Derrida - The Majesty of the Present

The Majesty of the PresentAuthor(s): Jacques Derrida, Alessia Ricciardi, Christopher YuSource: New German Critique, No. 91, Special Issue on Paul Celan (Winter, 2004), pp. 17-40Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211120Accessed: 20/09/2009 21:40

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The Majesty of the Present

Jacques Derrida

I I have had to choose between a continuous reading of Celan's speech,

an interpretation that would follow the apparent order and linear time of the text, its very sequencing, and another reading - less diachronic, more systematic - that would undertake, for the purposes of demonstra- tion, to make apparent a configuration of motifs, of words and themes, of figures that do not habitually appear within this order. It is this second course I have taken partly because we would not have the time to read together, linearly, all of the text from A to Z, and partly because the actively interpretive, selective, and directed reading that I am about to propose to you requires it. You will understand that I take this inter-

pretive reading neither for the only nor for the best one possible, but it does not strike me as impossible, and it is of importance to me from the perspective of this seminar.

Even before approaching - too quickly, to be sure - the motifs that I

propose to articulate together (even if Celan does not explicitly do so), that is to say the marionette, the Medusa's head, heads in general and

1. Translators' note: This essay is the translation of a fragment from two seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris during 2001-2002 with the title "The Beast and the Sovereign." The full French text includes further considerations suggested by Celan's key terms in the "Meridian" speech, which Derrida identifies as majesty (as he points out, majestas being the Latin word for "sovereignty") and sovereignty, marionettes and automata, the figure of the monkey [die Affengestalt], and the Medusa's head. This translation includes those parts of the seminar, collated by Ulrich Baer, in which Derrida explicitly engages with Celan's "Meridian," a text that, as he notes below, he previously had encountered in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan. The translation has retained the particular style of the seminar throughout.

17

18 The Majesty of the Present

majesty, the Stranger and the Unheimliche, two preliminary remarks. First preliminary remark. There is very much a question of dates in

the text, a question that is also a sort of poetics of the date. Devoting a little book to it, Shibboleth, some fifteen years ago, I made it a motif for reflection and analysis or for privileged interpretation, notably around a certain "January 20" that returns regularly, at the very least three times, in the text (Biichner's Lenz who "went walking in the mountains on the 20th of January" [Felstiner, 407, see below], then "perhaps we may say that every poem has its '20th of January' inscribed?" [408], and then "I'd begun writing from a '20th of Janu- ary,' from my '20th of January"' [412]). I commented with insistence in Shibboleth on dates, on the question of anniversaries and of the calendar, and on that example of the 20th of January. Thanks to Jean Launay's recent French edition (so invaluable and exemplary I would say), we are reminded of one more dimension to this "January 20." Referring to Celan's manuscript, Launay recalls in a note (107, note 50, see below) that "the 20th of January is also the day that, in Berlin, the conference called the Wannsee Conference took place, in the course of which Hitler and his collaborators settled upon the plans for the 'final solution."' (Cf. Launay, 68 and the following manuscript passage of Celan: "We always write, today as well, January 20, this January 20 [diesen 20 Janner] to which is added ever since then the writing of so many [days] of ice" [zu dem sich {seitdem} soviel Eisiges hinzuge- schrieben hat].) "January 20": anniversary of death, then, of the crime against humanity, of the supremely, arbitrarily genocidal decision. "Jan- uary 20": the eve of the anniversary of the royal beheading of Louis XVI, of which there is also some question between the "Long live the Kings!" of Lucile and of Lenz, of which we will speak again.

Second preliminary remark. The apparently surprising contiguity between our lectures on Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste and Celan's "Meridian" speech, such particularly different texts, so distanced from one another by so many traits, and whose dates - exactly this contiguity or this proximity of two texts apparently so anachronistic in relation to one another is justified beyond all other manners of juxtaposition by the fact that both treat, each in its manner, marionettes and everything that is fastened thereupon. It will be found that Valery is not simply absent from the "Meridian" speech. Celan asks himself at a particular moment, on the subject of a radical putting into question of art, if it is

Jacques Derrida 19

not necessary to "think of Mallarme up to his last consequences" [Mal- larme konsequent zu Ende denken]? There again one of Launay's long notes (105, note 43) leads us on the trail of a manuscript of Celan that refers to a passage of Valery in Varietes.2 Valery there cites a word of Mallarme responding to poor Degas who complained of not finishing his own little poem even though he was "full of ideas." Mallarme, reports Valery, responded to him thus: "But Degas, it's not with ideas that we make verses, but with words." And Valery concludes: "There is there a great lesson."

Let us now attempt, around or through the announced configuration (art, the marionette, the Medusa's head or the automaton, heads in general and majesty, the Stranger and the Unheimliche), to decipher a certain poetic signature, I do not say a poetics or a poetic art, nor even a poetry, I rather would say a certain poetic signature, the unique signature of a unique poem, always unique, that attempts - in order not to speak of the essence, the presence in which the poem is, but of where the poem comes and goes - to set itself free through art, from art.

What line ought to be pursued to approach the unique encounter with a unique poem? You know that the concept of encounter, the "secret of the encounter" [Geheimnis der Begegnung], is the secret of the poem, of the presence or the admitting into presence or the presentation of the poem, the secret of the encounter as the secret of the poem in the double sense of this expression "the secret of': first, on the one hand, in the sense of who makes a poem, in the sense of its fashioning, of its fashion, of its possibility of taking form if not of its art and its savoirfaire, I prefer to say its signature (this is the secret as the poem's genesis, its condition of possibility, as when we say "this one, he has the secret," meaning the art of, etc., but here it is not essentially art that keeps the secret of this act or rather of this event, it is the encounter) and then, double sense of the secret, hence, second, on the other hand, as that which even in the present, in the very presentation of the poem, in this present now upon

2. Jean Launay's translation of Celan in Le Meridien et autres proses (Paris: Seuil, 2002). We rely on John Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton, 2001) for English translations of Celan's text. Hereafter all page references to Fel- stiner's translation will be given in the text. Throughout the two seminars, Derrida quotes Launay's translation and reverts as necessary to the original German. We will substitute Felstiner for Launay, except for instances that necessitate attention to a specific wording in the French translation, in which case we will translate Launay into English while consult- ing the original German, giving Felstiner's English version in a footnote.


which Celan so much insists, in the experience of the encounter, remains once more secret, fundamentally as a present that does not present itself, a phenomenon that does not manifest itself. Nothing shows itself, the nothing, the absurd shows itself in not manifesting anything. We will come to this, to such a manifestation as non-manifestation.

