and place.
 
When considering these factors, it becomes important to take into account the status of works of literature within Latour’s project of analyzing the limits of ideology critique. Literary investigations have been demarcated historically from more “proper” theoretical investigations based on considerations of the kinds of claims formal and conceptual arguments can yield and the kinds of claims narrative can provide. However well a story may allow readers to come to a new understanding of the world, however much it enables readers to imagine that things could be other than they currently are, some contend that the readers’ ability to articulate what is compelling depends upon their going beyond literary possibility by making philosophical arguments concerning what justifies (or fails to justify) the beliefs, intentions, and actions of the literary characters. When Latour reduces Jagannath’s tale to an allegory of the modernist iconoclast, he engages in conceptual reductionism. It is as if he is suggesting that whatever insights can be found in Kannadan literature, they remain insufficiently epistemic because they have yet to be conceptualized properly. This strategy of attribution belongs to a long history in which: (1) non-Western inventions are marginalized; (2) the West is given credit for inventing things that were already fabricated; and (3) complex postcolonial situations that have given rise to numerous responses to, critiques of, and alternate configurations for, so-called “modernity” are elided.³² In short, Latour proceeds as if textual violence were not an essential component of analyzing Jagannath’s tale as a model–as a minimal representation of the fundamental features that account for the failure of ideology critique. Although models can be valuable for a number of ends–particularly in the sciences, when they can strip away inessential details in order to clarify the forces of a situation–using Bharathipura in this way undermines Murthy’s literary intervention: exposing the limits of critique in a specific context through a heavily psychologized and historicized agent.
 
Latour’s reduction of Murthy occurs as if he were unaware of the value of Said’s distinction between “theory” and “critical consciousness”:
 

Theory, in short, can never be complete, just as one’s interest in everyday life is never exhausted by simulacra, models, or theoretical abstracts of it. Of course one derives pleasure from actually making evidence fit or work in a theoretical scheme, and of course it is ridiculously foolish to argue that “the facts” or “the great texts” do not require any theoretical framework or methodology to be appreciated or read properly. No reading is neutral or innocent, and by the same token every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical standpoint, however implicit or unconscious such a standpoint may be. I am arguing, however, that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it; then, consequently, that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use. The critical consciousness is awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported.
 

(Said, The World 241-42, emphases added)

Whether Latour has read Said or should be expected to be well-versed in Said’s terminology is irrelevant here. The fact remains that when it comes to analyzing Western technoscientific practice, Latour has long advocated that STS practitioners should conduct empirical case studies that trace carefully how provisional identities and disseminated knowledge claims are stabilized temporarily through networks of heterogeneous actors and “actants” who engage in complex acts of translation and negotiation in real time. Indeed, when he discusses Western scientific achievements and failures in his books and articles, Latour depicts networks as strong and weak connections between people, objects, concepts, and events that cannot be specified independently of the activity of those particular people, objects, concepts, and events. In other words, when presenting the reader with an account of how Western knowledge is fabricated, Latour always displays great sensitivity towards to the spatial orientation and the “traveling” of theory that Said associates with “critical consciousness.” By contrast, his reduction of Jagannath’s tale to an abstract model transforms the story into a saligram: it appears magically, as an ahistorical object waiting to be de-fetishized by the postcolonial studies scholar’s contextualizing insight into historical networks of translation. What Latour’s objectification of literature impedes, therefore, is the appearance of Bharathipura as a “thing” of concern for those in STS.

Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern, Matters of Context

 
The exclusion of postcolonial historical context in Latour’s argument suggests that greater scrutiny should be given to his use of examples that resonate with a variety of global scenarios, be they postcolonial, multi-cultural, or otherwise involving the many local, regional, and national cultural situations systemically interlinked through geographically widespread economic, political, and social “development.” Our aim here is to highlight the effects of Latour’s analysis when it does not meet its own expectations for contextual specificity and situatedness.
 
For example, in his recent Critical Inquiry article, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam,” Latour recounts flipping between C-SPAN 1 and 2 in February of 2003, during the prelude to the Iraq War. On one station, ongoing coverage could be found of the recent Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Latour contends that this event was best understood as a “metamorphosis of an object into a thing” (234). A technology that had long been taken for granted as an “object”–another instrument in America’s technological arsenal–was becoming imbued with rich connections that could be characterized “in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship and poetry . . . . Here, suddenly, in a stroke, an object had become a thing, a matter of fact was considered a matter of great concern” (233-35). At that moment on another station, Latour finds a different process on display in which a “matter of concern” was being transformed into an “object”: a myriad of contradictory responses that had been proffered in relation to the Bush administration’s case for war were now being consolidated into a unified, monolithic narrative that justified preemptive military action. At the UN, “we had an investigation that tried to coalesce, in one unifying, unanimous, solid, mastered object, masses of people, opinions and might” (235).
 
But while Latour considers how these parallel events–broadcast over cable, satellite, and the Internet–can provide insight into the distinction between “things” and “objects,” he fails to address the issue of audience and, therefore, context. Consider that in those televised images of searchers combing the North Texas countryside, most of the footage was concentrated around a small town. As the United States ramped up its war efforts in the Middle East, millions of Muslims around the globe also watched and also registered the shuttle as a thing: an auratic entity–carrying six Americans and an Israeli-whose fall from grace, not far from the U.S. President’s ranch, had come to lie in Palestine, Texas. In light of such lack of contextualization, Latour’s claim rings hollow: “Frightening omen, to launch such a complicated war, just when such a beautifully mastered object as the shuttle disintegrated into thousands of pieces of debris raining down from the sky–but the omen was not heeded; gods nowadays are invoked for convenience only” (236). Perhaps Latour and Jagannath alike view the invocation of the gods as convenient cover for political actions. But for those believers, not only Dalit, but fundamentalists and religious literalists in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these gods do indeed come to life, justifying belief and action.
 
Glib dismissal of current events that resonate in messianic and eschatological theology might allow Latour to present justified criticism of President Bush’s rhetoric, but only by stripping away the significance of C-SPAN as a global, multi-media network, parochializing U.N. actions, and evading the import of his response to these programs as incommensurate with the responses of many believers. Any analysis of President Bush’s rhetoric must account for the religious coding meant for a largely domestic Christian audience. It is conventional wisdom that Bush needs to keep the bloc of the so-called Christian Right happy. However, Latour does not address the tendency towards complex and diverse responses around the globe to the explosion–even though they are relevant to the sorts of issues that Latour seeks to clarify in the Critical Inquiry article: that Critique seems to have given way to conspiracy theory, with the former lending the latter its methodological tools; that Critique has become disabled by its own modernist tendencies, imposing a tautological form of critical reasoning that occludes that which it seeks to critique; and that the work for critical STS is to understand how that historicized and contextualized fact–the “factish” in Pandora’s Hope–actually strengthens rather than weakens the ontology of the fact. Yet the very example of C-SPAN leads us to understand how Latour’s network fails not only to interact with the historical and cultural dimensions of transnational media and communications systems, but also with the significant beliefs that render the media’s “facts” over-determined. It also prompts us to revisit the theme addressed at the beginning of this essay, namely the relation between philosophy and STS. If STS has differentiated itself from philosophy by taking itself to be a mostly descriptive enterprise, then how does Latour justify his implicitly normative use of the factish? While Latour appeals to the factish to show why Dalit beliefs should be respected, he fails to explain why the factish does not likewise support the judgments of those who saw the Shuttle disaster as a divine omen and sign of Judgment, and for those who cultivate such beliefs for political gain.

The avatar haunts media and cyperspace in multiple guises. Nested in online chat rooms and seminars, internet commodity arcades, art installations, game worlds, architectural models, data-shadows, and program algorithms, the avatar has become the face of it-ness, who-ness, and what-ness mediating community and unseating the subject’s Eigentlichkeit (self-possession, the “having” of what is my own).¹ As the visible interface of the psychic drive, the avatar is not so much the double of the subject in the digital field as a kind of “puppet-homunculus” or totem that “drives” the drives. Freud’s notion of psychic drive as “constant force” (konstante kraft), instrumentalized in its goal-directed motricity, becomes newly relevant to the object-oriented worlds of games and internet markets in their subsumption and transformation of subjective properties.² Like the Aristotelian hyle (the causative and self-circular property of a form), avatarity, as I develop the concept here, bears on post-poststructuralist accounts of the destinations of agency in a technical milieu.
 

Parade of the Subjects

 
No theory of the avatar can be divorced from theories of the subject. Subject theory––buoyed in successive waves by the time-lag of French and German translations––predominated in the human sciences from the postwar period through the mid-1990s. Though some argue that it lost traction in the “post-critical” contemporary moment, I contest this idea. Subject theory endures as a “technics of the subject” situated at the juncture of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and media theory, and nourished by subfields as far-flung as systems theory, pragmatism, cybernetics, chaos theory, Heideggerian and Benjaminian notions of techne, Deleuzian vitalism and projections of the virtual, symbolic logic, artificial intelligence, computer programming, prosthetics, genomics, posthumanism, and game theory. The time-line of these disciplinary interactions is uneven, but not so uneven as to obscure the subtle yet generic shift from poststructuralist accounts of subjective impersonalism––from the mid-1990s on––to medial theories of the subject imbued with what French sociologist Georges Friedmann dubs “the technical milieu.”³ A specialist of factory life and subjective submission to the technical environment, Friedmann stands alongside Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon (especially important in conceptualizing a hylomorphic understanding of the human as ontologically utensil, as well as a somato-psychic theory of the existence-mode of objects) among the precursors of Deleuze and Guattari who together most significantly articulated philosophies of machinic expressionism and virtual ontology.⁴ As a set of thinkers, they join Freud and Lacan––the founders of analytic technique, and Heidegger, the premier theorist of technè and Bestand (“standing-reserve,” by which he refers to nature’s latent capacity to be technologically entrained by man), in setting the terms of subject technics. The work of Bernard Stiegler is also especially germane; his La Technique et le temps 1, La faute d’Epiméthée [Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus] examines the sophistic devaluation of technè in the history of philosophy, tracing its retrieval and gradual fusion with epistemè in Enlightenment modernity. Aristotelian distinctions between nature and technology thus give way to the “technicized life,” engendered through biopower, genetic and social engineering (education, marketing), “psychotechnics” (cognitive technologies), “phenomenotechnics” (technologies of memory, consciousness, individuation), and the noosphere of “psychopower” (the program of a new human under conditions of evolutionary complexity, cyberspatial orders of cognition) (276).⁵
 
Technics is of course a neologism in English and is adapted here from Samuel Weber’s translation of Heidegger’s Technik. “Technology” and “Technique,” according to Weber, are inadequate English equivalents because they fail to convey the range of associations subsumed in Heidegger’s usage, which include knowledge, craft, skill, the placing of orders (stock and trade orders, military commands), poeisis, and art (51-72). Arguably, Heidegger’s “Questions Concerning Technology” [alternately translated as “Questing After Technics”] sits at the fulcrum of a burgeoning “technics theory” bibliography comprising Gilbert Simondon’s Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques, Bernard Stiegler’s Time and Technics, Derrida and Stiegler’s Echograhies, Friedrich Kittler’s Network Systems and essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems, Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediaurus and Targets of Opportunity, Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Avital Ronell’s The Test Drive, Alexander Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory and Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia. What distinguishes these works from a host of other titles at the juncture of philosophy and media theory is their default to techne as conceptually constitutive of thought, being, and agency.
 
