Suspended
Sentence: Legacies of Post-structuralism
Lecture originally given at the University of Athens at a symposium for the journal Synthesis.
http://synthesis.enl.uoa.gr
At least in one of its most powerful and sustained
manifestations, that is in the work of Derrida, the legacy of post-structuralism
plays itself out, pays itself out and has its effects in the field of the legality
of post-structuralism, that is, in its confrontation with the question of the
law. To take the first substantive of the expression in a strong sense, this legacy
would also engage us with the question of the family, and of death, since
in a strict sense a legacy is something handed down normally from
father to son, not as a pure effect of filiation or genetic continuity, but as
something bequeathed through an act of will, through a will, an act of
law, necessarily written, a textual act. Legacy, etymologically, derives from legatus,
the office of a legate. It is something legally notified and documented. It is
a property (both in the material and conceptual sense) donated or bequeathed by
an act of will, itself a document. The notion of a legacy thus takes us into
the realm or the theme of law and legality but also into the field of the
family and of the death of the father, of paternal ascendancy and filiation. A potential
disturbance of this line of filiation, of this teleology, of this law, is inherent,
nevertheless, in its very structure. In
‘Legs de Freud’ [Freud’s Legacy], a chapter in The Postcard, Derrida
writes poignantly of the premature death of Freud’s grandson Heinerle, three
years after the death of Sigmund’s daughter Sophie and Heinerle’s mother Sophie:
‘The speculator can survive the legatee, and this is inscribed in the very
structure of the legacy’.[1] If
a legacy is a writing, writing presupposes temporality, and thus a delay or a
reversal of the filiation it presupposes. The legacy is interrupted. In Derrida’s
title ‘Legs de Freud’, - the legacy of Freud - an expression he says he has
picked up from Lacan and others, one should also hear, through a familiar
translation play, Freud’s legs – Freud’s step. The question of legacy is associated
here then with movement, with moving, stepping forward, and with what
constrains or interrupts or alters this movement. This is a play Derrida
exploits at the end of his essay, where he points to the paralysis (paralyse)
of the logic of the legacy that seems to come into effect here, through a note
pointing to the French word pas, both step and not, as
Derrida had explored in an earlier essay on Blanchot; paralyse is an
analysis – une analyse, that pertains to the step and the not,
the pas, drawing on and drawing between negation and movement.[2] In the instance of Freud’s legacy, one might see
that it is not handed down and handed over, it repeats, in the sense of
stutters, it stumbles – it is le/un pas au-delà, a step/not beyond,
to echo the title of Blanchot’s text.[3] The legacy is interrupted, its interruption is a
possibility inscribed within it just as it is possible that a letter will not
arrive at its destination, or a sentence suspended...
It is in this sense that I want to take the notion
of the ‘legacy of post-structuralism’; if the expression subscribes to the
sense of a filiation, a genealogy, a family treasure or capital, one of the
primary aspects of what is thus transferred is a troubling of the logic of
transmission as such, and in particular as concerns the legal narrative, if I
can put it that way. I want to address this trouble through and around the
motif of suspension, a word and a gesture which as I will try to show
works both in the context of legality and the law, that of narrative and
syntax, and that of movement, or what I am going to increasingly call
gestuality, the movements of the body and of bodies. All these contexts overlap
and are inseparable the one from the other: to suspend as in to hang, to be
suspended over a precipice, at a threshold, at the edge or the limit of
something, to be hanging over, to suspend as in to interrupt, to suspend judgment,
to suspend a (death) sentence, to suspend or be suspended (as in to suspend a
pupil, a student or an employee, or have one’s institutional place and rights
put on hold), suspended animation – a movement arrested as if in a freeze
frame, the suspension (of a vehicle), suspense, usually of narrative but
particularly of those narratives intended to thrill, destined towards a revelation,
perhaps a forteriori in film, finally, but not definitively, suspension of
disbelief, in which Coleridge noted a capacity and a principle of literature.
The legacy of post-structuralism, in the sense I am
going to read it here, although I will also touch on the other sense, concerns
what is bequeathed or not, by post-structuralism, what it hands down,
what by law it transfers by way of property, or what it fails to or declines to.
I will also, that is, be concerned, but more marginally, with the issue of what
is bequeathed to post-structuralism, what is handed down to it,
mobilizing the double sense of the conjunction ‘of’ in the topic title – the
legacy of post-structuralism. I am going to attend to the suspension
of this legacy, and to its legacy of suspension.
