Human Studies 1 9 : 17-42, 1996. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Insomnia and the (t)error of lost foundation in postmodernism*

P E T E R M C H U G H York University, Downsview, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

Abstract. Certain familiar theoretic claims of both popular and academic postmodemism are examined for their implications as to the necessary and desirable limits of social life. Taken to the end, these claims promote errancy as a means of freeing conduct from the constraints of foundation. But this kind of freedom, one which treats all limitation as pernicious, generates social action that is mechanical, scattered, and without substance-it is a pyrrhic emancipation which trades content for self-sufficiency and thus constitutes an empty life of unhappy social dispersion. And yet an opportunity does remain to address the way a limit can also be inspiring if we think through how interpretation, a limit which is itself limited, invites nevertheless what Derrida glossed as "joyous affirmation." Interpretation, though imperfect, offers powers that are genuine and enjoyable because these powers supply life with content and thus with the vitalizing collective and individual possibility of conduct which is affirmative (and disaffirmative). Perhaps it could even be said that interpretation emancipates us from the emp- tiness of pure freedom.

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I n s o m n i a is a w a k e f u l n e s s w i t h o u t i n t e n t i o n a l i t y . . . . I ts i n d e t e r - m i n a t e d n e s s . . , does not condense its o w n empt iness into a content . I t is uncon ta ined - inf ini ty (Levinas, 1989:170). t

T h o u g h w e shou ld be sleeping, we are awake, and ye t it is no t the k ind o f w a k e f u l n e s s that c o m e s f r o m noise or a bad dream, nor f r o m d a y t i m e ' s

occas ional intrusion with a particularly pressing immedia te problem. In somnia

- that speci f ic f o r m o f s leeplessness - is ins tead inde te rmina te , w i thou t

intention, and empty, a bed o f vacan t toss ing and turning.

This is odd. For one thing, here at the ve ry beg inn ing we f ind ourse lves

charac te r iz ing insomnia largely b y wha t it is not: it is not-s leep, a not- in-

*Revision of paper delivered to Society for Phenomenology and Human Science, Seattle, WA, 31 September 1994. My thanks to those discussing the paper following its presentation, and to Alan Blum, for helping me to realize it would be better understood with the addition of what is now Section 5. That part also draws on conversations with Blum over the years.

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terruption, a not-intention, a not-determinate, etc. But what is this? Even to call it empty is to place some zero at the center of the idea. I f sleep, after all, is some kind of respite or recess, then why should the absence of stimu- lation by intention and determinatedness - why should emptiness - not be exactly the soporific we need for sleep? How can we be kept awake by nothing?

Possibly we can, if sleep is not a recess - if it is more than a technical period of physical and psychic restoration. Though distinctive, with its own characteristics, sleep may be alive to life much the way waking is, so that it includes a more vital part of the sleeper, whether it is also a restorative or not. What Bergson first qualified by citing its "disinterestedness" - which is to say its interest in a certain seclusion - surely has to be something other than the slumber of anesthesia.

We can think of the kind of sleep we are working to locate as one which is active, as in daytime - one that does have an interest - but is not subject to the same intrusions of the day, not the kind of intrusions of the sun that come to us directly from others such as work and family, that come before our own first mediation. The space of this sleep is more solitary than the day, befitting the dark, and yet also greater than stupefaction: a space that is waiting to be filled by the "I.": One is what one is in sleeping, sovereign in that very sense of being with oneself, even if we are not always at one with ourself. Sleep is being together and at one with one's contradictions and similitude, but never being contradicted in that already heterogeneous being.

Hence, for example, the dreams we all know, and know as our own in each and every distortion of content. Sleep, here, is the solitude of being in one's own place. But this is not a vacuous place, because our place is filled, filled with the I, filled and yet without an other except through that I. Indeed, the one whose dream it is is led by it, drawn on and then back by the dream's enigmatic paths and ambiguous figures. Sleep is where the I defines the world without regard to counterclaims, the totalization of the world by the I in sleep's solitude.

In sleep, then, the I collects the self at its discretion, in its own time and way, on the sole occasion when such an action is possible. If sleep is a res- pite, it is a respite from interruption; if it is a restoration, what is restored is the autonomy of self-governance. (Lacan, 1981:79).

So it is not that the world is absent at night, and sleep ignorant. Rather, sleep affirms one's place in the world, and yet also one's independence from it, through the distinctive signature of the uninterrupted I.

Thus, the restlessness of insomnia, and its interminability, contravene not the numbness o f sleep but its sovereignty, its sovereignty as the wel- coming space of the I, the place where the I actively makes its peace and nourishes its subject.

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The insomniac's nights are empty, not productive, because they do not express, in the night's own way, the perfect world of the omnipotent sleeper. More, they fail to do this at the very period in which an I can be expressed, beyond busy trespass by the competitive practical interventions of the wak- ing hours we call daytime. The emptiness of insomnia with which we began is thus devoid of the self-defining work of the night. It is not that night has become day. Rather, it has become not-night. This is its emptiness, its interminability. Insomnia is insubstantial, an insufficiency of content, be- cause the I and its signature are made invisible.

We need now to think about a daytime that could belong with insomnia. Any life is connected between day and night - those that are not would surely call for explanation, would call for that kind of connection - and so we need to collect some sense of a waking existence consonant with the I- less night of the empty sleeper. We need an empty daytime. Though differ- ent than the night, it will not, presumably, be as different as the vernacular night and day.

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The following characterization of everyday conduct is from a self-described postmodernist:

Mark ing . . . Trac ing . . . Er r ing . . . Dri f t ing. . . (A)drif t . . . Ad(r i f t ) . . . R ifting. A/d/rift toward anonymity. . , common mark of spiritual life. If to be a self is to possess and to be possessed by a proper name, then to lose the self is to become anonymous, and to become anonymous is to lose the self. Tracing inscribes a certain anonymity. The trace is the "erasure of the present and thus of the subject, of that which is proper to the subject and of his proper name" (Taylor, 1984:140). 3

We shall look closely at this statement, not in order to explicate or correct but as postmodern self-description, because as a self-report it is an orthodox instance of postmodern conduct in the way it speaks about itself. 4 Thinking ahead, we should keep in mind whether it could equally have been written about insomnia.

2.1. Ellipsis

To begin simply and concretely, and to anticipate later issues on indetermi- nateness and the nature of speech, it is noticeable that the statement punctu- ates itself with ellipses, surrounding the writing with interjections that allow

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it to die away like talk. It is inarticulate in that respec t - faux poetry, poetry's rhythm without its tropes - halting, dependent on its regular silence to offer to us whatever we ourselves might think up to offer back to them. What lies at the root of this inarticulation?

Is it humility, self-effacement? Or must humble writing bespeak itself more fully, lest it be so mild we never hear it at all?