Yet I believe I know, from having read it so many times, that the tra- jectory of this poem follows a line that defies any reconstitution in the shape of logical or narrative exposition. Some of the initial sketches or evasions that I offer you today come therefore only as an invitation to see it yourself, to grasp it with your eyes and hands, to encounter precisely the poem. The line - I retain the word "line," but it will be necessary to say link in an instant, since the line is a link, verbinden - the line as link that links to the other, to the You of the encounter. The line as link that I seek to design or to reconstitute is moreover what indeed is sought, what Celan professes to have sought during this voyage, and on the path that in the end he qualifies and from which I will depart, that is to say from the end, by the end, that Celan qualifies therefore as "the impossible path" or "the path of the impossible." Moreover, "the impossible path" and "the path of the impossible" are not exactly the same thing. We can imagine that the path of the impossible remains itself possible, in so far as it is a path, as the progress of a path, what as a result renders the impossible path possible in its turn; and it is doubtless on purpose, and in view of the inextricable knot holding them together and yet keeping them distinct, that Celan says, juxtaposing and crossing the two, "the impossible path" and "the path of the impossible": "Ladies and Gentlemen, I find something that comforts me a little at having taken, in your presence .. . [in ihrer Gegenwart]." This in ihrer Gegen- wart which looks like a conventional banality, a polite formality suited to the addressing of an auditorium on the day of an award, this in ihrer Gegenwart is of a gravity all the more discernible since the whole text will revolve around the enigma of the "now," Gegenwart, and of presence. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I find something that comforts me a little at having taken, in your presence [in ihrer Gegenwart], this impossible path, this path of the impossible [in ihrer Gegenwart diesen unmoglichen Weg, diesen Weg des Unmoglichen gegangen zu sein; 413]."

Now this impossible path of the impossible constitutes as a link the line that he believes he has found, even touched [habe ich ihn soeben wieder zu beruhren geglaubt are the very last words], and that is going

Jacques Derrida 21

to be called the "Meridian" speech. This line is a link that leads to the encounter [Begegnung], to your encounter, to the encounter of you, to the nomination of You, by which the poem and the present of the poem more than once will be named. Yet before pursuing this quotation through to its end, I would like through three backward turns to show you why "in your presence" [in ihrer Gegenwart] was not a concession to convention (there are none in this extraordinary text). This "in your presence" [in ihrer Gegenwart] was invested beforehand, charged, aggravated by the question of the poem in its difficult and tumultuous explication with art, the question that hinges on art and the question that hinges on poetry [Frage nach der Kunst und nach der Dichtung], Celan says earlier on, adding: "with this question I must have gone to Bichner of my own (if not my free) will [aus eigenen, wenn auch nicht feien Sticken], to seek out his question" (405). Now, this question becomes that of the poem, defined by Celan as present and as presence, as now and as presence.

First turn. Toward what the word "majesty" precisely implies in the very essence, or rather the event and the chance of poetry. After the many manifestations of art to which we will return (art as a marionette, art as a monkey, etc.), here is Lucile from Danton ' Death, she who is precisely "blind to art" [die Kunstblinde], surprising us by crying, "Long live the King!" You see, need I even say, that with this scene of the French Revolution and of the putting to death of the King, at the edge of the scaffold, but also with this evocation of marionettes and of the monkey, we are closest, in fact, to our [seminar's] great question, "the beast and the sovereign."

Lucile cries, "Long live the King!," and Celan stresses with an excla- mation mark to what extent this scream surprises, so close to the bloody scaffold and after he had recalled "the words of great art" [kunstreiche Worte] by Danton, Camille, etc. Lucile, who is blind to art, screams, "Long live the King!" Celan calls this a counter-word [Gegenwort]: "After all those words uttered on the rostrum (it's the scaffold [es ist das Blutgerist]) - what a word [welch ein Wort!]. It is a counter-word [Es ist das Gegenwort], a word that snaps the 'wire,' a word that no longer bows to 'history's loiterers and parade-horses,' it is an act of freedom. It is a step. [Es ist ein Akt der Freiheit. Es ist ein Schritt]" (403). To uphold this proposal, that is to say this "Long live the King" from Lucile who is blind to art is a "step" and an "act of freedom," a manifestation without manifestation, a counter-manifestation. Celan must distance this scream,


this "counter-word," from its political code, that is to say from its counter-revolutionary meaning, indeed from what a counter-manifestation might still owe to such a politicized code. Celan believes that he recognizes in it instead, as an act of freedom, a poetic act or, if not a poetic act, if not a poetic making, or even less a poetic art, from someone who "is blind to art," he believes that he recognizes in it "poetry" itself [die Dichtung]. And it is to understand poetry in this "act of freedom," in this "step" (and the reference to the step, to marching, to the coming or to going is always decisive in the "Meridian" speech), that Celan ventures that this homage of the "Long live the king!," this taking of sides, this profession of faith, this greeting [gehuldigt] do not pronounce judgment politically in favor of the monarchy, hence of his majesty King Louis XVI, but in favor of the majesty of the present, of the Gegenwart. This Gegenwort speaks in favor of the majesty of the Gegenwart.

And in the passage whose translation I will consider next, I will stress four words for reasons that are too evident and on which I barely need to comment; they are the words that fall within the lexicon of "witness- ing," of "majesty," of "the present," and of "the human": "Certainly ... this sounds at first like a profession of faith in the 'ancien regime.' But here . . . here there's no homage to monarchy or to any so preservable Yesterday. Homage here is to the Majesty of the Absurd, testifying to human presence [Gehuldigt wird hier der fur die Gegenwart des Men- schlichen zeugenden Majestat des Absurden]. And that, ladies and gentlemen, has no fixed name once and for all time, yet it is, I believe . . . poetry [aber ich glaube, es ist . . . die Dichtung]" (403). This "I believe," so close to the majesty of the absurd (the word "absurd" returns more than once in the text to express, no doubt, what remains beyond meaning, beyond the idea, beyond the theme and even the rhetorical tropes, beyond all of the logic and all of the rhetoric to which one believes that a poetics should submit) seems to lead to an implicit "I believe wherever, I believe because it is absurd, credo quia absur- dum." Faith in poetry as faith in God, here in the majesty of the present.