The question of what is bequeathed by
post-structuralism, legally, is difficult, since – and this is what the example
from Derrida on Freud has already suggested – post-structuralism has a suspensive
effect on the law; it suspends the law. The legacy of post-structuralism is a
suspension of the law that would suspend the idea itself of a legacy, of
something handed down. The legacy of post-structuralism is suspended, held in
abeyance. This at least is one sense
of suspension. There are others.
The topos, the logic, the gesturality of suspension
has both a weak sense and a strong sense in a certain strain of
poststructuralist thought, namely deconstruction and the work of Derrida. Derrida
notes that literature suspends, and that deconstruction has a ‘suspensive’
effect. In response to Derek Attridge, in the interview titled ‘That strange
institution called literature…’, Derrida
says that ‘The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law’.[4] It is
not, however, a straightforward question of a suspension of reference, with the
effect that text refers only to itself. ‘These texts, Derrida writes (referring
to the kind of texts on which he writes, which instigate a ‘critical
experience of literature’, are ‘not only reflexive, specular or speculative,
[nor do they simply] suspend reference to something else, as is so often
suggested by stupid and uninformed rumour’.[5] What
is suspended is the ‘transcendent reading’ (which means going beyond interest
for the signifier, the form, the language (note that I do not say “text”) in
the direction of meaning or the referent (this is Sartre’s rather simple but
convenient definition of prose)’.[6]
Derrida adds that ‘it is not enough to suspend the transcendent reading to be
dealing with literature, to read a text as a literary text. One can interest
oneself in the functioning of language, in all sorts of structures of
inscription, suspend not reference (that’s impossible), but the thetic relation
to meaning or referent, without for all that constituting the object as a
literary object’.[7]
What I take Derrida to mean here is that the suspension operated by literature,
and which deconstructive criticism elicits from it, has a strong sense and a
particular logic. He clarifies this a bit further on: ‘There is no literature
without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended
means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality. In its
suspended condition, literature can only exceed itself’.[8] Here
Derrida brings out the double, or split nature of suspension: it is both
interruption, deferral, delay, arrest, and de-pendence, pendency, a condition
of dependency. It is the conflagration of these two senses of arrest and
conditionality which is expressed in the notion and the gestuality of
suspension. Derrida clarifies further: ‘to pick up again the deliberately
equivocal expression I just used, literature’s being- suspended
neutralizes the “assumption” which it carries; it has this capacity, even if
the consciousness of the writer, interpreter or reader (and everyone plays all
these roles in some way) can never render this capacity completely effective
and present. First of all, because this capacity is double, equivocal,
contradictory, hanging on and hanging between, dependent and
independent, an “assumption” both assumed and suspended’.[9] There
are more cross-associations, patterns of the signifier, and spatial, gestural
elements at play here than I can do justice to now, but I’d highlight the
expression ‘literature’s being-suspended’, and the dual sense of
de-pendence, to hang from, and in-dependence, to hang between. It is this
effect of hanging, of hanging from (conditionality), of hanging over (in the
sense of having a sentence hanging over you, a suspended sentence), but in any
case of not being on the ground, being grounded, that I want to signal for the
moment, to leave hanging here, to return to later. But not without first using
this image of being in some sense above the ground, in the air, to link
suspension to a ‘lifting’, which echoes the proposition that literature, in
principle ‘lifts’ the law, noted earlier. This lifting is also a suspension, a
taking of something out of its place, an arresting. Later in the Attridge
interview Derrida considers the issue of the ‘lifting’ of repression: ‘This
lifting or simulacrum of a lifting of repression, a simulacrum which is never
neutral and without efficacity, perhaps hangs on this being-suspended (hyphenated
here, as before), this époché of the thesis or the “metaphysical
assumption” which we were talking about just now’.[10] He
adds that it, the suspension, ‘produces a subtle and intense pleasure’.[11] To
‘lift’ repression, to suspend it, to suspend the law or the interdiction, which
in this context is made equivalent to the suspension of the thesis, the
transcendent idea, and the underlying, inevitable ‘metaphysical assumption’
yields pleasure, a pleasure of transgression. If the pleasure of
deconstruction, and the pleasure deconstruction procures from literature and
from a certain mode of literature, ‘is linked to this game which is played at
the limit, to what is suspended at this limit’, as Derrida writes, we can say
that this transgression is suspensive; it is a transgression, a play at the
limit, which suspends (rather than annuls or destroys).[12] It
is thus both conditional, hanging on and hanging over, provisional (in
the sense that a suspension is not definitive) and yet at the same time aerial,
ungrounded.