Is it indifference? Or does indifference not really speak to us in the first place, being always either silent or unresponsive?

Is it searching? Or does searching, even as it drifts, nevertheless resist drift for pathway?

Is it conversation? Or does conversation know that we could never exhaust its possibility, that the writing could never make it complete, and so ellipsis is only redundant in this respect?

Perhaps it is glossing, compiling words as glances upon some languishing subject that thereby remains opaque for us. It glosses itself as a way of leav- ing us to our own solutions beyond the mutual needs of intertextuality, cast- ing a shine on the subject in which we see our single reflection, the work we alone must do to deepen whatever it is that the writer commends.

Ellipsis amplifies the reader side of the good reciprocal relation of writer and reader. It effects a transfer of intertextual responsibility to us, as though the writer appears merely to punctuate a reader's authorization of the read- er 's own responses. But this is not laziness; it raises a question about postmodernism's commitment to content, which we will think about more thoroughly later.

2.2 Drifting

Possibly the glossing is an expression of drifting or aimlessness, also said to be postmodern:

To saunter is to wander or travel about aimlessly and unprofitably. The wanderer moves to and f r o . . , with neither fixed course nor certain end (Taylor, 1984:150).

What is aimlessness, conceived as part of the postmodern project? If it is not a fixed course, isn't it at least a course, i.e., a design named by the writer as one to expect rather than be surprised by as we come to understand postmodernism? What is the difference between a course that is fixed and one that is not? Is the latter random? Can a course be neither fixed nor ran- dom, i.e., flexible? What would that be, as a formulation? Really, for a course to be a course at all, do we not discover this precisely by seeing that it is limited in some way, not random, and in some sense directed in what it

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accepts as itself and what it rejects as extraneous. If a desigla is "no fixed course" we also discover this to be limited in some way, fixed in that s e n s e - for example to be limited in that it excludes fixing - even if, as now, we do not quite know what that means.

Lack of nerve, too, is noticeable in the passage when we consider the gloss "neither fixed course nor certain end." If all everyday conduct with fixed course or certain end were measured against behavior without, fixed and certain would be scarce indeed. The contingent and deeply ambiguous uncertainty of all social conduct have been explicit in the ideas of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, not to mention Heraclitus, then ethnomethodology, then analysis, and many others, up to and including postmodernism itself. 5 The condition of uncertainty in language does not distinguish aimlessness from much at all in this specific respect of uncertainty (which is not to say that uncertainty must be accompanied by aimlessness as Taylor intends it). That an exemplar of aimlessness would claim such a distinction only demonstrates, well, his own aimlessness in misunderstanding the nature of his own charge. But errors like this are not unusual, as we will see further on, because they follow from the promotion of errancy in postmodernism.

Within the space of the trace is inscribed a cross that marks the site of the disappearance of the self (Taylor, 1984:51).

The trace is a way of conceiving the basic structure of signs, and thus of one aspect of the nature of social action within a world of language. Erasure ("The trace is the erasure of the present and thus of the subject," p. 4 above) refers to the specifically contingent historical understanding in any relation, large or small; a contingency not just in the particular details of that relation but which includes the very basis of understanding p er se and so of history itself. It embraces all socially constituted relations: knowledge, errancy, sup- position, science, art, memory, fact, writing, reading, and so on, including, of course, tracing and erasing themselves as ideas and as conduct. This is necessary if one is to do Derridian postmodernism. 6

Erasure, then, is a theorist's formulation of the way the (now) fact, event, history, etc. are understood.And erasure of the (now) fact-event-history, which is now also a just-now fact-event-history, is a way of writing and under- standing not just the fact-event-history, but erasure's necessity, although it is not put this way by postmodems because they resist all requirement as "totalizing." But any erasure theorist must, to be such a theorist, formulate erasure. And this latter is not a contingency the way facts and relations are contingent. For one thing, it is said to be universal. For another, it is unavoid- able, if one is to be an erasure theorist, to erase, a requirement which is constitutive of postmodernism. For example, to drift away from erasure is not possible except as one who is no longer an eras-er. Most importantly, this

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is a fixed course, a course which imposes necessity on the world and on the postmodern theorist, making Taylor's claim a self-contradiction. The only contingency is whether one is (was, will be) an erasure theorist. In other words, this theorist cannot be aimless and must follow this fixed course. Is this a grand narrative? I don' t know. But it is a narrative of the compelling amplitude of necessity.

The trace erases. What happens here? Is it the end, as Taylor hints in his quote of Derrida, in that the subject and the subject's possessions are no longer present? Elsewhere he comments, again quoting Derrida, that "The trace marks the end of authentic selfhood by making 'enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words "proximity", " immediacy", "pres, ence" . . . . ,-7

The end of authentic selfhood. Does this mean, too, that there never has been an authentic self, presuming the trace has always been with us, doing its work on human discourse? Or has the self been inauthentic only since Heidegger, only since having been theorized, only since having been invented as a theorist's account?

If there is nothing left for us but inauthenticitv, life does begin to sound like drift and anonymity.

But in taking up erasure Taylor elides the other half of the idea of the trace:

Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as the other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear [italics supplied] (Derrida, 1976:70).

In other words, as the common-sense notion of tracing would imply, some- thing is left of then now, and as now becomes then this residue continues even as its specific composition may change. So the erasure for Derrida is not annihilation, as Taylor suggests s (although Derrida does claim elsewhere, contradictorily, that the self disappears). In fact, retention is what makes the difference between then and now (according to Derrida), the very differance that is said to generate meaning in the first place.

Thus Derrida, having been contradicted by Taylor, now contradicts Taylor. But our point here is not to correct an intellectual omission as an academic exer- cise. Rather, we see through the gloss to the problematic it fails to illuminate, the problematic which is this kind of work it-self: the postmodem conception of social conduct. It is not simply that Taylor's aimlessness begins in certain unde- termined linguistic ambiguities between fixed and loose, authentic-inauthentic, or in various elisions that simplify his task. Rather we need to think about this as itself an oriented instance of postmodem conduct. This will require a closer ex- amination of errancy, particularly in its connection to error.

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2.3. Errancy

To err:

1. a. To turn aside from the proper path: STRAY. b. To go about aimlessly. WANDER. ROAM.

2. To deviate from a standard (as of wisdom, morality, accuracy). To be or do wrong, to make a mistake. 9 (Webster's, 1961).

Errancy includes wandering, deviating, wronging, and mistaking, which have more generally come to be called transgression.And so it also includes there- fore the idea of a standard, some principle that includes what wronging is as well as what may be wronged, deviated from, accepted, afflrn~ted, mis-taken. Without a standard the conduct would be entirely self-presenting, incapable of offering the differance which according to postmodernism generates mean- ing. And as a simultaneous dimension of that standard, transgression is pro- posed to be errancy's practice.