Celan's gesture in recurring to the word majesty - and here is what seems to me most important, at least in the context of this seminar - is a gesture that consists of placing one majesty over and above another, thus to engage in an effort of trumping sovereignty. A specific kind of bidding-up that attempts to change the sense of majesty and of sovereignty, to transmute their sense, while retaining the old word or pretending to

Jacques Derrida 23

restore its most dignified meaning. There is the sovereign majesty of the sovereign, of the King, and there is, even more majestic or otherwise majestic, more sovereign and otherwise sovereign, the majesty of poetry, or the majesty of the absurd in so far as it witnesses the presence of the human. This hyperbolic trumping and bidding-up is inscribed in what I will call the dynamic of majesty or of sovereignty: in its dynamic, because it is a matter of a movement whose precipitation is ineluctable, and of a dynamic (I choose this word deliberately), because it is a matter of the sovereign, exactly, of power, of force [dynamis], of the deployment of the potentiality of the dynast and of the dynasty. That means "there is greater majesty" than the majesty of the king. As it has been said, you will remember, that Monsieur Teste was superior to superior men, or as the Nietzschean superman is higher than the superior man. As in Bataille, sovereignty, in the sense that he means it and that he means to give to it, goes beyond classic sovereignty, that is to say mastery, the gentry, absolute power, etc.

But then why retain the word? What matters most here with Celan is that this hyper-majesty of

poetry, beyond or outside the majesty of the king, the sovereign, or the monarch, this supreme majesty of the absurd, as the majesty of Dich- tung, finds itself to be determined by four equally grave values. It is nonetheless necessary, I believe, to privilege one among those and to recognize in particular the privilege of the value of the present [Gegen- wart]. These four grave values or significations are those of testimony: certainly, the value of majesty in so far as it gives testimony [zeugenden Majestat], the value of the human for which it gives testimony, but I would say most of all, because it does not cease afterward to confirm and to repeat itself, the value of the present [Gehuldigt wird hier der fur die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestdt des Absurden]. Here majesty is majestic: it is poetry, in so far as it gives testimony to the present, to the now, to the "presence," as it has been translated, of the human. Since to give testimony always implies an act of presence by means of a word addressed to the other in attesting to a presence, what counts here and what signifies is a presence attesting to a presence, or rather to a present in so far as it is human.

I would not privilege the present to such a degree, the presence of this present, if besides all the other reasons that you can easily imagine Celan himself had not returned to it with an evident and, I believe, undeniable insistence.


I will be briefer on my two other promised examples or turns. Second turn. Some six pages later in the "Meridian" speech, after a

crossing I cannot reconstruct but whose essential stages will be fol- lowed the next time, Celan says this on the subject of what he calls an "actualized language" [aktualisierte Sprache] under the sign of "a radical individuation" - he says this in adding the present to the now, in aggravating Gegenwart by means of Prasenz: "Then a poem would be - even more clearly than before - the language-become-form of a single person and, following its inmost nature, presentness and presence" [Dann ware das Gedicht - deutlicher noch als bisher - gestaltge- wordene Sprache eines Einzelnen, - und seinem innersten Wesen nach Gegenwart und Prasenz] (409).

Third turn. Further on in the "Meridian" speech, Celan clarifies something essential when it comes to the structure of this "present-now," and this clarification threatens to complicate everything that I will discuss (409-10). Celan makes clear that this present-now of the poem, my present-now, the punctual present-now of the punctual I, my here-now must let the present-now of the other speak, the time of the other. It must leave time, it must give time to the other. To the other, it must leave or give its time. Its proper time.

To the other, it must leave or give its time. To the other, it must leave or give its proper time. This formula is not literally Celan's, but I ascribe to him this ambiguous, indeed unheimlich, grammar, according to which one no longer knows to whom the possessive adjective refers: to the self or to the other (to the other, to leave or to give its time). I give or leave him this grammatical equivocation in order to translate what I believe to be the truth about Celan: to the other, to leave or to give its proper time.

There it is, to be sure - that which introduces into the present-now a divisibility or an alterity that changes everything. The formula fur- nishes everything for a rereading of the predominant authority, indeed of the majesty of the present, which becomes that of the other or that of an asymmetrical sharing with the other, turned toward the other or coming from the other. I will now read the passage in question and its wording, when necessary, in two languages.

The poem becomes - under what conditions! - the poem of someone who - always again - perceives, who is turned [zugewandten, I stress this turn, the turn of this "turned"] toward whomever

Jacques Derrida 25

appears [dem Erscheinenden Zugewandten], who interrogates whomever appears and addresses speech to him [dieses Erschei- nende Befiagenden und Ansprechenden ... this Ansprechen, this turning toward the other in order to address speech to him, to address oneself to the other, to speak to the other, indeed to shout at him - this Ansprechen is doubtless the turning and the turn that responds to everything in the passage, as in the "Meridian" speech; and I say this "turn" less to suggest a figure, a turning indeed of one of these rhetorical tropes Celan so mistrusts, than rather to gesture toward the Atemwende, the turn, the turning of breath that so often is literally the very inspiration, the spirit of the "Merid- ian" speech]; this becomes a dialogue - often a despairing dialogue [es wird Gesprach - oft ist es verzweifeltes Gesprach].3

The poem is therefore a speaking to two sides [Gesprach, a conversa-

tion], a speech to more than one, a speech whose now knows more than one within it, a speaking that in itself assembles more than one (I say "assembles" because, within what is known in the now, there is, you will understand, a movement of assembling, a being-together, a chance of assembling, Versammlung - once again a sharply Heideggerian motif - a movement, a springing, a step that assembles more than one in

itself), and the address of one to the other, even if it fails, even if the address is not received or does not arrive at its destination, even if the

despair of the other, or about the other, always lies in wait and even if it must always lie in wait, by way of its own possibility, for the possibility of the poem.4 Celan continues: What is addressed [das Angesprochene] takes shape only in the space of this conversation, gathers around [ver- sammelt es sich] the I addressing and naming it. But what is addressed