The double sense of suspension – as an act of law
and as an arrest, a delay, is at work in the text that Derrida writes on
Blanchot’s récit L’Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence], and it is indeed already
also at work in this title – the death sentence (as it has been translated),
but also the suspension of death, the arrest of death. Derrida writes, in
‘Living On (Borderlines)’ an essay which first appeared in English in a volume
called Deconstruction and Criticism, with the body of the text suspended
over the ‘Journal de Bord’, the place of the translator’s footnote: ‘In French
an arrêt comes at the end of a trial, when the case has been argued and
must be judged. The judgement that constitutes the arrêt closes the
matter and renders a legal decision. It is a sentence. An arrêt de mort is
a sentence that condemns someone to death’.[13] The
arrest is both decision, and suspension, in this case of that very decision,
that sentence. Derrida will lead this towards a distinction, later in the text,
between a decisive arrest, and a suspensive arrest: ‘this is the pulse of the
“word” arrêt, the arrhythmic pulsation of its syntax in the expression arrêt
de mort. Arrêter, in the sense of suspending, is suspending the arrêt, in
the sense of decision. Arrêter, in the sense of deciding, arrests the arrêt,
in the sense of decision’.[14] The
French word arrêt, then, has this double sense of verdict and
suspension, the one annulling the other, the decision suspended, the suspension
decided. But this is perhaps, surely, not the sole effect of a double
entendre; the duality is already inherent in suspension as such, between
suspension as a decision (I suspend you from this University), and suspension
as a delay, the lifting of a law (I suspend this sentence, the one I have just
pronounced). This is because suspension is always already in a situation of
pendency, of de-pendence and in-dependence, or inter-de-pendence, a situation
that inheres with any movement, any interval, any step.
The fact that in this instance the suspension at
stake, and the sentence at stake, pertains to death draws evidently on the
strong sense, the affective intensity, that surrounds the question of
suspension here. The strongest, most poignant and ethically charged sense of
suspension is where it relates to death and in particular to the death penalty.
A suspended sentence, in the sense of a prison sentence to which one would be
condemned if one infringed or transgressed certain conditions, gives us the
sense of a threat which is hanging over, which overhangs, a sword of Damocles,
to introduce a Greek name. It tells us something which Derrida, after Kant,
Schmitt, and Benjamin, never tire of reiterating – that the law is nothing
without force. Heeding Agamben, for whom sovereign power is conceptually
intimate with the bare life that can be legally killed, but not sacrificed,
this tells us also that the ultimate recourse of the law is the power, the
potential to put to death, to kill. Derrida also develops and explores this
point in Force of Law, an extended meditation on Walter Benjamin’s essay
‘Critique of Violence’, and originally addressed to the Department of Critical
Legal Studies at Cornell University, which I will not be able to address here.
We can note however that a suspended sentence in the final instance refers to
the delay but also the to the imminent threat of sword, the guillotine, the
electric shock, or the injection, through which the final force of the law is
finally and forcefully delivered. These are some of the concerns which
programme Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales in Paris between December 1999 and March 2001. The lexis
of suspension does not enter into play to a great extent here, explicitly,
except in cases where Derrida is dealing with the suspension, not the
abolition, of the death penalty in some states of the US in the latter years of
the 20th-century, until more ‘humane’, less cruel modes of execution
were found. The apparatus of suspension does, however, programme Derrida’s
concerns in this seminar, since in one instance he addresses the question of
forgiveness, of the pardon (the topic of the seminar for the previous two
years, and the logic of the sovereign exception to the law). He writes of
Schmitt’s Political Theology:
In
these pages, which I recommend you read, Schmitt analyzes all those states of
exception in which the state has the right, the right to give itself the right
to suspend right and law. Schmitt speaks of an “unlimited authority” that
consists in the power to “suspend the entire existing order”. […] Schmitt uses
several times a very strong expression that defines both the exception and
sovereignty: law suspends itself, law has the right or grants the right
to suspend itself (this is the structure of the right to pardon: law above the
laws, right above rights). One has to start from the possibility of this
self-suspension, of this interruption of itself by the law, in order to
understand both the law and its foundation in the principle of sovereignty.[15]
Suspension, self-suspension, is thus where things
begin, in mid-step, in mid-air. It is intriguing to question what Derrida means
by self-suspension here, or at least to conjur the notion of a suspension that
would not depend on a suspender, on a puppet-master pulling the strings. The
law suspends itself.
