Language, Memory and the Subject Sayer

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Derek SayerIncognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the Subject

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Incognito Ergo SumLanguage, Memory and the Subject

Derek Sayer

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. (Jacques Lacan,2001: 183)1

I

LET ME begin with what, from a post-structuralist point of view, mightbe regarded as commonplaces. I do so not in order to say anythingoriginal about the theorists upon whom I am drawing, but simply toclarify at the outset the premises upon which my own subsequent argumentsrest. To say, then, that the subject is constituted in language is first of all toreject any notion of an essential human subject that exists prior to or outsidelanguage, a subject for whom language serves merely as a vehicle of expres-sion. If we then ask what can unify this subject what can identify a selfas that which, in Aristotelian logic, is all that is not not-self, and remains,moreover, the same self at different points in space and time the answeris fraught with paradox. For all that permits the location of the subject withinlanguage is the existence of a vacant space, an empty signifier that me,myself, I which is able to signal my uniqueness to the extent that the samelinguistic space can be occupied by any and every other human being(Barthes, 1977: 145). We may, of course, attach any number of distinguish-ing predicates to this empty I, but what is true of the grammatical subjectholds equally of anything that we might wish to predicate of it. My subjec-tivity can be signified only through that which is irreducibly not me, myself,I. Within language I share the space that defines my uniqueness with allothers, while outside language that uniqueness cannot be articulated at all.As Wittgenstein famously said in the Tractatus, the limits of my languagemean the limits of my world (1971: 115).

An alienation which Lacan argues is present in the mirror-phase thatprecedes the infants acquisition of language, but already entails an

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identification with and in an imago of the self (2001: 18) is thus inherentin the very possibility of any subjectivity that is constituted within language.Hence Derridas poignant conundrum: I have only one language; it is notmine (1998: 1). It is entry into this alien field, the field of language, whichalone allows the constitution of my self. But to have ones self articulatedin and as language, to speak and to be spoken of, is also inescapably tosurrender oneself (or more accurately perhaps, to be surrendered) tolanguage, in all its vicissitudes and vagaries. This primordial estrangement,if we want to call it that, is the paradox that grounds any subjectivity at all:I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object,Lacan says (2001: 94). Not that this I, qua subject, could ever have had anychoice in the matter: Lacans sentence, a sentence that reads oddly if whatit states is true, is itself fissured by the same paradox. It is not that therewas an already existent I who decided to enter language, an original selfthat was ever there to lose. The subject is only created in this act of objec-tification of losing oneself in language. It is found(ed), we might say, inthis original loss.

The Cartesian subject, the unified, self-conscious ego, could never-theless still perhaps be salvaged so long as language itself continued to beseen as a stable system of meanings, whether meaning was anchored in adirect relationship between signs and their referents in the real, or at leastsecured in a rule-governed structure that guaranteed the constancy of therelationship between a signifier (sound, image) and a signified (idea,concept). In either case we could regard language merely as an object trans-parent to our intellect, a toolbox of signs of which we remain masters andcan use as we will. But this stability is exactly what post-structuralist theoryhas put in question. For post-structuralism there is no transcendental signi-fied, no concept signified in and of itself . . . independent of a relationshipto language, in which any signifier could be anchored. On the contrary,every signified is also in the position of a signifier (Derrida, 1982: 1920).What is the signified in one sign is immediately the signifier of another, sothat signification becomes a process of endless deferral. The word for moon-light is moonlight, says a character in Don DeLillos The Body Artist (2001:84); but the word for moonlight is precisely not (the thing) moonlight, andwhat the word signifies to me right now, because of a memory of an old song,is pennies in a stream, falling leaves, a sycamore, snowfalls in Vermont.Once we admit the capacity of the signifier in this way to exceed the signi-fied to float free from whatever singular reality or concept might once havebeen thought to pin it down, and instead to gesture toward another andanother and another signifier in an endlessly ramifying chain then subjec-tivity, too, becomes subject to what Derrida calls diffrance (1982: 249,1986: 129). Any predicates by which we might want definitively to identifythe subject slip away into infinity.

Lacan clarifies why, when he likens the signifying chain to rings of anecklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings. Using a differentanalogy, he writes that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of

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a score, so that there is, in effect, no signifying chain that does not have,as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation ofrelevant contexts suspended vertically, as it were, from that point (2001:16970). Meaning proliferates endlessly, and from every point. Theproblem is not its absence but its superfluity. What we have here, inDerridas words, is a chain of:

. . . syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, thata simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whetherin the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a signwithout referring to another element which itself is not simply present. Thisinterweaving results in each element . . . being constituted on the basis ofthe trace within it of the other elements of the chain. . . . This interweaving,this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text.Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhereeither simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences andtraces of differences. (1982: 26)

Where is the I in this necklace-chain, this textile, this text, if not every-where carried onward wherever the glissade of signification leads andyet, essentially, nowhere?

There is thus no longer any Archimedean point, whether in the worldoutside language, or in the presumed consistencies of the relation betweensignifier and signified in language itself, to anchor the subjects that areconstituted within it. The only constant is the inevitability of diffrance. Tosay that the subject is constituted in language, then, is above all to say that:

[t]here is no subject who is agent, author, and master of diffrance . . . [that]the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends uponthe system of differences and the movement of diffrance, that the subject isnot present, nor above all present to itself before diffrance, that the subjectis constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in tempo-rizing, in deferral . . . (Derrida, 1982: 289)

What we habitually think of as the self does not contain this subject. AsLacan puts it, mans ego can never be reduced to his experienced identity,for the subject goes far beyond what is experienced subjectively by theindividual (2001: 22, 61). The materials in and out of which the subject isfashioned are labile, fluid, slippery and treacherous shifting markers thatare always deferring beyond the self, always pointing somewhere else,toward some otherness that perpetually threatens to undo who we (think we)are. The subject is a movable feast, always gesturing, or perhaps we shouldsay for active and passive voices slip into one another here, as agencybecomes less than clear always gestured, elsewhere.

