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

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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,

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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,

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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