Here the lexis of suspension is explicit. Beyond
this, at least in the first volume of the seminar on the Death Penalty, the
only one thus far published and translated, the apparatus of suspension comes
into play around the guillotine, not simply in relation to the concrete fact of
its functioning, but insofar as the reputedly ‘humane’ machine instantiates
death in the blink of an eye through the cutting descent of the suspended
blade, and thus, Derrida seems to imply, installs a paradigmatic, conditional
scene at the heart of any philosophy of death and thus of life, the capacity to
decide, to distinguish in a clean cut between life and death. But the motif of
suspension and of the suspended sentence is also in play when Derrida
speculates on what it is that fascinates, and appalls, in the death penalty,
proposing that it is not its cruelty, or really the fact that the guilty party
has given over the right to life to the law, or the mode, but the finality, the
fact that death will occur at this hour on this day; what it annuls is the open
finitude of a life, the fact that ‘my death’ will not happen to me, will not
take place for me as an event; it is the indetermination of death that the
death penalty robs me of, and what fascinates me in the death penalty is this
fantasy of having my death programmed, appointed. The suspended sentence is at
work here too; insofar as it is a sentence, it must end, but it can keep on,
clause upon clause, suspending or holding in abeyance the final closure of the
full stop. In some of the most poignant moments of the seminar Derrida points
to an offhand comment in an essay he has found, in which the author proposed
that the contemporary era, with debate about the definition of death and the
instances of culturally different definitions of death, was one in which the ‘deconstruction
of death’ has begun.[16]
Derrida dreams that deconstruction might in some way thus be able to have done
with death. One can at least propose that it suspends it, perhaps, and with it
the definitive sense of a legacy.
Let’s go back a bit. The suspended sentence
indicates the ambivalence of the law, the way that its decision spits into its
application and its interruption. A death penalty can only be suspended by the
intervention of the law. Suspension however is not a repeal, a reversal; the sentence
remains hanging over, overhanging. It has the structure of a promise, a
postponement. It opens up in the sentence the difference, difference of
postponement, a displacement of presence and of the present. The sentence
remains hanging, incomplete, postponed in such as way as it will always haunt
the subject to whom it applies, always threaten them with a potential
application. Suspension has a quality of spectrality.
Here it seems pertinent to point to a text which
has, as I have explored elsewhere, haunted the theoretical imagination in an
understated, ‘secret’ manner – Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar’.[17]
Like Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort it also concerns, but perhaps more
literally, less abstractly, a suspension of death and of a death sentence.
Briefly, M. Valdemar is hypnotized on the point of death, and remains, although
‘physically dead’, under the power of the hypnotist. Following a brief
exchange, the hypnotist ‘wakes him up’, whereupon Valdemar’s corporeal body
disintegrates into a visceral mass. The narrative of the eponymous protagonist
is telling here insofar as he remains as if ‘suspended’ overt the bottomless
abyss of non-existence. He is both suspended in the sense that his ‘sentence’
has been suspended; his time is up, but the completion of his time is
postponed. But also in the sense that he is hanging over a void, suspended as
if by the voice of the hypnotist, by the thin thread of vocality that links him
to the voice of the hypnotist, suspended then by his tongue. It is significant,
of course, that is by language that he is suspended, that his utterances, as sujet
de l’énonciation, and his responses to the hypnotist’s voice, are
what keeps him hanging onto a kind of life, and what postpones – suspends the
completion of medical death. In a parallel exploration of Poe’s tale Lacan uses
this example to point to what he calls the ‘the sustentation of the subject in
speech’; it is by language that the subject is hooked into
a symbolic mode of existence.[18] This tale is just perhaps the most salient
symptom of Poe’s fascination for suspended death in the figure and dramaturgy
of premature burial. Beyond the Gothic interest of this thematics, what drives
its particular prominence as a reference, sometimes an echo, sometimes an
explicit focus, across writing by Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Agamben, and Nancy
is the close relation it proposes between corporeal death, language, and the
Law. Its proximity to other salient fascinations of deconstructive and
poststructuralist literary and critical theory such as the work of Mallarmé
lies in the way that it problematizes, suspends, the law of reference, and
takes us into a strange zone where the notion of a grounded subject, held in
relation to the objects to which s/he refers in a secure and consensually
communicative language, no longer holds sway. Rather, the suspended body sways.