As a program of everyday conduct, errancy seems to be a method of wary detachment from social intimacy. Erasure is said to deny authentic selfhood in identity, for example, as if the shifting relations among signifieds and signifiers are too much for any self to integrate, although in the postmodern program the actor must still be able to read signs cognitively in order to determine what constitutes regular pathways and thereby whalL would consti- tute straying from them. The isolation sought in aimlessness does increase self-direction by reducing the influence of other, if in the absence of an authentic self we are still permitted to speak of self-direction. But this remains a passive project because it is parasitical on paths that already exist, since it is these latter which determine what actual straying would be. And given that one must stray above all, substantial commitments and relations are to be inhibited except those that are accidental. Other persons, collec- tives, ideas, and interests need to be recognized for the pathways they are, and then passed up as too settled, complacent, orthodox, constraining. In this life the intent is to be remote and ready to go (away).

So we have a complete sweep in that wandering is to do away with social collectives, of all things: with any capacity to influence or be influenced by others, and with any theoretic possibility of an historically grounded self except through the accident of an aimless history. In this it is consistent be- tween its conception of life and the actual empirical conduct such a concep- tion would require.

But it does not do away with narrative if by that we mean it does away with a standard that certain things be done and certain things not be done. It is not a liberation from narrative, but from a particular one - shall we say from the one which commends collective social intimacy. It is not that

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wandering is not committed, for it is committed to wandering. In being com- mitted to wandering, which includes wandering among all the substantial possibilities of life, we can say that it is committed to rejection of content for the method of errancy. In this way, wandering is a producer of detachment.

Presumably, one wanders too from remnants of self, if anything is left of it after the trace, leaving the actor with something like personality: a collection of individual traits and proclivities. In a perverse way, the unitary self, which was to have been vanquished, is instead simplified and now reappears as one discrete individual stripped of other influences except those of errancy.

Thus, the isolated symmetry of the self-less pos tmodem actor, moving in a detached and motile world, promotes a new kind of privacy: not, as in the past, an interior struggling to speak itself, or struggling not to, but a vacuum inaccessible to other, a vacuum in which attachments are accidental, com- munal relations fiat when not oppressive, and pervasive dis-attachment forms between persons, groups, communities. I°

Surprisingly, pos tmodem privacy objectifies alterity by depriving it of its normative force, leaving it merely as a remote condition with neither appeal nor repugnance. The idea is to remain alone, satisfying needs perhaps but unable to enjoy them except in private or, when finally participating in some communal affirmation, doing so only as another straying, this time from the pos tmodem project. This raises still another question: how would such stray- ing be identified in the postmodern "community," such as it is?

Aimlessness is commended as liberation, liberation from socially sustained value, which will better fit the self-less personality. Here again we confront the contradiction of the postmodemist as one who is both aimless and committed.

Thus: 1. Erring is possible only on the existence of a standard because: a. It is only a standard that can be violated. A meaningless act violates

nothing. It is not even an act, really. 2. It is only a standard of what constitutes roaming, wandering, aimless-

ness that will differentiate them from anything else and permit particular concrete conduct to be so identified. To stray here is to conform to a standard for straying.

3. (1) and (2) hold also for the conduct of writing. To commend errancy is accomplished by collecting discourse according to some rule, connection, value, interest or orientation by which speech becomes social as behavior favorable to conduct which is errant. Taylor's earlier elision of Derrida con- forms, for example, to errancy's standard to be mistaken.

This is to say that postmodemism's recommendation to wander, as seen through Taylor, is parasitical upon the very thing it resists, the idea of a stand- ard, because what it recommends is to orient to a standard of aimlessness, a standard which collects, however ambiguously, discrete instances of behavior

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as errant, or fails to do so, or does so only as various contingencies appear to be the case. This is Taylor's commitment, his principle, from which he (his book) could not turn away or stray and be the book it is. 11

Several mixed questions now arise: 1. Given errancy requires a standard, is this a foundation? If one strays

from errancy, for example, is there anything left of one's errant self except in memory and history? Parenthetically, is errancy confirmed by straying from errancy?

a. Similarly: Given it is necessary to erase to be an erasure theorist, is it not true that erasure is a foundation?

2. If errancy can be foundational, how could errancy, or erasing, not offer an authentic self as an agent of such conduct? That is, how could we account for the errant act except by seeing it as oriented, as agency?

a. If errancy is not foundational, isn't all errancy therefore accidental, not worth commending as action, in that there are no grounds except the errant event i t s e l f - that is, an originary presence - by which to claim, justify, or deny the identity of that conduct?

3. If foundation is not possible, and agency a figment, what are Taylor, Derrida, Lyotard, and company doing, and how a r e we to understand their recommendations?

4. All in all, what /s foundation, and what could be foundational? In deconstmction, it most often means originary presence, sometimes only per- sistent commitment. 12 But can one say that the postmodem project is not a grand narrative, and that its practitioners are, Iike the rest of us, without selves and agency?

In any case, and whatever one calls it, we have found so thr that to be a postmodem theorist one must erase, and, simultaneously, to be a postmodem actor one must stray, must be aimless. That is, we have established something like a ground of demonstration in postmodernism, at once theoretic and quo- tidian, that can fairly be called both a requirement and a contradiction.

Now we need to work out the kind of thinking that could create such a world, and let me anticipate that we will find it as a reification of the sign- signified relation, in which all conduct is said to imitate the behavior of signs.

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The unending play of surfaces discloses the ineradicable duplicity of knowl- edge, shiftiness of truth, and undecidability of value . . . freely floating signs cannot be tied down to any single m e a n i n g . . . [so] everything is radically relative (Taylor, 1984:16).

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The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one's own presence (Derrida, 1973:85).

First we hear from Taylor that something is "ineradicable," and then, no, "everything is radically relative." Second we hear from Derrida that the trace, his term for the way same and other are fully interdependent, nevertheless erases selfhood, which is the interpersonal locus of same and other, the locus of interdependence. Through and through, writers' usage contradicts writ- ers' usage. Is this roaming, straying, erring? Mis-taken? Lost selfhood? Pas- sive resignation from the difficult but interesting opportunities generated by the problem of undecidability?

Perhaps it is the postmodern conception of the sign and of self that gener- ates these apparent errancies.