[das Angesprochene] and is now [in diese Gegenwart] become a Thou

[zum du gewordene] through naming, as it were, also brings along its otherness into this present [bringt . . . auch sein Anderssein mit]. Even

3. Here we have translated Launay into English, because of the force and length of Derrida's meditation on the meaning of "turning" (Celan's zugewandten, which Launay translates as "tourne" and which Felstiner renders as "facing"). Launay's version, cited in Derrida's lecture, runs as follows: "Le poeme devient - a quelles conditions! - le poeme de quelqu 'un qui - toujours encore -percoit, qui est tournm vers ce qui apparait et lui addresse la parole; cela devient un dialogue - souvent c 'est un dialogue desespere." Cf. Felstiner 410.

4. We render the phrase "une parole dont le maintenant maintient plus d'un en elle" as "a speech whose now knows more than one within it." The verb, maintient, sug- gests maintaining, holding, or keeping; we have chosen "knows" in the hope of retaining something of Derrida's allusion when he writes "le maintenant maintient."


in a poem's here and now [noch im Hier und Jetzt des Gedichts] - the poem itself really has only this one, unique, momentary present [diese eine, einmalige, punktuelle Gegenwart] - even in this immediacy and nearness it lets the Other's ownmost quality speak: its time [noch in dieser Unmittelbarkeit und Ndhe lasst es das ihm, dem Anderen, eigenste mitsprechen: dessen Zeit] (410).

What the poem lets speak at the same time (mitsprechen: "also lets speak," says Launay's translation, and the mit of mitsprechen deserves an accent, this speaking is originally, a priori a speaking with the other or to the other, even prior to speaking alone, and this mit does not nec- essarily rupture solitude, we might even say it is its condition, as it sometimes is that of despair), what the poem lets speak with it, lets share its speech, what it lets colloquize, con-voke (so many ways to translate mit-sprechen, which means more than a dialogue), what it lets speak, indeed sign, with it (co-sign, consign, countersign) is the time of the other, its time in what is most proper: the most proper and thus the most untranslatable other of the other's time.

It would be necessary to comment forever on the wording of these sentences. It is not only a question, you see, of an assembling in dialogue. What here is not even a poetics is still less a politics of dia-

logue, a dialogue in the course of which, aided by experts and consultants in communication, we would learn laboriously to allow the other to speak. It is not a question of a democratic debate in the course of which we allow the other its time of speech, under the surveillance of one of those clocks that, along with the calendar, are also, further- more, in question in the "Meridian" speech. It is not a question of the time of speech but of leaving to the other, thus of giving to the other without making a performance of generosity and so effacing it alto-

gether, of giving to the other its time (and giving is here leaving, for we only give to the other what is proper to it, irreducibly proper), it is not only a question of letting the other speak, but of letting time speak, its time, what is most proper to its time, the time of the other. It's time that it is necessary to let speak, the other's time, rather than to leave to the other its time of speech. It is a question of letting time speak, the time of the other in what is most proper to the other, hence in which it is most other - and that arrives, that I let arrive, as the other's time in the present time of "my" poem. And that I let arrive, that I let arrive what arrives (of the other), this letting neutralizes nothing, is not a simple

Jacques Derrida 27

passivity, even if a certain passivity is required; to the contrary, it is the condition on which an event may happen and something may arrive. What I would make arrive instead of letting arrive - well, that would arrive no longer. What I make arrive does not arrive, evidently, and it is necessary to draw consequences from this paradoxical necessity of appearance (though evidently the "lassen" of Celan's German means at the same time letting and making [noch in dieser Unmittelbarkeit und Ndhe Idsst es das ihm dem Anderen, Eigenste mitsprechen: dessen Zeit]).

Starting from there, if I may say so, though I must stop here [for this session], the "Meridian" speech starts over, we make a half-turn. After having said that the poem seeks this place [Ort], Celan approaches the question of place [Ort, place of rhetoric, Bilder und Tropen], the question of topoi and of u-topia, all the while remembering that he speaks of a poem that isn't there, of an absolute poem that cannot exist [das gibt es gewiss nicht, das kann es nicht geben!].

I had announced that after these three turns and three examples, I would read through to the end this conclusion that I have started to quote. I will do so, and then I will come back again to the "Meridian" speech. I thus will come back, in the hope that necessity will become clearer, to the motifs of the Other and of the Stranger, of the Unheimliche, of the head (the "Meridian" speech shifts back and forth between heads and decapita- tions, it frequently speaks of a fall in the Grund and Abgrund); and we then will rediscover, among other heads, the Medusa's head (in its relation to erection and castration), and, finally, we'll make a turn back toward the monkey, toward the marionette as a question of art [Die Kunst, das ist, Sie erinnern sich, ein marionettenhaftes ... kinderloses Wesen].

I ... seek - for I'm back where I began - the place of my own origin.

I am seeking all of that with an inexact because uneasy finger on the map - on a children's map, I must admit.

None of these places is to be found, they do not exist, but I know where, especially now, they would have to exist, and ... I find something!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I find something that comforts me a little at having taken, in your presence, this impossible path, this path of the impossible.


I find something that binds and leads to encounter, like a poem. I find something - like language - immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial,

something circular, returning upon itself by way of both poles and thereby - happily - even crossing the tropics and tropes: I find ... a meridian.

With you and Georg Biichner and the State of Hesse I believe I've just touched it again. (413)

II

The question of the sovereign, of the upright position, of the grandeur or the highness of the Very High had led us last time not only from the Roman majestas, as the sovereignty of the State or of the Roman people to the majesty in La Fontaine's fable, The Wolf and the Lamb, to His Majesty the wolf. It also led us to a double division, if I can say so, a division of division itself in what I would venture to call, through this poem on poetry that is the "Meridian" speech, on this side of or through the poem, Celanian discourse, the discursive logic or axiomatics that subtends or scans his poem, a double division. This is to say:

1.) On the one hand, a primary difference, dissociation, or division between the majesty of the Monarch (here of the monarch Louis XVI, of the one who lost his head in a Revolution) and, let us say, the majesty of the present or of poetry (Dichtung, since as you remember, Celan after having spoken of the "fiur die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestdt des Absurden," adds "but I believe it is ... poetry" [aber ich glaube, es ist . .. die Dichtung]); that ultimate majesty, that ultimate sovereignty, poetic sovereignty is not, Celan says, the political sovereignty of the monarch.