Subject technics also redounds to an earlier history of systems theory and cybernetics that flourished across disciplines during the Cold War. The short list of references includes Talcott Parsons (whose The Social System, a foundational work in social theory, appeared in 1951), Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Warren McCulloch (celebrated for mathematical modeling of neural networks), Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann (the legendary inventors of information theory, cybernetics, game theory, quantum mechanics). It is also important to mention the engineer Jay Forrester, who introduced core memory and random access magnetic storage in computing and extended systems theory to “world dynamics” using biofeedback models to examine the organization of industries, cities, and environmental situations. The idea of the “open system” emphasizes ways in which systems, interacting with the environment, evolve into new hierarchical structures of organization, and was applied in the fifties and sixties to organismic exchanges between matter and environment, or to instances of negative entropy. Cybernetics led to a further “opening” of the open system onto vistas of genetics and language. Swarms, adaptive and random response models, input/output, complexity, cost/benefit/risk calculations, information spread, allometry, entropy, morphogenesis, pattern recognition, space-to-surface algorithms, autocatalytic networks, world dynamics ––each yielded formal systems governed by structural logics and topologies. Starting in the early 1970s, and following in the steps of Chilean cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann linked autopoiesis to social systems (The Autopoiesis of Social Systems appeared in 1986). Modeled on the life cell, on the construct of a “self”-region patrolled by an autonomous boundary (filtering environmental stimuli to enable a distinct identity to self-create), autopoiesis in its very name heralded a migration of systems theory into the “softer” human sciences, where it was developed by Gregory Bateson, Ilya Prigogine, Friedrich Kittler, Manuel Castells, and Luhmann.
 
For Luhmann, the “systems” subject is self-selecting and impersonal, even in intimacy:
 

today the ego’s Self is no longer called the transcendental Self, but rather identity. The concept does not have a logical, but rather a symbolic relevancy, in that it proves that in a society characterized by predominately impersonal relationships it has proved difficult to find the point at which one can experience oneself as a unity and function as a unity. The ego’s Self is not the objectivity of subjectivity in the transcendental-theoretical sense. The ego’s Self is the result of self-selective processes; and this is precisely why it is also dependent upon others for its being selected by others. The problem now is not enhancement, but selection from among one’s own adaptive capacities.
 

(164-65)

I am prepared to argue, in accord with Peter Sloterdijk (in his short book Derrida, An Egyptian), that subject technics is that unlikely place where Luhmann and Derrida meet.⁶ If Derridean deconstruction may be said to have pushed the history of language philosophy past the known limits of grammatized thought and into the arena of genetic, metabolic and ontological process, Luhmann, it could be argued, re-modeled post-ontological, metabiological logics of system and environment. Derrida converges with Luhmann insofar as deconstruction is the code of late modernity’s unraveling self-description. This means that the “me” versus “not-me” conditions of self-ownership and self-property no longer hold. “Me,” “Mind,” “Interface” and “Face,” “Self” and “Own” – all these self-denominators melt into transmissive circuits.

 
Transmissive circuits, topologies of agency (as in Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s diagram of Lacan’s “Agency of the Letter”), Moebius strips, Klein bottles, Gordian knots, continuous folds, bodies without organs, “allegorithms” (the modal shift from systems of sign to sign reference, to systems of sign and number, adduced by Alex Galloway and McKenzie Wark), each of these represents the “subjectless subjectivities” of technics.⁷ “Hypostacizing process into a super-subject is the error of idealism,” Brian Massumi cautions, but he makes an exception when he invokes “subjectless subjectivity,” as defined by Guattari. “By ‘production of subjectivity,’ [Massumi argues] Guattari does not only mean the actual subjects that emerge in the ontogenetic net articulating context and expression, determining their potential. He also means that the movement of expression is itself subjective, in the sense that it is self-moving and has determinate effects. It is an agency, only without an agent: a subjectless subjectivity” (xxiv). The Lacanian counterpart would be “subjectivization without a subject,” identified with that moment in a patient’s analysis in which he “experiences the fantasy of becoming the drive” (95).
 

Avatarity

 
Who is the “character” of this system-subject? Not to be confused with the protagonist of cyberfiction (epitomized by William Gibson’s “Case” in Neuromancer, who acts like a traditional character despite being “jacked into” a network), the subject of technics, as I am defining it, is really a way of construing the ontology of “what-ness” and “who-ness,” or the “‘It in the I’” of agency, once the subject is framed as cognitive and affective algorithm, or a systemic configuration of the drives.
 
The character could, in this respect, be identified with the avatar. The avatar has emerged in the last ten years as a familiar character-player, custom-built from a commodified menu of enhanced body parts and facial features, and assigned a starring role in game spaces, MMORGs (the acronym for Massive Multi-player Online Role Play Game), and online communities like The Sims, Second Life, Eve Online, EverQuest, Proxy and World of Warcraft. The avatar might also be identifiable as a totem; less a second self or alter-ego than an animal companion or emblem.⁸ Avatar identity, in other words, is no fixed entity; it can be an anthropological proxy, but it might equally well take an indistinct form that is pure materiality, what Alex Galloway describes, in relation to the hive or swarm, as an “autochtonous material phenomenon unrestrained by the projection of a human spirit within” (“StarCraft” 93). In Galloway’s framework, the avatar is possessed of agential characteristics operating within a projected technical imaginary (something like cyberspace) that is held apart from an actual body. Here the avatar stands in marked contrast to Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of l’intrus (the “intruder” hosted by the human). After receiving a heart transplant, Nancy wrote: “If my own heart has deserted me, up to what point was it ‘mine,’ my proper organ? Was it even an organ? . . . . There is an intruder in me and I become a stranger to myself” (13-15).⁹ Where the implant represents the alienability of self-property it falls short of dispensing entirely with the fiction of a “human spirit within.” By comparison, the avatar takes shape as the prosthetic extension of desubjectivated agency, as in a joystick or mouse.
 
Philologically speaking, the word avatar derives from avatara, a Sanskrit term that breaks down into ava––”down”––and tarati––”he goes, passes beyond.” The word is traced by Gregory Little’s 1999 A Manifesto for Avatars to the Fourth Teaching in the Bhagavad gita, specifically to Krishna’s phrase, “when goodness grows weak, when evil increases, I make myself a body.” “Originally referring to the incarnation of Hindu deities,” according to Little, “avatars in the computing realms have come to mean any of the various ‘strap-on’ visual agents that represent the user in increasing numbers of 2 and 3D world” (2). As distinct from the cyborg, avatars are more fully fused with the human user. Little claims that the cyborg (christened in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline’s article on “Cyborgs in Space”), “incorporates body and prostheses in the forms of mechanical, optical, coded, pharmacological, electronic, telematic, genetic, and biological agents, hosted by an original human consciousness to form a unified but hybrid lived body” (Little 2). By contrast the avatar “is a mythic figure with its origin in one world and projected or passing through a form of representation appropriate to a parallel world. The avatar is a delegate, a tool or instrument allowing an agency to transmit signification to a parallel world” (3).
 
The nature of this parallel world was famously characterized some fifteen years ago by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash. As he describes Hiro’s avatar:
 

By drawing the moving three-dimensional image as a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.
 
So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo this universe is known as the Metaverse.
 

(24)

Hiro has, of course, created “a piece of software called an avatar,” one that is joined by a multitude of others on the “Street,” avatars that communicate with each other in the Metaverse that date, join crowds of groupies around clubs, and act out any of innumerable fantasies:

Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional––these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light––hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people–– persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals . . . . A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death.
 

(41)

The avatars of Snow Crash have spawned endless contemporary offspring at the nexus of film, literature, game culture, and biomedia. The last is exemplified by Eugene Thacker’s experiments with digital anatomy and virtual surgery in which animations seem to fly through the body or produce morphs that exceed anatomical classification.

 
The ludic dimension of self-transformation in avatar culture puts us in mind of the Freudian sense of “play drive”––the drive unfixed and allowing for infinite possibilities for the driver without consequences in the real world. In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, retranslated in the recent Penguin edition as Drives and their Fates, Freud wrote of the capacity of drives “to stand in vicariously for one another and to change their objects with ease,” thereby achieving “feats far removed from their original functions” (20). The allusion here to the changeability of objects, to living vicariously, and to the performance of uncommon feats, like flying and passing through material barriers, establishes kinship ties between the avatar and the “driver” or drive-transformer of Freudian Trieb. At issue here is the possible connection between the psychic avatar of the Freudian-Lacanian drive and the gamer avatar who, as a kind of holograph of drive, personifies the impersonalism of the id.
 
The name of Snow Crash character Da5id reinforces this interpretive drift. At first glance, it registers as a misprint of “David.” On second reading, it homonymically sounds out “Da Id,” the Id, or the It. Recall here that Freud’s” Es, Ich, Uber-Ich was Latinized in the James Strachey Standard Edition by the triad “id,” “ego,” “superego,” and that ever since Bruno Bettleheim scathingly criticized the Strachey translation (in his Freud and Man’s Soul) there has been heated interpretive controversy centered on these particular terms. Taking off from Adam Phillips’s thought-provoking observation that “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex” (xx), Leo Bersani distills a theory of impersonal intimacy from das Es, going back to the book that inspired Freud’s theory of the Id, Georg Groddeck’s 1923 The Book of the It [Das Buch vom Es].¹⁰ Groddeck had famously affirmed that
 

man is animated by the Unknown, there is in him an “Es,” an “It”, some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does, and what happens to him. The affirmation “I live” is only conditionally correct, it expresses only a small and superficial part of the fundamental principle: “Man is lived by the ‘It.’”
 

