Memories for Paul de Man by Jacques DerridaReview by: Nadia FusiniThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 431-434Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431344 .Accessed: 19/07/2012 14:46

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Finally, to reiterate, I have mentioned here a few strong points of the book without ignoring the pos- sibility that another reader would probably have focussed on other topics for discussion.

GENEVIEVE VAN CAUWENBERGE

F.N.R.S., Liege

KATZ, RUTH. Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera. New York: Pendragon Press, 1986, 224 pp. + 10 plates, $36.00.

Katz offers a convenient summary of her project: "opera arose from the conjunction in Italy of the urban bourgeois court and the idea of individualism; from the literary and dramatic forms that reflected the search for classical models, together with the tradi- tions of Church and theater; from the Italian taste for sensuality and elegance, together with the spirit of doing or 'operating' on the world." A count of the apparently conjunctive conjunctions, commas, and semicolons gives an initial feeling for the scope of the project. When we realize that the conjunctions, commas, and semicolons are not simply conjunctive, but signs of complex interactions, a full appreciation of the task emerges.

Katz's first chapter usefully lays out the geography of the project. The one "quarrel" I might have is that the Kuhnian notion of "paradigm" invoked by Katz as a potential organizer of her discussion is far too coarse-grained and simplistic to do justice to the project as it is carried out. In the end I think Katz might agree with this. A far better organizer is the issue of divining and defining the powers of music, a concern of all the principal individuals and groups instrumental in opera's birth, and this organizing issue is used extremely effectively as a link between many of the conjunctive elements cited above. It also has the advantage of allowing this book to contribute to the more general discussion of musical affect and expression currently being carried on by Kivy, Tormey, and others.

Katz's estimate of the many dimensions-aes- thetic, sociological, and musicological-necessary for a full explanation of the rise of opera seems to me to be realistic. For example, in a much briefer discussion of nineteenth-century opera used to set the context for an evaluation of Hoffmansthal, Hermann Broch has recourse to a very similar array of consid- erations. I find virtually nothing in Katz's book which fails to bear directly and informatively on the phenomenon she sets out to explain.

I do have minor worries about the organization of the book. Some of the chapters were written and

published as papers at early stages of the project and aren't quite fully integrated with the later material. Nowadays we are probably all guilty of this sort of thing, but we can still urge each other to take the time for a fully integrative rewriting. In the case at hand we're left with a few minor annoyances (not vitiating discontinuities), but since the project has so many subtle dimensions, I think we deserve to pay the most careful attention to expository architecture. In addi- tion, the integration of the text and illustrations is less illuminating than it might be, and I don't see why the author settles for that.

I suppose I ought to be flattered that the absolutely essential material from works in languages other than English rests untranslated. But my facility isn't such that I can sustain the flow easily under those condi- tions. A side benefit is that the producers of the book are provided the opportunity to treat us to a formi- dable array of Druckfehlern in almeno cinq linguae.

One more minor point: the missing anagram rela- tive to plate 6 on page 90 is trying to be "PLENIPOTENS," which would make good sense but would require the hypothesis that an "E" was mistranscribed as an "IL' at some stage. I'm cer- tainly in no position to make a judgment on that, but it would have the added benefit of restoring the symmetry of the inscription.

CHARLES DYKE

Temple University

DERRIDA, JACQUES. Memories for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, xvi + 153 pp., $17.50.

A place and a date frame this small but precious book by Derrida on Paul de Man. On January 18, 1894, there is a gathering for a recollection: at Yale, a group of friends reunite for the consummation of the final act of saluting the departed friend. Derrida speaks few words: he has, he says, "la mort dans l'ame," and it feels like a weight which gives him a leaden despair words cannot relieve. "I will try to find better words, and more serene ones," he prom- ises. Now he has: Memories for Paul de Man is, according to the Romantic movement Paul de Man has so many times deconstructed, the fruit of the emotions recollected in tranquillity. The tranquillity, though, is not to be thought of as a distance taken from, or put against, what in the heat of the moment hurts too much. It is more, in this case, the time it requires to fully absorb the blow, so that it spreads all through the organs of our perception and feeling, and it reaches the heart, the very locus where memory dwells. The absence fully internalized, the lack fully

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incorporated-now, perhaps, the words wie Blumen will entstehen.