IIIdentity, from this point of view, becomes an extraordinarily problematiccategory much as it might form the intuitive basis of our everyday

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perceptions of ourselves as individuals, and the epistemological bedrock ofour scientific knowledge of others, whose cultures we ethnograph, whosesocial welfare we measure, whose histories we write. If the foregoing argu-ments hold water, then identity whether of an individual or of a collective(a race, a class, a gender, a nation, a society)2 cannot be what we usuallyimagine it to be; at least, not so long as we continue to equate identity withthe subject, and reduce the subject to his, her or its identity.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, identity is:

1. The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition,nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute oressential sameness; oneness. 2. The sameness of a person or thing at all timesor in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itselfand not something else; individuality, personality.

I quote this dictionary definition not out of ignorance of the extensive socialscientific literature on identity, but because it neatly encapsulates therelevant point, from the point of view of the argument I wish to advance,that much of that literature fails to address. Very simply, if, as post-structuralists maintain, the subject is constituted in language, then identity,in any of these senses, is the one quality it is quite incapable of possess-ing. The aporia that constitutes subjectivity is precisely that the subject canbe itself, only insofar as it is something else; while being subject to thediffrance of language, it cannot exhibit sameness in substance, composi-tion, nature and properties, or at all times and in all circumstances. Thesubject is never present in and of itself, referring only to itself; absoluteor essential sameness, oneness is something that is congenitally beyond it.To adapt Baudelaire, the medium, in which the subject has its being, is letransitoire, le fugitif, le contingent (1986: 36).

When Baudelaire famously used this latter formulation to describemodernity, he was not referring, as most social theorists who have sinceused the term do, to a supposed stage of human thought or history. He wasdescribing any temporal present, in all its intrinsic fleetingness, with refer-ence to the necessity for the artist, as he saw it, to extract the eternal fromthe ephemeral. In his own words, every old-time painter had his ownmodernity (1986: 37). Baudelaires painter of modern life, Monsieur G.,returning from a day of busy flnerie to record images of what he has seen,may serve us as a provisional metaphor for the ways in which the transitory,fugitive and contingent materials out of which subjectivity is constituted areparlayed into (and in turn effaced by) identity. The relation of what, for wantof a better word, we may call the real, and the various imagos in which always after the fact (I gesture here to Geertz, 1996: 13) we seek to(re)capture it, to pin it down, is the crux of the matter.

By day, G. walks the streets of Paris, animated by a fatal and irre-sistible passion for life. Baudelaire compares G.s openness to the world,even in the apparently most trivial things, to that of a convalescent


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recently returned from the shades of death, who delightedly breathes inall the germs and odours of life (1986: 31). Convalescence, Baudelaire goeson, is a sort of return to childhood: for the child everything is new; he isalways exhilarated. He relates a friends childhood memory of watching hisfather dressing, as he gazed in wonderment mixed with delight, at themuscles of the arms, the graduated shades of pink and yellow in the skin,and the bluish network of veins (1986: 312). G. is a child-man, theperfect spectator, an I insatiably eager for the not-I (1986: 32, 34, 33). Hewalks the streets long into the evening, the last person remaining whereverlight shines, poetry thunders, life teems, music throbs (1986: 35). Only thendoes G. take up his pencil, pen and brush, and begin to draw eager,violent, busy, says Baudelaire, as if he feared that his images might escapehim (1986: 36).

And what does G. draw or better, how does he draw? First, Baude-laire tells us, he draws from memory, not from a model, for such artists,long accustomed to using their memory and to filling it with images, find,when confronted with the model and its multiplicity of detail, that their chieffaculty is disturbed and, as it were, paralysed. There is a perpetual strugglebetween the will to see everything and forget nothing, and the memorizingfaculty, which has become accustomed actively to absorb general colours,silhouettes, and all the arabesques of contour. G. does not attempt to giveimpartial heed to all details (which Baudelaire likens to an insurgentmob), but exerts, rather, a resurrective, evocative memory, which bids everyobject: Lazarus, arise! This acknowledges that what the artist draws hasalready passed away. The second thing Baudelaire stresses in G.s methodis a fiery exhilaration of the pencil and brush, almost resembling anoutburst of mania. It is the fear of not being fast enough, of letting thephantom escape before its essence has been distilled and captured. . . . Thecorpse has now become a ghost, haunting the artist until he can exorcise itby capturing its imago. Beginning with light pencil strokes, G. adds wash-tints, vague masses of faint colour at first, but later on retouched and loadedwith colours successively more intense. Only at the last moment are theoutlines of the various objects definitely marked in ink. He finally choosesjust a few sketches, and makes greater or lesser additions to their inten-sity, darkening the shades and progressively brightening the highlights(1986: 414). Thus we arrive at essence.

In a not dissimilar way, the photographer Ansel Adams, using anaperture setting that yields a depth of field that far exceeds the perceptualcapabilities of the human eye, and manipulating greyscale values tomaximize contrasts, fixed the Rocky Mountains in our minds in indelibleimages of what we could never see. Dorothea Lange accomplished acomparable trompe loeil when she removed an intrusive thumb, an unrulydetail that detracted from the symmetry of the composition, from thenegative of her famous 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, in the processcreating what is perhaps the most iconic of all visual images of the GreatDepression (Koetzle, 2002: 2837). This so-called straight photography, as


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its proponents called it, achieves its illusion of immediate identity withreality by expunging every trace of the real that might clutter up the photo-graph and dilute its power to speak. The lucidity of these images, as of anysign, is founded in diffrance: they can represent the real, in the doublesense of standing in for it and presenting it anew, because and to the extentthat they depart from it.

Edward Weston gives the game away when he claims that the cameraenables [the photographer] to reveal the essence of what lies before his lenswith such clear insight that the beholder may find the recreated image morereal and comprehensible than the actual object (1980: 174). As SiegfriedKracauer remarked, Weston often indulges in wrestling abstract composi-tions from nature (1980: 251). This diffrance also means that the imageperpetually gestures elsewhere. Migrant Mother, for instance, evokes notonly other photographic images of the dirty 1930s like Walker Evanss seriesLet Us Now Praise Famous Men, but also the entire corpus of Madonna andChild painting, coupling poverty and purity in a way that would have beenimpossible had not the living subject, Florence Thompson, stepped throughthe lens of Langes camera and out into the realm of the signifier. AnselAdamss Rockies, likewise, may conjure up other photographed landscapes,or recall other things that have come to signify an imagined America, like,say, Edward Hoppers painting Gas, which in turn may direct our mind toAmerican Gothic or Andrew Wyeths painting Christinas World or not.But they will always evoke something, which is other than the Rocky Moun-tains themselves, and the trace of that something is integral to their abilityto represent that landscape and in turn, to inform the way we picture it at all.

