View
219
Download
2
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
Chapter Two:
Paper(less) Persons
Reading as Refiling and Reshelving c. 1933 1
Articles lost.—What makes the
very first glimpse of a village, a
town, a landscape so
incomparable and irretrievable
is the rigorous connection
between foreground and
distance. Habit has not yet
done its work. As soon as we
1 The focus on transit in Saxl’s essay make it a link between WB (the buyer is in transit, his books have arrived; Adorno, books are damaged in transit, as they are produced to be sold). Saxl’s memoir is a strange biography of a library, a bibliobiography. Usually memoirs are linear, sequential, chronological. Here , the founding the library is the foundation of he memoir. But the memoir is insane because the library is about time going nowhere, and then the memoir ends. At the end of a memoir, there’s usually a break into impressionism, self-reflexivity, where the memoir becomes about writing the memoir. The medium gets recognized. But that doesn’t happen in Saxl’s memoir. Saxl’s essay is, like WB and TH’s, about issues involving book collection, bodies, reshelving, boxes, filing, and so on. But it is less interesting and does not reward close reading. Perhaps it is a case of blocked mourning for Warburg, an idealization of him (repressing his mental illness) because he is dead (whereas WB can analyze his own embarrassment). In Saxl’s essay, there’s an interesting thread running through it involving flesh and denuding, the removal of flesh. Last sentence describes the library metaphorically as a skeleton. Earlier he calls it a s hip. How does Warburg’s body figure into a memoir of his library? Here we have a genre of the biography of a biography, a genre that recalibrates the relationship between Warburg and the object (book or photo0. There is a fleshly record of that relationship that might be symptomatic of the way staging the library rewires the relation between the collector and the objects he collects—a question of the leg-acy left behind by the collector, whose domos has become his crypt, perhaps.
1
begin to find our bearings, the
landscape vanishes at a stroke,
like the façade of a house as
we enter it. It has not yet
gained preponderance through
a constant exploration that has
become habit. Once we begin
to find our way about, that
earliest picture can never be
restored.
--Walter Benjamin, “Lost-and-
Found Office,” in One Way
Street, Selected Writings, vol. 1,
468.2
“This allusion to the “total
insofar as fragmentary death”
already places us in literature.
It recalls what Goethe, again,
already said of literature, even if
it be Weltliteratur, namely, that
2 Mnemosyne p.154
2
is was “the fragment of
fragments”
Derrida, Demeures, 453
Die auslandiche
wissenschaftliche Literatur der
Kriegs- und Nachkriegsjahre ist
mir bis auf verschwindende
Ausnahmen nicht zuganglich
gewesen. Auch die Bonner
Universitatebibliothek ist seit
1944 in folge eines
Bombenangriffs teils
unbenuntzbar, teils verbrannt.
Ich habe daher manches Zitat
nicht meher vergleichen,
manche Quelle nicht mehr
einsehen konnen. Aber wenn
die literature ‘das fragment der
Fragmente” ist (Goethe), muss
ein Versuch wie der vorleigende
3 Derrida cites a line from Goethe about fragment of fragments in Demeure that
Curtius cites in European Lit. (Derrida discusses Curtius in the postscript).
3
erst recht den Charackter des
Fragmentarishcen tragen.
E.R. Curtius, “Vorwort,” in
Europaisches Literatur und
Lateinische Mittelater, 1947 (not
translated in the English edition
of 1953, which has a new
foreword specific to it).4
To write one’s autobiography, in
order either to confess or to
engage in self-analysis, or in
order to expose oneself, like a
work of art to the gaze of all, is
perhaps to seek to survive, but
through a perpetual suicide—a
death which is total inasmuch
as fragmentary.
Maurice Blanchot, Writing the
Disaster (64)
Bildung Box 5
In the second chapter, I examine the ways in which Alain Resnais’ Statues Also Die (1953), Night and Fog (1955), All the Memories of the World (1956), and Hiroshima, Mon Amour concern people as paper and paper as people and illustrate the ways in which bare life not confined to the space of the camp. In addition to discussing Resnais’ interest
4
in reconstructing the past through various kinds of archives, I examine the forging of papers, paintings, and related criminal activities in the paintings by attending not only to the artist’s signature but to the provenance of paintings established on their reverse sides. I discuss a forgery case related in Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer and the Nazis and in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts as well as a recent German museum exhibition that made both sides of paintings visible entitled Spectres of Provenance. The art work of the archive involves an endless play of concealing and revealing by reading in reverse rather than a belated recognition of the newest “hidden” camp Agamben urges us to find.
Jacques Derrida Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius: the Secrets of the Archive Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic
All kinds of readers “will bend the oeuvre and hors l’ouevre, or extraneous matter, that Helene Cixcous generously bequeaths to the French National Library. . . Will it prove itself to be a generous act of giving and giving back? If yes, or if no, in what way? . . Such questions ought to be prowling around the essence, the destiny, the vocation and the future of institution a s extraordinary as the French National Library, as well as around Helene Cixcous’s archive (ouevre and l’hors oeuvre)on the day of this contracting, with mutual confidence, of a binding engagement and a quasi-like-will alliance. . .(7-8)Here we find, as her readers are well aware, the powerful, constant, tight-knit, outgoing and introspective thread of Helene Cixcous’s work, her most intriguing plot radiating from row upon row of some fifty-five books and her tens of thousands of united pages, letters, dreams or documents of all kinds” (8)“folds in upon” he reads the “priere d’inserer (10-11) and the bilioontolological essence” (16)Forewarnings . . anticipate the text and give an inkling of the impossible and unending task that awaits the library reader. First of all, that a choice has been made. The author announces that she won’t be giving us all her dreams. So as to respect their secrets. Even is he leaves a first draft, the premier the (remember the word “jet”) untouched, this shaping nonetheless constitutes a first,, literary and public declaration. It would be could idea to reconstitute its articulations: with the remaining, immense corpus of the other dreams, of course, but also with the bulk of the published work. Cixous herself ahs apparently classified these dreams according to their more or less readably understandable connection with a number of her works. . But what sort of connection? Did these dreams induce some motif or figure in the published work? But in this case, though enthusiasts of the genetic study of the manuscripts may be tempted to consider them enticing raw material, they do not have the same status as a first draft. Nor do they constitute rough work with crossings-out in view of a final version. Nor are they proof in the process of correction, etc. “Genetic” or “generic” study comes to a dead end here. . . . We must grant these drams another fate and different histories depending on whether they have been published or not, as decided, deliberately and duly by the author. Are they even contemporaneous with the literary writing? Are they marginal material, deletions, oneric texts induced and later interpreted by the author. . . (27-28)
5
“customs agent” (28 and 29)
prehistory
Bigger and stronger than the libraries that act as if they have the capacity to hold them, if only virtually, they derange all the archival and indexing spaces by the disproportion of the potentially infinite memory they condense according to the processes of undecidable writing for which as yet no complete formalization exists. (15) itself and folds itself again (8)Start the chapter with analysis of Toute la memoire du monde, beginning with the happy face.
Put on a happy de-face.
This will focus paper as person, but also persons as paper—insects. Books becoming face, people defaced. Library not as carceral.
A new sort of document thus comes to make this event present: the entrance of the people from anonymity into the universe of speakers. In one sense the document is identical ot the event itself. . . It is the . . . the historian who is going to appear on the stage, show himself to us, holding in his hand those narratives of federation that are much more than narratives, he tells—they are love letters to his native land. . . the historian . . . comes to the front of the stage. He has just attested that he has committed an unusual act: he has opened the cabinet of treasures and read those forgotten, seeping testimonies, And he tells us what they are, love letters. . this visibility of speech is only for him. What he shows us is . . . what they make him see—not their content but their presentation. ‘The material details likewise gave them much solicitude: no writing seemed handsome enough, no paper elegant enough, not to mention the sumptuous little tri-coloured ribbons to tie the papers with.’” (Ranciere, Names of History, 44)
The double narrative ensures the object of history against any betrayal of the words by staging a double authority: the authority of the scholar, of the man of the archives who stands at the source of science transforms the ever-deceptive letter into an exact reserve of knowledge; but also the authority of that new partner that the scholar causes to speak by keeping her quiet, the silent witness.” (Ranciere, Names of History, 53-54)
Ranciere cannot be classified as a historian, philosopher of history, historian of philosophy largely because of his work in the archive. See krtstin Ross’s intro to The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Like Focuault, hiswork moves between theory and archival research. Ignorant scoolmaster is like Pierre Riviere, an obscure figure rescued from oblivion.
6
Richard Burt
Paper Persons
Democracy on Paper
A Splice of Life
Ranciere—equality is not about citizenship but about men, persons (citizenship is
about inequality) and for Hart and Negri, ctizenship is about sans papiers.
The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”
This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box”6 after troops cleared it of the Taliban.
7
Karzai stole an election, can’t provide a government in or out of a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace conference.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27rich.htmlThe 36 Hours That Shook WashingtonBy FRANK RICHPublished: June 25, 2010
The Book on the Books/h/elf: the Autobiographeme
Begin this chapter with discussion of lapse in de Man as well as in Derrida (or
mention that I get to iti n the conclusion. But get out closed reading as failed
reading, and what lapse means.7
Then go to autobiograheme and topos.
what is at stake in our use of the word "self" in “self-storage" ? What is it about
the "self-storage unit" that makes visible the importance of the archive even to
Foucault’s account of biopolitics and governmentality (as well as the
omnipresence of archiving surveillance practices? (By the way, we could also
talk about surveillance as archiving--a better way to understand it s opposed to
the panopticon and paranoia model.) So what do we mean by "self"? Autonomy?
Automatic? Our answer might be that biobibliopolitics (another key term we have
8
to get out lie, unread -ability and unarchiv -ability) is also the "paper machine" of
processing understood as protocols of reading, the confusion of the 'mechanics"
of filing and the organic life of persons. No autobiography without recourse to the
self-administration of one’s archive, one’s papers. (see Curtius on Goethe—
autobiography as a reshelving and accounting, even for error). Vismann's
recourse to metaphors for files "take on a life of heir own" and her point about
people being reduced to machines would be a perfect illustration of he way the
metaphors work even in a positive history of filing. "File" and "life" are anagrams
each other--forgot the word for this type of anagram. Autobiography would then
be read in terms of lapses and staged lapses, as expenditures rather than
calculations; reshelving is not an accounting; giving an account is not accounting
for oneself in a total way that allows for a last judgment.
To set up chapter four.
Even though chronology place regularity above permanence, it cannot prevent heterogeneous, conspicuous fragments form remaining with in it.Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 144 The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps. This development is taking place in many areas. One case in point is the telephone, where lifting of a receiver has taken the place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank the older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest consequences, A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Walter Benjamin, Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire A lyric Poet in the era of High Capitalism, (131-132)
Connect above to ready by hand, the slip.
(Thread)bare Life
9
As a result of the thing like a toy being in transit, taken in and out of a box,
narrative threads about it may be generated. These stories do not always end up
in the form of collected, unified works of fiction, however. The narrative threads
may get lost instead tying up the thing or text into bound book lying, as it were on
a table of contents. In the case of literary theory and historicist criticism, a
biographical or autobiographical anecdote offered in the middle of a philosophical
argument deflect that argument, causing it to collapse, diverting us into
stupefaction. The narrative “thread” becomes a trope, a thing that also needs to
be read since its very metaphoric function of providing closure is that prevents it
from functioning as a the means of securing closure. Again, we turn to Paul de
Man for a wonderfully instructive example of threading as unraveling. In the
transcript of the that ensued after he delivered his essay on Walter Benjamin’s
“Task of the Translator” at Cornell University, Niel Hertz asks de Man about his
discussion of a passage concerning the problem of translation presented through
the examples of the German words “Brot” (bread) and “Wein” (wine). De Man
writes:
This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of
language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction,
in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of
meaning it. In the words Brot and pain, what is meant is the same,
but the way of meaning is not. This difference in the way of
meaning permits the word Brot to mean something other to a
German than what the word pain means to a Frenchman, so that
10
these words are not interchangeable for them; in fact, they strive to
exclude each other.
p. 257
So far, de Man’s exposition and argument are clear enough; the example of Brot
makes concrete the argument concerning Benjamin’s distinction between what
and how something is meant. But Hertz asks a series of questions about this
passage and about de Man’s desire to “hold on” to the word “’inhuman,’ that like
the Sublime, a singular noun, cover[s] a series of failed apprehensions” (95). De
Man interjects a series of “Yahs” in response, leading Hertz to say “It’s that
transition I’m puzzled by, how you get from what's really a contingent
impossibility—to reconstruct the connotations of Brot—to a major terms, like the
‘inhuman’” (95). De Man responds by confessing, with good humor, “Well, you’re
quite right. I was indulging myself, you know, it was long, and I was very aware of
potential boredom, felt the need for an anecdote, for some relief, and Benjamin
gives the example of pain and Brot, and perhaps you shouldn’t . . . whenever you
give an example you lose, as you know, what you want to say.”8 What Hertz
calls a problem of “transition” occurs when De Man personalizes the problem of
translating Brot at rather great and humorous length. We quote the passage in
full:
How are we to understand this discrepancy between “das
Gemeinte” and “Art des Meinens,” between dire and vouloir –dire?
Benjamin’s example is the German word Brot and the French word
pain. To mean “bread,” when I need to name bread, I have the
11
word Brot, so that the way in which I mean is by using the word
Brot. The translation will reveal a fundamental discrepancy
between the intent to name Brot and the word Brot itself in its
materiality, a device of meaning. If you hear Brot in this context of
Hoelderlin, who is so often mentioned in this text, I hear Brot und
Wein necessarily, which is the great Hoederlin text that is very
much present in this—which in French becomes pain et vin. “Pain
et vin” is what you get for free in a restaurant, in a cheap restaurant
where it is still included, so pain et vin has a different connotation
from Brot und Wein. It brings to mind the pain, francais, baguette,
ficelle, batard, all those things—[now words have become things] I
now hear on Brot, “bastard.” This upsets the stability of the
quotidian. I was very happy with the word Brot, which I hear as a
native because my native language is Flemish and you say brood,
just like in German, but I have to think that Brot [brood] and pain
are the same thing, I get very upset. It is all right in English
because “bread” is close enough to Brot [brood], despite the idiom
“bread” for money, which has its problems. But the stability of my
quotidian, of my daily bread, the reassuring quotidian aspects of the
word “bread,” daily bread, is upset by the French word “pain.” What
I mean is upset by the way in which I mean—the way in which it is
pain, the phoneme, the term pain, which has its set of connotations
which take you in a completely different direction.9
12
Though de Man doesn’t say so, his turn to the personal is arguably unavoidable.
De Man had already told an anecdote about Derrida teaching a French
mistranslation of the essay and gone over some astonishing mistakes made by
the French and American translators of Benjamin’s essay.
A philosophical problem always comes when the metaplasmic verbal play
gets too hard and generates an anecdote about the play overwhelming the
sense. Language becomes the thing / gathering that distracts or which causes
the argument to lose itself. Yet this play also redirects: far from stopping you,
this play exerts its own gravitational pull and takes “you in a completely different
direction.” Translation becomes a material device, a device that materializes
language. The word or phrase that couples two words in translation becomes a
kind of toy, the Thing as a plaything that distracts you, leads you in a different
direction.
Yet any new direction inevitably quickly turns off into further detours in the
form of anecdotal attempts at elucidations that fail to advance the argument or
confess that failure as a human, all too human, failure to read. For example, de
Man rather movingly, with characteristic modesty and self-deflating irony turns
the general difficulty of reading Benjamin into his own personal difficulty: “The
Frankfurt School interpretation of Benjamin is shot through with messianic
elements which certainly are there, as a desire in Benjamin, but which Benjamin
managed to control by an extraordinarily refined and deliberate strategy of
echoing terms, allowing them to enter his text in such a way that an attentive
reading would reveal them. The attentive reading is very difficult to give. He
13
succeeded so well incorporating them in their displacement that you—it really
take along practice—it’s always lost again. Whenever I go back to his text, I
think I have it more or less, then I read it again, and again I don’t understand it”
(102). And when pressed, in the final question, on what he means by historical
events and occurrences that the questioner found “slightly obscure” ends the
discussion by conceding he can’t answer clearly: “What occurred was that . . .
translation. Then there are, in the history of texts, texts that are occurrences. I
think Rousseau’s Social Contract is an occurrence, not because it is a political
text, but because something that occurs, in that sense. I realize this is difficult—
a little obscure and not well formulated. But I feel it, that there is something
there. Something being said which is kind of important to me, which I think . . .
which isn’t clear” (104).