(11)

Groddeck’s concept of “das Es” was itself borrowed from Nietzsche, who used it for “whatever in our nature is impersonal and subject to natural law” (23). In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche curbed the hubristic “I” by making it subject to the “itness” of thought:

a thought comes when “it” wants to and not when “I” want it, so that it’s a falsification of the fact to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but that this “it” is precisely that old, celebrated “I” is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, in no way an “immediate certainty.” After all, we’ve already done too much with this “it thinks”: this “it” already contains an interpretation of the event and is not part of the process itself.
 

(17)

The “itness” of “I” underscores the element of foreignness within the subject, a force-field of blind energy that serves as thought’s predicate. Thinking as “itness,” other to or outside of self-consciousness becomes key to any theory of subject technics.

 
Something of this “itness” informs Lacan’s revisionist account of the Freudian drive. In “Démontage de la pulsion” (“The Deconstruction of the Drive”), a chapter of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan reinstated the distinction between psychical drive (Trieb) and biological instinct often blurred in the English translation of Freud. Lacan maintained that
 

Drive (pulsion) is not thrust (poussée). Trieb is not Drang, if only for the following reason. In an article written in 1915––that is, a year after the Einfûrung zum Narzissmus, you will see the importance of this reminder soon––entitled Trieb und Triebschicksale––one should avoid translating it by avatar, Triebwandlungen would be avatar, Schicksal is adventure, vicissitude––in this article, then, Freud says that it is important to distinguish four terms in the drive: Drang, thrust; Quelle, the source; Objekt, the object; Ziel, the aim.
 

(Lacan 162)

Interestingly for my purposes, in trying to avoid confusing drive with the thrust or vicissitudes of destiny Lacan clears a conceptual space for translating Triebwandlungen as avatar. Cautioning against the avatar, he nonetheless enters it on the oblique into the discussion of the semantics of the drive. It is important to note that he italicizes the English word avatar in the original French text while discussing the connotations of Freud’s term Triebschicksale: “il faut éviter de traduire [Triebschicksale] par avatar, si c’était Triebwandlungen, ce serait avatar, Schicksal c’est aventure, vicissitude.” In Freud’s German, die Triebverwandlung and der Triebumwandlung (used interchangeably as references to transformation) are invoked to emphasize the reversibility of select pairs of drives: sadism-masochism, voyeurism-exhibitionism, love-hate.

Für beide hier betrachteten Triebbeispiele gilt die Bemerkung, dass die Triebverwandlung durch Verkehrung der Aktivität in Passivität und Wendung gegen die Triebregung gegen die eigene Person eigentllich niemals am ganzen Betrag der Triebregung vorgenommen wird. Die ältere active Triebrichtung bleibt in gewissem Ausmasse neben der jüngeren passiven bestehen, auch wenn der Prozess der Triebumwandlung sehr ausgiebig ausgefalen ist.
 

(223, emphasis added)

[Translation: It is true of both kinds of drive under consideration here that transformations by reversal of activity into passivity and turning back on the self never actually involve the whole amount of the drive impulse. To some extent, the older, active tendency continues to exist alongside the later, passive one, even when the transformation has been very extensive.]

For Freud, the intellectual stakes of drive conversion include emotional ambivalence, a higher power of egoic defense, and the inhibition of destructive or self-destructive impulses, whereas for Lacan, psychic drive is principally of interest because it interferes with aim (Ziel), thereby restructuring the process of sublimation. Lacan’s arguments, however rich in potential applications, beg the central, interrelated questions: Why select the anomalous word “avatar” (supported by no standard German dictionary) as the appropriate translation for Triebwandlung? Why was it imperative to replace “vicissitudes” with the surrogate term “transformation,” variants of which are found elsewhere in Freud’s essay?

 
One explanation is that the anomalous term “avatar” was in fact just what Lacan was looking for despite professing the contrary. The notion of avatarity arguably performs theoretical heavy lifting for him, enabling him to align Zeil with the physics of destination rather than the metaphysics of destiny. Lacan, one could say, functions the avatar, in the manner of a gamer theorist. Tuned to the nuances of Freud’s references to verwandeln and umwandeln in Drives and Their Fates, Lacan projects the avatar as something on the order of a drive-transformer capable of reprogramming the Freudian elements invested as drive (triebbesetzt) (150). As avatarity, the drive is inserted into a new sequence of terms that involve play. Starting from the loaded expression “la pulsion en fait le tour,” Lacan spins out le tour as driving around something, as escape, evasion or fraud [le tour d’escamotage] and as le trick (in the sense of to play a trick, to be tricked, to turn a trick) (152-53). The effect of this gaming, of this play on the terms of transformation, directional change, and reverse targeting, is to unseal the fate of the drives, relaunching the intellectual adventure of the avatar as proxy or object-cause of desire.¹¹
 
For Lacan, the butterfly inspires phobic terror in the Wolfman because the Wolfman recognizes that “the beating of little wings is not so very far from the beating of causation, of the primal stripe marking his being for the first time with the grid of desire” (76). Here the wings act like a kind of faire causatif, a proxy or avatar that sets subject-formation in motion and resets the path of the drives. In both Freud and Lacan the avatar comes off as distinctly threatening and persecutory, not in the same way as the Other of the interiorized social gaze, but as a causative force––inchoate and pressuring––beyond intelligible grasp. Operating like an adaptor, transformer, or refreshed game-start, the Lacanian Triebwandlungen gives us avatar agency as the unsettling yet exciting specter of subject “cause” temporarily unhitched from aim.
 
Contemporary gamer theorists have emphasized the “driven” gamer whose “move acts” translate the player character’s position in the game world. Move acts give concrete expression to the abstract idea of Triebwandlungen; they swivel, reverse, and orient the flows of agency. They target an object that can easily shift course and aim. Alex Galloway writes that move acts “are commonly effected by using a joystick or analog stick, or any type of movement controller . . . in games like Tetris where the player does not have a strict player character avatar, move acts still come in the form of spatial translation, rotation, stacking, and interfacing of game tokens” (Gaming 22). Following Galloway’s argument, move acts can stand in for avatars, but this does not prevent them from giving full suasion to avatarity in its multiple meanings as targeted pulsion, power tool, or proxy of multiple personality.
 

Subject-Avatar: A User’s Manual

 
To equate the avatar with drive reinforces the purely abstract character of the subject of technics at the expense of the popular image. But this is to ignore potentially interesting theoretical connections between libidinal and cultural economy. It is surely no trivial symptom that avatars are occasionally referred to as “toons” (see Figure 1).
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Figure 1.

Djnaughtyjay Valentine Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG 2006 Digital print on canvas 87 x 114 cm Image used courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

 

 
They have a recognizable cartoonish look, part special effects, part mutant creature, that has given rise to imaginative work by artists like JODI, Toni Dove, Keith Cottingham (Fictitious Portraits 1996), Masaki Fujihata (Nuzzle Afar), Eddo Stern, John Klima, and the Italian duo Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 010010110101101.ORG), whose recent exhibition, 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, plucks its “subjects” from Second Life. The artists are clearly wise to the way in which Second Life changes out the tradition of character Bildung in favor of building your character in a capitalist economy. Building equals buying (in Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life). The players of Second Life opt for a kind of “digital Darwinism” (Wark) as they adapt the principles and procedures of cosmetic surgery––augmentation, enhancement, nose jobs, liposuction, botox––to virtual body-construction. Generating a portrait gallery that warrants comparison with Facebook Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of celebrities, or Diane Arbus-inspired “family albums” of marginals, freaks and superheros, 13 Most Beautiful Avatars tests the limits of communitarian “life-sharing” against the online conventions of a post-human meat market. As Jenny Diski notes,
 

eventually your avatar becomes a caricature of what you have always wanted to be, few can resist producing the tinseltown dream version. Second Life is almost entirely inhabited by impossibly long-legged, big-breasted, muscle-rippling blondes with lips so plumped full of what would be collagen in the real world that they make Ivana Trump’s mouth look mean. The males are much the same only taller.

Despite this conformism, avatars move beyond the commercialized beauty ideal towards an aesthetics of virtual surface and augmented bodies: skin, jewels, and tattoos, extreme morphology, intersectional race and gender, cross-speciation. Avatars in this way reinforce the utopian conviction that, in the words of the Mattes partners, “the most radical action you can do is to subvert yourself.”

 
Avatars tender the hope of a surrogate self capable of unseating the lexicon of “self” and “own” underwriting possessive individualism. Though with avatars, as one critic puts it, “the cloud of raw data has finally solidified into a body and a face,” they can also be regarded as screen-savers of the ego; as decoys masking the thingness of data and the autonomy of the drive. As Laetitia Wilson notes with respect to the game Proxy, “your agent suddenly really does have a ‘life of its own.’” Wilson complicates the notion of avatar agency with the notion of proxy, defined within the confines of the online game of the same name as an “interpassive object” that mediates program and cybernetic dopplegänger:¹²
 

Proxy is an art: software and game fusion that playfully stretches the parameters of each of these spheres while addressing notions of subjectivity, community and surveillance and juggling issues of agency and interpassivity. As a “player” one can adopt an “agent” or series of “agents.” These agents function as avatars, as information watchdogs, seekers and battlers in a variety of information spaces (textual and graphical). A given agent is personalised with your chosen psychological profile and the aim is to maintain stability in your agent’s psychological state. This interpassive object––as a mediator between oneself and the game-space––is thus a surrogate self that demands appropriate action or dialogue to avoid psychological problems; one’s game score decreases when the program “detects” feelings of anxiety or alienation in one’s agent. Individual agency is extended into the game-space as one is required to act appropriately, according to the “rules” of the “game” and in response to dialogue with other agents (other players).

The critical issue at stake here, clearly, is that “control over your symbolic stand-in is denied.” What we have is not just feedback, but blow-back; a pressure exerted by the proxy drive. Galloway’s correlative to the proxy is the informatic avatar. “Any informatic instance of a ‘role,’ [he writes] is thus always subtended by the necessary and continuous input of ‘rolls’ in the form of random-number generation and other nonrandom informatic inputs. Identity becomes mathematics, and mathematics becomes identity” (“StarCraft” 92). Galloway enables a subject of technics characterized by a constantly self-updating set of algorithms that mold bodily form, choreograph gestural affect, and redirect the drives.