2.) And on the other hand, there is the division in the point, in the very tip, in the very punctuality of the now, as the very presence of the

present, in the very majesty of the poetic present, in the poem as encounter, the dissociation and the partition that is also a partaking, between my present, the very present, the very presence of the present, of the same present, within the present of the same. And on the other hand - and it is the other hand of partition and of partaking - the other present, the present of the other to whom the poem makes present its time, so letting speak in a Mitsprechen the other's time, its proper time. [Das Gedicht selbst hat ja immer nur diese, einmalige, punktuelle

Jacques Derrida 29

Gegenwart - noch in dieser Unmittelbarket und Ndhe lasst es das ihm, dem Anderen, Eigenste mitsprechen: dessen Zeit: "Even in a poem's here and now - the poem itself really has only this one, unique, momentary present - even in this immediacy and nearness it lets the Other's ownmost quality speak: its time" (410)].

We have gradually specified what was the time of that speech left to the other within the encounter of the poem, beyond its politico-democratic interpretation, beyond the time of calculable speech or of a count of voices at the moment of the sovereign's election.

Having reached such a point, so as not to lose sight of our question regarding the proper of man, regarding the phallic majesty and revolutionary decapitation of the sovereign, I would like, while privileging such motifs as those of the animal, the monkey, the marionette and especially the Medusa's head, to reconstruct as quickly and as schemati- cally as possible the path that recurs to what Celan evokes as a setting out from the human [ein Hinaustreten aus dem Menschlichen].

This setting out from the human, the human on behalf of which the poetic majesty of the Absurd testifies, would be (here the conditional must be maintained, you will see why it must always remain "perhaps") the proper of art according to Biichner, but of an art that would be "unheimlich" (the word, you will understand, appears two more times5) - an art that would be "unheimlich," because in such an art some apparently inhuman things would find themselves at home [zuhause]. There would be three apparently inhuman or unhuman things after whose figures art, since the beginning of discourse, has produced its apparitions. These three apparitions would be 1.) a Medusa's head (it comes to be a question in the mouth of Biichner's Lenz through whom Celan pretends to hear the voice of Buchner himself); 2.) "the monkey's figure" [die Affengestalt, that also made its appearance a bit earlier] and 3.) automata or marionettes.

Here it is necessary as always to be most attentive to ellipses and fur- tive shifts of meaning, to cursive allusions. This setting out from the human, which Celan describes as one describes the gesture or movement of the other, Biichner's Lenz or Buchner himself, the character that Celan recognizes as him, attributes to him or confers to him, is that of the "unheimlich." You know that the word has two apparently contradictory and undecidable senses; we have spoken at great length of this

5. In his lecture, Derrida refers to Launay's wording in French, which we have retained and rendered into English. Felstiner translates Celan's unheimlich as "uncanny." Launay renders the German word as "etrange" and "etrange, depaysant." (See note 7.)


(cf. Freud and Heidegger) - the familiar but as the non-familiar, the terrible disquieting of the stranger but as the proper's intimate at home. The word appears two times in this passage and even more often elsewhere:

This is a question of a setting out from the human, of transporting oneself to a realm that turns toward the human its strange face - the same realm where the figure of the monkey, the automatons and as a result. .. ah! art, too, seems at home.

This is not the historical Lenz who speaks thus, but Btichner's Lenz; we hear the voice of Btichner here: art for him yet retains something strange, something disoriented.6

Here the word "unheimlich" bears all of the stress, precisely where it remains equivocal and so open to mistranslation; it expresses the essential bearing of the "Meridian" speech, it seems to me. It reappears elsewhere in the text, associated with a word fully as pervasive: the stranger.

And poetry? Poetry, which still has to take the path of art? Then we'd really have the path to the Medusa's head and the automaton.

Now I am not seeking a way out, I'm only questioning further, in the same direction and also, I believe, in the direction of the Lenz

fragment.

Perhaps - I'm only asking - perhaps poetry, like art, is going with a self-forgotten I toward the uncanny and the strange, and is again - but where? but in what place? but with what? but as what? -

setting itself free?7 (406)

Although the strangeness of the Unheimliche - which is a familiar

strangeness, which depends on what the figures of the automaton, the

6. Our translation from Launay's French and Celan's German original. Felstiner renders it thus: "This means stepping out of what is human, betaking oneself to a realm that is uncanny yet turned toward what's human - the same realm where the monkey, the robots and thereby . . . alas, art too seems to be at home. This is not the historical Lenz speaking, but Buchner's, here it's Biichner's voice we've heard, here too: art for him retains something uncanny."

7. What Felstiner gives here as "uncanny and strange" is translated by Launay as "etrange et etranger" (69). For the sake of consistency, in this passage and the remaining citations of Felstiner's translation, we have replaced his word "robots" for Celan's "Auto- maten" with Launay's and Derrida's word "automata."

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monkey, and the Medusa's head are at home [zuhause] - although the strangeness of the Unheimliche is often associated in this way with the stranger, it is by no means accidental that it should be so near to what forms the secret of poetry, that is to say the secret of the encounter. For "secret" calls itself in German Geheimnis (the intimate, the recoiled, the retired in the retreat, the hidden interior of at home, of the house); and this secret of the encounter is at heart the most intimate of what is present and presence [Gegenwart und Prisenz] in the poem.

Then a poem would be - even more clearly than before - the language-become-form of a single person and, following its inmost nature, presentness and present.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and underway. Whoever writes one stays mated with it. But in just this way doesn't the poem stand, right here, in an encounter - in the mystery of an encounter?