Also, can link Curtius to WB via Aby Warburg, one of two people to whom Curtius
dedicated his book.
you will be able to revise it to bring in the autobiographeme--WB and TA's essays
are both autobiographical, and Derrida's essay as a strange kind of
autobiographical aspect--the "sleeptalking" we discussed earlier. Even Curtius
has an autobiographical aspect in his paratexts and metaphors for the life of
Goethe's papers. We can also pull in, if only as a discursive endnote, the
discussion of Vismann's discussion of Stasi files and autobiographies (we can
show that her account is actually not of an aberration, as she thinks--she seems
to assume that there is a kind of normal autobiography--but one instance in
14
which the norm is always an exception (in being an aberration). In any case,
after I finish drafting it, I thought you could revise it and add the autobio-biblio-
grapheme stuff as you do so.
Reading Raum
Frame the chapter as a question of sovereignty over the book, archiving,
collecting, writing, and revising, papers and so on.
Alert reader that we will return to Unpacking My Library in the conclusion, or deal
with it in this chapter.
Begins with WB and TA over books, collecting and storing.
Biblobiblio.
Then turn to Freud and Spieker to leverage an account of he file and its lreation
ot the book in order to contrast Vismann’s account of the file and the book ,
focusing on Goethe, with Curtius’s essay on Goethe. File is rendered readable in
a variety of ways, even as documents become works of art.
Calligraphy becomes a form of resistance, an open question of sovereignty
Use Visman to raise sovereignty issue and Spieker the topography issue.
Then end with Derrida returning to WB and TA in terms of the address and
letters, triangulating correspondence with Gretel. Focus on what Derrida leaves
unread in the Gretel and WB correspondence as well as in the TA and WB
correspondence.
Dreaming on paper. So we come back to Paper Machine (from our intro), only in
the English translation of the book.
15
Goethe as a paper person—resistance to reading in Curtius, returns as resistant
reading in Derrida, a dream of reading with resistance as a way of returning to
sovereignty and setting up the following WB chapter and also “Typewriter Ribbon
Inc” in the conclusion—the lapse. Pas pace.
By expanding the time frame backward and forward, we are not writing a
positive history of the archive, as Vismann writes, or Spieker, but tracing a
temporality of the archive as a political space not reducible to one particular
phenomenalization, a temporality that historicism cannot account for (the time of
reading) and that could not be narrated in terms of a positive history of what
happened. That space is not instantiated in different ways, all of which are
metonymies, as in Agamben but rather may be red in relation to each other, a
question of reading room.
LebensLesensRaum
Follow out Derrida in Archive Fever is showing that nomos is not reducible to
domos, that Spieker division and simple history of the domicile to the office is
much too simplistic. Ditto for Schmitt (Nomos of the Earth) and also Agamben
(planet).
Visman’s history is overly rational—or doesn’t give enough weight to the Ronell
and de Manian ironies (Kafka too) that pile up, containing them instead through
readings of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Franz Kafka’s “Before
the Law” excerpt from The Trial, and finally through Anselm Kiefer’s sculpture of
books on a bookshelf, High Priestess. See Michael Camille’s remarks about
display of book in museum as unopenable and tomb, of editing as embalming in
16
“Philological Iconoclasm: Edition and Image in the Vie de Saint Alexis”” in
Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G.
Nichols (Johns Hopkins, 1996) 371-401; to 374; 382
Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing devotes the opening chapter to Freud’s
reading of Goethe, beginning with his citation of two lines from Faust while
forgetting to give Goethe’s name, all in a book, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life the first chapter of which is “forgetting proper names” (3). She also
says “Goethe, indeed, as we read in Kafka, will also have been the name of the
serious writing block. . . . According to the testimony of the Berlin Enlightenment
figure, Johann Jacob Engel, Goethe, Lessing’s masterpiece was to have been a
work entitled Doktor Faust. But from the moment Lessing was made aware of
Goethe’s project bearing the same title, his own work faltered. In fact, Lessing
soon lost the pouch (Kaesten) containing the Faust-manuscript (xxiv). Ronell
does give the source for this story, but it is similar to the anecdote Curtius retells
in his “Goethe as Administrator” essay about Goethe’s Faust mss.
And she cites a dream WB had about Goethe’s house in One-Way Street, “No.
113”
“the Dictaphone he has internalized after Goethe’s disappearance in 1832” n. 12,
201 [this quotation can go in the Shakespeare book]
Stephen Broser. “Kaestchen, Kasten, Kastration,” Cahiers Confrontation, no. 8
(Aubier, paris: automne, 1982)
Link the term “Kaestschen” to Curtius’s interest in the sack with Goethe’e’s Faust
mss in it as made of paper--envelope, folder, capsule (not made of canvas—
17
Curtius canvasses the word “sack”, as it were, in order to get rid of one way, the
most common way, of thinking its thinginess, its materiality).
“the Goethe effect” (Goethe not a father figure of influence), (xxvi).
Link up her reading of Goethe as a writing block to Curtius’s turn away from
Goethe in Euro Lit and his later return to Goethe (how historians read his reading
(or not writing about Goethe) in relation to WWII.
What is (Re)Called Reading, and Where Does it Go?
In this chapter, the essays by WB and WA are examples of UR forms self-
storage that allows to understand a historical phenomenon (involving the
transformation of book collecting, book cataloguing, books in transit, book buyers
in transit, shelving and reading) a phenomenon they recognize as biobiblilio
processing that makes less interesting ripple effects elsewhere (as in Saxl’s
memoir on Warburg, later by Perec in Thoughts of Sorts, Umberto Eco in Du
Archiv issue, and Italo Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night).10 And the “Reading
Rooms” sequence of photos of library rooms with no people in them in Du Archiv
issue as well as Toute la memoire and Secret Museums. Also a kind of later
essay on by Curtius on Goethe, who also appears in Visman’s Files: Law and
Media technology.
We turn from a discussion of their works to Jacques Derrida’s essay in
reception of the Adorno prize when he discusses Adorno and Benjmain and
adopts the position of dreaming writing.State of exception not a coup d’etat but a
coup d’archive.
18
The archive is the disclosure of what writing is. The grammatology section is the
mode writing comes to do—reshelving of the pluri-dimensionality in the archive
as opposed to linear system of writing—they only attempt to retard their pluri-
demensionality.
Adorno and WB on the library –they recover the pluri-dimensionality of the book.
We are choosing to bring the infra into view—the uncanny kicks –the book is
alive—the cat----bios and biblios are also on a continuum.
Just sketched a projection of what we could add at the end of chapter two (after
WB and TA) in order to motivate the library as a source of resistance even more
fully by explicitly taking on Freud's comparison of psyche and files to leverage a
critique of Spieker and Vismann. We could further extend this critique in a
Kittlerian direction In terms of war advancing new media and in terms of the
importance of the writing desk) by taking on data retrieval systems that are
imagined to be resistance free. That way we can cover the library, the art
museum, the law, and digital media (desktop--rethinks Stallybrass' take on
Marx's desk as the "real" inhis Marx’s coat essay or the view of places Nietzsche
wrote in the book The Good European, also as the real, the material), peace and
war.
Writing isn’t just about death, as Derrida talks in “The Pharmakon,” but also
about a form of life (or gets read that way). In addition to the uncanny, the
theological salvific yet and yet not salvific narrative or moment—as in Adorno the
19
library becomes a haunted place but also a sacred place; or WB ending his with
the disappearance and of himself-they involute—that’s their route. There’s a
continuum between theological and secular, both in the paralegal space of the
archive. Agamben says that deconstruction is a thwarted messiamism and
identifies the messianic with the historic (67). He doesn’t read the word history,
acts as if we know what historic means when it is actually a discursive effect;
deconstruction takes grammatology is ontological, not instants, its code, writing is
not language.
Being is hard-wired, never a time when it wasn’t. History as an outside, but it is a
moment when you find yourself plugged in; it’s an effect of technics.
As Paul de Man pointed out in The Resistance to Theory, “the resistance to
theory is the resistance to reading.” Moreover, this resistance cannot be
overcome, de Man maintains, even by the closest of readers.11 Nevertheless, de
Man practiced the allegory of reading, which he defined as the impossibility of
reading, in a very specific manner, as a return and rewinding to moments of
failure in texts that seemed almost to have succeeded. With his amazing flair for
calmly while dropping an irony charged cluster bunker buster bomb, de Man
observes, while waiting for the aftershocks:
It would appear that this concentration on reading [in reader
response criticism] would lead to the rediscovery of the theoretical
difficulties associated with rhetoric. This is indeed the case, to
some extent; but not quite. Perhaps the most instructive aspect of
contemporary theory is the refinement of techniques by which the
20
threat inherent in rhetorical analysis is being avoided at the very
moment when the efficacy of these techniques has progressed so
far that the rhetorical obstacles to understanding can no longer be
mistranslated in thematic and phenomenal commonplaces. The
resistance to theory which, as we saw, is a resistance to reading,
appears in its most rigorous and theoretically elaborated form
among the theoreticians of reading who dominate the contemporary
theoretical scene. (17-18)
Reading fails, then, but its failure can best be detected and appreciated in the
best, contemporary theorists of reading by returning to their texts.12
De Man includes himself, of course. De Man's “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task
of the Translator’” the word “Aufgabe” may be translated both as “task” and as
“giving up.” De Man seizes on the second meaning to say that translation always
fails for Walter B because the translator has to give up. De Man’s example is a
bike race. But his example doesn't quite fit his point because, as de Man says,
the translator doesn't drop out of the race but gives up on refinding the original.13
So the translator takes a detour that never ends. De Man’s trope for failure fails.
It perhaps means that criticism involves a photo finish that never stops
developing. In “The Resistance to Theory,” to refers disparagingly to “criticism by
hearsay,” and in an example of an anecdote based on hearsay and rumor which
attaches itself to a theory of failure as a “is but is not kind of (non)failure:”
“Jacques Derrida was doing a seminar with this particular text in Paris, using the
French—Derrida’s German is pretty good, but he refers to use the French, and
21
you are a philosopher in France you take Gandillac more or less seriously. So
Derrida was basing part of his reading in the “intraduisible,” on the
untranslatability, until somebody in his seminar (so I’m told) pointed out to him
that the correct word was “translatable.” The first sentence of “The Resistance to
Theory” is about what De Man “failed to achieve.” (p. 3)
So we begin by posing as a question in different forms: what does it mean
for reading (things as much as texts) to fail? And what does it mean to locate that
failure by rewinding a text to the moment where it went wrong? And why does
reading persist as resistance? After all, reading and translation happen and
events occur between texts, de Man says: “translation is an occurrence . . .
that’s an occurrence. That is an event, that is a historical event. As such the
occurrence can be textual, is generally textual” (103). De Man refers to this
occurence or event not only as translation but as “inscription,” though he defines
that term only negatively, and he also speaks of an “infracirculation” of language.
We will discuss these two terms later in this book.
In order to begin the project of opening a space of inquiry into these
questions and in providing you with exemplars of this reading method, we offer
two scenes of reading or “s/h/elf help.” The first stages Walter Benjamin’s
“unnoticed” surprise and “embarrassment” as he re-shelves the collection of
“Books by the Mentally Ill” that he never even knew he had; the second Theodor
Adorno’s “Bibliographical Musings” on damaged books written shortly after his
arrival in the U.S. following his flight from Europe. We close the chapter by
taking up Freud’s discussion of files and psyche in Studies and Hysteria in order
22
to show how the “unconscious” of shelf help, the resistance to reading, is
irreducible to any three dimensional architectural topology or archeological strata.
We thereby put pressure on recent accounts of the relation between art and
archive put forward by Cornelia Vismann and Sven Spieker. The unconscious is
not on the side of art, that is, which in a legal and bureaucratic sphere take the
form of a functioning, rational system of resistance free information processing.
Intermittent interference and related dysfunctions are the symptoms of the
atopology of the archive, the art of archiving and archiving of documents
potentially read as works of art. Put another way, the archive is a postal relay
system in which the letter sometimes does and sometimes does not arrive at its
final destination. With the atopology of the archive goes any strong opposition
between art and archive. We close by comparing two archival systems regularly
regarded as progenitors on the Internet, itself imagined to be resistance: Paul
Otelt’s Mundaneum and Vannavar Bush’s Memorex, apparently opposite
numbers: Otlet’s massive Mundaeum was to be open to the public, designed for
the purposes of international peace; Bush’s desktop Memorex was designed to
be secret, a device for maintaining U.S. National Security during the Cold War.
The reduction of text to data in these “machines” does not escape the need to
read the contradictions in both systems.
4. Passport to Biblio-polis
Walter Benjamin begins his essay “Books by the Insane [Geisteskranken]:
From My Collection,” with a personal anecdote about how problems he faced re-
23
shelving his books led to his constructing a virtual library inside of books he
couldn’t throw away yet didn’t know where to shelve:
A sense of embarrassment often goes unnoticed as the source of a
successful enterprise. When I began, ten years ago, to create a more
satisfactory order among my books, I soon came across volumes that I
could not bring myself to get rid of but that I could no longer bear to leave
where they were. Herman von Gilm's poems are among the curiosities of
German literature, but I know that at the time I was experiencing Hölderlin
as a revelation, I had no wish to include them in the section on Germanic
poetry. Emil Szittya's first publication, Ecce Homo Trick, is something I
would not want to be without, any more than many another revealing piece
of juvenilia by better-known writers. Yet I drove it from shelf to shelf from
one section to another, until it finally found a refuge not far from Gilm's
poetry. And Bluher's Jesus of Nazareth was a work I did not wish to
include in my books on the philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, its
contribution to the pathology of anti-Semitic resentment seemed too
valuable for me to dispose of it.14
Out of this re-shelving and processing of books that Benjamin could not bury, or
put to rest, a library came together that put Benjamin on a new direction of
acquisition that leads straight to the psychotic judge Dr. Daniel Schreber’s
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903) and Freud’s case study of it:15
“In this way,” he continues,
24
a motley collection came together over the years, a 'Library of Pathology,'
long before I thought to actively build a collection of writings by the
mentally ill--indeed, long before I even knew that books by the mentally ill
existed. Then, in 1918, in a small antiquarian bookshop in Berne, I came
across Schreber's famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published by
Oswald Mutze in Leipzig. Had I already heard of this book? Or did I read
about it a few weeks later in the essay on it by Freud in Volume 3 of
Shorter Writings on the Theory of Neuroses, published in Leipzig in 1913?
No matter. I was at once spellbound by it.
This account of re-shelving his books resonates with Benjamin’s much more well-
known essay “Unpacking My Library,”16 but is distinguished by the irruption of
what seems like chance, what seems like the gradual dawning awareness or
“embarrassment” that Benjamin feels as he describes the revelation that all the
time he had slowly but surely been compiling a library within a library. Moreover,
in “Books by the Insane,” Benjamin’s books are not in transit, not bound up, their
mobility is generated not by the process of packing to unpacking, but by the non-
linear process of re-shelving from one order to a more satisfactory one—a
satisfaction that waxes and wanes, comes and go, feels right, then wrong, as it
settles into something that passes as a routine. Moreover, this re-shelving is not
only very personal, but announced as being embarrassingly so. The desire not
for a “better” but a “more satisfactory order,” a labor conducted over ten years
and which we may assume involved trial orders, experiments by turns assiduous
and absent-minded, produces a number of “volumes” that Benjamin cannot
25
“bring [him]self to get rid of,” but which, we assume, rendered the new found
order less “satisfactory,” such that he “could no longer bear to leave them where
they were.” Benjamin calls foul, overflow, misfit, and then comes to discover that
this group of “volumes” constitutes itself a “motley collection,” a “Library of
Pathology”—that all the time had been subsisting among his other books, living
quietly or sometimes noisily perhaps, some gathering dust, others the object of
occasional curiosity perhaps, strangers dwelling with other tribes, who somehow
or other past muster as “books.”