 
How is pure drive made domus or environmental form? What would avatar architecture be? One is easily led to assume that it would simply replicate the period styles and signature designs of the “real world.” In Snow Crash, this hypothesis is borne out. Metaverse architecture is divided between garish, Las Vegas-style structures, “freed from the constraints of physics and finance,” and better neighborhoods of the programmer elite. Here “you can see ‘Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy Victoriana’” (26). Simulation is the rule in MORGS like the Sims or Second Life: prime estates reproduce icons and blue-chip buildings, from Harvard University to a high tech Swedish Embassy. But there are clearly other models of avatar environments, identifiable perhaps as “The algorithm made me do it” architecture. Here the program is allowed to run, self-evolving according to principles of autopoeisis, producing architecture that is dynamically responsive and stochastic. Such experimentalism has of course been realized for several decades now, influencing blob architecture and preoccupying research teams at places like MIT’s Media Lab, and stimulating projects like Façade Ecology (2003-06), a recent collaboration between Small Design Firm and EAR Studio that transformed a building skin into a responsive membrane coated with informational organisms. Many recent projects have contrived a subject of technics in architectural form. “Body Temperature Scan” by the Italian design studio laN+ experiments not just with body-reading surfaces, but also with avatar morphologies that re-scale human size and proportion. In “Sangre,” a project by Hernan Diaz Alonso, a vitalist, corpuscular architectural avatar is built out of the formal properties of blood. In “Hypnocenter” (see Figure 2), by the French firm R and Sie, a man lives in a cage of giant vertebra-algorithms made solid––encircled by screen monitors, or perhaps it is architecture as brain or coextensive cognitive milieu.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Figure 2.

Paris Hypnochamber By R&Sie (François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux)

 

 
Arguably, “the man” is not so much imprisoned by technics as ingrown to its environmental and neuronal structure. Subject technics in this instance merges with a techtonics that is invasive of the urban surround. The program runs rampant, submerging facades, encircling a lamp-post, and charging ahead full-throttle to infinity.
 
Avatarity, identified with a construct of the techno-subject as “driver” of the drive or “the algorithm made me do it” form, is adduced here to be continuous with theories of technical milieus, subjective impersonalism and psychoanalytic neutrality. In this sense, “theory” is given a “second life” as media or subject technics. The question remains, however, why one might want to hold on to a de-ontologized subject of technics. What accounts for the enduring investment in an impersonal subject? One explanation is that subjective impersonalism keeps the cloying individualism of mainstream humanism at bay and prepares the conditions for a new universal subject, a generic subject as Alain Badiou would have it, modeled through set theory and mathematical ontology.¹³ Subject technics also endures because it is congenial to capitalism. Avatars, as we have seen, commoditize the component “features”‘ of top brand bodies and buildings, promote “safe” communitas through online zones of sociality, re-sell already sold properties (land, houses, institutions), and inflate the value of trademark and signature by effectively marketing identities, ideas and products. But they also, countervailingly, contour a parallel universe characterized by a de-privatized commons. Avatarity in this instance might well refer to an equalized playing field of egoic drives and aims that undercuts fantasies of omnipotence and possessive individualism. If, as Brian Massumi suggests, one takes the theological element out of gaming (removing the trigger for targeting goals and the reward system for scoring), what remains is play or the topology of a ludic circus in which multiperspectival common angles, gestural syncopations, and convergent affects produce a fluctuating, gradient field of individuation and de-individuation. For Massumi, ever the Deleuzian, avatars can become agents of a technological utopia. With their high-performing motion sensors, gravity-defying power to jump worlds, and capacity for becoming subject and other at the same time, avatars have the potential of making the virtual feel.¹⁴ For Stiegler, something like this avatarity is identified with process-thinking, programmed into future robotics (which will emphasize the reproducibility of psychomotor as well as motor skills). Stiegler glimpses an evolutionary model based on (Simondonian) transindividuation that gives new life to experimental phenomenology (Prendre 184). I have emphasized that the avatar embodies the structural condition of the drive’s expression, its performative vicissitudes or Triebwandlungen that substitutes for a Freudian metaphysics of destiny (Schicksale). In this sense, the avatar is a partly-subjectified, partly impersonalized vicissitude of the drive. As a subject of technics, the avatar is not the idealized double of the player-subject (which is the naive concept of avatar), but a transformer of fates, at once independent and mimetic of some modicum of subjective agency.
 

“Books that teach how to dance–– There are writers, who, by presenting the impossible as possible and speaking of morality and genius as if both were merely a mood, a caprice, produce a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if one were to get up on tip-toe and simply had to dance for joy.”
 

–––Nietzsche, “From the Souls of Artists and Writers” (139)

Testing

 
Leaping right in I offer the following as a way to find one’s footing in what follows. Despite the epigraph from Human all too Human, this is not a study of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes up, but the text is not about him. For that matter Elias, Marx, Kierkegaard, de Man, Plato, and Derrida all come up, but the text is not about them. It is about dance and philosophical reflection as they are taken up by these figures. What recommends these figures is that they thematize different but related aspects of the matter at hand, and they do so with different degrees of intensity. In Marx dancing appears, as it were, in passing. In Nietzsche it returns eternally. Both, however, are concerned with the limits and force of philosophical reflection, a concern that achieves a distinctly reflexive urgency in the fashionable latecomers, Derrida and de Man. This said, what follows has no ambition to be either a philosophy of dance or a history of the relation between philosophers and dancers. Instead, this is a text that seeks primarily to raise questions about dance by detailing how dance is staged within philosophical reflection. In effect, it pushes off from the hardly controversial hunch that there is more to dance than we might otherwise think, and that this “more” becomes accessible when tracing, however erratically, the way philosophical reflection (of the sort embodied in Nietzsche’s remarks above) puts dance to work.
 
Specifically, I am proposing to speculate on the way dance figures in the work of philosophical exemplification. That is, the procedure, altogether routine, whereby the labor of abstraction is interrupted in order, through recourse to an example, to concretize a particular thought. This interruption need not be announced––”for example”––indeed, as in the case of Nietzsche’s remarks, it may in effect engulf the labor of abstraction, providing it with an animating figure. But an interruption it remains. Doubtless, one of the reasons Nietzsche is something of a philosophical renegade derives from the way his entire corpus is something of a philosophical interruption––as de Man, following Schlegel, will say, a permanent parabasis. Be that as it may, a striking thing about one of his favorite interruptive devices, dance, is the way it (or its avatars, leaping, jumping, pirouetting, etc.) races back and forth over its semantic status as a figure, an exemplary point of reference (when Kierkegaard appeals to the ballet), and as a designation of the very gesture of exemplification itself. Indeed, in attempting to engage this racing I have turned to my titular motif, “spins”––a term now capable of signifying interpretation, move, and turn.
 
This text then unfurls as a series of passes, spins, over its animating hunch regarding dance. What repeats in each spin is a stratified reflection on how, in effect, dance puts philosophy on edge. That is, first, a reflection on how the gesture of philosophical exemplification is exemplified, even codified, in the example of dance, and second, a reflection on how philosophical discourse appeals to the example of dance to articulate both its relation to its own limits (the problem of reference), and its relation to the (an)other world conjured through its critique of the world to which it refers (the problem of revolution). What emerges is an admittedly eccentric genealogy of the philosophical maneuvering that, if we are to believe Perry Anderson, came to a head in the postmodern, a condition whose emergence was prompted by the belated and thus decisive encounter of Charles Olson (or Black Mountain College) and Jean-François Lyotard. Important here is not the postmodern as such, but the way the concept has come to serve as a way to think the socio-historical break I invoked under the heading of “revolution.” That dance, precisely in the way it is deployed to figure, to refer to the social link and the question of leading––or, stated etymologically, of hegemony–– insistently comes up here is part of what suggests, perhaps even hypnotically, that there is, as I said, more to be said both about and with it.
 

One

 
When in 1968 Norbert Elias republished the dissertation he had written with Karl Mannheim, The Civilizing Process, he added a substantial new introduction to volume one, The History of Manners. As its opening paragraphs clarify, Elias is keen to establish the relevance of a study originally conceived and written in the wake of World War II to a present marked by imperial wars, anti-colonial struggle, and the insurgency of groups later referred to as “the new social movements,” just to pick out some of the more well-recognized challenges to the increasingly problematical relation between capital and civilization. Never shy about appealing to the power of theory, Elias establishes the relevance of his study by teasing out some of its important theoretical innovations. His introduction situates the project at the point at which figural language gestures toward what it would otherwise have trouble getting at:
 

The concept of figuration has been introduced precisely because it expresses what we call “society” more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a “system” or “totality” beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals . . . . What is meant by the concept of the figuration can be conveniently explained by reference to social dances. They are, in fact, the simplest example that could be chosen. One should think of a mazurka, a minuet, a polonaise, a tango, or rock ‘n’ roll. The image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine states, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist and feudal systems as figurations. By using this concept we can eliminate the antithesis, resting finally on different values and ideals, immanent today in the use of the words “individual” and “society.”
 

(261-62)

Elias goes on to rephrase Yeats’s point in “Among School Children”––that one cannot know the dancer from the dance––and stresses that while dance is nevertheless relatively independent of specific dancers, it cannot be treated as a separable “mental construction.” Imagine something like the eidos of the tango. Indeed, for Elias figuration names both the differently scaled and paced systems of Durkheimean interdependencies that interest him, and the properly social fact that their explanations and the “tools” that enable them belong to these very systems. In effect, sociology has partnered, or paired up, with society.

 
So what is Elias telling us about dance? Insofar as dance exemplifies figuration it is through figuration that one is obliged to sidle up to dance. As the cited passage makes clear, Elias appeals to figuration in order to transgress, that is disclose, a certain disciplinary limit. Specifically, figuration helps one get at an enabling insight of what for several decades has gone by the name of social constructivism, that is, the proposition that the presumed agents or bearers of social relations are themselves the products of those very relations. They are not simply products in the sense that they see themselves this way, but they are––down to the very matter of their being––social constructs. Now, truth be told, Elias does not explicitly advance this sort of vigorous constructivism, but his entire effort to demonstrate how affective thresholds of disgust, shame, and civility are rendered historical through the means by which specific societies identify and regulate such thresholds assumes, if followed to the end of the line, precisely such a view. In this he is clearly a “fellow traveler” of the Frankfurt School, although his relation to Marxism was always more ambivalent than theirs, which was ambivalent enough.
 