The poem wants to reach an Other, its needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it. For the poem making toward an Other, each thing, each human being is a form of this Other. (409)

Before coming back to this concept of the Stranger so associated with the strange, with the strangeness of what is "unheimlich," I would like to point out to you at least the route of a long detour through the texts of Heidegger. I have myself, for several years, underlined the decisive importance of, and so far have remarked slightly or not at all on, the lexicon of the Unheimliche or of Unheimlichkeit in Heidegger (an importance fully as great, however different, at least in appearance, as in Freud). Now, without wanting nor being able to reopen in full the question of the Unheimliche in Heidegger, from Being and Time up to the end, I will content myself with signaling to you, precisely because there exists the human and the unhuman within the human, that passage in the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) that resonates strangely [unheimlich] with what, by the Unheimliche, Celan names as that which, at home in art, seems to exceed the human in the human, seems to step out of the human in human art.

With some violence, and guided by what is important to us here in


this moment, I reopen the Introduction to Metaphysics at that point where Heidegger once more raises the question "what is man?" Two essential markers before arriving at what interests us here in this jour- ney, namely the Unheimliche.

1.) Heidegger begins by expressing the secondary, derived, and in short latecoming and basically very unsatisfying character, from an ontological point of view, of the definition of man as "rational animal" or as zoon loghon ekhon. This definition he elsewhere names in an interesting and unassailable fashion, "zoologic," not only but also in the sense that it allies the logos with the zoon, and that it pretends to provide an account of and a reason for [logon didonai] the essence of man in speaking of that which is before all a "living being," an "animal": "Die genannte Def- inition des Menschen ist im Grunde eine zoologische." But the zoon of this zoology remains in large respectfragwurdig. To put it otherwise, in as much as we have not interrogated, ontologically, the essence of being in life, the essence of life, to define man as zoon logon ekhon remains problematic and unclear. Now, it is on this uninterrogated foundation, on this problematic foundation of an unexplained ontological question of life that the entire West, declares Heidegger, has constructed its psychology, its ethics, its theory of knowledge, and its anthropology. And Heidegger then describes with irony and hauteur the state of culture in which we live where we can obtain books bearing on their cover the title, "What is Man?," without the first inkling of the question being posed beyond the cover of such a book - a book that, he then notes (in 1935), the Frank- furter Zeitung praises as "courageous and venturing out of the ordinary."

2.) Consequently, the response to the question "what is man?" cannot be a response but a question, a questioning, an act or an experience of

Fragen, because in that question it is man himself who is determined in self-interrogation about himself, about his being, so discovering himself as the questioning essence within the Fragen. From this Heidegger draws two conclusions in one, namely: "It is only in so far as he pro- ceeds in questioning that man comes to himself and is a himself' [der Mensch kommt erst als fragend-geschichtlicher zu ihm selbst and ist ein Selbst]. And so this Selbst, this himself, this ipseity (as we translate Selbst) which once again is neither an "I" nor an individual, neither a we nor a community, is a "who" before all "I," all individual, all some- body, all we, and all community (afortiori, I would add with respect to what interests us, neither a political subject nor animal, for Heidegger's

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suspicion regarding the place of man as zoon loghon ekhon, animal rationalis, will be equal regarding the place of man as political animal, Aristotle's word to which we will return at length later on). So that, second conclusion wrapped in the first, the question of man about his proper being [nach seinem eigenen Sein] transforms itself: it no longer is "what is it that is man," "what is man," "Was ist der Mensch?," but "who is man," "Wer ist der Mensch?"

With these two markers having been recalled, you then see, if you read the text as I ask you to, Heidegger as he temporarily abandons Par- menides, whom he is about to read, and turns toward Sophocles's Anti- gone to search there for the poetic sketch of what could be the Greek overhearing of man's essence. (It is a poetic sketch in whose interpretation he advances a reascension to what he takes to be a more originary sense of the Greek polis, for which, he says, the translation by "city" or "state," Stadt und Stadtstaat, does not render "the plain sense" [dies trifft nicht den vollen Sinne]). Before the state, hence prior to what we call politics, the polis is the Da, the there in which, and in so far as which, the Da-sein is geschichtlich, eventuates as history, as the historical origin of history. To this historical site belong not only the sovereigns [Herr- scher], the men who possess power, the army, the navy, the cabinet, the people's assembly, but also the gods, the temples, the priests, the poets, the thinkers. But in the course of this reading of Sophocles, what is most important to us is the moment when Heidegger translates the deinotaton of deinon - the most terrible, the most violent, or the most disquieting of the disquieting (lines 332-375 of Antigone) which occurs in lines that say also that there is nothing more deinon than man - by das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen, of which he will say that it resides in the conflict, in the antagonistic relation [im gegenwendigen Bezug] between justice [dike] and tekhne. Heidegger asks himself, "Why do we translate deinon by un-heimlich?" The principle of his response is the sentence [Spruch] that says, "Der Mensch ist das Unheimlichste [deinotaton], then." "Man is the most unheimlich" gives the authentic, proper, Greek definition of man [gibt die eigentliche griechische Definition des Menschen].

Why? Why translate thus? Not in order to add, after the fact, a sense to the word deinon (which we often translate by "violent" or "terrible"), nor because we hear the Unheimliche as a sensible impression, like an affect or that which makes an impression on our sensibility, but because there is in the Unheimliche something that throws us out of the


heimliche, of the appeasing quietude of the domestic, of the heimisch, of the habitual [Gewohnten], of the current and of the familiar [Gelaufi- gen]. Man is the most unheimlich, because he sets out from the familiar, from the habitual frontiers [Grenze] of habitude, etc. When the chorus says of man that he is to deinotaton or das Unheimlichste, it is not a question, according to Heidegger, of saying that man is this or that and, in addition, unheimlichste; it is indeed a question in the first place, indeed from the first, of saying that the essence of man, the proper of man (his fundamental trait, his Grundzug) is to be estranged from everything that we can identify as familiar, recognizable, etc. The proper of man would be, in short, this fashion of not being at home in security [heimisch], as if it were near to him as his proper essence. As if, according to what is now, on the whole, a somewhat traditional motif, Heidegger said that man's proper is this experience that consists in exceeding the proper in the opinion of whoever is appropriated into familiarity. In point of which, Heidegger will not quite say "there is no proper of man," but rather that this proper otherwise has as its fundamental trait a certain impropriety or ex-propriety, at least the propriety of being apprehended - to the extent of propriety - as the strange, the non-appropriated, indeed the non-appropriable, the stranger to the heimisch, to the reassuring proximity of the identifiable and the similar, to familiarity, to interiority at home: in particular beyond all of the defi- nitions Heidegger calls zoologic of man as zoon logon ekhon.