Like modernism, postmodernism persistently follows and works out the inevitable variability in relation between sign and meaning, which is now a commonplace in the humanities and social sciences. But modernism seemed to struggle to tame this variability, as in architecture's effort to purify form against mixture, whereas postmodernism celebrates it. Thus, the modernist conception of value as uncertain has been replaced by the view that it is essentially undecidable, moving us from an interest in working out the value of, say, purity, to disdain for such work, and elevating the fact of sign-signi- fied multiplicity to a principle, to heterology. This is the principle that under- lies the demise of self, of grand narrative, of the valorization of political consensus, and so on. But the self is only the first domino:

The death of the Alpha and the Omega, the disappearance of the s e l f . . . fray[s] the fabric of his tory. . , the story seems pointless . . . . From the perspective of the end of history, the "final" plot seems to be "that there is no plot" (Taylor, 1984:73).

All "disappears" into variability in imitation of the sign, following the roam- ing, wandering, and straying among all variety of relationships among al- ters, just as the sign does. Postmodernism conflates variability of the s ign - that its meaning cannot be controlled if by that is meant that theoretically a sign may always change its relation to the signified-with self. If the sign is contingent, then so is self; if the sign is not self-identifying, then neither is self; if the meaning of the sign disappears, so does self. Thus, if the sign strays, so must the self, and errancy becomes a method for living. In this determining respect the sign is made originary for postmodern theory - the method of the sign appears as the method of all within language - another contradiction for those whose theorizing disclaims the originary. And it is

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noticeable that while they dislodge what they claim to be one conceptual tyrant, the self, they only replace it with another, this time the sign, and all this is make possible by stripping conduct of genuine collective influence, i.e., of the social. Again, the question: should such an elemental, even totalizing heterological privileging of the sign, be thought foundational for postmodemism?

Having suffered the death of self, history, and God, the postmodern actor is left in a social vacuum, without guidance or support - that is, without possibility of a conversational or dialectic relation - by any organic collec- tive. This has significant consequence beyond the losses themselves, because it is these communal relations which are the source and focus of social value and individual commitment, but which are now placed out of reach.

We are left with a denuded actor who is circumscribed by cognition, a sort of linguistic processing machine, one who can recognize all that is given in language but must always remain detached. Loss is the elemental condition of life. The actor labors always not out of conviction but in imitation of its condition, as one who cognizes but does not commit, as one always moving away. This is its aimlessness.

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Becoming has no goal and underneath all becoming there is no grand unity (Nietzsche, 1968:13).

This is a remark which has been put to many uses, among them to demon- strate that development is random and good, development is random and bad, development is foreordained and good, development is foreordained and bad. In postmodernism, Nietzsche's comment plays out this way:

Through unexpected twists and unanticipated turns, erring and aberrance show the death of God, disappearance of self, and end of history to be the realization of mazing grace [italics in original] (Taylor, 1984:168).13

Here, although it may not strictly be a goal (just what did Nietzsche mean by goal anyway?), aimlessness is said to be realized in the unsure wanderer 's recognition that stable icons are dead and there is no plot, etc.; he "is not sure where he comes from, where he is, or where he is going . . . . . He is forever sans terre " (Taylor, 1984:156).

In this example becoming does come to something of a realization, whether or not it is a goal, and it is something united as well: first, it comes to the recognition that even icons are unstable, and then in achieving mazing grace, which is meant to refer back to an embrace of the play brought on by the

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labyrinthine maze of life's endemic plotlessness and distinctionlessness. In other words, as we come to aimlessness, errancy nevertheless winds up con- ceding an arrival and a sort of negative unity, contravening its Nietzschean paternity. It concedes also the play in language depicted by Derrida (though without the affirmative joy he recommends):

[There could b e ] . . , the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active inter- pretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center (Derrida, 1978:292).

It is significant that Derrida cites "the affirmation. . , offered to active inter- pretation." This characterization opens the theoretic door, as it were, to all social participants and not, as it might otherwise seem in postmodern litera- ture, only to we chosen few who profess theory. Now interpretation is extended to a socially inclusive hermeneutics, to a communally salient set of questions that could in principle be asked by any speaker, whether professor of theory or plain theorist: (1) What interpretation is, what active interpreta- tion is, and what affirmation is; (2) How actual speech conduct might embody each of these hermeneutics, both separately and together; (3) Whether commended and actual postmodem conduct, such as that which is the topic of this paper, satisfies (1) and (2). But Derrida does not do this, nor do his exegetes. I4

In this paper we address (3), and we are beginning to understand that the postmodem actor may not be equipped by postmodern theory to embody any conception of joyous affirmation or active interpretation. In this respect postmodernism does not seem to teach because it does not adequately for- mulate itself, does not narrate any method for its own accomplishment, as with Derrida here; and because the conduct it commends could not produce what it claims to be able to achieve, such as joyous affirmation and Taylor's notion of grace, as we will see further on.

Derrida calls for joyous affirmation and the faultlessness of innocence, a surprising resonance of Rousseau and a commendation Nietzsche and some contemporaries might reject as being a goal. It is almost as though we still retain a trace of the state of nature, of the epoch before society, before lan- guage, before knowledge of the prohibition? 5

Perhaps becoming, for postmoderns, is to abandon the abstractions of truths and standards for "the nearest reality, that which is around us and inside of us, [which] little by little starts to display color and beauty and enigma and a wealth of meaning-things which earlier men never dreamed of" (Nietzsche, 1982:#34). Wandering, now reconceived as "individual development," could qualify in the sense that this standard of proximity, nearness, the close at hand rejects exoteric universals, as well as significant communal influence

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upon the immediacy of the signifier. Of course this is a standard, a limit, in that certain things are included and others excluded. One would have to be very careful about making comparisons, for example, lest the colors cancel each other out. But note here that the history of the wanderer, and of sign- signified relations, would not be cumulative; each moment would constitute its own epoch, the next its own, and on and on.

In this way, a past and a future become sheer chronological aspects of one's life, which is to say not normatively relevant except as aimless accre- tions. It is an aesthetic standard, generating episodic novelty of experience in the here and now, as though one's identity is always a contemporaneous fabrication. Error doesn't count for long, nor truth. And when they arise they are seen for the wealth of their color and their curiosity as enigma. Thus does the faultless innocent circulate as a means of generating exposure to experi- ences "without goal or underlying unity."

It is one thing to exemplify the intrinsically loose nature of language, which we all do without exception, including Derrida, whether we speak from postmodernism, classicism, the enlightenment, or whatever. It is another to claim that this de facto universality of the gap alone is an affirma- tion simply by having been noticed or exhibited as our condition. Something is missing here, something is missing in Derrida and postmodernism gener- ally in the ways they (fail to) theorize this vital dimension of language, which for them we might even risk saying is fundamental. Of course signs, a condi- tion of all speech, are not at fault; nor, as conditions, can they be truth; nor, being utterly variable in their use, could they be originary. These very fea- tures of the sign are not only what permits but demands what Derrida glosses as "active interpretation," a conclusion with which one may wish to be sym- pathetic but which does need to be examined.