Figuration then falls into step with concepts like mediation and articulation. Like them it expressly designates the Moebian interface between the inside and the outside of the agent, and the inside and outside of the structure, or as Elias puts it, the individual and society. The individual is not in society like an animal in a cage (whether iron or not). Instead, the individual is in society the way speaking, at least for Saussure, is in language. Sensing that sociology (at least in the western European tradition) cannot think outside the box, that is, cannot understand the preposition “in” without converting it into a designation of containment and therefore distributing it across the divide between container and contained, Elias feels compelled to introduce figuration. As if to concede but also thereby accentuate the concept’s strangeness, he immediately seeks to exemplify it. Hence the appeal to dance.
 
But before elaborating further what this tells us about dance, consider the gesture of exemplification itself. On the one hand, although figuration might be opaque to sociologists, it is perhaps a little too self-evident (meaningfully opaque?) to students of literature, especially those aware of the traditions and practices traced by Auerbach in his probing meditation, “Figura,” or, to invoke a post-de Manian rhetoric, to those familiar with the concept of figural language. Might this not suggest that the gesture of exemplification is an apotropaic one? Is Elias gesturing toward exemplification not in order to render the strange familiar but to fend off a certain reading, specifically a reading in which the figural would install itself at precisely the point where agency and structure can no longer be either differentiated or confused? To invoke the intellectual high point of the Clinton administration, perhaps the decisive matter is not what “is” means, but what “in” means. On the other hand, setting aside without discarding the apotropaic possibility, the gesture nevertheless assumes the profile of what Austin in How to do Things with Words calls a performative, that is, in reaching across from the theoretical to the quotidian, in referring to a world of readers not already prepared to follow his theoretical lead, Elias makes exemplification act out something like the Moebian interface of figuration, where the meaning of a text is in its readers the way speaking, to invoke an earlier example, is in language. On the one hand and on the other, together they join the figural and the performative, reminding us not only that the apotropaic is trope-like, but that the act of exemplification is also a feint, a dip where the quotidian has already slipped into or out of the philosophical, the text into or out of the reader whose lack of familiarity with figuration is then disclosed as a mirage. As Nietzsche said about those books that make us get up on tip-toe and dance, presenting the impossible as possible, genius becomes capricious, morality a mere tone.
 
This implies, does it not, that Elias’s turn to dance is already part of what he wants us to import into figuration from dance. And vice versa. Dance, insofar as it both exemplifies figuration and exemplification itself, does so because dance taps out the fleeting but impassable frontier between an inside and an outside that in arising everywhere belongs to the endless, though hardly seamless, referential encounter between theory and society, or, if one prefers (although the differences matter), between thought and world. Important here is not the leap from dance as stylized movements to dance as example, for the example, however theoretically rich, is nothing more than steps and movements, but the spin out on the other side of the frontier negotiated by the concept of figuration from among the concepts Deleuze and Guattari, as if in commemoration of their own relation, call friends. “Dancin’ with myself,” indeed.
 
This said, historians of popular dance would certainly not miss the trajectories–– popular/elite, collective/singular––sketched in Elias’s list of examples. But precisely because this list is an example within an example, it points beyond its contents. It thus invites consideration of what Elias actually knows of the dances listed. The following excerpt from “Biographical Interview with Norbert Elias” is suggestive. In discussing Elias’s Nazi-provoked exile in Paris, the interviewer asks:
 

In which quarter of Paris did you live? Probably Montparnasse; I lived in a hotel. It was very nice to go dancing at the Apache, near the Bastille, and to sit at the cafés in Montparnasse. You could eat very well at cheap restaurants, and meet everybody––except French people. But at the same time it was a very difficult time, the only time I ever went hungry because my money had run out.
 

(Reflections 50)

This exchange refers to a context marked by frustration, specifically Elias’s frustration with being excluded from Paris and the French despite his command of the language and his appreciation for French intellectual traditions. It is intriguing that the experience of dance figures here. Intriguing as well that Elias liked to dance at a place called the Apache. The term “apache” actually entered the French language through the exertions of Emile Darsy at Le Figaro when, in the early years of the twentieth century, he introduced “apache” (modeled, it turns out, on a eighteenth-century British appropriation of “Mohawk”) to designate Parisian gangs given to various forms of urban violence and crime. With an ethnographic ignorance to rival that of people rabid about the right to name athletic teams “redskins,” “chiefs,” and the like, the French adopted this instance of rebarbative “primitivism,” and happily used it to name clubs and bars that may or may not have catered to such gangs, but which obviously promised patrons a rowdy, even wild (Darsy picked the term up from American stories of the “wild west” being translated at the time) atmosphere in which so called apache dancing (an especially aggressive, even misogynistic form of gymnastic gyrating) almost certainly took place.

 
In the absence of reliable witnesses it is impossible to know whether Elias was, as we say, dancing on the tables at the Apache. In the end, this is probably only interesting, but not important. What is important is that this example dips the concept of “figuration” into an interesting genealogy, one that becomes clear when in addition to all the other edges evoked and finessed by Elias––foreigner, Jew, intellectual (just to name a few)––one recognizes here Marx’s engagement with Hegel and the secret of fetishism. It is significant that in Capital Volume I Marx has occasion to deploy his famous figure of corporal inversion both in the postface to the second edition (where he is acknowledging and settling the debt with Hegel) and in his analysis of the commodity. In the first, he proposes husking the dialectic from its mystical shell by recognizing that with Hegel “it is standing on its head” (103). In the second, he describes the commodity:
 

but as soon as it [his example is that of a table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
 

(163-64)

The implication is clear, namely that transcendental idealism is the commodity in philosophical form, or spun in the opposite direction, that the commodity’s grotesque ideas are Hegelian. Equally clear is the assertion––rendered stenographic in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach––that in order to cross from an interpretation to a transformation of the world, a revolution, Marxism must break, and break decisively, with the commodified forms of philosophical discourse. Marxism, however faithful it must be to objects, cannot, in the end, allow itself to be thought by them, a risk actually entertained by Marx when slightly later in Capital I he presents Marxism as the content of what commodities might say about their value if provided an interpreter. He calls this sustained instance of prosopopoeia an example (ein Beispiel).

 
So, to put the matter concisely, is figuration––precisely to the extent that it rediscovers society in the individual and the individual in society––an expression of this vamp toward the philosophical repudiation of the world of the commodity? Or, what is the difference between dancing tables (note Marx’s dependency on the figure of catachresis here) and dancing that might take place on tables? Reading these as two versions of the same question, we are confronted with the truly wild, perhaps on the way to the postmodern, articulation of the co-implication of philosophy and dance. Both Elias and Marx write as though dance figures and figures essentially on the path from reference to revolution. Surely this is not the dance, the writing of the chorus, we thought we knew.
 

Two

 
Those who have wrestled with the angelic corpus of Kierkegaard (including, of course, those texts authored by him as well as those authored by his pseudonymic masks) know that it is a body of material sprawled across the discursive practices of philosophy, theology and poetry, to mention only the most obvious landmarks. Indeed, many of his texts worry precisely over the matter of which law of genre they may be in violation of, a worry, in fact an anxiety, that he passed along to Heidegger when, in 1955, the latter sought to separate thinking out from philosophy in a way pre-dicted by Kierkegaard’s struggle to separate faith from theology. At issue here is an edgy reflection on the question of “what is philosophy?” that finds trenchant expression in, among other places, that most autobiographical of texts, Fear and Trembling. If, as has been argued, the example of dance is likely to haunt any such gesture of delimitation––especially when executed with passion––then one is not surprised to find the figure of the ballet dancer leaping and spinning around in de Silentio’s text.¹ Its most sustained appearance takes place in that section of the text designated, “Preliminary Expectoration”:
 

It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it––but this knight [the knight of faith] does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth––and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian––only that knight [the knight of faith] can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.
 

(41)

This passage follows an extended stalker’s monologue in which de Silentio describes his pilgrimage to the abode of the knight of faith and his effort once there to discern in the knight evidence of what in the passage is referred to as his sublimity. Restating in narrative form the relation between public and private reasoning as formulated by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” (in private we can give no sign of our critical and if so desired public repudiation of our professional obligations), de Silentio draws attention to the paradoxical and ultimately absurd character of the knight of faith’s singular relation to the absolute. As he puts it in the very steep climb, “Problema II,”

the paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual––to recall a distinction in dogmatics rather rare these days––determines his relation to the universal [the ethical] by his relation to the absolute [god], not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.
 

(70)

As if channeling Spinoza’s misnamed pantheism, de Silentio insists that under such circumstances one loves god not by dutifully loving one’s neighbor, but simply by truly loving (although presumably not coveting––even in one’s heart) one’s neighbor. Seeking outward signs of this paradox, of the “optical telegraphy” signaling its movements, de Silentio stalks the knight of faith, not leaving him “for a second,” watching him walk about town, go to work, go to church and so on. Enter the ballet dancer.

 
In the passage cited de Silentio, like Elias, uses the dancer in order to exemplify a crucial distinction, that between the knights (NB: plural) of the infinite and the knight of faith. However, instead of resorting to exemplification in order to leap from the theoretical to the ordinary, de Silentio assumes the reader’s familiarity with, on the one hand, classical ballet, and on the other, with standards of aesthetic execution that only a trained eye would pick up. What the trained eye will pick up is precisely what the stalker does not pick up in the knight of faith who could otherwise pass for a tax collector, namely, the barely perceptible “waver” that separates his ordinary acts from the movement of infinity that, in not yet being doubled, syncopates his being. By contrast, the singular knight of faith is capable of leaping directly and imperceptibly into his positions––first, second, third and so on. Something like a pas de chat, but done in reverse. So let us pose the decisive question again: what must dance, here ballet, be such that it can exemplify, can instantiate this edge between faith and philosophy? Or, as is becoming more obvious, what must philosophical exemplification be if dance must carry it out?
 