Benjamin’s self-embarrassment or performance of self-embarrassment—
the essay begins by producing what amounts to a maxim derived from the
experience of re-shelving: “A sense of embarrassment often goes unnoticed as
the source of a successful enterprise—reveals the way an unexamined sense of
“satisfaction” or order is coterminous with both the mechanisms of desire and
ideology and the way in which neurotic re-shelving yields a library. On his way to
Schreber, Benjamin tells the story of Herman von Gilm’s poems, which we watch
migrate through his library as Benjamin shelves and re-shelves the volume,
driving it “from one section to another” until it “found a refuge”—though the
reason for why the shelving stops there, why the book somehow stops moving
even if it does not quite belong, the source of the satisfaction—other than a
sense of rightness in the guts—goes unstated.
Benjamin shifts from the active to the passive voice at the moment he
resolves his neurotic quandaries or, more rightly, when the resolution was
revealed to him, and declares an unanticipated successful compilation: the
26
collection of books “came together” at a point “long before I thought to actively
build a collection” and “long before I even knew that books by the mentally ill
existed.” Who knew? Well, now we all know: you, us, Benjamin, and all the
readers of Die Literarische Welt (July 1928) —but it’s all a bit of a mystery as to
how we come to know. Benjamin’s use of the passive voice calls into question
the coherence of his “Library of Pathology” in suggesting that the while only
some writers (call them pathological) write pathological books, all readers of
books are pathological, neurotic, doing things of which they remain unaware,
doing things they don’t intend to do—subject, if you like, to the unrecognized
ideological construction of the writing machine and the ordering of books in the
world and at home.
The opening passage of “Books by the Insane” paradoxically becomes
more embarrassing to Benjamin even as it becomes less so. Noticing the
previously unnoticed embarrassment does not get rid of the embarrassment—but
augments it, making of it, rhetorically at least, the condition of success or the
recognition of a “successful enterprise.” The memory of unconscious re-shelving,
a time Benjamin nevertheless remembers clearly (“I know that at the time I was
experiencing Hölderlin as a revelation”) gives way to a memory of the conscious
acquisition of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness which Benjamin cannot
remember clearly.” Cut to Berne, ten years earlier, “a small antiquarian
bookshop.” “Had I already heard of this book?” he asks “Or did I read about it a
few weeks later in the essay on it by Freud in Volume 3 of Shorter Writings on
the Theory of Neuroses, published in Leipzig in 1913?” The embarrassment
27
here is not only personal, a self-exhibition of Benjamin’s own neurotic symptoms,
then, but also impersonal, mechanical. Indeed, the more conscious Benjamin
becomes of his desire, that is, the more automatic its realization becomes. By
the same token, the more automatically his desire is realized, the more
mechanical Benjamin’s memory becomes. Its automaticity is made clearest in the
moment of Benjamin’s memory lapse: did he buy Schreber’s book before or after
reading Freud’s book on Schreber? When was that exactly? “No matter,” he
writes, “I was at once spellbound by it,” announcing the closure of memory, the
effect of reading the book a spell that rebinds time, space, knowledge,
experience, etc so as to remake the man and re-shelve his books.
If then Benjamin is able to find a place for books he dislikes that yields a
new order, that order, once recognized, yields a new temporal disorder located at
the moment of his accounting for their acquisition: rather than narrating a
moment prior to finding a place for the new item in the collection now recognized
as such, Benjamin gives us a displacing, spellbinding moment that calls into
question a chronological distinction not between before and after, so much as a
different kind of time in which bookbinding becomes in psychoanalytic terms
spellbinding. Both orders, both collections, “satisfactory” and “motley” were there
all along, intertwined or conjoined in ways that are not exactly recoverable but
which nevertheless Benjamin finds instructive, helpful.17
5. Minima Bio-bibliographia: Reflections on the Damaged Lives of Books
In “Bibliographical Musings,” Theodore Adorno tells an anecdote in which
he correlates a distinction between real and fake books with a distinction
28
between damaged and undamaged books: damaged books are the real books,
and fakery extends not to only reproductions of books but even to the
presentation of new books as old:
[The] Potemkinian library I found in the house of an old American family
on the grounds of a hotel in Maine…displayed every conceivable title to
me; when I succumbed to the temptation and reached for one, the whole
splendid mass fell apart with a slight clatter—it was all fake. Damaged
books, books that have been knocked about and have had to suffer, are
the real books. Hopefully vandals will not discover this and treat their
brand new stocks the way crafty restaurateurs do, putting an artificial layer
of dust on bottles of adulterated red wine from Algeria. Books that have
been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by assigned places
and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them disorder is not
being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often
punished for it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off. (24)18
Against the degraded collection he finds in Maine, that nevertheless, because of
the verisimilitude or efficacy of the “backing” and the replete order of titles
seemingly on offer, “tempts” him, Adorno pitches the authentically damaged
book. Not a stunt book that falls apart on contact—there only to advertise the
importance of books which are in fact not there—the damaged book acquires a
life all its own, a life, or liveliness. The damaged book, then, the used or mangled
book is the book that resists its owner’s impulse to order it.19
29
Adorno goes on to describe his own damaged books, their ruination and
repair, taking a theological cast that makes Providence sound like a life and
death selector or military officer deciding which books will be preserved and
which will be disappeared:
Emigration, the damaged life, disfigured my books, which had
accompanied me, or, if you like, been dragged, to London, New York, Los
Angeles, and back to Germany, beyond measure. Routed out of other
peaceful bookcases, shaken up, locked up in crates, put into temporary
housing, many of them fell apart. The bindings came loose, often taking
chunks of text with them. They had been badly manufactured in the first
place; high quality German workmanship has long been as questionable
as the world market began to think it was in the era of posterity. The
disintegration of German liberalism lurked in it emblematically; one push
and it fell to pieces. But I can’t get rid of the ruined books; they keep
getting repaired. Many of these tattered volumes are finding their second
childhood as paperbacks. Less threatens them: they are not real property
in the same sense. Now the fragile ones are documents of the unity of life
that clings to them and of its discontinuities as well, with all the
fortuitousness of its rescue as well as the marks of an intangible
Providence embodied in the fact that one was preserved while another
was never seen again. None of the Kafka published during his lifetime
returned with me to Germany in good condition (24).
30
It is as impossible as it would be undesirable to separate the story of these
damaged books, books broken in and by transit, from the damage inflicted on
their owner in and by his own eviction or emigration. Indeed, it is tempting to say
that here Adorno embarks on a rhetorical inflection of the pathetic fallacy, to
construct the “bare life” of books which follow in the wake of their human reader.
And so it is perhaps that despite their damage, despite the damage they reflect
back at him, Adorno cannot bear to throw out these books and they remain, in
stark relation to the reduction of books to mass culture delivery mechanisms for
“stimuli.”
Beyond the folding of books into a biographical regime as backing or prop
for the self, Adorno goes on to write that “the life of a book is not coterminous
with the person who imagines it to be at his command. “What gets lost in a book
that is loaned out,” he continues,
and what settles into a book that is sheltered are drastic proof of that. But
the life of a book also stands in oblique relation to what the possessor
imagines he possesses in his knowledge of the book’s dispositio or so-
called train of thought. Time and again the life of books mocks him in his
errors. Quotations that are not checked in the text are seldom accurate.
Hence the proper relationship to books would be one of spontaneity,
acquiescing in what the second and apocryphal life of books wants,
instead of insisting on that first life, which is usually only an arbitrary
construction on the reader’s part (24-25).
31
Forget immobility. Forget the established or satisfactory order (dispositio) of “first
lives.” Give yourself over to the order that books produce by and in their
juxtapositions, use, misuse, and damage. The trick is how to do it without doing
violence to the relation that develops between biblion and bios—how might we
come to accede or allow ourselves to be the beneficiaries of s/h/elf-help without
installing that aid as another order or system. Best to keep everything—however
damaged. Best not to know why exactly and trust to luck, to what seems like
chance, a pure exposure to the aleatory figure that cohabits with fictions of order.
One might as well attempt to herd cats—which is of course the animôt or
anti-metaphor to which Adorno turns:
The private life of books can be compared to the life that is a widespread
and emotionally charged belief, common among women, ascribed to cats.
These undomesticated domesticated animals exhibited a property, visible
and at one’s disposal, they like to withdraw. If their master refuses to
organize his books into a library—and anyone who has proper contact
with books is unlikely to feel comfortable in libraries, even his own—those
he most needs will repudiate his sovereignty time and time again, will hide
and return only by chance. Some will vanish like spirits, usually at
moments when they special meaning. Still worse is the resistance books
put up to the moment one looks for something in them: as though they
were seeking revenge for the lexical gaze that paws through them looking
for individual passages and thereby doing violence to their own
autonomous course, which does not wish to adjust to anyone’s wishes.
32
An aloofness toward anyone who wants to quote from them is in fact a
defining characteristic of certain authors, especially in Marx, in whom one
need only rummage around for a passage that has made a special
impression to be reminded of the proverbial needle in the haystack. (25)
Moody, aloof, resistant, apt to punish, the book is a strange animal, an animal
dressed in an anthropomorphic “coat,” for to itself it lacks no skin. It joys to
punish the “pawing” of the “lexical” gaze of the reading animal that seeks after
particular passages rather than accepting what is given freely if capriciously, and
subject to loss. It is worth noting further that properly speaking the book is not an
animal at all, so much as a form of life that unfolds in the circuit that unfolds
between women and cats—the book, this book, like this cat, is always a
thoroughly historical, singular being which resists attempts to confine it to this or
that species, this or that slot on the shelf. It wanders.
For Adorno, then, life, life worth living, might be said to consist in a
bio/biblio project that we might call ‘living together with or through books,’ that is
by attending to the second-ness of books, to the apocryphal, tacked on life, that
books make possible, to the backing and bucking of writing, to recall Derrida’s
modeling of the biblion, that they effect.20
Freud discovered a similar problem in Studies in Hysteria the psychoanalyst
faced when constructing a case history.21 Trying to account for the resistance he
and his mentor and colleague Josef Breuer both met from their women patients
and their failures to help them, Freud runs through a series of similes for the case
33
study’s (dis)organization. In the first adopts the bureaucratic metaphors of file
and dossier and then takes a Conradian turn to discuss their sabotage:
It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept
in good order. That analysis of my patient Emmy von N. contained
similar files of memories though they were not so fully enumerated
and described. These files form a quite general feature of every
analysis and their contents always emerge in a chronological order
which is as infallibly trustworthy as the succession of days of the
week or names of the month in a mentally normal person. They
make the work of analysis more difficult by the peculiarity that, in
reproducing these memories, they reverse the order in which these
originated. The freshest and newest experience appears first in the
file first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience
with which the series in fact began.” The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 2, 288
The file and dossier simile allows Freud to remedy a narrative problem simply by
reversing the original chronology of narration.22
Yet discontented with this straightforward simile, Freud continues to adopt
other similes until he reaches, as he does at the end of “Note on a Mystic Writing
Pad,” a point of breakdown.23 Freud proceeds to describe resistance as a kind of
sabotage not reducible to easily recognizable political secret agency but instead
a kind of sleeper cell that works even when sleeping.
34
But the causal relation between the determining psychical trauma
and the hysterical phenomenon is not of kind implying that the
trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur in releasing the
symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence. We
must presume rather that the psychical trauma—or more precisely
the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after
its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at
work.24
The foreign simile overrides the others, a body that sounds medical (an internal
virus) and yet also political (an external agent that it is still at work, even if not an
agent provocateur. Freud quickly rejects the foreign body simile, however, for a
“pathogenic organization” in favor of an “infiltrate,” a medical term for an
inanimate substance left by an unknown and unlocatable foreign body.
We have said that [pathogenic] material behaves like a foreign
body from the living tissue. We are now in a position to see where
this comparison leads. A foreign body does not enter into a any
relation with the layers of tissue that surround it, although it
modifies them and necessitates are reactive inflammation in them.
Our pathogenic psychical group, on the other hand, does not admit
of being cleanly extirpated from the ego. Its external strata pass
over in every direction into portions of the normal ego; and, indeed,
they belong to it just as much as they belong to the pathogenic
organization. The interior layers of the pathogenic organization are
35
increasingly alien to the ego, but once more without there being any
visible boundary at which the pathogenic material begins. In fact
the pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body,
but far more like an infiltrate. In this simile the resistance must be
regarded as what is infiltrating.25
Freud’s succession of similes testifies both to a problem of describing the
topography of the psyche as “concentric strata” (289) and to a problem of
narrating (from the beginning). Acknowledging in a parenthetical paragraph that
he is making use of a number of similes that are “incompatible with one another”
(291), Freud adds that he will continue to do so in order to throw light on “highly
complicated topic which has never yet been represented” (291). Freud
inadvertently politicizes resistance to his treatment in the process of describing it
through various conspiratorial and medical similes (resistance is a kind of viral
politics that deconstructs distinction normal and pathogenic groups, nucleus and
foreign body), but politics in Freud’s hands turn out to be a problem of
representation and narration, of organized agencies that don’t have bodies and
that cannot be visualized.
In Studies in Hysteria, Freud refers to memories as files, and he calls the process
of psychotherapy a "defile" of consciousness. He puts this word in quotations
because it is as if he made up another definition for it outside of its basic usage
to indicate desecration or spoilage. Why not make up another word like "unfile" or
something else without such an attached meaning that is so strong?
36
Freud piles one simile on top of another, often getting form to the other in the
same paragraph and eventually admitting that none of them work. At the same
time, he employs , unself-consciously, metaphors like path, thread, and related
topographical analogies like the simile analogies. The only passage becomes a
kind of rhetorical collapse as the topographical model—the analyst drilling in
toward the core as the patient becomes aware of the periphery, adding, as it
were, more layers to resist the analyst’s effort to penetrate. If visualized, made
into ta schema, it is the opposite of the camp in Agamben, the more penetration,
the more expansion of spce. So the two circles can never be superimposed and
meshed totally, as there are in Homo Sacer. The atopology of the psyche then
resists all efforts to visualize it through words. Freud also talks about talking
through the images, getting beyond the images by talking about them in therapy,
but he continues to use visual similes and metaphors to describe the psyche.
The bureaucratic similes Freud adopts evince a problem already present in
the state’s ability to order the identities the citizen and the foreigner by
processing them as papers and files: the stranger traverses categories both
categories: the citizen is already estranged from herself and from other migrating
citizens as well as form (illegal) immigrants, resident aliens, and, most
importantly for Avital Ronell, refugees and the sacred alien (as much as space as
a person that cannot be placed). 26
37
Vismann gives us a way of making a number of moves on historians of the book as bookacrats, office workers. We want to (un)read everything, the text as book, hte bokas text, all as paratext, etc. hence, the History of the Book (in Theory).
Our notion of "unreadability" will differ from Vismann'sin that she sees the law constructing barriers to access, interpretation, and amplification as it becomes "immutable" through writing (in the "vulgar" sense).
So we will go much further than she does in deconstructing the metaphysics of presence that still haunt her Kittlerian archaeo-archive. She has no concept of the arche-trace, of arche-writing but is great at disclosing the various ironies and paradoxes that follow each step of the law's rationalization (from late Roman antiquity onwards) through the "techno-medium" of writing.