Leaving off there for want of time, everything in those pages and beyond those pages resonates with Heidegger around the utterance, "Der Mensch is to deinotaton, das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichsten." Before returning to what with Celan appears to produce a strange echo there, I emphasize only that the superlative [das Unheimlichste] does not count less than the equivocal and unstable sense [das Unheimliche] that the superlative thus exaggerates and radicalizes. Man is not only unheimlich, essence always already equivocal and strange (see, I repeat, what Freud says in the essay that bears the title Das Unheimliche on the contradictory significations of the German word, which designates at once the most familiar and the most strange), man, what calls itself man, is not only deinon and unheimlich, it is to deinotaton and das Unheimlichste, the being that is most unheimlich, which is to say that excels with sovereign power on this score, it is more unheimlich than anything and everything. It attains, I would say, though here it is not

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expressly Heidegger's language and word, a sort of exceptional excel- lence, a sort of sovereignty among unheimlich beings and modalities of Unheimlichkeit. The superlative and the sign of the hyperbolic, it wears the crown of sovereignty of human Dasein. And this sort of sovereignty, you have understood, concerns, under the mark of the Unheimli- che, a certain experience of estrangement: not only of the strange, but of the Stranger (a figure that finds itself taken over somewhat later in the texts on Trakl and in Unterwegs zur Sprache).

If now, keeping in memory this indissociable pair of with sovereign power, superlatively unheimlich and of the stranger, the estrangement, we return to the "Meridian" speech and to the moment of crossing when Celan comes to evoke this setting out from the human [ein Hinaus- treten aus dem Menschlichen] (and that movement which consists of "transporting oneself to a realm that turns toward the human its strange face": art's three apparitions: the automata, the figure of the monkey, the Medusa's head). This moment of the setting out from the human must be compared to the one which, first of all, had let it be understood that "perhaps" ("I believe," says Celan) poetry is that homage rendered to the majesty of the Absurd, which testifies to the present or to the now of the human [fur die Gegenwart des Menschlichen zeugenden Majestdt des Absurden]. Celan asks himself as well, you have understood, whether or not poetry must take the path of an art that would belong, as well, to the Medusa and to the automata. From that instant onward, the value of the unheimliche separates itself no longer from that of the stranger, not only of the strange but of the stranger, and all of the - multiple - approaches of whatever might be poetry are all approaches not of an essence but of a movement, of a path and of a step, of a direction, of a turning in the direction of a step, as of a turning in the same breath [Atemwende].

We will find an example in almost every line at least from this point in the "Meridian" speech forward (page 406)? I will cite no more than a few in order to suggest that this insistence on the step - that liberates, that cuts through, that goes and that comes in such or such direction - commands us to think of poetry as a path [Weg] (and it is so often Celan's word that we, for better or for worse, take badly when we disso- ciate it from an incessant and insistent work of meditation on the path, on the Bewegung of the path, on the movement of Weg with Heideg- ger). As a path, according to Celan, for whatever comes or goes and that


thus is less something that is an event than the coming of an event that arrives. I will underline very quickly this privilege accorded to the path, to the going and to the coming, to the step. But in reading these lines, I will not content myself with marking the step, I will also mark the step on three other words for reasons that I will disclose in a moment, namely the I, the Stranger, and the abyss with no ground [Abgrund].

Then art would be the distance poetry must cover - no less, no more.

I know, there are other shorter paths. But poetry too hurries ahead of us at times. La poesie, elle aussi, brule nos etapes....

Will we now perhaps find the place where the strangeness was, the place where a person was able to set himself free as an - estranged - I? Will we find such a place, such a step?

" ... only it sometimes troubled him that he could not walk on his head." - That is him, Lenz. That is, I believe, him and his step, him and his "Long live the King."

" ... only it sometimes troubled him that he could not walk on his head."

Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, whoever walks on his head has heaven as an abyss beneath him. (406-07)

On this subject, see Heidegger at the beginning of The Introduction to Metaphysics, where he raises the question "why is there being? What is the foundation of being?" Heidegger asks himself, then, if such a foundation is an originary foundation [Urgrund] or indeed if such an originary foundation refuses all founding and becomes Abgrund, or even further a foundation that is not one, an appearance of foundation, Schein von Grundung, Ungrund....

Here, then, eventuates in the path or in the poetic speech of Celan, but, as with all decisive events under the category of the reserve or "perhaps" [vielleicht], in truth between two "perhapses" and indeed three "perhapses" and even four, five, six, seven, eight "perhapses" (in some twenty-odd lines and two paragraphs), here therefore eventuates between two and three and four, five, six, seven, eight "perhapses" the event of an extraordinary turning whose risk I would like, with you, to dare and whose angle I would like to explore. Celan comes to evoke the

Jacques Derrida 37

obscurity proper to poetry as the place of an encounter to come from the horizon of distance and of the stranger. Here is a first perhaps.

That obscurity is, I believe, if not congenital, then the obscurity associated with poetry for the sake of an encounter, by a perhaps self-devised distance or strangeness. (407)

And there is then, always under the reserve of a second perhaps, a strange division of the Stranger itself: there are perhaps two sorts of Strangers, one nearby the other:

But perhaps, in one and the same direction, there are two kinds of strangeness - chockablock. (407)

And here now, in order to specify this duality at the heart of the stranger, a sort of revolution within the revolution. You recall that Lucile's "Long live the king!" had been greeted as a counter-word [Gegenwort] that was perhaps ("I believe," so said Celan) poetry, there where homage was rendered, far from the political code of the reactionary counter-manifestation, to the (non-political) majesty of the absurd that testifies to the present or to the now of the human. Yet here now another "Long live the king!," Lenz's "Long live the king!," which is to say Bichner's, is sup- posed to take one step more than that of Lucile. And it is no longer, this time, a speech, nor even a counter-word [Gegenwort testifying to a Gegen- wart], it is above all no longer a majesty, it is a terrifying silence, it is a seizure smiting speech dumb, which cuts off breath and cuts off speech.