A response, if not an answer, can begin by observing that dancing makes two other entrances in Fear and Trembling. The first occurs earlier in “Preliminary Expectorations” where, among other things, de Silentio gets the concept of “the leap” off his chest:
 

It is commonly supposed that what faith produces is no work of art, that it is a coarse and boorish piece of work, only for the more uncouth natures, but it is far from being that. The dialectic of faith is the finest and most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can make the mighty trampoline leap whereby I cross over into infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer’s, twisted in my childhood, and therefore it is easy for me.
 

(36)

As the Hongs note, this is an early invocation of the one thing “everybody” knows about Kierkegaard: the leap. Thus, it is likely significant that here the leap is paired with dance, indeed types of dance, a pairing that carries out the confirmation of the claim that faith is indeed a work of art. Awkward though it sounds, this is the proper way to make this point because if the leap is precisely the way to supplement what is otherwise strictly conceptual (the non-aesthetic), then the leap is the trace of the work of art in de Silentio’s text. It is also an example. As such, its pairing with dance is an adumbration of the later encounter with the knight of faith who can leap into position without wavering. In designating the cross over into infinity, the tightrope dancer also prepares us for the passage, the referential back and forth between thought and world that the knight of faith imperceptibly embodies. But the shadows cast here reach much further ahead than that. In fact, they would appear to reach all the way into the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra where, in section three, we witness, along with Zarathustra, another tightrope performance (the German here, Seiltänzer, makes the link to dancing obvious), indeed one in which a high wire leap (this time by a demonic partner) allegorizes the overcoming of “the last man” by the “over-man,” in effect, the revolution. Although Nietzsche’s awareness of Kierkegaard’s corpus comes, as it were, too late (Walter Kaufmann says 1888), it is clear that both writers find something compelling in figuring fundamental concerns of their thought in this particular way. Indeed it is this figuring of figuring that is so striking, and it is crucial that Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future had to generate a non-Kierkegaardian repudiation of Hegel to get off the ground.

 
The third and final appearance of the dancer takes place in “Problema II” now in verbal form:
 

Anyone who does not perceive this [Abraham’s absolute inability to explain the necessity of sacrificing the long awaited son] can always be sure that he is no knight of faith, but the one who perceives it will not deny that even the most tired of tragic heroes dances along in comparison with the knight of faith, who only creeps along slowly.
 

(77)

Here, a new negation-fraught contrast is introduced between the knight of faith and the tragic hero, a contrast designed to clarify the importance of Abraham’s speed, or lack thereof (one thinks here of Kafka’s waiter). Perhaps because there is no symmetry other than structural between the tragic hero and the knight of the infinite, dancing is apparently set opposite the knight of faith who, faithful to the topical motif of procrastination, creeps along. As if to undercut any balletic association with gracefulness, the knight becomes a figure of subreption, and dancing, insofar as it survives this apparently contradictory trans-valuation, realigns with implacability. Thus the imperceptible waver is rendered not as the instantaneity of the leap between philosophy and the world, but as the glacial, perhaps even tediously minimalist advance of the Abraham-machine. Both intense acceleration and intense retardation cause motion to disappear, the point, I take it, of the evocation of the Eleatics with which Fear and Trembling concludes and, subsequently, the frequent editorial pairing of it with Repetition. At the risk of reducing the dancer to the creep, the passage remains true to the earlier evocation of ballet in highlighting the problem of the appearance of transcendence in immanence, or what I have rephrased as the encounter between the world and its philosophical interpretation. Like Elias and Marx, Kierkegaard sustains recourse to dance as the way to point to the revolution that lies out ahead of referring, even if that revolution is all about a love for god that establishes its worldly and thus secular dominion here and now.

 
Pivoting back then to the example of the example, one turns perhaps inevitably to de Man. In “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater,’” de Man broaches the matter of the example in the context of a general consideration of the inscription of the aesthetic in literature and education. Arguing that Kleist’s account of the aesthetic is more rigorously faithful to Kant than Schiller’s deployment of the concept in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, de Man locates this “account” in the formal mechanism, literally the form-machine, that manifests itself in the titularly evoked marionettes suspended between the ephebe and the bear of the text. The dancing executed by these puppets solicits the allusion to the correspondence between Körner and Schiller with which the essay opens, correspondence in which dance is held forth as the very image of a society committed to aesthetic education. Elias, in effect, but in reverse. Although passing reference is made to Kierkegaard in the essay, de Man’s own rhetoric suggests a more complicated relation, one that nuances and intensifies how dance and exemplification affect each other.
 
De Man stresses the impossibility the logic of exemplification puts in play by drawing out the paradox of the example. “Is not its [the example’s] particularity, to which it owes the illusion of its intelligibility, necessarily a betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey?” (Rhetoric 276). Adding that properly literary texts convert this dilemma into their mainsprings, de Man resumes his reading of Kleist by observing that the three narratives that comprise “Über das Marrionettentheater” (those of the ephebe, the puppets, and the bear) are allegories of the “wavering status” (276) of narrative as regards the epistemology of proof. The appeal here to wavering is notable, in fact so notable it suggests that the distinction between proof and narrative is virtually a re-articulation of the distinction between the tragic hero and the knight of faith, with narrative in the position of the tragic hero, that is, of a dancer incapable of imperceptibly striking a pose. As if plowing de Silentio’s entire discussion back under, de Man finds the work of art (whether or not in faith) not in the exemplary grace of the ballet dancer, but in the conspicuous wavering of a text that, though driven by a grammatical machinery, spins relentlessly toward even the most illogical and unpersuasive conclusions. Thus, it is this relentlessness that puts the paradox of exemplification on display, but in the form of the permanently interrupted, almost therefore filmic performance of the text allegorized in the dance moves of the gravity defying puppets.
 
A further twist occurs in “Excuses (Promises),” the essay on Rousseau that closes de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Written almost a decade before his sustained reading of Kleist, this discussion of Über das Marionettentheater comes up in a reading of Rousseau’s excuses. Specifically, de Man appeals to Kleist in order to exemplify what it might mean to talk about an automatic excuse, that is, an excuse that one is driven to offer virtually without reference to the specific circumstances of its solicitation. Anticipating the later reading of Kleist, de Man underscores the “anti-gravity” or dance-like dimension of Rousseau’s text, proposing that the Marion episode of The Confessions is perhaps most fundamentally about the compulsion to confess otherwise known as writing (Allegories 294). His discussion is set within the context of both a general meditation on the rhetorical effect of anacoluthon (the abrupt intrusion of, in de Man’s case, the performative code within a text otherwise dominated by the cognitive [constative] code) and a reading of particular textual passages. As a consequence, anacoluthon––to the extent that it is automatically implied in the breaking off of narrative -appears to designate precisely the sort of interruption represented by a citation or an example. As if to mark and instantly re-mark this, de Man interrupts the presentation of Rousseau’s excuses with the example from Kleist, or to put the matter as succinctly as possible the discussion of Rousseau’s Marion is interrupted, that is, exemplified in the discussion of die Marionette. As this point is not made by the very reader least inclined to miss it, de Man himself, one is invited to assume that the machine-text, the grammar without which no text can exist, is here exemplifying itself in much the same way as it is shown to be at work in Rousseau and later in Kleist. In appealing to Kleist’s meditation on the link between dancing puppets and the automatism of the aesthetic at the very point where the constantive, in fact referential movement of his own text is interrupted by the performative protocols of academic citation (a discursive feature “excused” in the volume’s fitful “Preface” (ix-xi)), de Man deftly pulls at his own, now plainly visible, strings. His text, qua text, starts to dance. It does not, unlike Pinocchio, become a “real boy,” it becomes “de Man.”
 
What urges the association of de Man’s discussion of Kleist with de Silentio is not just the opening gambit regarding autobiography and the traffic between its perfomative and constative dimensions, but the almost immediate appeal de Man makes, once the text-machine is introduced, to the problem of maintaining balance. In commenting on Kleist’s text––after forging the link between commentary and graceful dancing––de Man exposes the pairing therein of mechanism and art, making balance and grace belong more properly to dancing puppets, not to people. Does this not invite us to consider that de Silentio’s Knight is a Kleistian puppet and that the work of art may be more pronounced in faith than he knows? That, in effect, de Silentio has taken de Man’s Kleist in hand.² Perhaps the centrality of dramatic representation (contrasted sharply by de Man from dancing) in both texts is the fraught opening through which an even more perverse, that is, relentless mechanism gains access to the critical operations of de Man’s text. The paradoxical affirmation of both wavering and balance is thus a symptom that would then suggest, would it not, that conditioning the enunciation of de Man’s reading is the very object and condition of faith, but now formulated in accord with Nietzsche’s twilit maxim: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” (Twilight 483).
 
If such a reading makes sense then it rebounds upon Fear and Trembling in ways that cast an even colder eye on dancing and leaping. God and grammar are conflicting, thus competing incarnations of the transcendental. They thereby invite us to pluralize the transcendental, indeed they invite us to pluralize the structure of transcendence and immanence, suggesting that dance, if it exemplifies exemplification, that is, if dance is the very paradox of a relation within and between transcendence and immanence, then it is perhaps the figure of the “negative capability” (to invoke Keats) required as one thinks and acts in between two worlds, or, to put it less melodramatically, between one hegemonic order and another. Dance is thus not just a way to embody the imperceptible difference between the Knight of Faith and others, or between faith and belief, but it is a way to imagine, perhaps even practice, the steps to be taken in the space between the world referred to by philosophy and the world called for through philosophical critique. The dancer, as a student of what Elias calls figuration, exemplifies a different way of approaching the experience and execution of the slow and difficult work of social transformation.
 

Three

 
Interest in the example goes back a ways. Aristotle takes it up in Book Two, chapter twenty of The Rhetoric, where he worries over its two chief varieties (133-42). More interesting is Plato’s earlier discussion of the example in The Statesman, where it surfaces in a spectacular meditation on revolution.
 
Recall that wonderful moment in the dialogue where, after recognizing the false start of their reflection on the essence of the statesman, “The Stranger” proposes to “Young Socrates” that they consider the wisdom embedded in a story, in fact, the story that explains the quarrel between, of all people, Atreus and Thyestes (of Poe and later Lacan/Derrida fame). Without elaborating the details, The Stranger moves to situate this story among all those stories that derive from what he calls the “great event” (269b), an event that would appear to link all stories (Lévi-Strauss later called them “myths”) to the shift between autochthony and sexual reproduction, in effect, to the advent of the human. At the heart of this story––and let us not forget that it is recounted in a dialogue on the statesman––stands the concept and the figure of revolution and counter-revolution.
 