Vismann’s history is very much parallel to Agamben’s. they complement each
other very well. She leaves out constitutional history; he leaves out administration
(files and emdiatehcnology). Her model of power is pre-Foucaldian; his model is
Schmittian—legal absolutist historicism (indifferent to recording, transmission,
reading aloud or silently, etc) as a replacement narrative for Foucault’s biopolitics
(Agamben radicalizes it by totalizing it).
We are seeing the storage unit come into focus as a historical construct only
now, the way files become one in the 1920s. But we are situating the moment of
its visibility in books already in the 1930s, around the moment when the state of
exception becomes the norm, when all life becomes virtually bare life.
Files makes a perfect triangle with Homo Sacer and Archive Fever. She cites
Archive Fever and Foucault (she has a chapter on governmentality) mentions
“sovereign power” and the Nazi, decision ( 82), but never mentions Heidegger,
biopolitics, nor Schmitt nor Agamben. Meanwhile Agamben has no account of
administration (of the law and writing) even though he is a philologist, and
38
Derrida does not think through the relation between the archive and archived as
a series of divisible media (not just postal relay and email): it’s not just the letter
that is divisible; everything is divisible the book / file; literature / law’; document /
record; work of art / monument / waste; treasury / archive / office; sealed, scrolls,
wired scrolls, glued documents; forgeries / replicas / relics, flying leaflets /
looseleaf binders; scattered leaves (cut out single pages from medieval mss and
sold for auction).
Is the envelope divisible for Derrida?
Visman also talks about shifts from the addressee to the address of the sender.
Her model remains functionalist and pragmatic (kind of bad sociology dressed up
as Weber and Foucault—power as a thing relation than productive or a relation)
The other brilliant move for us is that she links the res gesta as things that come
back to the registry (a treasury of sorts, sometimes put on public display even
though secret) as Acta or registrata (file as self-storage and retrieval system,
though she does not use the term self-storage). The thing here is a record (p.77)
And this is government as a file machine (76; 82).
And then she adds that res gestas was the database for the chronicle , for
history.
So here is how we can intervene in thing theory and material culture studies of
things. The thing is a record, which is also an act, which is also an event.
Storage is the master metaphor because it recalls / retrieves reading (that
otherwise goes missing or gets reduced to a new economy (time saving), as an
irreducible unread –ability produced by the dynamics driving the metaphorology
39
of the archive, a metaphorology which produces various kinds of blind spots (74-
75) to particular metaphors and their metonymic weakness (they can be
exchanged for other, stronger yet weaker, metaphors for administration, storage,
architecture, rationalization, modernization, the modern state, empire,
government, bureaucracy, and so on). A history of the archive depends on a
constant sorting out of these dynamics into binary oppositions such as material
and virtual, interior administration as external ceremony, aesthetics versus
prestige (72) history and prehistory, mobility versus immobility of the archive (77)
records for eternity or for permanent update (79) (which can be made either
totally calculable, according to a universal exchange through which archiving
becomes book keeping) or irreplaceable treasures, the latter of which can be
made more or less paradoxical. Vismann thinks that files are the only blind spot.
“the erratic side of the law—the administrative operations, the transmission
medium itself—remains a blind spot for legal history” (75)
“It is not until the beginning of the twentieth century that files turned into an object
of historiography” (75)
We could make a similar move on the historical specificity of the self-storage unit.
“Diplomatics” is like CSI except specific to forgery—perfect for passports (72-73)
What we can do is show that the material studies, history of the book / new
media are caught in a structure of knowledge of which they are entirely unaware.
The are totally unconscious of the mediatic unconscious that is the condition of
their own disciplinary practices (and all of the unrecognized and unacknowledged
contradictions that go with them).
40
Homogenous text, homogenous time, (83) closed text, closed law, uniformity,
standardization, synchronic—an ideal she both assumes functions and shows
not to function (64-65).
The sovereign turned into an interactive unit that acted and reacted, either in proxy or in person. (95) History of boxes, pp. 96-99
"The reformed Prussian Reform State no longer simply founded and arranged empirical data into tableaus; it created itself by way of writing and recording. It generated itself in files that did not merely accumulate but grew organicially. Prussian files are, have, and institute the life of the state. To write the history of Prussia, then requires only retrieving the administrative procedures that have been laid ad acta and reviving the history deposited in the lower strata of the archive. That is how the Protestant historian Ranke proceeded." (121because historians search for the essence of the state behind profane administrative techniques, they do not dwell for very long on the files themselves. Rather, they deduce the spirit of Prussian bureaucracy form the imprint it left on its administrative structure.”(122)
"the micrologisitics of record keeping presents itself as a narratable story. The result is not an overview of the developments of controlling administrative algorithms, but a story of the spirit of officialdom materialized in files. (122)
In the second quotation above that ends with Ranke, it is difficult to tell who speaks. She seems to be speaking for Ranke, almost ventriloquizing him. She falls apart in her last sentence on p. 122 (the end of the chapter entitled "Governmental Practices.")
In any case, the files as life of the state (dead?) metaphor (along with retrieve as revive) is perfect for us as way of connecting the archive to biopolitics (she even uses the phrase "birth of the state" on p. 122.
We're on to a kind unconscious / semi-conscious metaphorics of biopolitical-archivology.
“archeo-archival layers” (65)
She is certainly not a close reader of Derrida.
41
The book’s Kittlerian moment happens on p. 82.
Event , 81
“virtual registries (81)
Hitler’s oral orders, p. 185 n. 68
Telephone (164)
Self-historicizes (120)
Sovereign act 110
Paper as treasure, 84
Materiality and mediality (76)
Seal as sealant versus certification (73)
Glue
“stored themselves as texts” (72)
“inside a text” (72)
attached (68)
paratitla (68)
montage (66)
sacred text (66) –no reading allowed
trash , 64
closure of the law (62)
Virtual reference (62)
Preface (63)
Silent reading versus reading aloud (61)
Sealed with a thread (60)
42
Transmitted versus stored version (60)
Time becomes spatial (58)
Strata (59)
Archive or office: one merges in the other, for in both cases the simple fact of
storage generates work with and on that which has been stored (59)
The symbolic or ciruta reference to old texts (59)
Wiped from history (57)
Rumor (56)
Law becomes written law (56)
Aura (54)
Speed writing (54-55)
Simultaneity (54)
Whitewashed (55)
Surface / substrate (55) wax tablet, Freud
Tool of writing is both a means fo writing and of erasure 955)
See Chartier, Inscription and Erasure
Glue p. 53, 60
Outside the city (51)
Empire has a center yet can be dispersed as well, translated. Much more
complex topography than the polis of Agamben
File meaning to put in its place (48)
Death of emperor (48)
43
Message = the messenger (49)
Administration is about usage, newest, revised edition; historiography is about
the oldest version (as opposed to mutilated, distorted older versions) (46-47)
Compilation as
Ur-text as relic (40) quest for origins (40)
Files as notebooks (41)
Legal violence (29), mentions WB’s Critique of Violence, later his Task of the
Translator, but never has an actual reading of the work.
Unreadable ur-text (27)
Deletion (26)
Preambles (24)
Unalterable status of scripture (25)
Re-script (71)
“programmed” p. 71
news versus eternal (70)
law becomes literature (70)
Books
Scrolls become art become files beocome book of photo reproductions of the
work of art (which c cannto be sued and is htus a work f art) Kiefer, 161-62
Prescript (23)
Tedious rereading (81)
Files become object of discourse15hand 16ens (76)
44
Nazi index of Jews (740 “murdering texts (44) body of law (45) liivn glaw (44)
“The murder metaphor used by the historian Franz Weieaker . . .” (44)
prestige versus aesthetics (72)
Documents are stored individually, partly because of their external appearance
(parchment, format, hanging seal), while files area always blasted, bundled, or
bunched collection (cited on p. 75)
Vault, p. 99
Poe’s purloined letter (84)
“the last secretary of the chancery to peruse records. He stood at the threshold
of the decoupling of archiving and administering. For archival purposes, he was
the very last to read the files that the registered, so that no one else had to read
them after him. (99)
We could say that even Adorno remained blind to the complexity of
administration in his critique of the administration of aesthetics.
Speed (100)
From chariot to dirigible (100)
Historians taken out of the processing loop (120)
Phone calls, 127,
1933, p. 126
despotism versus automation as restraint (138)
1932, p. 138
45
power was expressed metaphorically (149)
“highly unmetaphorical fashion, files and their techniques organize the very
architecture of digital machines” (164)
techniques for controlling transmissions and the life of files . . . . has promoted
archivists and administrative experts to reflect on the near-extinct medium of
files.” (163)
“material files” 163
Books versus files in terms of use versus uselessness (as works of arts or
monuments), 162
See Touch of Evil scene with Heston in the archives realizing Quinlan has faked
all the evidence for all the cases. (52)
Disposing of Reading: E.R.Curtius on Goethe’s Eliminations
Curtiuser and Curtiuser, or a Cabinet of Curtiusities:
The Missing Lexicon as E.R. Curtius and the Resistance to Reading in “Goethe
as Administrator”
46
In 1785, when Serene Highness
proposes a simplification of the chancery style,
Goethe casts a highly characteristic vote: “
In general I hold such a change to be
harmful rather than beneficial . . . A chancellery
does not deal in material things and anyone
who has only forms to observe and to work
with must have a bit of pedantry in him.
Eliminate the pedantry from garrison duty and
what is left of it?” (61)
Every system of registration implies
accumulation for that reason requires a method
of elimination.(7)
So what is at stake is not only what deposes means but also “eliminates”—one is
figurative and one is material, the papers that are stored as fact (bureaucracy)
but can’t be read, that have to be figured, “graphically depicts” in a “letter” (60)
Writing as phramakon—it would be about the fold in Goethe and sealing aas
sedateness, as well as formulas and calligraphy of he curia style—sedateness
orsedative—whereas for WB it would be the arious kinds of paapers andscripts,
images htat perhaps resistant to imageing as hashish for WB.
Abakhtin smoking his own manuscript.
47
Curtius essay is an interesting and remarkable case of using the archive to
generate a biobibliography of a self-archiving writer, taking administration and the
sovereignty that it entails as a means of narrating the person’s story and
mapping out his mind.
Collecting and ordering hs collections was a fundamental trait of Goethe’s nature.
Its first attestation is the Emphemerides, an anthology of extracts from his
reading that Goethe started in January 1770 in Frankfurt and then continued in
Strasbourg. But through his study of law, his practice as a lawyer, and, finally,
his public offices, one of which. The “supervision of the immediate institutes of for
science and art,” he exercised until his death, he was compelled to handle
documents daily for sixty years. A new publication of the Weimar State Archives
[1950] grants us an insight for the first time into this side of Goethe’s life. It
presents the records of the Privy Council from1776 to 1786. About seven
hundred and fifty sessions fall within this decade. Thousands of documents
record the proceedings:, in every existing style and form; as for instance:
rescripts, votes, protocols, postscripts, memoranda, elaborations, writes of
chancery, drafts for copyists, orders, decrees. The whole thing a source of
cultural history of great charm.
the Curtius essay (in what used to be chapter two and is now chapter one, the
old chapter one having been put in deep storage) and linked the Curtius essay
back to WB (now in the intro, on toys) via habit (pharmakon): G's sedateness
(sedative) vs hashish (WB); folding and fitting (paper into envelopes) and sealing
48
for G versus kinds of papers and microscopic handwriting for WB; curial formula
and calligraphy as sovereignty for G; self-archiving for WB. Very schematic, but I
think it will work when written out and revised.
In addition to bringing files into the chapter (along with books), the Curtius essay
will connect "administration" to "sovereignty" (Adorno to Agamben and Schmitt)
via paper life .
And in this case, what becomes important is the missing or the yet to be
completed, if ever, Goethe lexicon, the undecidable has to do with the meaning
of deposit. But this decision, semantic ambiguity which Curtius refuses to decide
parallels Curtius’s own account of Goethe’s practices of refusing to decide, or a
problem of the temporality of writing sovereignty.
On sealing:
I tried to maintain order as far as my circumstances allowed. I used a thicker
blotting pad-while sealing a letter, for it often happens that fine volumes of a book
are spoiled by careless hot sealing or that dedication copy is ruined.
(69)
“he wishes to prevent the sealing wax from also sticking to the written page in
case the envelope should be somewhat too narrow.
Goethe has long since ceased merely to administer affairs of state. He
administers his own existence. And when he lacks the energy to do more, he
finds contentment in the well-regulated course of self-administration. (68)
49
But now the process of sealing becomes a means of eliminating the undesirable.
(70)
Curtius wants to narrate a story of Goethe become less able to decide: “it
became uncommonly difficult for him in his later years to make decisions. (71)
But what Curtius calls a sovereign act –“the abolition of newspaper reading by
way of a ‘strict resolution’ is a sovereign act that Goethe executes on himself, in
the same way as Carl August condescended to resolve the conduct of his
subjects’ lives by issuing a rescript to his “steadfast, worthy, and most learned
counselors, his dear devoted and loyal ones.”
“with advancing age he suffered from indecision.”
But Curtius engages in a semantic confusion of dealing of documents to
eliminate with disposing of them as in destroying of them.
Goethe seals off a book from a super Hegel because “I knew as much about 80
years ago as I do today and about which none of us knows or understands
anything.” Just like he did with the failure to comprehend and understand earlier.
Goethe ironizes his project by sealing as eliminating the need to read.
He stops reading the newspaper and “he even goes so far as to hide them in
order to show that he really does not read them.”
One asks oneself whether it would not have been easier to destroy the offending
newspapers; to donate his books to the Weimar library. Every system of
registration implies accumulation for that reason requires a method of
elimination.
50
Not “means” but a ”method” of elimination.
But preventing one from self from reading, sealing, is not the permanent act or
decision that Curtius implies itself since any sealed document or book that has
gone unread may always, in theory, be retrieved later and read.
Even if he did give them away or destroy them,. Sealing in order to not read is his
method of elimination:
“I have now sealed these books up so as not to be tempted to read them again.”
Sealing implies unsealing, the breaking of the wax seal meaning the reading that
follows.
The problem is not Goethe’s age so much as it is Goethe’s method, the way that
sealing something off, as Curtius uses the metaphor for Faust as opposed to
emptying the contents, is a method of production as well as of elimination.
Curtius last discussion of Faust goes back not only to the beginning but to
page63. There is the “filtering mechanism,” which Goethe uses as a metaphor
for reflection, and this marks “the sedate formalism emerges which will mark
Goethe’s character to the end of his life. The management of administrative
affairs furnishes him with the model and technique for organizing his personal
existence.” (63)
Curtius sees to want the self-administration to work, to see in it a rational
bureaucratic procedure, but even the speed of writing that marks G’s sedateness
is a slowness that has nothing to with the decision but only the time it takes to
script it and therefore to send and reveal it (words into pictures)
51
“The transaction of business through administrative channels into several
phases. Goethe begins with a schema,” This is followed by a “draft,” which is
then “supplemented.” Then the final “redaction” is “engrossed.” The execution of
a written decree is called “expeditions.” An inventory is kept of all incoming and
outgoing papers.” (63)
Curtius uses the same metaphor “schema” for business here as he does at the
end for the composition of Faust. Curtius starts with the emptying of the sack
story because it its the storage “thing” its lack of clarity, that enables him to
externalize the mss but inscribe it with a papering process, a life lived through
paper and the rhetoric of filing papers. The self-administration breaks down when
sealing as eliminating a product and as eliminating waste breaks down. The
papers poured out of the sack and then transcribed do not necessarily disappear.
But Curtius writes as they do, sealing them off as something not to be read as
he does not read Faust.
He skips over a problem of non-correspondence in sovereignty of the writer like
Goethe and the sovereignty of the prince. The time for internal reflection does
not extend to a reflciton on elimination, just a method of not reading.
The mephaiss son thenegative, on the not read, not on the read. The storage
unit becomes a kind of boundary separateing necessary transcriptions for
unnecessary scarps, for the disorderof the latter into the rder of the former. But
the sack is juts another apper inneed of filing as much as it is a method and
means of filing..