But that is exactly what this precious small book keeps questioning: can there be a fully experienced experience of death, and if so, more to the point, should we, ought we want to want it? Do we have the right to want it? Is that the duty and movement of fidelity? Doesn't writing itself (this very book) at- tempt to avoid the void of death? Isn't writing a-void-dance around death? Is writing a fine doing in front of Death? Wouldn't silence suit better?

Following the gathering for the funeral service, another gathering then takes place, in and for, and in virtue of, this book. The book is indeed the thing (didn't both Derrida and de Man run a seminar on The Thing, revolving around the very famous essay by Heidegger?) which allows a most intimate gath- ering for recollection: it is the private, solitary mourning of Derrida for his dear friend. "Upon the death of the other we are given to memory," says Derrida; but what kind of memory, since Derrida and de Man make a difference (of course) between Geddchtnis and Erinnerung? Derrida is a philosopher and a writer. But he prefaces this book with that announcement of impotence which keeps coming back throughout the book; "I don't know how to write a story." No, he does not. It is true. But that is simply because in order to write a story one must believe (not a very easy belief nowadays) that words can be believed for what they say, and not constantly stopped and deconstructed. Derrida's passion (the same as de Man's) is, on the contrary, to try, infinitely and obsessively, to exhaust all the possible meanings of a word, till any movement of the word itself toward telling is arrested. L'arret du mot doubles in a sort of arret de Mort: a fatal pace which impedes language from flowing towards its destina- tion. Or, if you prefer, since "destination" is such a loaded word for Derrida, towards the performing of its vocation-which certainly must be to tell a story.

This would be right, now: if words would come, as flowers come, to tell a story, the story of a friend- ship, the story of Paul de Man in relation to what Derrida knew of him, saw of him, felt for and through him, learned from him . . . But words do not come to Derrida that way, the way of storytelling. He must do something different, then; he lets the other speak through him, he allows himself to be traversed by de Man's metaphors, words, haunting images. He allows himself in his own book to be inscribed in de Man's vocabulary and language. "I am here," says Derrida, "in his name." "I came for him." It is for him I am writing." "What I am writing is thus his text, he is writing through me." There is in this gesture of Derrida's something of the impetuous, hasty, generous response of Hamlet when death comes to him via the Ghost. At the father's intima-

tion that he might not remember what he commands, instantly Haamlet answers: "Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all pressures past . . . and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter." That is how the living responds to the dead: the "intimation" (another meaning Derrida suggests for the word Erinnerung-see pp. 35, 64) becomes a commandment, a task, a duty, an alliance.

But there is also war between the dead and the living. Canetti analyzes in pages of scorching lucid- ity the connection between power and survival. Derrida must know those pages, but they do not come to his mind now; now he is inclined more towards the mood of impoverishment and deprivation Freud describes so well. But certainly there is, in the face of the death of the other, a less acceptable feeling, a less humanized reaction, which consists of saying, "He is dead, I am alive; he lies down, I stand up." It is from the inhuman ascertainment that it is the other who is dead that guilt springs, I suppose, and all the discourse of mourning is generated. Death is never to us simply the death of the other: we have the problem of justifying our survival. That is why death is so indecent: it exhibits our erection over the other's prostration. If we cannot tolerate death, it is precisely because we have come so far from that kind of primitive, direct triumph of life, which says "yes" to survival. We want to keep alliance with the dead one, not win over him.

Then we must help him to die, and ourselves to die with him. Which takes us into another problem, because in so doing, in fact, we do not let the dead die, and death invades our life and triumphs over it. Life and death then constantly intermingle, and we have nightmares, hallucinations, ghosts . . . Kafka dreamt many times of a contented death: a complete death, a total closure: a death, that is, which in happening would realize itself completely, exhaust all the possibilities. That would be a "real" death: a happy, or contented, death-an action which would end the possible and the impossible, all suspension, all indecision, all ambiguity. But Kafka, we know, died "like a dog" -as we all do.