Yet it is not examined. That gloss is about as far as Derr ida- and Nietzsche too - are able to go in their work: to affirm the gap between what we say and what we mean, between our actual speech and the conversation it seeks to imitate, between the nature of Desire and its spoken realization, between sign and signified. Play for Derrida is a way of stipulating the betweenesses in our actions, but he does not work out any theoretic description of this space as a collection of possible relations. His many analyses offer stimulat- ing demonstrations, but the theoretic relationships that make joyous affirma- tion possible, and the kind of world this would be, are unformulated, and so we are left with the apparency that it is only possible in the absence of a standard. But this is not possible (since there is always a standard, including the standard of no standard).

So it is up to us now to initiate some formulation of what active interpre- tation and joyous affirmation could be, not for Derrida but for ourselves. This is to say we shall place these notions under erasure, to be worked out

30

and developed here in order to suggest some conception of greater vitality than errancy as an interest of postmodernism.

.

Beginning with our situation, we stipulate now the profound and irreducible ambiguity (erasibility) of all sign-signified relationships, such that language, whatever greatness it may give, does not offer any natural transparency in the connection between sign and signified. Discourse is not self-explicating, and conversation is not self-sustaining. 16

Profound ambiguity is a limit, which is to say it is laid down as a given in and as language, laid down as such beyond our capacity to change, tran- scend, or put aside.17 Any and all parts of language -wr i t ing , talking, think- ing; laughing, grtmting, profaning; babble, silence; reason, the ineffable, theorizing, the divided line; affirming, enjoying; ambiguity itself; - all parts are limited by the limit, and so profound ambiguity forms part of our being, always and everywhere. This is a limit which is, but does not exist, and cares not if we resist. It does not alter, and cannot be altered. It does nothing, subtracts nothing, adds nothing. It is not active, not organic, not anything except what is: profound ambiguity.

And yet the limit, though final, does not determine all particulars. The very finality of profound ambiguity opens the door to multiplicity, most sig- nificantly to the possibility of interpretation to begin with, and then to mul- tiplicity of interpretation. As with all limits, we learn from it what necessity is, what possibility is - here of interpretation - what impossibility is, and how possibilities may or need to be realized if only we have the imagination to imagine them. And it is a limit that can be known, one which is not so remote that it could never be understood.

So we are kept by the limit from certain things as beyond poss ib i l i ty - perfect knowledge, for example. But we are offered others as within our power, among them interpretation. The limit 's boundary establishes in the whole both the impossible and the possible, which together form an enor- mous and irreducible heterogeneity in what we are. The limit's nega t ion - of perfection, completeness, certainty - simultaneously offers the freedom in- herent in ambiguity, heterogeneity, and the indeterminate, which is the pos- sibility of interpretation. This is what is offered by profound ambiguity. But it is only offered, not given and not forced, which means it is left to us to affirm the offer by taking it up. This is how we live on the border, on the line between determination and freedom as that between our heritage of incorri- gible incompleteness and the opportunity for interpretation.

Whether ambiguity will be painful or enjoyable depends not on the limit

31

itself but on our willingness to accept its powers: the powers it does not give, and the power it offers, this latter being the (limited) power of interpretation. We do suffer incompleteness as one dimension of our mortality, but by the very same token we may enjoy interpretation, the affirmative counterpart of incompleteness, because it gives us the active work of doing it, of develop- ing the arts and wants of interpretation as well as the understandings it gen- erates. Because our capacity for joyous aff irmation resides in active interpretation as an expression of our own powers, this is a difference we can make for ourselves in making interpretations. We can actively engage the very part of the limit inaugurated as our powerlessness: profound ambiguity, imperfection, incompleteness, mortality. We can do so as the part which is interpretation, that part of the limit which is the same to ambiguity and yet also other to our powerlessness.

This heterogeneity, composed of both power and powerlessness, gives us our place as a space in which the play of interpretation is not only possible but necessary: possible as a consequence of the profound ambiguity of the limit; necessary if language is to be part of human practise, if we are to enjoy our situation as an affirmation rather than suffer it as a sentence. Once again we live within a moderating mixture, here between possibility and necessity, as what can be and what needs to be.

But this need is not arbitrary and external, in the way we think of the coercive necessities of biology. Rather, it is one in which we are free to understand it as that which will inspire affirmation, not resignation, because it gives us interesting and independent work to do, and thus to be decisive rather than aimless in doing that work, decisive in the way we have taken up the offer and affirmed that it is good for us to have done so. And so this limit is a mixture in which the difference between parts does not subtract from but rather enhances the place and consequentiality of interpretation. It is enhanced by the play of this mixture, a play between the freedom of possi- bility and the weight, the import, the potency bestowed upon that freedom by necessity, a play which amplifies the power of interpretation and thus the flourishing of discourse and conversation.

And so the heterogeneity of language concerts a mixture in which the particular pleasures of specific interpretive invention commingle with, now, what we might name the enjoyment embodied in the vitalizing work of the whole of interpretation. Why not affirm this as within our power, and why not do so joyously, as an affirmation that our powers are necessary?

We are approaching something like a poetics of enjoyment, where the work of interpretation will coalesce with enjoyment as itself a work, itself in the work, itself the active working of interpretation. Now the work of inter- pretation becomes also an embodiment, an embodiment that demonstrates the joyous affirmation of interpretation, of both its freedom and its weight as

32

a moderation of what could otherwise have been a passive polarization of freedom and necessity. And is it not this latter that produces Taylor's aimless actor?

Any interpretation is a making: something is done that changes what had been, conceived either as a moment in the stimulating current of profound ambiguity or as that content which came before, or could have come before, or could have come after and now does (not); of that which comes against, or could have come against, or could have come for, and now does (not). Think of this making as beginning in a multis of grammars, a multis of grammatic applications, and some ambient necessity to interpret. This is the scene of the play of interpretation, the setting for the work and for enjoyment, the latter only a possibility for the same reasons we already know about whether the need for interpretation will be taken up: for the reason that it might not be taken up, might not become the work, might not therefore fertilize what had been only the possibility for enjoyment.

Play TM is expressed in the artifice that confronts this indeterminate setting and transforms it from within by working out some speakable formulation that folds back on this working out as interpretation. If artifice originates in the limit of profound ambiguity, artifice brings that very origin to life as the initiative of making which that origin offers. Artifice, then: (1) is free because the original demand of profound ambiguity is not specific as to interpretations made; (2) and not free because interpretation, though true to itself, is neither its own origin nor its own validation. This is to say that all substantive interpretation, like politics, is local, and, being local, also sub- ject to erasure; that particular interpretations, always possible, are never eter- nal; that enjoyment of the work, always possible, is never inevitable.