What I wish to draw attention to here is the process of abstractionthrough which the remembered remains of the real are resurrected as gravenimages. We might call it a fixation, bearing in mind both the photographicand the psychoanalytic resonances of the term. Either way, the flux of life le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent is arrested, whether in a momentof temps perdu frozen on photo-sensitive paper, or in an obsessive psycho-logical return of the ever-same. For let us be clear that there is nothing inthe real to which the image corresponds; it represents a reality that hasalready passed away. The image can stand in for this reality not because itresembles it or reproduces it, but because it has supplanted it. Summingup Monsieur G.s extraction of the eternal from the ephemeral, Baudelaireexpresses it like this:

And objects are reborn upon the paper, true to life and more than true to life,beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiasticvitality, like the soul of their author. Out of nature has been distilled fantasy.All the stuffs with which memory is encumbered are classified and arrangedin order, are harmonized and subjected to that compulsory formalizationwhich results from a childish perceptiveness that is to say, a perceptive-ness acute and magical by reason of its simplicity! (1986: 36, emphasisadded)


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Nietzsche put the same idea more succinctly: To experience a thing asbeautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly (quoted in Sontag,1977: 184).

Identity, I want to suggest, is fabricated out of the diffrance in whichthe subject has its being by an analogous magic. It is a re(-)presentation ofthe subject, constructed wholly in the realm of the imaginary; a represen-tation founded in every bit as violent an abstraction, as radical a simplifi-cation, as Monsieur G., Adams, Lange or Weston wreak on their respectivesubjects. Identity is not the living being of the subject, but its imago, forged(in both senses of the word) out of the memory of what once was but nolonger is; and it is in the guise of this counterfeit that the subject enters thesymbolic register of society.

We could express this in the simple, if enigmatic formula: identity =being in denial.

IIIWe have a template for thinking this Alice-in-Wonderland (or more accu-rately, perhaps, Through-the-Looking-Glass) logic of identity, though it isnot one to which I am wholly wedded.3 This is the familiar Freudian top-ography of the Id, the Ego and the Superego or to use Freuds own moredown-to-earth German, whose literal English translation I prefer here, theIt (es), the I (Ich) and the Over-I (ber-Ich). The baroque absurdity of thistriptych bears pondering. For the trifurcation of the subject is the directconsequence of the fact that identity can only be achieved in the imagin-ation. Having been expelled from the imagined I, the diffrance that consti-tutes the subject in language returns in the subversions of the It, which isthe place where the signifiers continue to play, but is now no longer recog-nized by the ego as a part of the self. It manifests the absent presence ofdiffrance in the cryptic disturbances of the joke, the slip of the tongue, thedream, the symptoms of an original non-identity that has been denied, butcannot ever finally be overcome. That self, in the meantime, has nonethe-less somehow still to be reconciled with the symbolic order from which ithas been imaginarily severed, and this can now be guaranteed only throughthe punitive vigilance of the superego that stands menacingly outside andover the supposedly self-contained I.

The joke is undoubtedly on the self, and it is a masterpiece of Breton-ian black humour (Breton, 1997). The imaginary overcoming of the originalestrangement if, as I said, we want to call it that which accompaniesthe constitution of the subject in language is purchased only at the price ofa further alienation, whose sign is the Freudian trinity itself, in whichanother familiar mythological triad is prefigured: the Tweedledum andTweedledee of Culture (or Society) and Nature, the hammer and anvilbetween which the imagined Individual must negotiate his way home likeOdysseus skirting Scylla and Charybdis. For this synthesis of identity is notthe resolution of a contradiction, but merely its displacement; as Derridaremarks in another context, if there were a definition of diffrance, it would


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be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relve[Aufhebung, usually translated as sublation] wherever it operates (1982:401). The imaginary relve that synthesizes the self in an imago with whichit identifies (itself) effects and conceals what is in reality a radical fissur-ing of the subject, which makes its being in diffrance unrecognizable.Identity is sublimation, to use Freuds term, not sublation; and it everywhereleaves behind it the subliminal traces of the diffrance it denies.

I long wondered why, at the beginning of Nadja, Andr Breton answershis question Who am I? with another question, Whom do I haunt? (1960:11) since an orthodox Freudian view of the unconscious, as the archaicrepository of unresolved complexes, sublimated drives and repressedinstincts, would lead us to expect him rather to ask By whom am I haunted?But Bretons question is the right one. For there is a departed I, of a kind,who does haunt the ego of the Freudian triptych, in exactly the same waythat the ghosts of the departed real haunt the images confected by Baude-laires night-time Monsieur G. The ghost is that of the lost subject found(ed)in language, the subject who has no identity, the subject whose being issubject to the play of the signifier. This is what (in Bretons words) I musthave ceased to be in order to be who I am, and whose fixation in an imagohas the paradoxical consequence of mak[ing] me, still alive, play a ghostlypart (1960: 11). We are reminded here of Freuds utterance, which soimpacted on Jacques Lacan: Wo es war, soll Ich werden where It (theunconscious) was, I must become.4 Breton concludes that:

. . . this sense of myself . . . seems inadequate only insofar as it presupposesmyself, arbitrarily preferring a completed image of my mind, which need notbe reconciled with time, and insofar as it implies within this same time an idea of irreparable loss, of punishment, of a fall whose lack of moral basisis, as I see it, indisputable. (1960: 12)

The convolutions of his language testify eloquently to the complexity of thatof which he is trying to speak.

Thinking about what that irreparable loss might be in the real timeto which Breton alludes, with which the image of the self does not need tobe reconciled let us recall the daytime Monsieur G., Baudelaires irre-pressible flneur. The being of this child-man actually consists of perpetu-ally trying to (sub)merge his self into something else. He is an I insatiablyeager for the not-I and it is this dissolution of identity, according toBaudelaire, that gives G.s eye its keenness:

The masses are his domain, as the air is the birds and the sea the fishs. Hispassion is his profession that of wedding himself to the masses. To theperfect spectator, the impassioned observer, it is an immense joy to make hisdomicile among numbers, amidst fluctuation and movement, amidst thefugitive and the infinite. To be away from home, and yet to feel at home; tobehold the world, to be in the midst of the world, and yet to remain hiddenfrom the world. . . .