52
The value of the esay is that that method rather htan matierlaremains at the
forefront, rhetoric, ropes, not topos,
If it is examined more closely, numerous annotations come alive (63)
. Curtius’s resistance becomes visible not only because he is such an astute,
close reader but because the way he reads the archive by a technical term into
an over-arching rhetorical term to read Goethe’s life and works through the lens
of administration. More specifically, Curtius’s essay betrays a rhetorical violence
in eliminating error from the archive by yoking anecdotes to philological analysis
of words. Curtius begins his essay with a brilliant philological analysis of an
anecdote of about Goethe dumping the mss out of a sack. Curtius translates
sack as paper (not canvas), pouch and capsule as envelope. This analysis,
becomes for Curtius a way into reading Goethe’s life teleologicaly, the telos
being Goethe’s routinization of “handling everything as administrative business”
(64).27 Goethe’s management practices become existential: “The management
of administrative affairs furnishes him with the model and the technique of
organizing his personal existence.” Curtius then introduces metaphors of “life”
as a consequence for our reading of Goethe once we understood how he
breaches “the gulf between life and paper” (63): “We breathe something of the
atmosphere of Goethe’s life when we observe him in the planning and keeping of
the most diverse kinds of records. . . . If it is examined more closely, the
numerous annotations in the Diaries come alive” (63).
53
Having used the archive to establish a telos in Goethe’s life, Curtius linearizes
that life by organizing Goethe’s archival practices as a “procedure that falls into
several phases” (63) . . . “just as “one scene follows another” (61) when Curtius
characterized Goethe’s entries through a metaphor theater. (“From sheaves of
documents situations, men, and destinies emerge” and all of them “engaged
Goethe’s mind and Goethe’s heart” (61). The first evidence of what I am calling
rhetorical violence appears when Curtus Quoting from Goethe own comments
about his practice of binding the pages of his writings. Curtius “reads” Goethe by
turning him into a museum piece, by taking him out of a file cabinet of curiosities,
as it were, by acting as a “museum of language and script” curator, pointing out
the “old-fashioned and amusing” style Goethe uses in his “administrative
language. Agenda and exhibenda, regisitranda and propopenda, Tecturen and
Reposituren march past, so that it is a joy to behold.” (65) Curtius then interjects
his own comments on Goethe’s words, using the metaphor the “specimen” for
one word: “My greatest pleasure, however, is in the loculamenta. This word is a
specimen of rare magnificence. I can verify its use only once. In Seneca and
Pliny it means bookshelf, in Goethe the compartment of a filing cabinet.” (65).
Curtius then makes his central move, one of his most resistant resistances to
reading Goethe’s archive as itself a reshelved, rebound book. Nnoting that in a
letter Goethe raised the technical term into “a metaphor designating the highest
regions of the mind” (65). Curtius quotes Geothe commenting on Humboldt’s
Fragmens de Gelogie: “in the end we are ready to imagine that we can grasp the
impossible . . . as if nothing had happened remains outside the limits of my
54
comprehension in those dark regions where transubstantiation dwells, and my
cerebral system would have to be completely reorganized . . if it had to find room
for such wonders. . . But does everything have to be understood? I repeat: our
conqueror of the world is perhaps the greatest rhetorician.” Curtius not only
plays the role of collector who values a specimen according to its rarity but
quotes Goethe to sue Goethe’s own metaphors of geological elevation to support
his own raising of loculamenta from one technical administrative term among
others into a philosophical metaphor for the mind, for cognition (Descartian, I
would say, in Curtius’s account).
Curtius uses “loculamenta” as a trope to “read” Goethe’s mind by organizing
it as a kind of filing cabinet, without making the metaphor explicit, however: “The
loculamenta of Goethe’s mind are reflected in the division of his documents into
rubrics. Curtius strings together lists and quotations to show how Goethe as a
writer was an administrator: “The cliffs have become a rubric to be filled in.
Nature is entered among the documents. But poetry too is brought into proximity
with administrative affairs” (67). Goethe starts to take “cognizance of his own
death.” (68) “Goethe has long since ceased merely to administer affairs of state
he administers his own existence” (68, repeats more explicitly the point about
“routine” on p. 64). Curtius totalizes Goethe’s life into a technique that he
construes as a metaphor in order to make that life (corpus) legible.
Yet something gets in the way of Curtius using the trope of “loculamenta”
(disappearing the philological questions involved in publishing a book of Goethe’s
archive28) to read Goethe’s life as an administrative practice to be read not only
55
though a lexicon but specifically in terms of “the prickly Latin words of Goethe’s
administrative language” (65). Unlike material culture critics, Curtius wants to
understand Goethe’s auto-archiving practices in relation to the “real” documents
but in relation to language and style. A philological method allows Curtius to
“read” all of Goethe’s life in relation to a certain model and techniques of “filing.”
While he is fully aware that filing necessitates refilling, returns that not only
organize but eliminate parts of what has been accumulated, Curtius’s use of
loculamenta as the master trope breaks down at the decision and sovereignty
implied in archiving / refiling.
The key Goethe quotation Curtius uses to make his point is from a letter
Goethe wrote to Schiller: “”For that reason I have made files for myself and have
had all sorts of published papers as I just happen to come across . . . entered
into them; I also file what I see and observe as well as my conclusions of the
moment I then file the new information and instruction with the other documents,
and so materials are obtained which ought to remains sufficiently interesting to
me in future as a history of outer and inner events” (67). Curtius moves forma
discussion of Goethe’s use of the word “loculamenta” as technical term for filing
cabinet compartment, into a discussion of it as a metaphor that nearly overcomes
the sublime (the Himalayas overshadow Mount Blanc, as it were), and then to
Goethe’s autobiographical account of his own filing practices. Curtius’s Goethe
is a kind of anti-Perec: Goethe turns himself into “repository of Goethe’s
repository” (66). One box can be neatly placed inside another.
56
Yet Curtius can only trope Goethe by leveling the published archive, by in
effect treating everything in it as records. Records include anecdotes the truth
value of which is guaranteed by their having been recorded, that work the way
Curtius is arguing Goethe worked. First person and second person accounts do
not have different values for Curtius. One is not more prone to error than the
other. Curtius returns to a second hand account of Goethe’s writing practices as
in the anecdote he began with and also the story about Goethe’s stake in Gothic
script and “V” and “T” “masterpiece of calligraphy” being the last of “final
transformation of medieval initial illumination” (62). Goethe’s “old-fashioned and
amusing” style is not only a matter of his idiosyncratic preferences for one kind of
script over another but an expression of his stake in a rationalization of sovereign
decision making. The slowness of the writing creates a sedateness for
sovereignty: “The ‘sedateness’ of the sovereign decision emerges visibly in the
script” (62). Curtius strings together a series of quotations (as he first does on p.
59) to illustrate Goethe’s concern with Goldbergian / Kitlerian writing matter
(evidently to match sovereignty to script). Script almost becomes a kind of trope
here, a mirror.
What gets in Curtius’ way, then? The meaning of the word “decision” does not
fit into Curtius’s account of Goethe’s auto-archival practices. The missing lexicon
makes its appearance. The issue of decision returns in another second hand
account as a problem of Goethe’s management of his already archived papers,
of his need to decide which he should keep and which he should destroy: “it
became uncommonly difficult in his later years to make decisions. . . if quick
57
decisions are unavoidable, indeed, if the instances demanding them piled up, he
would readily become sullen” (70; 71). “Decision” returns Here decision
becomes a philological problem and a problem of translation: “Since we still do
not possess a lexicon of Goethe’s vocabulary, I dare not decide, of course, which
procedure is meant by the word “dispose” in the following entries: the destruction
of documents or the dispatch of business” (71). The “disposition” of the
documents is undecidable for Curtius in a way that the “resposition” (70) of the
documents does not.. Only reading habits can be regarded as decisions, as
decision not to collect: “The abolition of newspaper reading by way of a “strict
resolution” is a sovereign at that Goethe executes upon himself.” (71)
The undecidability of the meaning of “disposition” would not be decided by a
lexicon, were it to be published. The undecidability arises from a necessary
moment of decision that repeatedly occurs because repetition involved in
accumulation (Derrida’s anarhcivicdrive?): “Every system of registration implies
accumulation and for that reason also requires a method of elimination. Mere
“reposition” is not enough. What has become superfluous must be disposed of.”
Here Curtius thinks that disposed” means destroyed. Every system he says has
periodically to destroy documents that have been registered. Somehow Goethe
is exceptional for Curtius when it comes to determining when and if Goethe
destroyed his archived materials.
Instead of facing down the exception Goethe appears to be, Curtius closes
his essay by looping back to the Faust anecdote he retold at the beginning of his
essay and linearizes a series of quotations to tell the story of the manuscript’s
58
conclusion, this time using the quotations to describe the manuscript’s
completion as having had to “pass through the ‘filtering’ mechanism of the
expeditions” (70). Curtius’s last quotation is from Goethe’s Diary: “The main
business accomplished. Final engrossment. Everything fair-copied filed” (72).
The metaphors of sealing and circling in Curtius’ last two sentences provide
further narrative closure to his essay: “In August, finally, the manuscript is sealed
and the friends are notified of the event . . . The circle has been run and closed
itself, as we would like to say, to use one of Goethe’s favorite formulations” (72).
Curtius’s account of Goethe has a double structure, both linear and circular.
Through this double structure, Curtius manages to skip over the iterability of
Goethe’s self-biobiblioarchivalization. But Curtius trips himself up. The “filtering
mechanism” does really filter anything. Goethe says nothing in quotations
Curtius gives about eliminating parts of his Faust manuscript. And only “the main
business” has been finished. “Minor business remains yet to be accomplished.
Curtius is forcing closure here by using rhetoric to substitute for philogical
analysis as the “loculamenta” metaphor returns as a “filtering mechanism” that
implies decisions are made to keep and to destroy. One symptom of this force is
that Curtius speaks of the completion of the mss in his own voice, adding “finally”
for emphasis as well as “sealed.” The circle hasn’t really closed because the
circle is really a loop, having skipped over the question of how or whether Goethe
destroyed anything. Goethe’s account of what he keeps quoted by Curtius back
at he beginning of the essay implies that Goethe kept everything: “For I have
kept records from the beginning and in this way preserved both my errors as well
59
as my proper procedures, but especially all experiments, experiences, and ideas:
and I have separated all these volumina, have had paper sacks made, indexed
them according to a certain schema, and stuck everything into them” Is it the
word “error” that freaks Curtius out, that is the source of the “violence” of the end
of his essay? Because Goethe’s account is itself undecidability open to two
interpretations: he separated errors and from proper procedures when he
sacked his papers, as it were, or he separated his records into sacks without
regard to whether or not they included errors. In one reading, error versus
proper would be the organizing principle of Gothe’s index. In the other reading, it
wouldn’t be. We can’t really decide because he doesn’t say what his “certain
schema” was, and by saying that he stuck “everything,” an undifferentiated mass,
into the sacks, which may also be arbitrarily organized. The quotation that
follows suggests that arbitrariness may be the “un-guiding” principle: You will
never find single sheets lying around in his presence; if they do not fit in
anywhere, he will paste up a capsule out of a sheet of paper, write a heading on
it, and not until then do they become (illegible).” This quotation is particular
puzzling. First, Goethe seems to file with violence. He forces what doesn’t fit.
Second, a singular “sheet of paper” becomes plural “them”). More strangely, the
force makes the filed pages “illegible” rather than legible. Do the parentheses
imply a double meaning? That the pages becomes legible only when a heading
is written on an envelope containing them and hence illegible because they have
been stored in an envelope? We have arrived at an undecidability of reading the
archive raising the question of its own unread –ability. Curtius’s move to “raise” a
60
technical term to a rhetorical one (metaphor) markshis own resistance to reading
(raising is not betting, a raising of the stakes; it is just pure ascent and hence
pure extension, both expansion and inclusion).
Certainly the relation between archiving records and reading the archive
(especially when published as a book) poses problems of error and legibility,
problems Curtius’s essay both wants to take out and distance by a rhetorical dis-
play and role play (Curtius as curator) but then quickly file away.
Addressing the S/h/elf
P/Relapse
“Fichus” is a restaging of the staged lapse in Typewritter Ribbon, Inc, the
difference between that Fichus is entirely a lapse, unlike the autobiographical
and discontinuous lapse in Type R Inc. It’s as if Derrida is playing out the role he
gives Adorno—the person who could answer the question must philosophy be
awake in order to arrive at truth both “yes” (as the philosopher always does) and
“yes, but sometimes No, as in the case of the poet and psychoanalyst (being
asleep, unconscious can deliver the truth. So Derrida throughout the essay
performs this division, reconciled in Adorno, by not playing Adorno, playing out
the split, giving himself over sanely to a delirium. This means he has to write not
only about Adorno but about WB. And about Gretel. It is clearly staged not only
because the essay begins again n the middle but because he begins with
Benjamin (oddly not with Adorno) by saying it could serve as apigraph, though it
61
doesn’t and says he will return to it. Then he does return in the second half. So
the almost epigraph becomes an almost epilogue, though it is no more an
epilogue than it is an epigraph. So there is a restaging that calls attention to has
been staged from the beginning.
It’s worth noting “Fichus” is not in the French edition of Paper Machine while
“Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” is not included in the English translation (three other
short essays along with “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” which is the subtitle and
centerpiece of the French edition drop out in the English translation; Bowlby does
have a note about the excluded and included essays, pp.ix-x).
Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans.
Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). “I am dreaming. I am
sleepwalking” (169)
put this essay in relation to “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” because the WB
and TA pairing echoes the de Man / Derrida pairing. JD discusses the
long dream WB talks about in a letter to Gretel Adorno about a dream he had in
French while in an internment camp. It's not really a reading, or, I should say,
it's a kind of Freudian of the letter as a dream (JD quotes Freud) with JD
dreaming his own dream of reading the poem, of being only to be awake and
dream. The reading moves from the word "fichu" which cannot be translated,
Derrida says (175), to a consideration of the letter "d" WB "reads" (JS notes that
WB puts “reads” and “writes” in quotation marks) on it. Derrida rehearses a
number of possibilities but rather tendentiously reads in the lower case letter in
the dream as WB's own signature (Detlev Holz in Deutschen
62
Menschen) and Detlef in letters to Gretel or even “Dein alter Detlef.”
"As it is both read and written by Benjamin, the letter d would then indicate the
initial of his own signature, as if Detlef was to be understood as "I am the fichu
one," and even his voluntary workers' camp, less than a year before his suicide,
and like every mortal who says me, in his dream language: "Me, d, I'm fichu."
Less, than a year
before his suicide, less than a few months . . . Benjamin dreamed, knowing it
without knowing it, a sort of poetic and premonitory hieroglyphic "Me, d, from now
on I'm what is called fichu." Now the signatory knows it, he says to Gretel, none
of it can be said, written, and read, it can't be signed like that, in a dream, and
decoded, other than in French: ‘The sentence I pronounced[sic] distinctly toward
the end of this dream also happened to be in French. A double reason forgiving
you this narrative in the same language.’ No translation, in the conventional
sense of the word, will ever give an account of it, a transparently communicable
account” (175).
I find this to be almost a Lacanian reading of the letter of the dream from within
the Imaginary of the Symbolic (a written address to the people who have given
him the Adorno prize). Derrida wants to keep the letter indivisible, like Lacan in
his essay on “The Purloined Letter” but also outside language as an initial rather
than a letter, and also as an idiom within language (fichu is idiomatic), the secret
being that the initial is lower case, hence not the first letter of a name. But it can
be connected to
63
the first letter of the name of WBs wife, Dora, and his sister “who iwas very ill at
the time,” (176)--so Hermacher whispers to Derrida
(176), "which in Greek can mean skin that has been scorched,
scratched, worked over." (176) The translator puns on Adorno’s first name: “The
more usual etymology is from doron, gift; Adorno’s own name Theodor, from the
same root, means “gift of the gods.”—Trans.” (203, n. 23). The translator
unwittingly starts playing the game, revealing that Derrida is playing a kind of
game. And the translator misses the dor in Adorno, or the pun on “adorn” that
the English translation activates. Or Ador-no. Or Ador-know.