Lenz - that is, Biichner - has gone one step further than Lucile. His "Long Live the King" is no longer words, it is a frightful fall- ing silent, it takes away his - also our - breath and word. Poetry: that can signify an Atemwende, a Breathtur. Who knows, perhaps poetry follows its path - also the path of art - for the sake of such a breathtur? (407-408)

What I would like, always in privileging the thought that concerns us here, namely the thought of sovereignty, of its majesty in the figure of present or present-to-itself ipseity, sometimes present to itself in the form of the ego, of the ego's living present, of "I," of this "I," of the power to say "I" that from Descartes to Kant and to Heidegger always


has been literally, explicitly reserved for human being (only man can speak the signifier "I," "I me" in referring in an auto-deictic fashion to himself, as those three there - Descartes, Kant, Heidegger - have written) .... What I would like to make apparent, if it is possible, is by what means Celan makes a sign to an alterity that, on the inside of "I" as the punctual, living present, as the very tip of the living, present-to- itself present, as an alterity of all other comes not to include and to modalize another living present (as with Husserl in the analysis of tem- poralization - of the protention and the retention of another living present in the now living present - the ego comprises in itself, in its present, another present), but here, what is altogether another matter, to let appear the present of the other, that "to leave the most proper of the time of the other" of which we spoke last time.

I read in the first place that long passage riddled with countless "perhapses" that all finally have as their destination the removal of such poetic utterances about the event of the poem to the dimension and to the authority of knowledge.

Perhaps since strangeness - the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the automatons - seems to lie in a single direction, perhaps poetry here succeeds in telling strangeness from strangeness, perhaps right here the Medusa's head shrinks, perhaps right here the automatons break down - for this unique brief moment? Perhaps here, with the I - the estranged I set free here and in such wise - here perhaps yet some Other becomes free?

Perhaps from here the poem is itself.... and in this art-less, art- free way can now follow its other paths, including the paths of art - again and again?

Perhaps.

Perhaps we may say that every poem has its "20th of January" inscribed? Perhaps what's new for poems written today is just this: that here the attempt is clearest to remain mindful of such dates? But don't we all date from such dates? And what dates do we ascribe to ourselves?

Yet the poem does speak! It remains mindful of its dates, yet - it speaks. Indeed, it speaks only in its very selfmost cause.

Jacques Derrida 39

But I think - and now this thought can hardly surprise you - I think a hope of poems has always been to speak in just this way in the cause of the strange - no, I can't use this word anymore - in just this way to speak in the cause of an Other - who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other.

This "who knows" I see I've arrived at is the only thing I can add, for myself, today and here, to the old hopes.

Perhaps, I must tell myself now - perhaps even a meeting between this "wholly Other" - I'm using a familiar term here - and a not all that distant, a quite near "other" becomes thinkable - thinkable again and again. (408)

Perhaps we begin here to think this subtle, unheimlich difference between the two strangers, difference that is like the space for the narrow passage of poetry of which Celan before long will speak. It's the difference in the punctuality of the now, in the tip-point of the present instant, of my present, between, on the one hand, my living, other present (retained or anticipated by an indispensable movement of retention or of protention) and, on the other hand, wholly other, the present of the other whose temporality cannot be reduced, included, assimilated, introjected, appropriated within mine, cannot even resemble it or be similar to it, present or time proper to the other for which I must doubtless make my mourning, radically renouncing it, but also whose very possibility (the "perhaps" beyond all knowledge) is at once the chance of the encounter [Begegnung] and of this event, of this coming, of this step that we call poetry. An improbable poetry ("who knows?"), but a poetry of cutting off and of turning the breath, which is to say also life and the path, which can be moreover a path of art at once too large and too narrow.

I read a last passage before making, not without some violence, a leap backwards and sideways to the text about a scene of dissection from which we had proceeded in an earlier seminar, the dissection of a grand animal, of the elephant, in the presence of his majesty Louis-the-Grand.

Elargissez 'Art! With its old, with its new uncanniness, this question steps up to us. I went toward Biichner with it - I thought to find it there again.


I even had an answer ready, a "Lucilesque" counter-word, I wanted to set something opposite, to be there with my contradiction:

Enlarge art?

No. But with art go into your very selfmost straits. And set yourself free.

Here too, in your presence, I've taken this path. It was a circle. Art, thus also the Medusa's head, the mechanism, the automatons, the uncanny strangeness so hard to tell apart, in the end perhaps really only one strangeness - art lives on.

Twice, with Lucile's "Long live the King" and when heaven as an abyss opened under Lenz, the Atemwende seemed to be there, the Breathtur. Perhaps also when I tried to make toward that occupi- able distance which finally becomes visible only in the figure of Lucile. (411)

As you already have well comprehended, in this division between two Strangers, two fashions of thinking the other and time, in this very division between the two "Long live the kings!," the first of which names itself majestic, the first of which, that of Lucile, requires the word of majesty, poetic and not political majesty, now we have passed ("perhaps") beyond all majesty, hence all sovereignty.

It is as if, after the poetic revolution that reaffirms a poetic majesty beyond or on the outside of political majesty, a second revolution, that which cuts off breath or turns breath in the encounter of everything other, came to tempt or to recognize, to tempt to recognize, even, without knowing or recognizing anything, to tempt to think a revolution in the revolution, a revolution in the very life of time, in the live of the living present. This discreet, even undisclosed, minuscule, microscopic dethron- ing of majesty exceeds knowledge. Not in order to pay homage to some obscurantism of not-knowing, but to prepare perhaps some poetic revolution in the political revolution, and perhaps also some revolution in the knowledge of knowing, exactly between the beast, the marionette, the head, the Medusa's head, and the head of his majesty the sovereign.

That which doubtless signs the repetition of "perhaps" and of "who knows" [wer weiss].

Translated by Alessia Ricciardi and Christopher Yu

Documents

Derrida - The Majesty of the Present