It is by now a commonplace that postmodernists seek the break in the regular order of things (Jameson, 1991). This is no mere descriptive interest but one that values new space, the chance for novelty, rearrangement, ex- periment, and so on. Although the need for interpretation is constant, it can become an explicit issue of conduct if life gives off an appearance of crisis, when we can be moved to call up and revisit the very process of making which is interpretation. In a break we can imagine that we are remaking interpretat ion- once again joining the play of its parts, and the pleasures of engaging this artifice, as if for another first time. A break is a space when interpretation and interpreter may come together as self-expression, or tal- ent, or invention, or revolution (and also, alas, the reverse of these). Here the working out of interpretation is thought there to be seen, to be put together under the auspices of the situation and its particular artificers, which is always a pleasure, a pain, or both. 19 What can be pleasurable is the artifice and effort, the work, the attention, the action of making an interpretation. This is possible whatever else may happen, including the success or failure

33

of some interpretation's results. One end of making may be the result it brings. But another is the play of making itself, which can be a source of pleasure in its own right, because it engages the particular, the local, the self, as palpable rud imen t s - as the streets, so to s p e a k - of interpretation. Although a break is just another variation on the demand for interpretation, it does greet the par- ticular with a distinctively explicit opportunity for invention in the work of making. 2°

Perhaps it is these local expressions of artifice that Nietzsche meant by the colors of life. Sometimes, for example, we find pleasure in making inter- pretations because they are an expression of talent, such as tossing the pasta or playing the violin; or because they seem spontaneous, as with a joke, a sudden kiss; or because they are so complicated, say in settling the peace. These can be inventive, pleasant, surprising - engrossing in the sense that their doing gives satisfaction. They can even be important in their conse- quences for us. And they do affirm interpretation, in that they are made within the context of artifice and effort, are erasible, discursively repetitive, hetero- geneous, etc. etc.

But is that all there is to interpretation? Do we want to leave joyous affir- mation to such particular exhibitions of the work of making interpretation? The winning of a peace prize certainly affirms peace, and the skills of the winner, but it does not say anything (yet) about joyous affirmation of the demand for interpretation, profound ambiguity, or the play of language. World- wide perhaps in its political implications, it remains at this juncture a theo- retically local process because, though a real accomplishment and a feat that may receive acclamation for its consequences, it does not as that feat of peace express joyous affirmation of its making as an achievement of lan- guage. At least, that is not why it is given a peace prize. This is to say that achievement of peace does not itself warrant characterization as the kind of joyous affirmation we are trying to formulate.

On the other h a n d . . , it may be that tossing the pasta, so publically over- shadowed by peace, will evince our sense of joyous affirmation because what can be joyously affirmed as interpretation is interpretation itself, which is not equivalent to widespread acknowledgment nor even good results. Toss- ing the pasta can demonstrate not just artful tossing, effective tossing, famous tossing, but also love of the notion of interpreting, love of interpreta- tion embodied in the tossing, a notion which may be instantiated but is not circumscribed or exhausted by tossing. The tossing could demonstrate love of the artifice and the idea of making interpretation, of craft and our affirma- tion of the offer to interpret, of the freedom and necessity in which all this originates. While we can love the doing so also can we love doing - dare we risk saying this? - we can love doing the representation that is the doing, and that is what I am attempting to formulate as joyous affirmation.

34

In exactly the same way, the peacemaker could love not just the prize for peace but also the embodiment of freedom and need distinctive to the work of interpretation. Though s/he would win no prize for that (except in hermeneutics), it would be an action that embodies not just the artifice of making the peace, but also joyous affirmation of the need for interpretation offered by profound ambiguity.

All in all, then, joyous af f i rmat ion- love of interpretat ion-has two parts, or rather one whole from which one part may be separated: (1) Love of the whole body of interpretadon, of ambiguity-artifice-demonstration-freedom- need-pleasure-enjoyment; (2) love of the particular part which is the pleas- ure of artifice. We can take pleasure in the particular artifice involved in tossing, peacemaking, invention, expression of talent, spontaneity, and so on, which can be indelibly satisfying as occasions in the taming of uncer- tainty, and why not? 21 But this is not the same as the joyous conjunction of that work with profound ambiguity, the eternal condition in which artifice itself was bom, the image of which we bear now: of an origin that prefigures the use of artifice, of an offer of interpretation which needs to be affirmed, of a need which we do affirm as a matter of fact and commitment. We are not original. The limit is. But we can live creatively in its image if as we inter- pret we embody its freedom and necessity.

I f this is the look of interpretadon, is it also a center, a foundation? Per- haps, if by that we mean it is not an origin but an opportunity, offered by the limit, to center ourselves more affirmatively, and more enjoyably, than in the errant life proposed by Taylor.

In any case we need now to turn back to errancy where, after this refrac- tion, it becomes a story of decisive resistance to joyous affirmation.

.

Early on in the Inferno. Dante describes the Futile, who run, for perpetuity but without progress, after a whirling standard in the Vestibule of Hell:

The dismal company of wretched sp i r i t s . . . Whose lives know neither praise nor infamy;

Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him Were faithful, but to self alone were true;

Heaven cast them forth - their presence there would dim The light; deep Hell rejects so base a herd,

Lest sin should boast itself because of them.

35

This dreary huddle has no hope of death, Yet its blind life trails on so low and crass That every other fate it envieth (Dante 1949:86).

Futility inhabits a vestibule rather than either Hell or Heaven, having been rejected by each because the futile were not only not faithful but not rebel- lious either. Even sin does not want them, for while their lives did not deserve praise they also deserve no blame. Instead, the fate of the futile is nothing, to be suffered in the limbo of the vestibule. Their fate is to live in the debilitated nowhere in-between, between life and afterlife, in an eternity that will not offer even death, that offers no definite place or particular con- tent. Having circulated aimlessly to and fro in life, having made no record and inscribed no reputation, having embraced nothing in particular, they are without substance now, just crying out and envying the definite fates of oth- ers. Compared to Hell itself, theirs is a region without content, a region whose vacant distinction is its absence of anything to do or be or name.

Is errancy the postmodern version of futility? Futility's emptiness, as we see, is not the void, nor rejection of everything, nor love of evil, but rather the always provisional touch then separate, touch then separate of the wan- derer. Its emptiness is its aimless commendation that we see this lover, this work, this family, this community, this self, this moment, this sleeper, this soul, as foreign. It is to treat everything intimate not with love, nor irony, but as anthropologically strange.

Thus, in limbo, the world's inhabitants and occasions are entirely factoid. Alterity is there, always there, but it is not a relation ofnourisl~nent because it must be momentary, and detached even then, serving only as a place or per- son from which to depart.