Derrida does not want his dear friend to die that way. This book is, among other things, an attempt to find a right way for Paul de Man to die. But what is the right way, exactly? What is, on Derrida's part, the just, proper liturgy which would help his friend to die well? The question is complex, particularly so for Derrida, who has complicated the notion of proper and improper to the utmost degree of subtlety. The point is that death is no longer for us a rite de passage: what Derrida discovers (and we through him in this book) is that death doesn't come to pass.

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Its necessity is inscribed exactly here: Lacan would say that death is necessary precisely because "elle ne cesse pas de ne pas s'ecrire." Death is the necessary angel that accompanies all our actions: if it is so, then what we have to face is the triumph of death. And death here is the subject.

Around these names-triumph, death, life- Derrida and de Man encountered each other, and exchanged gifts of understanding and writing, which passed through Shelley and Blanchot. Even this book is but another evidence of how much they shared. This book is, in fact, threaded with the constant return of certain names which tie de Man and Derrida: Rousseau, Heidegger, Shelley, Holderlin. . . .It is pointless to retell the different stations of a journey whose progress is traceable anyway: the books are there, monumental pieces of evidence of a deeply exciting and nourishing intellectual friend- ship.

This small and precious book revolves around those very knots: where the warp and woof of the texture meet in a knot, there the encounter gets deeper, and the book itself accomplishes somehow its implicit aim of celebrating the death of the dear friend by giving him the words which were his. But now these words around which Derrida's and de Man's minds busied themselves, these words which always engaged the two friends' thinking and imag- ination, have an extra tone, a very special echo. Now these words have to master a "real" event; an event, that is, which has actually taken place. Paul de Man is dead: out of this "real" death, Derrida must now speak. He knows, from de Man, that "the dis- junction is the relation"; but, does it help'? He knows that a man always speaks, so to say, "by heart"; that, at the bottom, any utterance which comes out, comes from beyond the grave (wasn't that what de Man taught, the bond between human language and prosopopeia?); that we always want to speak the other (wasn't it allegory that de Man tried to deconstruct as an ineliminable aspect of human language?). But now it is a different knowledge for Derrida; and although he knows "by heart" the words in which such an event can be phrased, he does not know "how to tell the story."

He knows of death and language, of how they relate; he knows of the omnipotent vocation language has to salvage and rescue; of its innate tendency to restore and supplement. But now there is something more at stake: a powerful emotion surges which annuls the power of words to say. Or, all that is there to be said is nothing: the negative of death has annulled even Paul de Man's "signature," his I"yes." Because Paul de Man the deconstructionist was, to Derrida (and he is absolutely right, of course) "la thinker of affirmation," "he existed in memory of an affirmation and a vow: yes, yes." But now, he

is gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled: his life-that is, his power to say yes to life, to receive and respond to it, and to know it-is annihilated. Derrida is alone confronting this terrible solitude at the death of Paul de Man. The possibility of death has "happened," and the real exhibits a hole. There is nobody now who can answer when he says the name Paul de Man. Still, that's the thing which he has been left with, just a name.

Quite rightly, Derrida keeps repeating, I have only a name to say; only that: Paul de Man. Paul de Man suffices. That name is everything: the proper name is the only proper sound to utter, in the face of death, as a lamentation or a litany. We know that there are times when one can only grasp at names as in prayers or in religious meditation. The mind, then, empties itself: no other thought, no other care enters it till it reaches the extreme point, when the prayer becomes silent. No words are uttered, no thoughts are formu- lated: unheard melodies are sweeter. . . . How else can we pay homage to the gods, and to the dead, if not through this silent sacrifice, when one renounces one's only proof of existence? one's own power to say?

At the memorial service (as reprinted in Yale French Studies no. 69) Derrida confessed what is at the origin of his writingfor Paul de Man, about him: we have 'death in the soul," he says. This might, among other things, mean that the soul has been invaded by a despair that clouds sight and thought. But if talking is impossible (precisely because talking about Paul de Man is not talking to him; it only reinforces his absence, which the heart cannot ac- cept-the heart aches), to be silent would be a negative too hard to bear.