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The observer is a prince who always rejoices in his incognito. . . . He mayalso be compared to a mirror as huge as the masses themselves; to a kaleido-scope endowed with awareness, which at each of its movements reproducesthe multiplicity of life and the restless grace of all lifes elements. (1986:334)

In the daytime, in real time, G.s being is impelled by desire, and the objectof that desire is always what is other. He does not want to possess that other,so much as lose himself in it; and in that losing he finds himself mirroredin the endlessly moving kaleidoscope of the multiplicity that surrounds him.The slogan that defines this subjectivity would have to be incognito ergosum I am insofar as I am not my self.

Why I think the formula identity = being in denial fortuitous, isbecause of the duality of meanings that it condenses. It may be taken tomean either that identity is the denial of being, or that identity is a state ofbeing in denial, in the psychoanalytic sense of suppressing an unaccept-able truth. I intend to convey both. What, above all, the fixation of the fluxof being in an imago of identity denies, but at the same time enables us tolive in denial of, is the dispersal of the subject from which we began; thenon-identity that follows from its original constitution in language, of whichBaudelaires prince rejoicing in his incognito furnishes a model. Thisspecious relve is no small accomplishment to immobilize the diffranceof subjectivity in the singularity of identity is a deception of breathtakingproportions. It comes, however, at a cost. For what it requires is nothing lessthan that we treat the flux of the real as imaginary, in order to treat the fixityof the imaginary as real.

It should not, therefore, surprise us to discover that this self is aprecarious construct, as anything founded in denial ultimately must be.Identity is the flimsiest of garments, ever liable to unravel, unpicking alongevery ill-stitched seam. Albert Camus beautifully captures a chancemoment where it begins, for no apparent reason, to come apart, in his novelThe Fall:

I had gone up on the Pont des Arts, deserted at that hour, to look at the riverthat could hardly be made out now night had come. Facing the statue of theVert-Galant, I dominated the island. I felt rising within me a vast feeling ofpower and I dont know how to express it of completion, which cheeredmy heart. I straightened up and was about to light a cigarette, the cigaretteof satisfaction, when, at that very moment, a laugh burst out behind me. Takenby surprise, I suddenly wheeled around; there was no one there. I stepped tothe railing; no barge or boat. I turned back toward the island and, again, heardthe laughter behind me, a little farther off as if it were going downstream. Istood there motionless. The sound of the laughter was decreasing, but I couldstill hear it distinctly behind me, come from nowhere unless from the water.At the same time I was aware of the rapid beating of my heart. Please dontmisunderstand me; there was nothing mysterious about that laugh; it was agood, hearty, almost friendly laugh, which re-established the proper pro-portions. Soon I heard nothing more, anyway. I returned to the quays, went


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up the rue Dauphine, bought some cigarettes I didnt need at all. I was dazedand had trouble breathing. That evening I rang up a friend, who wasnt athome. I was hesitating about going out when, suddenly, I heard laughter undermy windows. I opened them. On the sidewalk, in fact, some youths wereloudly saying good night. I shrugged my shoulders as I closed the windows;after all, I had a brief to study. I went into the bathroom to drink a glass ofwater. My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that mysmile was double . . . (1991: 3840)

The unexpected, a laugh coming out of nowhere, has opened up a gapbetween the lawyer and his imago, whose identity for the first time he beginsto doubt. He will never be able to close that gap again.

IVI want to suggest that memory is the dimension in which, above all, thisfixation of identity in an imago takes place; the self is always recollected,forever being put together (again), re-membered, after the fact. What Baude-laire calls the memorizing faculty is pivotal to maintenance of identity. Wesay of someone who has lost his memory that he has forgotten who he is(and not, as we should say if we were to be logical about it, who he was).On the other hand, because of its ineradicable dependency on diffrance,on signifiers that float (away), memory is always also a locus of potentialdisintegration. Lieux de mmoire (Nora et al., 1996: 120) are thereforetreacherous places, because the condensation that fixes them as points decapiton for the imagined I may always unravel, displacing them to becomesignifiers of something else. A signifier on the loose may lead us God knowswhere, and sometimes, like that laugh on the Pont des Arts, it may take usto places where the I is unable any longer to recognize what it sees in themirror as itself.

At the start of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kunderapresents us with a powerful image of erasure of memory. In a photographthat circulated widely in communist Czechoslovakia, the fur hat on Partyleader Klement Gottwalds head was the only trace that remained of formerForeign Minister Vlado Clementis after the censors airbrushes had done aDorothea Lange on the visual record of the communist coup dtat ofFebruary 1948. Clementis was executed following the Slnsky show trial inDecember 1952. The trace remains in the photograph, fortuitously, onlybecause it had started to snow and Clementis removed the hat from his ownhead and solicitously placed it on Gottwalds just before the latter haranguedthe masses from the balcony of the Kinsky Palace in Pragues Old TownSquare. This surreal anecdote introduces what is perhaps the most quoted and arguably the most misunderstood sentence that Kundera ever wrote:It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is thestruggle of memory against forgetting (1986: 3).

A character in Ivan Klmas Love and Garbage is another Czech wholaments that in our country, everything is forever being remade: beliefs,


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buildings, and street names. Sometimes the progress of time is concealedand at others feigned, so long as nothing remains as real and truthful testi-mony (1993: 45). Klma confronts us with the vertiginous terror of a perpet-ual amnesia, in which there is no longer anything real to confirm the truthof the memories in which identity is anchored, only an endless parade oftransparent fictions that are imposed retrospectively and updated every day.History, here, becomes palpably an artefact of the present, just as in theCzech joke of the period: The future is certain, comrades! Only the past isunpredictable. As with the repeatedly revised back-copies of the news-papers in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-four (1983: 7647), successiverewritings have put the reality of what has gone before beyond recovery. Theoriginal, if we may speak of such a thing, is irretrievably lost. This producesa peculiar pathos. Klmas characters know very well that they live in a worldof simulacra, but they no longer have any means of telling good copies frombad.