There is an era in which God himself assists the universe on its way and guides it by imparting its rotation to it. There is also an era in which he releases his control. He does this when its circuits under his guidance have completed the due limit of the time thereto appointed. Thereafter it begins to revolve in the contrary sense under its own impulse––for it is a living creature and has been endowed with reason by him who framed it in the beginning. . . . Hence it is impossible that it should abide forever free from change, and yet, as far as may be, its movement is uniform, invariable and in one place. Thus it is that it has received from God a rotation in reverse––the least possible variation of its proper motion. To revolve ever in the same sense belongs to none but the lord and the leader of all things that move, and even he cannot move the universe now in the one sense and now in the other––for this would flout eternal decrees.
 

(269d)

Recapitulating our theme of movement that is uniform and invariable, The Stranger concludes by explaining that the universe can execute thousands of revolutions because “its balance [is] so perfect” (270b).

 
This account of spinning and counterspinning is rich indeed. Aside from finally getting the discussion of the statesman off on the right foot, it links this not so subtle discussion of regime change to the vexed theological problem of God’s agency, “his” physical relation to what the French would call the sens of the universe. As if pairing the interventionist God with autochthony and the “human universe” with sexual reproduction, Plato appears to set up de Silentio by drawing close and immediate attention to the perceptibility of the change between this world and the other. Clearly anticipating many of the central themes of Genesis (the description of Eden, the Flood, the autochthonous creation of humans, etc.) Plato, despite the rhetoric of uniformity, balance etc., stresses a “cosmic crisis” that reduces humanity to “a remnant” (270d), one that does not perceive the revolution because its coming into being is the revolution. It is as though when the ballet dancer leaps into her pose, she effects the passage from the world in which belief is hegemonic to one in which faith is. Or, in Plato’s vocabulary, she effects the passage from the world in which the statesman as leader (c. 275) is to be modeled on the shepherd, to the world in which the statesman is to be modeled on the weaver (c. 281).
 
The matter of examplification arises as Young Socrates and The Stranger segue from the story to the model of the weaver. Specifically, the example comes up as a way to clarify precisely in what way a fissure opens between the cosmology referred to in the story and the dialogue itself. Linking the strategy of his presentation to its referent, The Stranger points out that it is difficult to explain important things (like the essence of the statesman, or the emergence of sexual reproduction) without using examples. However, the problem with examples is that in their very accessibility they routinely point back to the wrong world. Here the issue is not the paradoxical particularity of the example stressed by de Man, but rather the move the example effects between the familiar and the strange, a move that always threatens to subject the latter to the former, thereby losing it altogether. What bothers The Stranger about his necessary recourse to the story––and surely it important that he is given these lines––is that its insight is blinding; that is, to the precise degree to which the story frames consideration of the statesman in an illuminating way, it obscures the nature of the difference between the familiar account of this figure and the new philosophically strange one. Both he and Young Socrates are thus faced with the daunting prospect of leaping from one world to the next without knowing whether they will make it. Apparently when dance is the example of the example, it puts this dilemma on display, implicitly thematizing not simply the epistemological problem of the referential relation between philosophical interpretation and the changing world, but the ontological problem of the relation among possible worlds, say the Copernican versus the Ptolemaic, or, closer to home, the capitalist versus the communist. Spinning backwards, it is as if Kleist’s text were saying: recognizing art in the machine is one thing, but acting as if you inhabit the world in which that insight becomes hegemonic is quite another.
 
Enter Nietzsche who, like Kleist, is a sworn enemy of the spirit of gravity and devotee of the dance, and who, like Kierkegaard, is worried about the destiny of philosophy. Although passages like the one that serves as my epigram abound in Nietzsche’s corpus, it is a mistake to confuse them with all that he has to say about dance. In fact, the more satisfying challenge presented by Nietzsche is to think the relation between such passages and those found in the testimony of those who witnessed his infamous demise. In a letter written after his first urgent encounter with his fast faltering friend and former colleague, Franz Overbeck describes Nietzsche’s state thus:
 

That is, growing inordinately excited at the piano, singing loudly and raving, he would utter bits and pieces from the world of ideas in which he has been living, and also in short sentences, in an indescribably muffled tone, sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant and unspeakably horrible things would be audible, about himself as the successor of the dead God, the whole thing punctuated, as it were, on the piano, whereupon more convulsions and outbursts would follow, but as I said, this happened only at few fleeting moments while I was with him; mainly it was utterances about the profession which he had allotted to himself, to be the clown (Hanswurst) of the new eternities, and he the master of expression, was himself quite incapable of rendering the ecstasies of his gaiety except in the most trivial expressions or by frenzied dancing and capering.
 

(Middleton 353)

This account is essentially repeated and thus confirmed by the housekeeper at 6 via Carlo Alberto who testified that she, when drawn more than once to an inexplicable commotion in Nietzsche’s room, peered through his keyhole to see him perching on furniture and dancing naked in the center of his quarters. Liliana Cavani, in Beyond Good and Evil, frames Nietzsche’s dancing differently, but she grasps dexterously its function as passage.

 
Easily set aside as the choreography of his imminent decline, this material calls out to be read in relation to what dancing is doing in and to Nietzsche’s critique of the western world. As if partnered with that notorious Russian émigré Emma Goldman, Nietzsche may well be linking dance and revolution, not by setting up the former as the so-called litmus test of the latter, but as the very way to think about how to, as it were, get from here to there. The frenzied dancing witnessed by Overbeck all too readily indulges our inclination to be somewhat stupefied wallflowers unless we consider that such action may well be an attempt to find one’s footing, as Derrida was later to suggest, the mochlos, in the madly impossible/impassable shift between the world of the last men and the revolutionary world without precedent, as Benjamin was to call it. Instead of a sign of madness, dance becomes the means by which to float an example of how to withstand the becoming real of the critique of philosophy when philosophy itself is spinning out of control, losing its footing in the practice of interpretation. We know, of course, that Nietzsche’s timing was way off, but that does not trip up the project, an insight that can be maintained even as we acknowledge that the man was troubled, indeed deeply troubled in 1890. He may have been a Hanswurst, but he was no fool. Or he was a fool in precisely that non-foolish way that in The History of Madness Foucault sought to ventriloquize. In this regard, one might do well to think carefully about what Nietzsche is saying about madness in the fourteenth aphorism of Daybreak, Part One.
 
Some examples, then, of what dance is doing in Nietzsche’s text. The epigraph has already drawn attention to dance instruction and the writer who can finesse the gulf between the possible and the impossible. Dating from 1878, it establishes that Nietzsche’s interest arises early. The Birth of Tragedy, from 1872, contains several passing references to dance (perhaps most powerfully in Section One’s linkage of dance, Dionysus, and Bakhtinian carnival, the Sacaea), but what most emphatically recommends it to our attention is that in its “director’s cut” (from 1886), Birth of Tragedy includes an “Attempt at Self Criticism,” an addition that strings together the early work and the late work, while throwing leaping, dancing, and laughing into the mix.
 
Toward the end of the “Attempt,” Nietzsche indulges in the practice of self-citation, leading us back to the middle of Part Four in Zarathustra, specifically to the section entitled, “On the Higher Man.” Two things seem to be at work here. One is the recognition that dance has become an important conceptual friend, one that helps Nietzsche think and write. The other is more performative: if Nietzsche senses that “The Attempt” and Part Four of Zarathustra have something to do with each other, this is because both give form to irony or, as it is called in Birth of Tragedy, self-criticism. In effect, what is to be found in Part Four and certainly in “On the Higher Man” is a version of the sentiment uttered by Captain America (Peter Fonda) at the end of Easy Rider: “we blew it, man.” Specifically, in attempting to distinguish between Zarathustra and the last or higher men, Nietzsche draws attention to the politically disabling contradiction of leadership, that the revolution cannot, and will not, be taught, while deriving what authority this insight has from something like revolutionary pedagogy. In a nutshell, Part Four is a meditation on the position of the ironic (pointedly neither traditional or organic, nor universal or specific) intellectual. If he recognizes that such material fits with his backward glance at his own formation, this is because the position of the ironic intellectual structures his relation to everything and everyone with whom he was once confused. Like the seductive power of Socratic ignorance, the distinctly ironic character of Nietzsche’s criticism casts him as a “man interrupted” (as suggested earlier, the subject of permanent parabasis) not, as is often concluded, as Mad Max. In being about leadership this is also about politics. Perhaps surprisingly it is also about dance.
 
“On the Higher Man” returns us immediately to the figure of the tightrope walker (more literally the rope dancer) who appears now epigrammatically suspended between the “all” (alle) and the “none” (keinem). Along the line we are confronted with, among other things, the death of God, the pollution of gestation, and the absolute limits of both scholars and the mob. In section 17 one reads the following:
 

A man’s stride always betrays whether he has found his own way: behold me walking! But whoever approaches his goal dances. And verily, I have not become a statue: I do not yet stand there, stiff, stupid, stony, a column; I love to run swiftly. And though there are swamps and thick melancholy on earth, whoever has light feet runs even over mud and dances as on swept ice.
 
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!
 

(Thus Spoke 406)

In Section 20 this reeling call falls back on itself. Gesturing ironically Nietzsche writes, “You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance––dancing away over yourselves!” (407), a formulation that, in context, compares those––somewhere, one would think, between the all and the none––with ears calibrated to hear Zarathustra to the ponderous circus elephants of Section 19, elephants who, if we recall Marx’s discussion of the dancing table, appear to be anti-Hegelian, creatures who, in Nietzsche’s mind, can only stand on their feet. The undecidable punning that operates in Vom höheren Menschen (the higher/hearing men) would appear to restate the irony in advance.

 
In the preceding citation it is impossible to ignore “Kierkegaardian” resonances. Specifically, like de Silentio, Nietzsche directs our attention to the man on the street, indeed to the stroller. He invites us to search there for evidence of the proximity between the pedestrian and his goal. The opposition between the dancer and the statue would appear to re-channel de Silentio’s attentive preoccupation with the leap that immediately and imperceptibly reveals the pose of the Knight of Faith: the one who has reached his/her goal.³ The leap of the dancer, higher and higher, while certainly Kierkegaardian, is also complicated by the emergent inadequacy of the “higher men.” In the course of this section, as I have proposed, certainly one goal appears undermined, namely that of reaching the higher men. Indeed, the very concept of leadership is set aside, but as part of the articulation of this insight dance (and later laughter) works to fuse goal and failure, making this very confusion into what dance achieves or, in another sense, sustains.
 