I read the book as an effort to face death in truth and honesty. Derrida is generous, and honest, and inconsolable. And that is exactly as it should be. He has too much respect for words and honest speech, and too much love for his friend, to accept any pharmakon. His mind joins his heart in the same motion of generous lucidity; and all he has come to think with, through, because of Paul de Man-and all he will go on thinking through de Man's books- helps him to face death bravely.

I like this book for many reasons which I have tried to explain; but I like it mainly because I read it as a lesson in how a well-trained mind works through death and out of it. Death-like the sea, Keats said before leaving for Italy, where he was to die very shortly-is a great agent of separation. That is why we want to put something against it: a token, a word, a remembrance. It is a very human apotropaic gesture we must not be ashamed of. The ancient would place Death, that agent of destruction, in opposition to Fame. Fame is just the proper name surrounded by the special aura of its bearer's actions. Fame is

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connected to "name" in the very root it derives from: fari, to speak. But it is also connected to phos, light. If Death wants to come and devour the man, death cannot, according to ancient beliefs, destroy man's name; Fame triumphs over death. Through fame the name will survive. If Death wants to come and bring in its darkness, the name with luminous halo, its radiant power, will strive against the eclipse. Light and dark, caducity and eternity, the present death and the future life fight against each other.

Thus, when Derrida calls de Man, it is not simply a magical incantation, an hallucinatory gesture, an impotent hope. Calling a name cannot annul what has happened. On the contrary, we have to call in order to hear the silence which will answer. The wound of separation must not be healed. We must not get used to death, we must refuse the many stratagems through which we try to blind ourselves. This is the right liturgy, where Gedachtnis and Erinnerung come the one in help of the other. There is something we must want to remember (Gedachtnis), or at least we must not want to forget. But then, involuntary memory (Erinnerung) must get in; then, beyond remembrance, having forgotten to remember, a fidel-

ity of a different kind must affirm itself. Then we will let the dead die, and put an end to that egotistical sense of deprivation, of bereaved mourning. We will not accept any consoling simulacrum. But will we be capable of this? Do we have the right to let the dead die, to go where they must go-away from us? Is this the duty and movement of fidelity?

To these, Derrida's questions, I will answer yes, yes. I will also remind him (I apologize for that "remind") of something Holderlin can teach us (which he certainly taught de Man). Talking about the strange alliance between man and God, Hdlderlin defines it as a sacred knot. He calls it the sacred knot (or bond) of infidelity, or an infidelity of a sacred kind. Wouldn't Derrida recognize in this chiasmus, where fidelity and betrayal join, the bond he has been trying to describe between himself and the dear dead friend? Isn't this the impossible tale he cannot tell?

NADIA FUSINI

University of Rome

Article Contentsp. 431p. 432p. 433p. 434

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 341-446Volume Information [pp. 443-446]Front MatterEditorial [pp. 341-343]Traditional Art History's Complaint against the Linguistic Analysis of Visual Art [pp. 345-349]Metaphor in Music [pp. 351-360]Schleiermacher among the Theorists of Language and Interpretation [pp. 361-368]Acts of Narration [pp. 369-379]Donkeys, Stars, and Illocutionary Acts [pp. 381-388]The Criticizability of Feelings [pp. 389-391]The Aesthetic of the Antique [pp. 393-402]The Role of Titles in Identifying Literary Works [pp. 403-408]AfterwordsRadically Misinterpreting Radical Interpretation [pp. 409-410]Does Art Have a Spectator? [pp. 411-412]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 413-415]Review: untitled [p. 415]Review: untitled [pp. 416-418]Review: untitled [pp. 418-420]Review: untitled [pp. 420-421]Review: untitled [pp. 421-425]Review: untitled [pp. 425-427]Review: untitled [pp. 427-429]Review: untitled [pp. 429-431]Review: untitled [p. 431]Review: untitled [pp. 431-434]

Books Received [pp. 435-437]The American Society for Aesthetics: Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting [pp. 439-442]Back Matter