What interests me is how the juridical and
linguistic fields in which suspension seems to operate – postponement (of a
sentence (un jugement), interruption (of a sentence (une phrase)
is conjoined with a semantics and poetics, even, of movement and of the body.
To suspend something is to to hang it, to dangle it, in the air. To be
suspended is to be not on the ground, to be hanging, dangling, or at a limit, risking
a fall. Suspension, in this narrow sense, but one which is intimately linked to
the juridical sense and the linguistic sense, involves being at a threshold, at
a limit, on the other side of which the ground falls away. Something inherent
to this logic connects interruption with this lack of ground, the ground giving
way, a lack of certainty about where one is standing, whether there is form
ground to stand on, whether one’s judgment is founded, whether the sentence can
be justly completed (both in the juridical and the linguistic sense). To
suspend, to be suspended, to be hanging over or above (sus- pendre) is
to lack firm ground, but also to depend on something or someone holding
you up, dangling you, perhaps like a marionette. Suspension reverses the
direction of dependency, since in the usual run of things one depends on the
ground and on having one’s feet on the ground to guarantee upright posture, the
uprightness of a stance and thus of a Subject. The Subject is usually conceived
of as something, someone, who stands to attention, which stands by itself, independently,
although to attend also to the word one also might want to valorize the
particles of the Subject and say that it is something thrown under, just
as in juridical/political terms the subject bows, prostrates themselves to the
sovereign, and is under, closer to the ground. The suspended is inherently
aerial, in the air. To be suspended is thus not to depend on the ground but to
be hanging in the air, suspended in some manner from above, above the ground.
Although this is not so clear in a later example I will come to. Suspension
arrests gravity through some prosthetic means. It arrests the movement which in
the usual run of things would pull everything groundward. One speaks of
suspended animation. Suspension arrests the movement of a fall. It hooks the
body in its fall, prosthetically, but without stabilizing it in a new, grounded
security. It is at a threshold, at a limit, on an overhang. It hangs over.
Here a rich vein of sense is opened in the writing
of Georges Bataille, whose heterogeneous oeuvre is punctuated by a concern with
posture, bodily positioning, with a heretical phenomenology, so to speak, of
bodily experience. There is Bataille’s fascination with the pineal eye, with
the fantasmatic erection of the human shape as an ecstatic and subversive
escape from horizontality. There is his obsessive focus on the sun as the
principle of absolute expenditure, without reserve. There is the experimentation
with figures and modes of acephalous ontology. All of these figures, and more
subvert normative, and, I would add, hetero-normative conceptions of the human
concept and shape. They push against metaphysical and phenomenological
orthodoxies founded and anchored in the notion of a grounded Subject, even if
Bataille might ultimately remain wedded (but not without himself questioning
it, not being able to think further) to the notion of a subject of experience.
Nevertheless, certain instances in Bataille’s work postulate a radical un-grounding
of the subject, and propose a suspensive experience as a profound reversal and
perversion of the idea and the performance of the human.
I will point to two examples, one from a 1931 text
written to accompany drawings by André Masson, which commences with the
following sentences: ‘Me, I exist,
suspended in an infinite and unnamed void’ [Moi, j’existe, suspendu dans un
vide infini et sans nom…].[19] What
Bataille intends is the absolute contingency of his existence, and to this
extent one might link what he says to the nausea of Sartre’s Roquentin
in the slightly later novel of that name. But whereas Roquentin is on the
ground, walks about, and is repelled by the facticity of the tree, the soil out
which it grows, the visceral being of what is on the ground, one imagines
Bataille, here, to be suspended, in the air. Perhaps falling, and yet not
falling, (as one might see Baudelaire), since there is a hook, the hook of
contingency which has placed him here, existing, suspended. Elsewhere Bataille
refers to the hook, the chance of a hook, which retains him in existence,
suspended in the arc of a fall… this perversion of gravity is figured perhaps,
in the contemporary practice of body suspension, which I would propose as a
literalisation, a dramatization, so to speak, of Bataille’s heterology.[20]
This perverse phenomenology is also evident in a
crucial scene in Bataille’s novel The
Blue of Noon, written in 1935 but not published until 1957, my second
example. Already in the dense and programmatic preface to the novel Bataille
writes: ‘To a greater or lesser extent, everyone depends on stories…’ [Tout
homme est suspendu aux récits…].[21] This is a curious formulation which draws out
the issue of suspense, narrative suspense, but also goes further than this, I