This pathos, however, is entirely dependent upon our acceptance ofthe idea that behind the never-ending erasures there exists some authenticprimal identity, whose truth reposes in the memory of realities that havebeen washed away by the tide of history. It is this same postulate of authen-ticity that makes memory so poignant a locus of resistance for KunderasMirek, providing the firm foundation from which he can defend his humanintegrity in the teeth of the falsifications of power. But Kundera himself isvery much less sentimental than his hero or than Ivan Klma. In The Artof the Novel, he warns us against taking Mireks pronouncement as thebooks message. The truth, he says, is more complicated and less heroic:

. . . the originality of Mireks story lay somewhere else entirely. This Mirekwho is struggling with all his might to make sure he is not forgotten (he andhis friends and their political battle) is at the same time doing his utmost tomake people forget another person (his ex-mistress, whom hes ashamed of).(1988: 130)

In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera goes still further. Not only does heabandon Mireks comforting equations of humanity = remembering, andpower = forgetting. He confounds the very opposition of memory and forget-ting from which they draw their rhetorical force. Much more than intention,or bad faith, are at issue here:

We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediatelytransform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount anepisode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a briefsummary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even thestrongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are sodazzled by their potency that we dont realize how schematic and meagre theircontent is.

When we study, discuss, analyse a reality, we analyse it as it appears in our


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mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not knowit as it is in the present, in the moment when its happening, when it is. Thepresent moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negativeof forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entriesone day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And stillworse: that the imagination is unable to help our memories along and recon-struct what has been forgotten. The present the concreteness of the present as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet;so that we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it throughimagination. We die without knowing what we have lived. (1995: 1289)

This relation between the reality of the present in which we live, and thememories in which we recollect it, is exactly the relation of Baudelairesdaytime and night-time Monsieur G. The only difference is Kunderasmelancholia for the temps perdu that is lost beyond recall. Baudelairesconcern was not the truth of the reality that was lost, so much as the beautyof the fantasy that was born from it, fixated forever in a work of art. But asBlanchot remarks, And artists who exile themselves in the illusion ofimages, isnt it their task to idealize beings, to elevate them to their disem-bodied resemblance? (1999: 419).

For those attracted to the defiant humanism expressed in Mireksdeclaration, what Kundera has to say here is profoundly disturbing everybit as disturbing, in fact, as we might expect of the author of a vicious shortstory, The Hitchhiking Game, in which the presumption of identity itselfis pitilessly deconstructed. A young girl, having stripped naked and wiggledobscenely on a table in a cheap hotel room, playing the two-bit whore forher boyfriend, is left in tears, repeating over and over, as she lies besidehim afterward in the bed, Im me, Im me . . .:

The young man was silent, he didnt move, and he was aware of the sad empti-ness of the girls assertion, in which the unknown was defined by the sameunknown.

And the girl soon passed from sobbing to loud crying and went on endlesslyrepeating this pitiful tautology: Im me, Im me, Im me . . . (1999: 1056)

This tautology ought to give us pause, in the present context. For what itreveals is the void, the vacancy, the lack, which the assumption of identitywith an imago of the self both denies and enables us to live in denial of and which has unexpectedly opened up again in the space created by whatstarted out as a titillating game, just as it did for the lawyer in Camus TheFall at that moment when he stopped to light his self-satisfied cigarette onthe Pont des Arts.

Asked in an interview reproduced in The Art of the Novel about thesignificance of this story, Kundera replied with a reference to another of hisbooks:


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In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at herself in themirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetrelonger every day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrec-ognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza stillbe Tereza? Where does the self begin and end? You see: Not wonder at theimmeasurability of the soul; rather, wonder at the uncertain nature of the selfand its identity. (1988: 28)

The image of finding in a mirror a way out of the existential tautology ofdefining an unknown by the same unknown recurs in Lacan, Baudelaire,Camus and now Kundera. He employs the same figure in The Art of theNovel when discussing kitsch, which he defines as the need to gaze intothe mirror of the beautifying lie and be moved to tears of gratification atones own reflection (1988: 135). The archetype for such identification, ofcourse, was Narcissus, fixated by his reflection in a pool. Might we then goso far as to say that identity is necessarily a species of kitsch? And thatkitsch, therefore, is the very fabric of any organized social existence?

It is far too easy simply to read the spectre of amnesia in modern Czechfiction politically, as an indictment of communisms flagrant distortions ofhistory, which on one level even for Milan Kundera (see his 1984) itplainly is. As Zdenek Nejedly, Czechoslovakias cultural plenipotentiary fora decade after 1948, expressed it, with greater honesty than he perhapsintended, To us, history is not the dead past, indeed it is not the past at all,it is an ever-living part of the present too (1958: 7). A longue dure perspec-tive might go further, and detect in the repeated cycles of remembering andforgetting that are so characteristic of Czech history an instability of identityendemic to this uneasy centre of Europe (Sayer, 1998a, 1998b). I want,however, to offer a more radical reading here. This is that the amnesiadescribed by these writers is not a uniquely Czech or communist aberra-tion, but should provide an occasion for reflection on what Kundera callsan existential situation (1988: Part 2). For when and where, we might ask,was it ever not the case that beliefs, buildings, and street names were beingremade with all the attendant vertigo that Klma implies?5 When was theoriginal not always already lost at the point where it became a memory? Theproblem, as I see it, is rather to explain how the improbable fiction ofidentity, of an essential, authentic identity that exists outside the metamor-phoses of time to recall Bretons characterization of that imago whom hehaunts could ever have been sustained in the face of the reality of le tran-sitoire, le fugitif, le contingent at all.

It is precisely here that memory works its Baudelairean magic, distill-ing fantasy out of the ghosts of the real. We can experience ourselves aspossessing identity across space and time, only because our memoryprovides us with the means of continually recollecting ourselves in theimagined space of an ever-present past. It is able to do so, however,precisely to the extent that memory indeed is a form of forgetting. This isfar more than simply a question of selectivity, partiality or repression; ofwhat we like, or dont like, to remember though it is doubtless that as well


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(Lacan wryly observes that the amnesia of repression is one of the liveliestforms of memory, 2001: 57). The fundamental issue is of the diffrancebetween all memory and what it purports to be a memory of and what, inits decoupling of signifier and signified, this diffrance makes possible.