It seems crucial to stress here that Nietzsche is not exactly using dance as an example. But nor is it simply a figure. When he characterizes Zarathustra as a dancer, dancing only gets less familiar, less particular, and not simply because we have trouble getting any kind of fix on who or what Zarathustra is. Given that exemplification, as I have proposed, seems to have assumed the responsibility within philosophy of articulating its limit, that is, the zone of indistinction between world interpretation and transformation, Nietzsche’s strategy––for lack of a better word––seems to address itself to this very responsibility, a responsibility one might also link to the delicate matter, at once political and choreographic, of leading. At least this is one way to make sense of Nietzsche’s tendency to dance when it comes to the end of the world and, for the sake of parallelism, the end of the book. This last receives provocative treatment in The Gay Science, a text whose two editions (1882 and 1887) actually bookend Zarathustra.
 
Dance appears in aphorism 381 of Part Five as part of a meditation on the hermeneutics of difficulty. Influenced, no doubt, by the attacks on scholars of the sort we have already noted in Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s discussion of difficulty sets in motion an opposition between scholars and dancers. Rehearsing the reception problem flagged in the epigraph from Zarathustra––Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen––Nietzsche opens by insisting that books may just as readily be filled with intentions to communicate as with intentions to confuse and challenge. Not content to thereby permanently interrupt the hermeneutical value of intention, he moves quickly to sing the praises, indeed the philosophical praises, of brevity. Thereon follow the terms of suppleness, lightness, etc. Aware that he writes as a scholar, one whose quickness is slowed by anxiety about ignorance, Nietzsche then counsels philosophical scholars in particular to aspire to the conditions of dance, writing: “I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer” (Gay 346). The pose of the ironic intellectual is again at issue. Specifically, Nietzsche troubles here the very logic of exemplification, that is, the expository concessions necessary to bring philosophy within reach of those seeking to bring either clarity or change (or both) to their lives. The “friends” he targets, ironically understood to lack understanding, are told to train. Train to dance. It is as if dance is the means envisioned for finding one’s footing in the hermeneutically and politically impossible space of being in two places––understanding and misunderstanding, this world and the next––at once.
 
Consistency dictates that Nietzsche’s repudiation of the logic of exemplification not be overstated. It is not that dance doesn’t exemplify, but that it assumes exemplary status in figuring, at the limit of book and world, the very limits of exemplification. With Nietzsche we come to someone who seems to have recognized one of the enabling philosophemes of the West, one that in splitting apart captures deictically the means by which philosophical discourse tries to refer to its own limit from the inside. It is not altogether surprising that the outer edge, the end of Gay Science (and remember this is an end added to an earlier end in strict conformity with the logic of the supplement) culminates in an invocation of the “kingdom of the dance,” followed by song. Although there are several other references to dance in the pages of The Gay Science, they all trace and retrace the edges, the ends of the book and the world. As such they urge that the dancing that consumed Nietzsche’s final days not simply be understood either as the unambiguous sign of the impending disaster, or as the metaphor for the faltering steps of a life exhausted in a collection of books with which it has since become confused. Instead, in the spirit of his own evocation of the link between dreaming and dancing (indeed “ghost dancing,” cf. aphorism 54), the frenzied dancing of the end might provocatively be read as a warding off of the revolutionary awakening for which neither the dreamer nor the philosopher is quite prepared. The point may well be to change the world, but if “change” is not simply a new version of the already anticipated, that is, the same, then the leader rushes in at his or her peril. Nietzsche invites us to consider that dance is the way not to think, but to do leading differently. In this he may have indeed broached the question of politics within and in the wake of the postmodern. After all, Rudolf Pannwitz, one of his early German “followers,” was the first (1912) to use the term Postmodernismus as the means by which to designate the crisis breaking out in and against modern European culture.
 

Four

 
Nietzsche’s apocalyptic tone gives the relation between one world and the next a verticality that Jacques Derrida helps us see through and resist. Wittingly or unwittingly (now, alas, a permanent undecidable) he does so by making dance matter to his own deconstructive embrace of philosophy. This is abundantly clear in the discussion of “sexual difference” with Christie McDonald in their interview titled, “Choreographies.” Perhaps even more pertinent is the set of formulations that take place in Derrida’s lecture, “Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties,” from 1980. To be sure, dance is not the explicit topic of his address, but leaping and securing one’s footing assuredly are, and by now I hope we recognize that a certain philosophically inflected, if not executed, dance is thus very much at stake.
 
The occasion of Derrida’s remarks is the centenary celebration of the founding of the graduate school at Columbia University. As such, he is concerned to think aloud and at length about the extent to which Kant’s 1798 essay, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” limits and/or enables the thinking of Columbia’s present. If it makes sense to say that this discussion inaugurates the line of inquiry now concluded in “The University without Conditions,” this is because in both texts Derrida is calling us to consider what is at risk in finding new footing for an institution like the university. Aware that a certain steroidal, even disastrous capitalism is itself embarked on the task of reorienting the university, Derrida insists that strategic options remain open for those committed to calling for another change and a different future. The drama of the address derives largely from the delicacy with which Derrida sketches the nature of the abyss on which we are poised. The footwork of the piece is far too fancy to summarize, nor is that the purpose of this last spin. Instead, I plant and turn quickly to the concluding passes of the piece to delineate how they engage what above I have called the verticality of Nietzsche’s tone.
 
The issue that concerns me is the one Derrida introduces under the heading of “orientation.” He asks: “How do we orient ourselves toward the foundation of a new law” (30)? The question is spurred by Derrida’s proposition that our moment is one in which we both have to take a new kind of responsibility for the footing of the university, and acknowledge, even accept, that such a footing is already, as it were, under foot. In other words, the problem of orientation, of our bearings, arises because our moment is a span, it is a zone of indistinction between one footing and another, between one rationale for the founding of the university and another. It is not a question of this world and the next in the sense that Augustine summons under the heading of the City of God. That is verticality plain and simple. Rather, it is a question of, let’s say, the horizontal displacement of absolutely immanent worlds. It is a question of thinking and enduring what political scientists call “transition” as an event, as a rupture characterized not by an absolute break, but by an absolute indistinction brought about by the co-presence of worlds whose political, economic and cultural structures are radically incommensurable. Invoking his titular term, Derrida writes:
 

Traditional law should therefore provide, on its own foundational soil, a support for leaping to another place for founding, or, if you prefer another metaphor to that of the jumper planting a foot before leaping––of “taking the call on one foot” (prenant appel sur un pied) as is said in French––then we might say that the difficulty will consist, as always, in determining the best lever, what the Greeks would call the best mochlos.
 

(30-31)

As though having thereby secured his own footing, Derrida proceeds to perform a “brutal leap” (31) back into the disputed shoes of his quarrel with Meyer Schapiro, a distinguished professor of Art History at Columbia, the point of which is to link the question of orientation to the problem of distinguishing between the left and the right (whether in the realm of shoes or in the realm of politics––for Rancière, of course, they may well be the same thing). That Kant’s engagement with the matter of orientation toggles between sleeping and fighting––with the issue of whether to lead with the left or the right moving in tandem––implicates Schapiro’s insistence upon the orientation of the shoes in a certain martial and therefore rightist art.

 
There is, obviously, a great deal to say about all of this––about academic disputes, about the orientation of the neo-liberal university, about political affiliation and leadership in the wake of the postmodern––but my dance card is now empty. Nonetheless, it is worth observing that Derrida’s discussion, precisely when read in the context of Nietzsche’s dancing, leaping, and leading––and perhaps the sin for which he can never be forgiven (remember here his own account of forgiveness) is that he has spun out the webwork in which the dismissive consensus that has authorized the left to stop reading Nietzsche is hopelessly self-entangled––it is worth observing that this discussion immediately encounters in the problem of changing the world, or stepping from one hegemonic foundation to another, the problem of choreography, of knowing, as it were, with which foot to lead. Nietzsche and before him Kierkegaard certainly have led us to expect this without thereby leading us to the radically horizontal, even aphoristic (taken etymologically) perspective found in Derrida, where faculties/disciplines, texts, and worlds collide. What confronts us here is a still urgent question about the very means by which to figure the activity, both psychical and physical, of stepping beyond the headlong emergence of neo-liberal hegemony. Not to withdraw from it (where to, exactly?), but to lead it elsewhere and survive the passage.
 
My purpose here has been to propose that there is a symptom, a sign, to be read in the recourse taken by philosophy to the example of dance when attempting to coordinate metacriticism of its own referential capacities with revolutionary calls for the transition from, to use Marx’s formulation, interpreting to changing the world. If, as Jacques Lacan writes, the symptom is “a symbol written in the sand of the flesh” (232), what is one to make of the scrawl left by philosophy’s recourse to dance? As with all symptoms, this one too operates on more than one level. The erratic genealogy traced here suggests that as philosophy poses with increasing directness the question of its self-overcoming, the manifest practice of exemplification (of appealing to the local and concrete) increasingly aligns with a practical sublation of philosophy thought to be embodied, even realized, in dance. What enables dance to serve this function is the latent way that the spinning it entails can be shown (the latent is never patent) to have shadowed philosophical reflection in the west for quite some time. Not for nothing does Paul Valéry’s “Dance and the Soul” (from 1921) stage its meditation on philosophy after the war (should it not be more sensuous, less abstract?) in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Between the latent and the manifest is the absent, that is, the structural dislocation that in preventing the latent and the manifest from becoming one and the same provides the symptom with both its structure and its force. Dance figures here as something of an index where all of it that has nothing to do with philosophical reflection points to, indexes, what is missing in philosophy. Nietzsche evokes this by counterposing the book that is studied, read, re-read, underlined, memorized, etc. with the book that simply makes us get up and move. While this overstates the physicality of dance (it is both more and less than that), it does draw pertinent attention to the movement that escapes philosophy, or to the movement that in escaping philosophy figures, as absent, the change interpreting the world is being pressured to give way to. In one sense, this invites us to recognize in dance the symptom of philosophy’s strained relation both to theology and to politics. In another sense, this discloses the philosophical force of dance, a force that in pushing philosophy to its limit, in putting it on edge, points to something more in dance. Paradoxically, this more may precisely be the place from which the vital political energies of the future are approaching us. Indeed, they are closer than we can think.