So the name becomes double, even though Dora left Walter, and the initial can
be translated, carried over, as a remainder and reminder or make possible
translation as renaming and then read etymologically. Though Derrida has writes
earlier that he will not inflict such a reading on his audience: “Before hastening to
my conclusion I don’t want to forget either the fichu in Benjamin’s dream or the
contents page of a virtual book on this Adorno prize, a book and a prize that I no
longer hope may one day achieve or deserve. I spoke to you about language
and dreaming then about a dreamed-of language, then about a dream language,
that language you dream of speaking—here now is the dream’s language, as
would say since Freud. I won’t inflict on you a lesson in philology, semantics the
derivations and uses of this extraordinary word, fichu. It means different things
according to whether it is being used as a noun or an adjective” (173).29
Strange reduction of WB or dream of reducing him to a signature that
64
can be read as anagram of a name after reading the signature from a letter as
an initial (pun on initial as initializing, beginning?) and expanded by being
translated into Greek words that echo the meaning of the word fichu, which is
both a noun and an adjective in French "The fichu--and this is the most obvious
meaning in Benjamin's sentence--designates a shawl, the piece of a material that
a woman may put around her head or neck. But the adjective fichu denotes evil:
that which is bad, lost, or condemned. One day in September 1970, my sick
father said to me, "I'm fichu." My speech to you today is very oneirophilic, and the
reason is that dreaming is the element most receptive to mourning, to haunting,
to the spectrality of all sprits and the return of ghosts (such as those adoptive
fathers Adorno and Benjamin-that's what they were for us and for others too, in
their disagreements as well, and that's what Adorno perhaps was for Benjamin"
(173-74).
The autobiographical and Oedipalization of the scene--two fathers, one
of whom may have been a father to the other--that gets rerouted,
mourned, by Derrida dreaming of a book he can't write but still dreams
of writing. See also “the long narrative that follows . . brings back into the picture
(this is my own selective interpretation) an “old straw hat,” a “panama” that
Benjamin had inherited from his father . . . Then there were the women. . .” (174)
And check this aside on at the bottom of 177:
"(If Gretel Adorno were still alive, I would write her a confidential latter about the
relationship between Teddie and Detlef [Derrida does not comment on the
difference between the "v" and the "f" at the ends of Detlev / Detlef] and would
65
ask her why Benjamin doesn't have a prize, and I would share my hypotheses on
this subject with her.)" (177-78). The woman reader (Gretel) is a figure of
“reading” in quotation marks, as Derrida points out Benjamin puts the word
under. The woman reader can and cannot receive the letter (which tells a dream
about “reading” women). Interesting that Derrida uses “Teddie and Detlef” but
not Felizitas or even Herr B and Herr A since that is how “Teddie and Detlef”
address each other in the letters Derrida cites.
In this parenthetical aside, Gretel seems to be something like an oracle, the know
it all who can't speak at all (even oracularly) or be even addressed--she is not a
ghost who returns, unlike TA and WB and Derrida's Dad, but dead and gone,
someone who has to be remembered with her first and last name, not just her
first). (I'm not making a feminist critique of JD, just noticing the difference, that
something here goes missing related to the name just like other things go
missing / unread in the essay.) Derrida also notes that “Detlev” was “the first
name he used in some of his pseudonyms” (175) but not discuss the pseudonym
WB used for Gretel nor the many, many different ways in which Adorrno signed
his name to published work, sometimes adding his middle name in full,
sometimes initializing it as “W,” and sometimes omitting it altogether, or the many
different ways he signed letters to Benjamin (and other addresses). Not that he
should or has to do so, but he opens up paths (Freudian?) that he does not
follow, blindly, as it were. He seems blind, as if enacting a Freudian repression
(castration as blindness, the Sandman, Oedipus, etc) while dreaming reading the
letter of WB’s letter as anything but a single letter (reducible to a liberal meaning
66
in which a letter is always and only recognized as an orthographic letter). The
signature, the signed for, is singular because it iterable but excessively so, the
signature being singular plural. “This was always how he signed his letters to
Gretel Adorno”, sometimes adding Dein alter Detlef) (175)
Is the word “fichus” in the title a neologism, a plural of fichu? Or the Latin word
from which the French word “fichu” is derived? Is Derrida playing on the “s” in
relation to the “s” at the end of “address” in the essay’s subtitle, “Frankfurt
Address”(two “s”s in “address”, even in French encrypting a plural than remains
unread and untranslated? The address is itself interrupted by September 11,
references to which Derrida “added on the day of the ceremony.” (164). Derrida
has a strange endnote explaing why: “By an odd coincidence, it happens that
Adorno was born on a September 11 (1903). Everyone who was in the audience
knew this, and according to what had been the usual ritual since the prize was
founded, it ought to heave been presented on September 11, not September 22.
But because of a visit to China (I was in Shanghai on September 11), I had to
ask for the ceremony to be put back” (203n. 29). It wasn’t the attack that forced
the delay and then the acknowledgement of 9/11 2001 in an essay but his own
travel plans that had already diverted him, prevented him, or self-prevented him
from giving the talk on its customary date. So 9/11 in a weird way did not
interrupt Derrida’s already delayed talk (this is crazy, but 22 is 11 times two
(another doubling that goes without comment). But why didn’t Derrida change
his China plans so he could be in Frankfurt on Sept 11?
67
Derrida does not mention Adorno’s birthday in the text, but he does refer to WB’s
in the text: ”Less than a year before his suicide, few months after thanking
Adorno for having sent him greetings form New York on his last birthday, which
was also on July 15, as is mine.” Is it just me, or is something happening here in
relation to dates, birthdays, coincidences, and doublings?
The lecture does not have an address, Derrida’s address exceeds the postal
relay system in which it might go missing.
Only Adorno, not Benjamin, is “present” to give and receive. If Adorno was
WB’s “adoptive father,” Derrida perhaps implies, A Benjamin was not regarded
by Adorno as an “adoptive son.” Derrida also puts the letter “d” in italics rather
than quotation marks, further singling it out, just as he italicizes
“fichu” and insists on its untranslatablilty even though he quotes Benjamin
translating the French into German, fichu into “Halstuch” which neither Derrida
nor the translator note is the German word for the French “fichu.” When Derrida
quotes the lines again within a fuller chunk of the letter (174-75), he transcribes
the letter has having “d” in italics as well as “fichu.” But the German translation of
the sentence with “fichu” that follows in brackets does not single out the word
“Halstuch, putting it in italics as are all the other German words in the sentence.
In some ways, Derrida’s “address” seems less about a dream of language than a
dream about translation as the vehicle of dream interpretation. Derrida seems to
echo Benjamin in insisting on what cannot be translated before adding that a
certain didactic translation is legitimate), and goes further than Freud in attending
68
to the written dream as something that involves “reading” in the dream itself even
before it is read by the patient and analyst (transcribing it for a case study,
perhaps, to be published). Freudian dream interpretation becomes a dream of
reading enabled by the translation of a letter into a name or names, word or
sword, or series of words.
The letter to Gretel addressed as “Felizitas” (something Derrida a
also does not comment on—the possible relation between “Felizitas” and “fichu”
and also the “s” in “Felizitas” and “address” (though “address” in French would
end with an “e.” Still, this is an essay in / about translation and letters).
He reads WB’s dream told to Gretel in his letter instead in relation to a doctor
who had treated WB had shortly before the dream. “We can always speculate
about the d that Benjamin discovers on the fichu. “Perhaps it is Dr. Dausse’s
initial—it was he read had treated him for malaria, had given one of his women
something that Benjamin says he wrote.” (175). This is Derrida’s first
speculation, Doctor Dausse, presumably because Benjamin mentions Dausse in
the letter (and Derirda quote this part of the letter on p. 175). But Derrida does
not read the “D” in Dr. (or not that WB calls him Dausse, not Doctor Dausse, as
Derrida does), the title Dausse holds. Derrida also misses the letter “f” in “fichu”
that is also translated by Benjamin in the letter to Gretel as “Halstuch” (“H” in
German, in which all nouns, like proper names, are capitalized). This seems
rather odd given both that the fichu is worn by women and that a woman appears
in Benjamin’s dream.
69
Derrida also mentions the internment camp setting for WB’s letter to Gretel and
makes nothing of it (like the references to WB’s suicide).
“As an epigraph to this modest and simple expression of my gratitude, I would
like to begin by reading a sentence that Walter Benjamin one day, one night,
himself dreamed in French. He told in French to Gretel Adorno, in a letter he
wrote her on October 12, 1939, from Nevers, where he was in an internment
camp. In France at this time this was called a camp de travailleurs volontaires
(“voluntary workers camp”).” (165) Benjamin says this to himself, in French: “Il
s’agissat de change en fichu une poesie [it was about changing a poem into a
fichu. And he translates “Es hadelte sich darum, aus einem Gedicht ein Halstuch
zu machen [It was about making a scarf out of a poem]. In a moment we wills
stroke this scarf or shawl. We will spot in it a particular letter of the alphabet
which Benjamin thought he recognized in this dream. And we’ll also come back
to fichu, which is just any old French word for a woman’s scarf or shawl.” (165)
Later Derrida says “This is how Benjamin begins the long letter he wrote Gretel
Adorno, in French, on October 12, 1939, from an internment camp in the Nievre
region . . . So a message meant for teddy, for Adorno, Gretel’s husband, Why
does Benjamin tell this dream to the wife, not the husband? Why, four years
before, was it also in a letter to Gretel Adorno that Benjamin responded to some
slightly authoritarian and paternal [if Adorno does regard WB as his “adoptive
son,” Adorno is a bad Dad] criticisms Adorno sent him, as he often did, in a letter,
on the subject of dreams, the relationships between the dream figures and the
dialectical image”? (174)
70
Derri a has a great passage on the same word “wound” used by TA in his
discussion of dreams in Minima Moralia and in the subtitle subtitle to Minima
Moralia: Relfections on a Damaged Life,
“beschaedigt “meaning wound rather than damanged.
An alert to the reader to read Derrida’s subtitle?
Derrida’s first endnote on the publication of WB’s letter is really fascinating. It
was published twice in French and one in German, with slight modifications, as a
dream for himself, not as a letter to Gretel, and published in
Autobiographistesche Schriften, 1980 6: 54-42.
In endnote 17 (202-203), Derrida lists all the names of those people he wishes to
thank and ends saying ”I apologize to whose who names I have omitted here.”
This note follows from an odd moment in the essay when he begins over again,
addressing the Mayor and audience directly and thanking everyone (he has
moved the customary place for such remarks and gestures to the middle of the
essay and into a “summary note” which he does not read at the ceremony: ”I
haven’t yet begun to touch my debt to you . . .—to all those, both in Frankfurt and
elsewhere in Germany, who must forgive me for not mentioning them by name
other than in an a summary note” (173). The endnote is just a list of names with
the first names being the first initial of he first name in all cases except for
Bernard Stiegler and Peter Szondi. (203). It’s kind of like a monument ot the
dead, names becomes abstract by virtue of having been listed in alphabetical
order and made therefore serial, anonymous, nameless, as it were, the two
exceptions being exceptions because their first names are given in full.
71
WB’s last letter, in French,
Listed this way in the TA and WB Correspondence;
121 BENJAMIN TO HENNY GURLAND [AND ADORNO?]
PORT BOUS 25.9.1940]
The editors cannot with certain determine the addressee of the letter even
though it is addressed to one person. Is the intended reader he suggests,
Adorno, not the addressed? The question can be raised but has to put in
brackets because WB mentions TA ands Gurland to pass on his thoughts to TA ,
but WB does not ask him to forward the letter. But Gurland did give the letter to
Adorno, who kept it.
Dans une situation sans issue, je n’ai d’autre choix que d’en finir. C’est dans un
petit village dans les Puyranees a mon ami Aodrnoet delui expliququer la
situation ou je me suis vu place. Il ne me reste assez de temps pour ecrire toutes
ces letters que j’eusse voulu ecrire.
[In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. In a tiny
village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, my lie must come to an end.
I would ask you to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to
him the situation in which I have now found myself. I no longer have enough time
to write all those letters I would dearly have written.]
The editor then has a strange and relatively long footnote beginning by quoting in
italics “In a situation with no escape” (already something of a melodramatic
stretch from “sans issue,” “without conclusion”) explaining what it means and
mentioning the lack of the required French exit visa (and then in a parenthetical
72
aside referring the readers the Benjamin-Katalog “for an account of the flight
across the Pyrenees,” then quoting the editor (a Frenchman!, Henri Lonitz)
“—‘The result: the threatened deportation of the refugees back to France, which
would have been equivalent to handing them over to the Germans’ (ibid).
But this info does not satisfy the editor, who adds in the same sentence above “is
what Benjamin meant by the situation without escape.’
The translation requires translation, explication de texte. The note ends then with
these two sentences:
Having decided to take his own life, Benjamin wrote these lines to Adorno and
Henny Gurland. The text survives only in Henny Gurland’s hand amongst
Adorno’s literary remains (cf GS V [2], pp. 1201ff).” (342)
The editor repeats the citation and readdresses the letter, putting Adorno first.
The last line is uncannily resonant: “the letter “survives” in A’s “literary remains”
while in neither’s hands. Gurland had a hand in relaying the letter by
transcribing it. Translation is thus also trans-scription, and the copy is the more
embodied than is the “surviving text’ or its final placement in “literary remains.”
The body appears only as a gesture of handing over property to someone to
whom it does not belong, to which it is not addressed.
Lonitz’s note not only rereads and misreads the letter’s addressee but also ails to
note the way WB, by routing the letter through a transmitter and translator rather
than a forwarding service also lays a guilt trip on Adorno. In the form of an
apology—or at least leaves it open to question whether he is apologizing to
73
Adorno or accusing Adorno for not having enough time to write all those letters
he would have (loved to have) written.
Wondering, after reading some more WB and TA correspondence after “Fichus,”
how we might want to use Ronell with Derrida and relate the storage unit,
reshelving as reading operation, to relay systems like the post. Even before the
problem of arrival happens (destinerrance), there is the problem of address—and
we, after all, are reading letters not addressed to us, many of which Adorno and
Wb kept copies of for themselves because they contained mini-articles, of notes
for work in progress, etc.)
WB writes, for example, about people with whom he has “placed” his msss. (p.
245-46, and 247n.4.It’s as if people became storage units, with copies
sometimes produced by them. His letters are almost indices or notes to selves
as to where they are and how has them. The editors have a note at the back
about where the letters were (and are). The editor has a note on all this in his
afterword, mentioning that “Some of the papers form part of the Benjamin papers
belonging to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. These are letters which
Benjamin kept separate from the rest of the correspondence on account of their
extensive theoretical character; before his flight from Paris, Benjamin gave these
and various other papers to Georges Bataille, who hid them in the national library
where he worked.” (345)
Even here there is something slightly odd about the way Lonitz first uses the
French and then English (“national library”). For the non-French reading reader
of the afterword, a bit of guess-work is involved in making out that “national
74
library” is the BNF. It’s as if the French title ahs to be used when establishing the
provenance of the “papers”: they become the “WB Papers,” documents, as they
become the property of an institution—the papers belong where they belong to
whom they belong. Provenance and property exorcise any kind of uncanniness
about their properties, about the improper spectrality of their transmission from
private, addressed correspondence to public, random access, unaddressed
readers who do not correspond, as it were, or can become correspondents only
by putting the uncanny transformation of letters in papers on hold. WB has to
become a “papered” person, or a “repapered” person, a “papered over” person in
order to be rendered readable.
Letters and delay (326)
Life as a c.v..