Memory operates entirely in the register of the symbolic, not of thereal. Our memories are not the things we remember (as we habitually, andtellingly, refer to them, occluding words and things and denying thediffrance that separates them), any more than history is the past or the wordfor moonlight is moonlight. The things we remember have always alreadypassed away. Like Clementis. What we call their memory is merely a trace,existing wholly in the realm of the signifier, be it a sound, a smell, a sightor a word, that is capable of suggesting something else; a trace that hasalready gone through the transformative alchemy so well described byKundera and Baudelaire, and which may yet be transmuted again andagain, and again. Julian Barnes describes it well:

Your first memory wasnt something like your first bra, or your first friend, oryour first kiss, or your first fuck, or your first marriage, or your first child, orthe death of your first parent, or your first sudden sense of the lancing hope-lessness of the human condition it wasnt like any of that. It wasnt a solid,seizable thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way might decoratedown the years with fanciful detail a gauzy swirl of mist, a thundercloud,a coronet but could never expunge. A memory was by definition not a thing,it was . . . a memory. A memory now of a memory a bit earlier of a memorybefore that of a memory way back when. (1998: 3)

Memories stand in the same relation to the experiences that gave rise tothem as images do to the real: they do not correspond to reality, they repre-sent (which is to say, replace) it, and what enables them to do so isdiffrance. Vlado Clementis could be airbrushed out of the photograph, andwhatever that image might have conjured up in Czech memories, onlybecause the photograph was not identical with the reality it depicted; onlybecause Clementis himself had already become a corpse, dangling at theend of a hangmans rope.

Two years after Mirek made his touching pronouncement aboutmemory, the image of Vlado Clementis was resurrected on a 60-hellerCzechoslovak postage stamp in the guise of a Fighter against Nazism andFascism during the Occupation of 193945. His dates of birth and deathwere given, but there was nothing to connect the latter with the Slnsky trialof the same year. And why should we expect there to be? This resurrectionis no less grotesque than the original erasure. But both illustrate the samepoint. As with all phenomena of memory, Clementis was no longer a solid,seizable thing. His life and death had long since turned into signs, some-thing that will not return . . . mere words, theories, and discussions . . .lighter than feathers, frightening no one. I quote here from Kunderasdiscussion of Nietzsches eternal return at the beginning of The UnbearableLightness of Being. In the sunset of dissolution, Kundera continues,


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everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine(1991: 4).

It is because signifiers slide that it is possible to reconcile the eternalflux of life and death with a sense of the permanence of the self. Memorycan sustain the unity of the imagined I, not because it is anchored in a bedof authenticity, but because it floats upon the tide of language; not becauseit is grounded in an original identity, but because it depends upon andprofits from the diffrance it so insistently denies.

VThe veracity of memory its effect of truth, as Foucault would call it (1994) is a function not of its relation with the past that it re(-)presents, but whollyof its place within a signifying chain in the present of language. Theairbrushing works, or not, according to how seamlessly the retouched imagecan be reconciled with other representations through which the event isconstructed, which are themselves, of course, also sliding signifiers. Theimaginary unification of the self by and in memory takes place entirely atthe level of the signifier. Here, as elsewhere, there is no transcendental signi-fied. It is this, I believe, that accounts for both the resilience of the self(-image), and its ultimate vulnerability. If signifiers did not defer, the selfcould not be continually re(-)membered and reconciled with a reality thatchanges all the time at all; but since they do, the same diffrance may alwayssubvert the coherence of the narratives in which that unity is articulated.The issue, then, is of how this imago is stabilized, this illusion of authen-ticity sustained.

A passage I quoted earlier from Testaments Betrayed lamented thepaucity of the contents of our memories schematic and meagre was howKundera described them by comparison with the concreteness of the real.Kundera is obviously correct in this. There will always be missing piecesin the jigsaw of what we remember, holes that are papered over, as often asnot, with inaccuracies. No memory is ever complete. What remains, at best,are stray details, often recollected with extreme clarity which is notnecessarily the same thing as accuracy that lend a patina of authenticityto a picture that, on closer inspection, proves to be mostly compounded ofBaudelaires general colours, silhouettes, and all the arabesques of contour(1986: 43). I believe Kundera overstates his case, however, when he claimsthat a diary entry (for instance) cannot evoke a single concrete image, sothat the imagination is unable to help our memories along and reconstructwhat has been forgotten (1995: 129).

Certainly whatever it is that the imagination reconstructs cannot bewhat has been forgotten, for the reasons given above concerning thediffrance between our memories and the things (we think) we remember.But on encountering some signifier that, as we say, triggers a memory, theimagination has no difficulty whatsoever in reconstructing images of the pastwhich are every bit as concrete as any other image that our minds mayconcoct for us:


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And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dippedin lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me . . . immediately the oldgrey house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set toattach itself to the little wing opening on to the garden that had been builtfor my parents behind it (that truncated section which was all I had seenbefore then); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in allweathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where Iwent to run errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine. And as in thatgame in which the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowlwith water and steeping in it little pieces of paper until then indistinct, which,the moment they are immersed in it, stretch and shape themselves, colourand differentiate, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and recogniz-able, so now all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swanns park, and thewater-lilies on the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their littledwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of thiswhich is assuming form and substance, emerged, town and gardens alike,from my cup of tea. (Proust, 2002: 50)

An idyllic picture, firm and recognizable, paints itself before our eyes.It suffices only to ask, however, which flowers were in bloom, whichweathers, which errands, which streets, which good people and when,exactly, these things happened, to recognize that this picture is a compos-ite, akin to one of Monsieur G.s creations for assuredly what Marcel Proustrecollects here never actually took place in the simultaneity in which thisfamous passage represents it.

What interests me most here is the tactility of each signifier in thisnostalgic chain, beginning with the taste of the madeleine itself. So palpableare the individual elements in the picture, that we lose sight of theabstracted character of the composition as a whole. While the extent of whatwe remember may be pathetically meagre, the manner in which weremember it is anything but schematic. A large part of the reason whymemorys representation of the past convinces us, I believe, is because itoperates through signifiers that evoke the sensuous just like those detailsMonsieur G. chooses to highlight. These then create their effect of truthmetonymically, by standing in for a whole synecdochically rather thanmimetically replicating it. Without their presence, that whole would remainas nebulous and abstract as Kundera says it is. Instead, they enable usalmost to taste it. But these metonyms can create verisimilitude, preciselybecause they are few in number, relative to the tumult of the once-livingpresents that they have come now to signify. Baudelaire observed thatmultiplicity of detail disturbs and even paralyses the memorizing faculty.As with Monsieur G.s pictures, the very paucity of remembered detail theradical simplification is what makes the finished picture more legible. Thisclarity is achieved not by abstracting away from detail as such, but byzooming in on exemplary detail, the detail that signifies, and cropping outwhatever is distracting and irrelevant like that irritating thumb in LangesMigrant Mother.