The issue with aimlessness is not that all is the same, that there are no differences. Difference is necessary as that to and from which one must stray, a stranger upon whom to glance and pass by. To be aimless, one must stray from an alter to an alter, and then again, and again.

This is a corollary of the claim that self disappears, much like insomnia dissolves the sovereignty of the I in the night. Now only alterity is left, or rather half of alterity, the half that is difference, because the half that is the same no longer has its common partner in some self of its other. Alter no longer has a same to itself in the same of other, because other is without that same. To stray from this lover, for example - to treat this lover as fo re ign- is to "erase" the part of this lover that is the same to me and reduce this lover to any other to me. Between postmodern alters there can only be alterity, and any basis of community is eradicated.

Straying thus proposes that movement must always remain on the surface and never go to root. Deeply, errancy is shallow. So straying is not free to move anywhere after all: it must avoid the profound possibilities in any relation.

36

Nevertheless, this levelled surface does have profound consequences. It forms the world as a place where all difference is equal, and if all differ- ence is equal no difference is significant. It is the significance of differ- ence, of course, that is the basis of community, in which we not only recognize identity (the difference of a difference) but also our commitment (the worth of a difference). 22

This objectification of difference atomizes relations by liberating content from influence by the social. Objects, including persons-as-objects, do not develop into community because they are unable to embrace (or reject) the collective. They can only recognize it. Selves and alters as objects- cognizers, identifiers-are futile because the normative force &identity, its social worth, is lost in perverse liberation by social default, and so the meaning of signs, individual opinion, and interpersonal instrumentalism are freed from any collective or communal influence. They remain unsocialized. This is truly a lost foundation - the social is a foundation because only in community can discrete and specific meaning become history, only in community can indi- vidual opinion be true (or false), and only in community can value humanize what would otherwise be sheer instrumentalism. And this loss is a result of the overwhelming conflation of signs with social community. Indeed, the greatest social difference is that between sign and community, and it is only from the two together that we can theorize social action as a dynamic rela- tion between identity and value.

Here we come upon a monotony of the daytime comparable to that of insomnia, in which everything in the world is virtually if not literally identi- cal because all differences are remote and impersonal. Difference exists, but it does not excite or call. Perversely, the colors of life, the particular shapes and sounds of the world which were to be renourished by doing away with formulaic narratives grand and small, are muted still because they come to be invisible in the remoteness ofpostmodern alterity. And so, in the end, the colors of errancy are gray, which is no color at all.

What has come to be called "free play of signifiers" takes on a genuinely double new sense here, in that signifier comes to collapse into one both signs and sign-ers, to collapse the users of words into the what of words. In social life, the limit of the s ign - i t s essential and profound ambigui ty- in no way obviates its collective use as reasonably certain or uncertain by those en- gaged in everyday conduct. But in errancy people, and the talk of people, are finally individuated, left free of collective necessity in its commendation to aimlessness. The emptiness of insomnia is revived here as content emptied of collective significance and thus also of a community's own power to gen- erate individual commitment and to limit the sign' s perfect freedom. A world that reduces community to sign, and thus produces a world "without fault, without truth, and without origin" is a world conceived in the absence of the

37

users of signs and the collective traditions and commitments that only the social can endow. It is a world offered by a theory which privileges the sign. Indeed, this actor is not really a user of signs at all, but a follower of them, a follower not just of content but also of their promiscuous theoretic attach- ments to signifieds, without which attachments those same signs would be voids without end.

.

As all and everything are to be treated as foreign, we come in sight again of Dante's futile, who must live just that way for eternity because their aimless- ness offered nothing in particular, offered nothing defnite enough to make them eligible for some distinct place, whether Heaven or Hell.

A capstone phrase in postmodernism is "the death of the author" and now we are in a position to examine this gloss. Foucault, remember, ends his 'What Is an Author?" with the remark "What difference does it make who is speaking, so long as we know the conditions of the discourse?" (Foucault, 1948:101-120).

And it is true that a course of action, such as discourse, can be independ- ently theorized. In fact Dante does this for futility through tile usage of the whirling ensign, we do this for errancy, and so on. There are different modes of speech-for example science-speech, art-speech, quotidian-speech-which may need to be addressed at times for their distinctiveness, without regard to the usual influences and modifications of the whole.

But speech-in-the-world, whatever its mode, must be ]practiced, and practiced by speakers who actually live within the incompleteness of speech in two vital senses of that idea: (1) The many varieties of practically possible actions and understandings that are relevant at any one moment, and (2) the non-self-explicating, profoundly ambiguous meaning and significance of any single social action. Everyday speech does not say itself exactly, directly, or explicitly. It can only intimate. It is always contingent how any practical speech will connect with such relevances as problematic collective interests, problematic individual interests, problematic particular relations among speakers, problematic collective histories, problematic collective knowledge, problematic relations between collective knowledge and a particular speak- er's knowledge, problematic interlocutors of any speech, problematic resources of intelligence, duplicity, and stupidity; possible real consequences, imagi- nary consequences; and the nature of false presuppositions, ambiguous pre- suppositions, adequate presuppositions. The life-speaker serves all modes of speech as an interlocutor of these continuous problematic reverberations which are always being worked out among co-speakers in their course, and as the

38

context for the utterances they actually read and hear and act upon. And this is not a matter of reducing ambiguity by accumulating more information, or calculating more extensively what is already at hand. Nor is life itself reduc- ible to abstract conditions of discourse, as Foucault would have it. Rather, a who that is speaking is the one who works through the always ambiguous flux of sign-signified relations, across the whole spectrum of meaning, limi- tation, morality, and so on in any one encounter.

So: a who not only has a life in life, but now in theorizing too, as a one (collective, person) that labors as the specific and visible embodiment - the what-embodier-of the conditions of discourse and their various realizations in conduct, and thus a one who can be said not only to produce and make whatever any actual discourse turns out to be but to demonstrate the need for whatness that turns up in any and all whatever, z3 Only through life-speakers speaking and through the implicit histories and traditions this speech em- bodies (such as the need for interpretation), will "the conditions of discourse" be realized. Of course life-speakers speaking conditions can be a condition, too, but then Foucault's question becomes empty. In the life-speaker the prac- tical and the philosophical commingle as considerations taken together in theorizing social conduct.

Again, given the irreparable gap between sign and signified, it is the who that actually do this relation in the world, work which embodies in all dis- course the possibility given by language, whether this is joyous affirmation or only muddling through. Or both, which is not impossible to imagine. Life- speakers embody language, and language includes the whole beyond the use of signs, and thus life-speaking includes the whole beyond the sign.