You will be getting my curriculum vitae via Geneva—which is also how I shall
probably be sending these lines. I have incorporated the bibliography of my
writings into the biographical information because I don’t have all resources here
to organize the material more precisely. (340)
We might think of the pile up as a model for accumulation and addressing:
After I have spent a long day piling up books on books, excerpts upon excerpts. I
am ready now to compose a series of reflections which will furnish the foundation
for an entirely transparent structure . . . In conclusion, an accumulated pile of
mixed post. (247)
75
“Grete de Francesco has passed through Paris. I only managed to speak to her
on the telephone. She is extremely depressed about things. Her parents, along
with some considerable assets, have got caught in the Austrian trap.” (247)
My dear Walter,
On this your birthday, Max has actually given us the finest gift we could wish for:
the prospect that you will soon be joining us here, and the hardly less
encouraging one that the Baudelaire will soon be in our hands as well . . . I only
received the French expose of the Tableaux Parisiens yesterday, and I shall be
writing to you in responses once I have been able to study it at leisure. Firstly, as
far as the Baudelaire is concerned, the prospect of publishing it in the first issue
of the journal this year (a double issue) would be the ideal fulfillment of a dream.
(313)
I hope you will not be too angry with me if these lines resemble an index of
headings more than they do a letter. . . . As far as the aforementioned list of
headings is concerned, it is essentially an index to the numerous and many-
layered motifs which have been omitted from the new chapter . . . These motifs
are naturally not to be eliminated form the total complex, and I am intending to
supply them with detailed interpretative commentary in their proper place.
In the meantime I got your second letter with the marvelous dream in it [from
Gretel], (318)
The last two pages of your essay (pages 52-3) struck me like a table of birthday
gifts upon which the passage . . . The work also resembled a birthday table
(331)
76
My dear Teddie,
I was delighted to receive your letter of 15 July for a number of reasons—for one,
because you kindly remembered my birthday . . The circumstances that
suddenly befell me la=in September could easily be repeated at any time
The complete uncertainty about what he next day, even the next hour, may bring
has dominated my life for weeks now. I am condemned to read every
newspaper . . . as if it were a summons to me in particular, to hear the voice of
fateful tidings in every radio broadcast” (339)
“P.S. Please forgive the painfully complete signature: it is officially required.”
(3411)
I think you can write to me in German, and should therefore write more often, too.
For my part, writing letters in German is now necessarily the exception in other
respects as well; the thoughts expressed her were quite as free of terminological
tags as personal gifts are free of price tags” (333)
Derrida puts himself to sleep—his bibliography only possible-zoebiobibliography?
Also about dead / alive discourse of species. Books are trees. Ecology of the
book, palpably there but not but in a totally denatured way but that recognizes
how species difference get articulated through media. Threshold of difference
between bare life—zoos and bios and Agamben.
Different media of are sorting mechanism that keep distinctions between paper
persons and nonpersons who lack paper in place.
Sleepwalking.
77
Sleep waking is like life and death Derrida saying that the question can be posed
in relation to Ben and Adorno means that their discussion has not finished.
The animal therefore he was—puts himself to sleep, down (pun on animals
being.
Why is Derrida there at all to give the Adorno address.
Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin Correspondence 1930-40
Ed. Henri Lonits and Christoph Goedde trans. Wieland Hoban (Malden,
MA: Polity, 2008)
Walter Benjamin writes himself to death as a way of (bare) life.
“What weighs on my mind more heavily than anything is the fate of my
manuscripts. I have not yet found time to describe the circumstances of my
departure to you. Nevertheless, it will give you some idea if I tell you that I was
not able to take anything with me but my gas mask and my toilet bag. I can say
that I had foreseen all of this, but that I was powerless to do anything about it. I
might add that, if none of the things I cling to now are at my disposal now, I can
at lest entertain a modest hope regarding the manuscripts for my extensive study
on the nineteenth century.”
288-89
WB mentions looking for his brother (who had been in a camp). Need to track to
down (can’t find it).
78
If he is to remain silent about my review, however, I would at least like to have a
look at it. Firstly for my archives, and secondly also to make sure that it was
printed faithfully. P. 23
I must say that the day on which I went back to the library for the first time
was like a little festive occasion at the house. Most of all in the case of the
photographic service, where, after making photocopies of some of my own notes
years ago, it has been necessary to bring quite a number of my personal papers
in order to make copies. (279)—footnote to this sentence on pp. 280: The original
has not survived; the carbon copy of the typescript is dated 22 December.”
My dead Detlef
Oh, how I hate to write to you in a foreign language” (284)
At the present time, the fate of letters is a matter of chance.”
270
Max tells me that you might have to prove your ownership of a certain sum
of money in order to obtain a visa.” (265)
The large library with 15000 books is the best thing about Pontigny
Max . . . tells me that the Institute is seeking a scholarship for me in
America” (251)
And I must beg forgiveness for the paper; the desire to write to you seized
me at a moment when I did not have any other with me.
p. 277
I read the detective novels . . . I ultimately find them too French.
79
175
WB’s dream: “There are so beautiful things here to tell you about. –It is a dream
of the kind that I have perhaps every five years, and which revolves around the
motif ‘reading’. Teddie will recall the role occupied by this motif in my
epistemological reflections. The phrase that I spoke quite distinctly towards the
end of this dream happened to be in French. . . . I saw that there were some
strange beds almost at the bottom of it. They had the shape and the length of
coffins; they also seemed to be made of stone. Upon kneeling down halfway,
however, I saw that one could sink gently into them as if getting into bed. . . . we
found ourselves on a sort of miniature landing stage, a little terrace made of
wooden boards. . . . In the meantime, one of he ladies had occupied herself with
graphology. I saw that she had something in her hand which I had written, and
which he had been given to her by Dause. I was slightly unsettled by this
examination, fearing it would disclose some intimate traits of mine. I moved
closer. What I saw was a cloth that was covered in pictures; the only graphic
elements I could distinguish were the upper parts of the letter D, whose pointed
lines revealed an extreme striving towards spirituality. This part of the letter had
also been covered with a small piece of fabric with a blue border, and the fabric
swelled up on the picture as if it were in the breeze. That was the only thing I was
able to ‘read’--the rest offered indistinct, vague motifs and clouds. For a moment,
the conversation turned to this writing.”
12.10.1939
p. 272; 273
80
letter 173
At the moment I am looking for someone to teach me English. I even made
some attempts in the camp; but I soon had to give up. So I was unable to do
anything there. I sent you the only text I wrote immediately; it was the account of
a dream that filled me with joy. It would be a great shame if the letter had not
reached you; but I am also inclined to assume this as you do not make any
reference to it at all. . . . .
Sleeptalking: Addressing the Books on the Books/h/elves
Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses—punning usefully on address as destination of
letter and also as speech given at an occasion. Derrida is a kind of res/h/elving of
the mentally Ill essay, the distinction for WB between neurosis and psychosis
being for Derrida the distinction between waking and dreaming. Derrida says he
is speaking like Adorno near the end of “Fichus,” but he is really imitating Adorno,
or speaking like Adorno as impersonated by Freud who speaks in WB’s name.
That is the relay network that Derrida puts into play without demanding an
apology from anyone or giving one, without defending against an accusation
against anyone or making one. Furthermore, Derrida just stops reading WB, or
stops and starts, can’t pace himself (as does WB in the mountains—stopping to
rest after every three steps or so) and instead begins “writing” / dreaming the
virtual book he knows he no longer has time to write and imagining also not only
as a TV guide but in multimedia terms as well:
The seven chapters of this history I dream of are already being written, I’m sure.
What we are sharing today certainly testifies to that. These wars and this peace
81
will have their new historians, and even their “historians’ ward” (Historikerstreit).
But we don’t know yet how and in what medium, under what veils for which
Schliermacher of a future hermeneutics, on what canvas and on what internet
fichu the artist of this weaving will be hard at work (the Plato of the Statesman
would call him or her a hyphantes [weaver]). We will never know, not us, on what
Web fichu some Weber to come will plan and to author or teach our history. No
historical metalanguage to bear witness to it in the transparent element of some
absolute knowledge. (181)
(I assume he means Max Weber, not Sam Weber)
There is perhaps a gift exchange happening here as well, Derrida taking the
Adorno prize but giving back an address that is a kind of telephone book to the
Adorno and Benjamin correspondence for which Freud is the best operator. If we
“read” that correspondence, we see how “highly selective” Derrida’s reading is
and the ways in which is resistance to reading makes it possible for the
(over)extended reader to dream awake read the correspondence, letters and
dates in terms of papers and persons as a question of dreaming the letter, initial,
and signature. Derrida’s essay pushes unread -ability to its limits insofar as it
does not take or give but overextends itself and abandons a pacemaker: dream
on, Derrida. Derrida also inscribes all of the texts in Paper Machine within an
economy of debt, punning on the word “due” in order to “place” them in a more or
less delirious “situation” to which they were “given over”:
“All the texts in this book are due—to occasion, to provocations, to opportunities
given, sometimes by people, close to me, personal friends or political friends. So,
82
taking them for situations, I thought I should at least indicate the “places” for
which these texts were initially written. Always in reply to an invitation, a request,
a surveey. All of them institutions (highly national or quite international, if not
universal) given over to the machine and to paper, each held to its own rhythm,
to the original temporality of its survival. (2)
The phrase “given over” may also be read as an expenditure, a gift, to give it
over, but also to it over by giving it again (over) and also by letting it go, letting
oneself go, putting oneself on automatic pilot. If Thomas Bernhard’s book Preises
has been translated, we could also bring that is as a way of discussing the
economies of address in terms of acceptance and rejection.
NOTES
83
10 The focus on transit in Saxl’s essay make it a link between WB (the buyer is in
transit, his books have arrived; Adorno, books are damaged in transit, as they
are produced to be sold). Saxl’s memoir is a strange biography of a library, a
bibliobiography. Usually memoirs are linear, sequential, chronological. Here ,
the founding the library is the foundation of the memoir. But the memoir is insane
because the library is about time going nowhere, and then the memoir ends. At
the end of a memoir, there’s usually a break into impressionism, self-reflexivity,
where the memoir becomes about writing the memoir. The medium gets
recognized. But that doesn’t happen in Saxl’s memoir. Saxl’s essay is, like WB
and TH’s, about issues involving book collection, bodies, reshelving, boxes, filing,
and so on. But it is less interesting and does not reward close reading. Perhaps it
is a case of blocked mourning for Warburg, an idealization of him (repressing his
mental illness) because he is dead (whereas WB can analyze his own
embarrassment). In Saxl’s essay, there’s an interesting thread running through it
involving flesh and denuding, the removal of flesh. Last sentence describes the
library metaphorically as a skeleton. Earlier he calls it a ship. How does
Warburg’s body figure into a memoir of his library? Here we have a genre of the
biography of a biography, a genre that recalibrates the relationship between
84
Warburg and the object (book or photo). There is a fleshly record of that
relationship that might be symptomatic of the way staging the library rewires the
relation between the collector and the objects he collects—a question of the
legacy left behind by the collector, whose domos has become his crypt, perhaps.
11 “Technically correct readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable, ad
unpleasant, but they are irrefutable. They are also totalizing . . . but are an
unreliable process of knowledge production that prevents all entities, including
linguistic entitles, from coming into discourse as such, they are indeed universal,
consiaentently defective models of language’s impossibility to be a model
language. They are, in theory, the most elastic theoretical and dialectical model
to end all models and they can rightly claim to contain within their own defective
selves all the other defective models of reading-avoidance referential,
semiological, grammatical, performative, local, or whatever. They are theory and
not theory at the same time, the universal theory of the impossibility of theory. To
the extent that they are theory . . . rhetorical readings like the other kinds, still
avoid and resist the reading they advocate. Nothing can overcome the resistance
to theory since theory is itself the resistance. The loftier the aims and the better
the methods of literary theory, the less possible it becomes. (19)
85
12 Perhaps this decadence
cannot be halted. Since the
sixteenth century philology has
stood on firm ground. It exhibits
many stars of the first
magnitude; and even the lesser
stars have their function in a
constellation. In this discipline
the emendation, restoration,
and interpretation of texts are
rigorous skills. Without sound
grammatical training and
extensive reading nothing can
be accomplished. Germanic
studies, Romantic studies,
English studies are without a
tradition. Hence they are easy
prey for the fashions and
86
aberrations of the “Zeitgeist.”
They could improve their
situation only if they would
resolve to go to school to the
older philology. But to do that,
one must learn Greek and Latin
—a demand which no sensible
man would even dare to
express. . . . The controversies
over methods in the last decade
and the windmill battle against
so-called “Positivism” . . .
merely show that there was a
wish to evade philology—on
grounds which will not discuss.”
E.R. Curtius, “Retrospective” (chapter 18 of European Literature and the Late Middle Ages), 382; 383 [link this passage to Paul de Man’s return to philology—already, in the heyday of “old” philology,” a philologist says philology is being evaded, that is a decadent phase. Curtius even mentions “great teachers” including his own 382, kind of the way de Man focuses on Harvard pedagogy]
87
13 One of the reason why he takes the translator rather than the poet is that the
translator, per definition, fails. The translator can never do what the original text
did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator
as such is lost form the very beginning. He is per definition underpaid, he is per
definition overworked, he is per definition the one history will not really remain as
an equal, unless he happens to be a poet, but that is not always the case. If the
text s called “Die Aufgabe des ubersetzers,” we have to read this title more or
less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If
you enter Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe—“er hat
aufgegeben,” he doesn’t continue in the race anymore. The translator has to
give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original.
p.80
14 Benjamin, vol 2, 123.
15 And see Georges Perec, “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging
One’s Books,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 148-55.
88
16 Acquiring books and arranging one’s books have become topoi in modern
fiction. See, for example, Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979,
pp. 4-6: See also George Perec’s chapter “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of
Arranging One’s Books,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 148-55.
17 Benjamin’s own archiving practices and the problems editors have faced
publishing his works constitutes in themselves a subfield we call F(h)ileology, the
philology of files.
4 “During the war and postwar years, I lost sight of foreign literary criticism after it
vanished was thus inaccessible to me. Also, as a consequence of an air raid in
1944, parts of the Bonn University Library were unusable or burnt. I could no
longer check various citations or consult many sources. But if literature is "the
fragment of fragments" (Goethe), an attempt like this one in particular must
exhibit a fragmentary character.” Thinking a little more about the Curtius and
Derrida Goethe citations. Turns out Curtius wrote a book in 1932 on The German
Spirit in Danger Deutscher Geist in Gefahr which he claims in the 1945 preface
to European Lit (published in a journal, as I think I mentioned to you) has a
89
passage in it about the Jewish spirit infecting the German that is unambiguously
anti-Semitic. I will check
it out. But Curtius wrote about Euro lit focusing on Latin and leaving Germany
mostly aside. The scholar I mentioned reads this as Curtius's internal exile. But
the citation of Goethe can be read symptomatically since , as Derrida does, links
Curtius' Euro lit
back to Goethe's Weltliteratur. So the book of essays from which Goethe
as Administrator comes is a sort of return of the repressed in making
Goethe so central. Another thing I need to research is the reception of Curtius's
Eruo Lit. Auerbach said it so lacked structure it was unreadable. I remember
wondering what the fuck it was when I first bought a copy in grad school. So
there’s a possible way of reading the book as a philological working of the topos
as shelf that ends up making the book's unity suffer, or even its readability. it
becomes an archipelago of topoi. I think I checked once before and saw he does
not have the shipwreck as a topoi. The book is all about continuity. There are
various passages referring to the war in the English edition--in the foreword
written for it and in the Retrospective, the first part of the Epilogue. Of course, all
of the excurses at the end over a quarter of the book) don't make it seem any
90
more unified. The book has to be read discontinuously rather than continuously
because of the way Curtius goes (discontinuously) about structuring his book.
5 Anke te Heesen. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-
Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Ann M. Hentschel.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002.