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Kundera is likewise right, when he writes in The Unbearable Light-ness of Being that we can read Nietzsches myth of eternal return negatively,as a device to highlight the fact that where there is no return, existence hasno weight. There is an infinite difference, he observes, between aRobespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eter-nally returns, chopping off French heads (1991: 4). Granted, the real itselfnever returns; we cannot step in the same river twice. But the signifiers thattake the place of the real may return endlessly, if not always with the samemeaning; and indeed they can do so the more readily precisely because theyneed not always have the same meaning, but obligingly defer to the nuancesof time, place and circumstance. French historians can be proud ofRobespierre not (just) because, as Kundera says, he will not return, butbecause the signifier that has replaced him may also gesture to many thingsother than the guillotine like Progress, the Dawn of Modernity or the Gloryof France, for example. Kundera provides an exquisitely perverse exampleof this kind of association himself:

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation.Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: theyreminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members ofmy family perished in Hitlers concentration camps; but what were theirdeaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period thatwould never return? (1991: 4)

Such repetitions of the signifier itself confer a unity on memory, whichdoes not depend and this is crucial upon there being an equivalent repe-tition in what is signified. The Slnsky trial, in which Vlado Clementisforfeited his life to the Czech nation, was attended, metaphorically speaking,by 15th-century Hussite warriors, 19th-century national awakeners and themuch-loved illustrator of the Czech Mother Goose, all of whom had beenbidden Lazarus, arise! and co-opted for the cause of peace and progress.6These leading players in the socialist drama had assumed many other, noless metaphorical roles in the past. Comfortingly familiar figures, they havereturned again and again throughout the centuries, in many and varied(dis)guises, threading (together) Czech history and conferring on it a coher-ence it might otherwise woefully lack. Such repetition does much to mitigateKunderas lightness of being, without, however, always making it any themore bearable. The weight of such returns may be heavy indeed, as Clemen-tis discovered. Had the entire company of our great minds7 not beenpresent in that Prague courtroom, the verdict might have been quitedifferent. But on the morning of his execution, 3 December 1952, the formerForeign Minister wrote a farewell letter to his wife Lda, summoning up thesame ghosts: I am smoking a last pipe and listening. I hear you clearlysinging the songs of Smetana and Dvork. . . .8 He could not escape thesymbolic order, it seems, even on death row.

Since, on Kunderas own premises, we can never know the real that is


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always already lost to us, but only the imagined world as constituted inlanguage, this recurrence of the signifier what might be described as theeternal return of the never-quite-the-same may be very much more conse-quential than that long-forgotten loss, which is doomed to remain forever inthe realm of that whereof we cannot speak. Lacan makes the same pointwhen he bluntly states that the value of the image as signifier has nothingwhatsoever to do with its signification (2001: 176). A portrait of Hitler maymake us feel warm and cosy, an illustrator of childrens books smile downon the gallows. In fact, I would suggest, this repetition is first and foremostamong the devices through which language creates identity in and throughmemory. It is recurring signifiers that are the Lacanian points de capiton thatmetaphorically fix(ate) the imagined subject, whether individual or collec-tive, in a floating world, and not as the postulate of identity leads us toassume what they signify. The latter may vary infinitely, with each changeof content being hidden from the I by the eternal return of the signifiersthemselves.

Once the past has been resurrected in language, all the wiles by whichlanguage overlays meaning on the world are available for the imaginationof a unitary identity, an imago that is not bound, as Andr Breton realized,by any real time in which the subject has actually lived. This applies equallyto individuals and to what Benedict Anderson (1991) has called imaginedcommunities, like nations. For the temps perdu of the real, which we livein but can never know, is substituted the misplaced concreteness that isconfected for us by and in language. It is the world of words, Lacan says,that creates the world of things the things originally confused in the hicet nunc of the all in the process of coming-into-being by giving its concretebeing to their essence, and its ubiquity to what has always been (2001: 72).And language has no trouble, it seems, in conjuring up in memory a morethan passably concrete facsimile of identity a whole other self, we mightsay.

This perspective also clarifies other well-known tricks of memory itsability, for instance, to mix up times, places and events, to convince us thatwe perfectly recall things that we never experienced, to feel nostalgia forwhat we never left behind, weaving them all into one seamless recollectionof self. Because memory is borne on nothing but chains of signifiers, itmakes no distinctions between a genuine experience, something one hasbeen told, something one has read or something that one imagined in thefirst place. It is a planar space in which all things are equalized, as flat asthe two dimensions of the paper upon whose surface Monsieur G. resur-rected his Parisian phantoms, giving them all the perspectival illusion ofdepth. All these things may be remembered equally concretely, becausetheir concreteness is established by and within language alone.

VIIn memory the individual is always already linked to the socius, for the onething a language can never be is private. The coin of memory is the common


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currency of the language we all speak, which is also the language in whichwe can alone be spoken (of). Every memory partakes in and attaches itssubject to the symbolic order. It is here, I think, that we can give somesubstance to the otherwise very misleading notion of a collective memory.Collectives do not remember only people do. Nevertheless memory isalways collective, in the sense that its operations are wholly dependent uponthe common stock of signifiers. But it is also always individual, because alanguage presupposes a speaker. In Lacans words, only a subject canunderstand a meaning; conversely, every phenomenon of meaning impliesa subject (2001: 11). The signifiers that comprise my individual memoriescarry the entire weight of my personal history it is certainly to be foundnowhere else and yet they also remain the speech of what is irreduciblyother, bearing all its traces too. To insist on this rootedness in the Other thatis language, is to take nothing away from our humanity. It is our humanity.Which was, of course, Emile Durkheims classical response to those whodreamed that they could ever be free of society, and still remain men (1974:55). As Lacan puts it, man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol hasmade him man (2001: 72).