Indeed the gap, however affirmed or suffered, is an opporttmity rather than a curse because it distinguishes human conduct from the life of plants. In these respects, everyone cares who is speaking because any who partici- pates in authorizing as a matter of agency the work that generates, trans- forms, rejects, etc., the speeches that constitute discourse, and the valuable-valueless contingency that makes some discourse significant and other discourse not. The who are not anonymous by virtue of their responsi- bility for practise in the world, and by virtue of language's need for embodi- ment, including embodiment of interpretation. Finally, given the necessarily variable nature of signs, the particularity of this demonstrative work cannot be laid down in advance and could not be accomplished by a mechanistic dummy. Thus, what is laid down - the gap, profound ambiguity, absence of originary presence, sign-signified contingency - leaves to us the very work that cannot be laid down. If we are free, this is where it begins - in the active interpretation generated by the limit of imperfect speech.

The futility of postmodern aimlessness resides in its prescriptions of estrangement and depersonalization and its picture of language as a set of

39

overwhelming conditions: loss of self and independence from commitment. It is an ignorance that conceives value always as constraint and the gap as victimization. And yet it exempts itself from these same principles. Conse- quently, futility can offer no possibility of a one that is particular (I do not say unique), just the many that are the same in their anonymity: "Who cares who is speaking?" Who cares, ask the futile, because alter cannot be heard and cannot be seen. Who could care in such a world, in which the only vis- ible is the me that is acted upon, a me without remnant of its sovereign I, a me that can only be a victim:

Me, Me I say, and that's enough.

As anonymity supplants embodiment, and intimacy recedes into indiffer- ence, we do now begin to drift because we lose touch with content. 2a We float, free as a signifier: abandoning, and being abandoned by, place after place; compensating for the loss by always being vigilant; calculating iden- tities here and there in the homeless ozone of impersonality. Embodiment, commitment, ousia have been replaced by abstract motion that continues without resistance, but which could never moderate or even socialize the worst uncertainties of tomorrow.

.

That is our freedom in postmodernism, a vast and palpable emptiness. It is not the emptiness of nothing because it is filled. It is filled first with the worm of our losses: of self, truth, history; and second, with dread: not the anxiety of death, for we have already lost ourself and the rest, but dread - dread of living through each night and day in thrall to our insomnias:

1. The horrible silence of talk that could never become conversation. 2. The horrible invisibility of appearances that could never suggest authen-

ticity. 3. The horrible tableau of ceaseless motion in which nothing can mature. 4. The horrible monotony of a world in which everything is recognizable

but nothing is significant. 5. The horrible repression of a world in which expenditures of Desire are

made impossible. 6. And where all this will be eternal because there is no longer enough pas-

sion for revolt, or even suicide.

Certainly it is true that joyous affirmation will risk horrors of its own. But

40

t h e y c o u l d no t be these , b e c a u s e p r o f o u n d a m b i g u i t y has i n s p i r e d e n j o y m e n t

o f i n t e r p r e t a t i o n r a the r than, as w i th er rancy, the ( t )e r ro r o f a b s o l u t e f r e e d o m

o f the s ign.

Notes

l. See also Levinas (1987:48). 2. In his note on the subject, Blanchot calls sleep the "Sovereignty of the I" (1982:264--268). 3. At the end of the paragraph Taylor is quoting Derrida (1978:229). 4. I want to emphasize the idea of everyday conduct, by which I mean to include the whole

social world of doing work and living life, including doing philosophical work and living philosophically. Thus, for example Taylor's writing is examined not just for its prescriptions but also as a popular account of certain everyday practices today.

5. For example: Heidegger (1982); Wittgenstein (1958); Garfinkel (1967); Blum and McHugh (1984). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

6. Trace and erasure, terms given by Derrida, derive from Heidegger's famous crossout, "A thoughtful glance ahead into the realm of 'Being' can only write itself as j3~q,~," re- presented by Derrida as "The sign)N~that ill-named 15ai~, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy, 'What i s . . . ? '" Cf. Heidegger (1958), Derrida (1976).

7. Taylor is quoting Den-ida (1976:70). 8. Call this elision an error, as Taylor himself might. But it would not count as particularly

negative because he commends erring for the postmodern actor, as we will see below. 9. Again, this is used not to correct or define, but as a repository of usage with which to

begin. 10. Sloterdijk (1987:127) characterizes our time as "the incapacity to have the right rage at

the right time, the incapacity to express, the incapacity to explode the climate of care, the incapacity to celebrate, the incapacity to let go."

11. This notion of principle is fully developed in Blum and McHugh (1984). 12. See Gasch6 (1986) for the variety of incommensurables that have been called founda-

tions (his name for them is grounds). 13. Mazing grace is the recognition cited by Taylor and referred to above that "From the

perspective of the end of history, the 'final' plot seems to be 'that there is no plot, '" which he borrows from Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?

14. But see Staten (1984). 15. But it is after knowledge of the prohibition and so, once again, a standard. We are not

thinking about an issue that arrays standard against pure freedom. 16. Folding this principle back on our saying of it, whether or not that principle is 'true'

here and now, we need to accept that whatever I am referencing by it is true to the extent we can stipulate with some confidence that this beginning, while both a risk and erasible, does not traduce either conversational good faith in general or the implicit interest in joyous affirmation which we seek to make explicit by this working through.

17. For a more complete discussion of limit see McHugh (1993), and Blanchotts (1993) discussion of the neuter.

18. In the literature play is both noun and verb, to reference the loose relations between parts of language as well as actions which express those relations. We exclude play as a trait of persons, not because there are none but in order to emphasize that our interest is in the structure of language.

19. There can be pleasure in working out the painful situation and vice versa, e.g., Barthes's

41

lovers (1978). Note also that we are not depicting the results of interpretation here, but the making of them.

20. A pleasure not always for the better, since it can eventuate in new forms of repression, junk, emptiness, etc.

21. The pleasures of particularity can be reversed, of course. War, a lapful of pasta, only reaffirm the uncertainty of the particular. What would not have disappeared in these failures, however, would have been the play of artifice, whatever the circumstantial dis- satisfaction. But embodiment, as distinct from satisfaction, does not await success of interpretation, and success does not determine the joyous affirmation of embodiment.

22. Derrida makes use of difference as differance. But he means to depict in how differance is the way we locate meaning, in the relation of sign-signified, or what I am calling here identity; it is not, therefore, an account of the communal significance of those differ- ences in identity as meaning.

23. In fact, this very problem was an impetus to phenomenology from the beginning. It should be noted here that the idea of a who as speaker is not limited to persons. Collec- tives, too, may speak as interested participants in community, e.g., governments, cul- tures, social classes, musics, traditions. And it would be especially misguided to neuter these, as if they can neither influence nor be influenced by history, because that would mean everything must be refabricated in every moment at every space.

24. Usually accomplished in postmodern theory as nothing but another sign anyway. Viz., Baudrillard (l 981).

References

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