6 February 13, 2010A Test for the Meaning of Victory in AfghanistanBy DAVID E. SANGER http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/weekinreview/14sanger.html7
Reading-to-Hand
For a wonderful illustration of how Benjamin turns the object into a trope in
his own writing practice, we may turn to his use of theatrical metaphors to stage
an analysis of children’s book in his essay “A Glimpse into the World of
Children’s Books” (SW 1, 435-43). We offer an extended reading of this dense
and poetic essay in order to bring out some of the dimensions of closed reading
91
as they relate to the pedagogy, aesthetics, the body, media, technology, and
their finitude, both their spatial dimensions and their duration. Benjamin tropes
the child picturing / reading children’s picture books and pull out as a
metaphorics of hallucinogenic, fantastical, immersive play, theatricalization and
carnivalization unbound by sense. Color becomes the atmospheric “medium”
(442) par excellence that makes reading and writing into transferential
experiences of turning words into images and vice versa. Near the end of the
essay Benjamin concludes that “pure color is the medium of pure fantasy, a
home among the clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the
constructive artist” (442).?
Why is color so central to Benjamin? Because it is a trope of tropes as
attachments and detachments, much like clothes:
The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages
of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages,
becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world
of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist
vision of perfection come true; he overcomes the illusory barrier of
the surface and passes through colored textures and brightly
92
painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life.
Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning
“attach”: you attach five colors to the objects. In German, the word
used is anlagen: you “apply” colors. In such an open, color-
bedecked word where everything shifts at every step. The child is
allowed to join in the game. Draped with colors of every hue that
he has picked up form reading and observing, the child stands in
the center of a masquerade and joins in, while reading—for the
words have all come to the masked ball, are joining in the fun and
whirling around together, like tinkling snowflakes. . . At a stroke,
words throw on their costumes and in the twinkling of an eye they
are caught up in a battle, love scenes, or a brawl. This is how
children write their stories, but also how they read them. And there
are a rare impassioned ABC-books that play similar sort of game in
pictures. . . .
Staging reading through the metaphor allows Benjamin to describe the
knowledge and memory as containers that may be turned inside out, with no
loss:
93
Children know such pictures like their own pockets; they have
searched through them in the same way and turned them inside
out, without forgetting the smallest thread or piece of cloth. And if,
in the colored engraving, children’s imagination can fall into a
reverie, the black and white woodcut or the plain prosaic illustration
draws them out of themselves. Just as they will write about the
pictures with words, so, too, they will “write” them in a more literal
sense: they will scribble on them. Unlike the colored pictures, the
surface of the black and white illustration seems to be incomplete
and in need of additions. So children imaginatively complete the
illustrations. At the same time, they learn language from them, they
also learn writing: hieroglyphics. (SW, 1, 436)
Benjamin interrupts this line of thought about the importance of the lack
of color as the double determination of what kinds of book surfaces invite writing
and define writing as scribbling and completion. He takes a detour first to the
body, particularly the child reader's hand, and the “disintegrat-ability,” as it were,
of one kind of picture book that has detachable parts, before returning to broader
considerations about color, media, language, and the body at the end of the
94
essay:
And even in children’s books, children’s hands were catered to just
as much as their minds or imaginations. There are the well-known
pull-out books (which have degenerated and seem to be the most
short-lived as a genre, just as the books themselves never seem to
last long). . . . you now find in books those beautiful games in
which little cardboard figures can be attached by means of invisible
slits in the board and can be rearranged at will. This means that
you can change a landscape or a room according to the different
situations that arise in the course of the story. For those people
who as children—or even as collectors—have had the great good
fortune to come into the possession of magic books or puzzle
books, all of the foregoing will have paled in comparison. These
magic books were ingeniously contrived volumes that displayed
different series of pictures according to the way one flicked through
the pages. The person I the know can go through such a book ten
times, and will see the same picture on page after page, until his
hand slips---and now it is as if the entire book were transformed,
95
and completely different pictures make their appearance. (437-38).
In this techno moment of reading by hand, the book becomes magical precisely when the hand slips: the magic effect occurs at the moment of the hand loses control, not the hammer breaking apart, as in Heidegger’s Being and Time, what he calls equipment becomes no longer “ready-to-hand” but “present-to-hand” when it fails. And paradoxically, only the reader who knows how to let his hand skip can perform the magic trick on the book.8 Discussion after Task of the Translator, p. 90
9 Task of the Translator, 87
18 Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings” in Notes to Literature Vol 2 Trans.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia UP, 1992),
20-31
19 http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/fake_books/index.php
http://daniellespencer.com/graphics/design/books/fake_books/index.htm
20 Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” in Notes to Literature,
Volume Two, Trans Shierry Weber (New York: Columbia, UP1992), 20-31.
Adorno tends to personify books.
Through “streamlining,” the newest books become questionable, as
though they had already passed away. (21)
96
Publishers are irrefutable when they point out to refractory authors, who
after all must live too, that their books have less chance of success the less they
fit in with that development. (23)
Books that have been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by
assigned places and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them
disorder is not being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often
punished for it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off. (24)
Certainly the collector demonstrates that books say something without
being read, and sometimes is not the least important thing. (25)
These unitary and too carefully prepared blocks of books [collected
editions] give the impression of having come into being all at once” (24-25)
At many points Marx’ [sic] texts read as though they had been written
hastily on the margins of the texts h was studying and in his theories of surplus
value this becomes almost a literary form. Clearly his highly spontaneous mode
of production resisted putting ideas where they belong in neat and tidy fashion—
an expression of the antisystematic tendency in an author whose system is a
critique of the existing one; ultimately, Marx was thereby practicing a
conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such even by itself. The fact that for al
97
the canonization of Marx there is no Marx lexicon available is fitting; the author, a
number of whose statements are spouted like quotations form the Bible, defends
himself against what is done to him by hiding anything that does not fall into that
stock of quotations. . . . The relief the lexica afford is invaluable, but often the
most important formulations fall through the cracks because they do not fit under
any keyword or because the appropriate word occurs so infrequently that lexical
logic would not consider it worth including: ‘”Progress” does not appear in the
Hegel lexicon. (26)
In speaking of Marx practicing “a conspiratorial technique unrecognized as
such even by itself ,”Adorno sounds surprisingly close to the mystical Walter
Benjamin as well as Freud on the uncanny. In Adorno’s account, the process of
writing and printing involving a secret that is hidden even from the author himself
(already described by Adorno earlier as estranged form his text when he reads
the page proofs (“the authors look at them with a stranger’s eyes”, 23)
“unrecognized as such even by itself.” Yet what is hidden (“hiding anything”)
from cognition by the violence of reading for the pullable quotation is not
reducible either to a secular Marxist account (book as commodity, reified means
of production) nor to an actual agency (the book continues to be personified) nor
98
to a particular theology but is detected through a series of metaphors, the last of
which is “fall through the cracks” based on resemblance, a topic Adorno takes up
most explicitly in the very last section of his essay, which begins “What books
say from the outside, as a promise, is vague; in that lies their similarity with their
contents” (29). Reading the book’s resistance to reading, understanding what
says withoutits being read, is a question of mimesis. Although Adorno refers
throughout the essay to the book’s external and internal form, his account of the
true book as the damaged book does not yield an a analysis based on
resemblance: he defines damage both as external and literal (what happens to
books when they are shipped around the globe, when they are read and reread
over time, when they are produced more cheaply) and also as external and
metaphorical (the way external coercion and pressure gets interiorized by the
author the damage internal to books (“The book[‘s] . . . own form . . . is attacked
within the book itself” 21.) The (his)story of books, for Adorno, is the story of a
dynamic and dialectical estrangement in which metaphors for the resistance to
reading books is personified but not personalized. Adorno’s metaphors for
reading a book focus on the paratext of the book—the vertical printing on the
spine, the removal of the place and date pf publication of the title page, the
99
book’s cover. This focus on the paratext transmutes the book from printed
(para)text as the “most eccentric features” to the book as image, “imago” (30),
“graphic image” (30) [kind of like WB’s “prismatic edges” metaphor in Unpacking].
Reading the book’s paratext is for Adorno a matter of attending to the book’s
graphic design.
The book has figured among the emblems of melancholy for centuries . . .
there is something emblematic in the imago of all books, waiting for the profound
gaze into their external aspect that will awaken its language, a language other
than the internal, printed one. Only in the eccentric features of what is to be read
does that resemblance survive, as in Proust’s stubborn and abyssal passion for
writing without paragraphs” [Adorno does not use paragraphs in his essay, just
chunks broken up by graphic markers and space] (30):
The eye, following the path of the lines of print, looks for such
resemblances everywhere. While no one of them is conclusive, every graphic
element, every characteristic of binding, paper, and print—anything, in other
words, in which the reader stimulates the mimetic impulses in the book itself—
can become the bearer of resemblance. (30)
100
By reading mimetically, Adorno becomes revelatory, a way into reading
the history of the book and of historicizing the book:
At the same time, such resemblances are not mere subjective projections
but find their objective legitimation in the irregularities, rips, holes, and footholds
that history has made in the smooth walls of the graphic design system, the
book’s material components, and its peripheral features. (30)
“What is revealed in this history” (30) is a totality the implosive dialectical
tensions of which may be detected in Adorno’s adoption of metaphors or literal
book damage to route the book’s materiality through a formal “graphic design
system” (30)
Adorno’s essay ends with a series of breakdowns in mimetic reading until
reading itself becomes impossible. First, a distinction between inside and
outside gets collapsed as a consequence of Adorno’s having made “anything” in
a book an occasion for mimetic reading:
The power history wields both over the appearance of the binding and its
fate and over what has been written is much greater than any difference between
what is inside and what is outside, between spirit and material, that it threatens to
outstrip the work’s spirituality. This is the ultimate secret of the sadness off older
101
books, and it follows how one should relate to them and, following their model, to
books in general.
Reading a book through its graphic design is to encounter the book’s
resistance to reading. Marx’s marginal notes (of Marx) are not analogous to
musical notes, which may be heard by a reader:
Someone in whom the mimetic and the musical senses have become
deeply enough interpenetrated will . . . be capable of judging a piece of music by
the image formed by its notes, even before he completely transposed it into an
auditory idea. Books resist this. But the ideal reader, whom the books do not
tolerate, would know something of what is inside when he felt the cover in his
hand and saw the layout of the title page and the overall quality of the pages, and
would sense the book’s value without needing to read it first.” (31)
Adorno finishes his essay off by calling up an “ideal reader” rather than an
existing one. In speaking of “the work’s spirituality” and “the ultimate secret,”
Adorno ends by (re)tuning into a theological wavelength, a call from beyond the
grave of the book’s life, as it were, but there is no religious station identification.
On the one hand, a kind of Jewish mysticism may be heard in the metaphors of
hiding the hidden (even the act of hiding) from the hider; on the other hand, a
102
kind of Christian messianism may be heard as a “Passion of the Book” become
work of art: “Damaged books, books that have been made to suffer, are the real
books.” (24) “The bibliophile expects from books beauty without suffering . . .
Suffering is the true beauty in books; without it, beauty is corrupt, a mere
performance” (29). The books’ suffering is redeemed in aesthetic terms, as the
books’ true beauty. And yet Adorno’s account of suffering is clearly to messianic
nor eschatological in that he is not analyzing or narrating a linear history (of more
and more degradation of books due to changes in the book publishing industry)
nor is singling out a book in particular. His concern with damaged books is rather
with the conditions of book publication and how those conditions make books
both more accessible and more resistant. Adorno speaks at the end of
“Bibliographical Musings” both of a singular type of books (older books) and of
books in the plural, putting even more pressure on his personification of books by
highlighting even more clearly the differences between the non “coterminus” (24)
if analogous lives and deaths of books and the lives and deaths of writers and
readers. Books preserve and defend their value by becoming inhuman. Reading
a book whose value you cannot determine without reading it effectively reduces
reading to information processing.
103
21 Inscription / recording is not reducible to visible / invisible, writing and erasure (see Chartier’s book). The metaphor is a contact zone, itself a metaphor for a space that may have an architecture but which is discursively available only through a nomotopological similes (see Freud on the psyche as dossier in vol 2 standard edition, Studies in Hysteria or the end of the mystic pad essay were the similes all break down, he says; our version of psychoanalysis is about a problem of modeling the psyche, a dynamic that has no coherent topology), that calls forth a dream of interpretation that gets immediately resisted since it proceeds as a metaphorlogy. 22 In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres, 2008),
35-50, Sven Spieker includes a chapter entitled “Freud’s Files” but he not does
not cite or mention this passage in which Freud uses the file simile.
23 See Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
24 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 2, 6, 289.
25 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
2, 290.
26 Avital Ronell. "On the Misery of Theory Without Poetry: Heidegger's Reading of
Hölderlin 's 'Andenken.'" PMLA 120.1 (2005):16-32.
Once in a while, reading a text is tantamount to submitting it to a blunting level of
interference, and so one rarely wants to read, in the space of published thinking,
104
what one truly loves, which is which is to say, what one truly relinquishes. (18)
Arendt’s thought on Kant and cosmopolitanism pivots on the hesitant allure of the
stranger—on the possibility , that is, for welcoming the stranger, and yet the
stranger, the alien, calls for love and incomparable ethical responsiveness. (20)
I have cited the sacred alien to level the word of Hölderlin against the
accelerating velocities of hostility directed against foreign bodies I the United
States. I may seem odd to state that Hölderlin gas already responded to
mainstream desecrations of the alien, but it is so. (20)
In the twentieth century, a subtle shift occurred in the terms in which we locate
the ethics and value of responsibility. . . to the movement away from the concept
of citizen and toward the refugee as the figure that carries the demand for clear
ethical responsiveness. . . . it is no longer the citizen, the one assumed to occupy
the secure interior zones of a polity, who generates the affect and discourse of
care, concern, responsibility, and rights; rather, the refugee—the foreign and
shifting body with no home base—has become the exemplary locus for any
possible cosmopolitan ethics. (20)
105
The inhabitual, what we do not inhabit habitually—where we do not live and work
—does not mean here an aberration, the sensational state of exception of the
ever before seen. The contrary, the inhabitual is always there as the simplest
and ownmost of beings . . Normalcy harbors the unexpected: solely in the
habitual, says Heidegger, can the inhabitual appear within its clearest contours.
To celebrate (feiern) is to become free of the habitual: when celebrating, one
honors the becoming of he habitual. (26-27)
Bound to the impossible task of commerative retrieval, “Andenken” persistently
reorients the discussion concerning a decisive locality and the placing of the
political, blowing apart the premises on which one could build a substantial work
or project of asserted nonalientation and secured returns—a political work or
project mirroring the narcissistic totality of the state. . . . Greeted and greeting,
the poet stands on responsive alert, clear about the limits of poetic dwelling on
earth. . . States of security, windswept, reveal the nature of illusion. There will
be no gathering home, even if the poet has projected a homeward turning. (30)
27 The other key moment is when the Goethe’s practice becomes “routine” (6428 Curtius completely ignores the postal system through which the archive he is reading (published in 1950) p. 60 have passed. He is totally unself-conscious about reading the book as an archive, totally static, pre-fabricated, already
106
assembled. Already filed. He doesn’t trope the book. He just uses the book a s a storage mechanism to trope Goethe through a philological analysis29 One strange thing about the essay is that the title uses the word “Fichus,” In
the essay, Derrida only uses the word “fichu.” The word “Fichus” does not exist in
French nor in Latin. “Fichus” is used in English as the plural noun of “fichu,”
which a loan word in English.
Etymology: French, from past participle of ficher to stick in, throw on, from Vulgar
Latin figicare, from Latin figere to fasten, pierce. A woman's triangular scarf of
lightweight fabric, worn over the shoulders and crossed or tied in a loose knot at
the breast a woman's shawl or scarf of some light material, worn esp in the 18th
century; a garment worn around the head or neck or shoulders for warmth or
decoration. [French, from past participle of ficher, to fix, from Vulgar Latin *figicre, from Latin
fgere;
in Indo-European roots.] . être bien fichu~ to be well designed;[book] to be well
laid out.. Adjectif masculin singulier
familièrement pénible, désagréable, sale, mauvaisfamilièrement mal arrangé,
mal conçufamilièrement détruit, détérioré, perdu
107
Recommended