What Durkheim calls society is the supreme extraction of the eternalfrom the ephemeral, the ultimate beautifying lie. Insofar as we are consti-tuted as subjects in language, we do indeed partake of the immortal andinfinite, for language transcends the finite and mortal confines of (the)human being. Language once and for all removes us, or at least, that partof ourselves we can ever know as our selves, from the transience of the real from le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent. We are born again in diffrance,immortalized as denizens of the symbolic order, which everywhere exceedsus. There is nothing mystical, as Durkheim also pointed out (1973), aboutthe doctrine of the soul; it grasps precisely who we are, not as corporealbeings destined to return to the dust whence we came, nor as the self-contained Cartesian egos we like to think we are, but as subjects oflanguage. Long before the post-structuralists challenged the overweeninghubris of Descartes cogito, or Milan Kundera pondered why we areobsessed with the uncertain nature of the self and its identity rather thanthe immeasurability of the soul, religions had equally radically decentredthe subject. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,and the word was God, begins the Gospel of St John. The only problem isthat like Humpty Dumpty, we sometimes confuse being the subjects oflanguage with being its masters (Carroll, 1993: 2545).

But subjects of language we remain, and for that reason our fictionsof identity unavoidable as they are will always remain precarious. Fora social theorist, those moments when the unified self suddenly shows itselfup for the counterfeit it is, moments like Albert Camus lawyer experiencedwhen he heard that laugh on the Pont des Arts, or Kunderas hitchhikersuffered when her fun turned sour in that hotel room, ought then to beinstructive. For they throw into relief the entire edifice of being-in-denialupon which our everyday social intercourse rests. Since, as a representation,


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an imago, the unified self cannot be derailed by any direct comparison withthe real, its complacency may be jarred only by something that puncturesthe flow of the discourse in which its imagined identity is endlessly reiter-ated, rehearsed, performed (see Butler, 1990) a slip of the tongue, a doubleentendre, a disturbing dream or, as in this case, a rude interruption. In usingthe word puncture here, I have in mind that punctum of which RolandBarthes speaks in Camera Lucida, when he distinguishes what he callsstudium and punctum as elements of a photograph.

Barthes studium may be summarized as what makes an image intel-ligible within the cultural preoccupations of a particular time and place(Barthes, 2000: 26). Not so with punctum, which is altogether more Proust-ian (Proust, 2002: 47), depending, as it does, on the objectivity of purechance:

The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is notI who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereignconsciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of itlike an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound,this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all thebetter in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because thephotographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes evenspeckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds,are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium Ishall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, cut, little hole andalso a cast of the dice. A photographers punctum is that accident which pricksme (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes, 2000: 267)

A punctum will be a chance detail that stands out from its surrounding(con)text, irritating its smoothness, confounding its easy legibility a trace,the footprint of an absence, that points elsewhere. The punctum is Freudssymptom, Bretons found object. Might that errant thumb Dorothea Langecropped out of Migrant Mother have been the punctum of that photograph the point at which it could have slipped from being a conventional, ifpowerful, representation of poverty to a human portrait of the mortalFlorence Thompson, the blemish that might have saved it from becomingkitsch? Maybe but this is not the main reason why I am citing RolandBarthes here.

Later in the book, Barthes applies the same term to the freezing of aninstant of time in an image that takes place in any photograph, which isthus always, he says, an intimation of a death to come, because what thephotograph portrays has always already passed away. This new punctum,which is no longer of form but of intensity, he writes, is Time, the lacerat-ing emphasis of the noeme (that-has-been) of pure representation (2000:956). If, as I have argued, the (remembered) self is an imago, an image,then Barthes remarks may appropriately be applied to it in both senses ofthe term punctum. The laugh on the Pont des Arts punctuates the studium,the discursive register in which that self is routinely made culturally


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intelligible to itself and others; it is the stray detail that does not fit, thesignifier on the loose, which disturbs that ready (or should we say, self-evident) legibility. It pricks, it stings, it cuts, it wounds, it bruises be itever so trivial. And in so doing, it opens up a gap the gap Camus lawyerapprehended later that night when he gazed into the mirror of what wouldnormally be the beautifying lie, and for the first time saw the smile therenot as his own, but as that of his reflection.

This is the gap through which time, and the intimation of death, floodsin, because whatimago, as other; bered I that-hasperceptively recoimage, the imagtinual efforts of undone. And thrthe ineffable Lacwhich we once fimpregnable fortof the unadornedthan the imaginein the mirror t

Notes

1. The present arconcludes my boo2004). I am gratef& Society for facil2. The argumentsas to individual id3. My reservationwith those express4. My translationcome to the place5. It may be that wish to historicize6. During the per1948, a determinenational revival 1998a: ch. 7; see 7. As the artist MPrague, in which since the mid-19t1939 (see Sayer, 18. Quoted (and orDvork are quinte


04 047416 (jr/t) 12/11/04 3:15 pm Page 87 was thought to be the self has now been recognized as anbecause the identity of the I who is present with the remem--been is fractured. The timelessness that Andr Breton sognized in Nadja as essential to the maintenance of his self-

e of that I whom he haunts, is momentarily lost. The con-memory to reconcile past and present, then and now, areough this gap in the defences of the ego we can see, if notanian real, then at least the shifting sands of signification,

ondly imagined to be solid rock, on which those seeminglyifications were built. Beyond the imago we catch a glimpse subject, who is both a good deal more and very much lessd I, the remembered self, that we are so used to admiringhe subject who is never and can never be complete.

ticle is a reduced and revised version of a longer essay thatk Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject (Sayer,ul to both Paradigm Publishers and the editors of Theory, Cultureitating publication of these two different versions of the text. developed throughout this article apply as much to collectiveentities (see Sayer, 1998a, 1998b, 2004).s about Freuds own treatment of the unconscious are consistented by Lacan (1998: 24) and Derrida (1986: 201). of Freuds German is literal here. Lacan renders it as I must

where that was (2001: 189).modernity speeds up this turnover, and to that degree we might this remark (see, for example, Berman, 1982).iod that followed the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia ind effort was made to resuscitate the discourse of the 19th-centuryto legitimate the new regime (I discuss this at length in Sayer,also Sayer, 1998b).ax Svabinsky described the occupants of Vysehrad cemetery inleading Czech artists, writers and composers had been buriedh century, at the funeral of the artist Alfons Mucha on 19 July998a: 1921).iginal Czech source given) in Sayer (1998a: 239). Smetana andssentially Czech composers.


References

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Language, Memory and the Subject Sayer