think, and merits connection with what Bataille says later in the same preface
where he talks of those books which are written out of a sense of rage, which
are read in a feverish, trance-like state, and which the reader feels their
authors were constrained to write. There is an element of suspense but also of
suspension in the relations between author, text and reader; it is as if the
text suspends the usual and normative communicative relation, on the one hand,
interrupting communication with an affective breach. But Bataille’s language
also connotes the sense that the texts to which he refers suspend, put on hold,
the socially sanctioned and consensual rules and laws, discursive and
experiential, which fix individuals as discontinuous entities. The texts hold their
authors and readers over an affective abyss, which is threatening in so far as
it offers no ground. This is what I think Bataille means when he talks about
being ‘suspended’ by, from, through narratives, tales. It is significant also
that among those books Bataille mentions which he feels the authors have been
‘constrained’ to write one finds Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort, as if the
seam or the line – le fil – of suspension is running through these texts
outside the intentionality of their authors.[22]
The scene to which I referred earlier occurs
towards the end of the novel, when Troppmann and his lover Dirty, short for
Dorothea, are in Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx. Having walked out of the
town to a ploughed field next to an escarpment overhanging the cemetery, on the
day of the dead, the couple have sex, half-immersed in the earth of the field,
but start to slip down towards the edge of the overhang. Troppmann manages to
grab hold of something to arrest their fall, but since the graves of the
cemetery below are each adorned with a candle, he has the impression, he says,
of falling into the void of the sky:
At
one turning in the path, an empty space opened beneath us. Curiously, this
empty space, at our feet, was no less infinite than a starry sky over our
heads. Flickering in the wind, a multitude of little lights was filling the
night with silent, indecipherable celebration. Those stars, those candles –
were flaming by the hundred on the ground; ground where ranks of lighted graves
were massed. We were fascinated by this chasm of funereal stars. […] Leaving
the path across ploughed earth, we took the lovers’ dozen steps. We still had
the graves beneath us. […] We were stunned making love over a starry graveyard.
Each of the lights proclaimed a skeleton in its grave, and they thus formed a
wavering sky, as unsteady as the motions of our mingled bodies. […] She uttered
a terrible scream. I clenched my teeth as hard as I could. At that moment we
started sliding down the sloping ground. Father down, the rock formed an
overhang. If I hadn’t stopped our slide with my foot, we would have fallen into
the night, and I might have wondered if we weren’t falling into the void of the
sky.[23]
Troppmann and Dirty are suspended, overhanging, at
a threshold. But this suspension, and the dynamic of Troppmann’s hallucinatory
image, goes further than this in seeming to suspend the law of gravity, the
direction of the fall. It is this suspension of referential normativity which
Bataille finds integral to literature, its capacity, he says elsewhere of
seeing the sea in the sky (here citing Rimbaud), la mer allée avec le soleil.[24] The
gravitational suspension Bataille stages here resonates with a later moment in
critical theory – in the work of Paul Virilio, whose focus on technologically-induced
speed and acceleration also suggests limits at which the fall can be upward, speed
overcoming gravity.[25] Troppmann
and Dirty do not fall, however, upward or downward; they are on the edge,
on the precipice, and this state of suspension is the limit around which
much of Bataille’s thought revolves. The suspension takes places at or on the
threshold, without tipping into the ether, or the other, without taking off for
transcendence. Suspension is not sublation. The subversive gestuality that runs
across and through Bataille’s writing is a suspension and an interruption of
dialectical transformation.
At this point, or on this line, I want to move
towards a conclusion by evoking Genet’s astounding essay on the Tightrope
Walker, Le Funambule. As we will see Genet proposes an apparently far
more dialectically successful account, and this perhaps informs Bataille’s
condemnation of Genet for the incapacity to communicate which emerges from his
texts, an incapacity to open to alterity.
But this will also lead us back to Derrida and to the death penalty. Genet’s
text, generically trembling between an extended prose poem and a theory of art,
is dedicated to the acrobat Abdallah Bentaga, who he had met in 1955, and who
would ultimately commit suicide. Genet’s panegyric to the funambulist addresses
the tightrope dancer even as it concerns the question of address and
adroitness, of how the artist should address the wire. It proposes a series of
prescriptions about this address: ‘you will love it’ [tu l’aimeras], ‘go give it a kiss [va lui donner un baiser], ‘ask it to support you’
[demande lui de te supporter], ‘salute it and thank it’ [salue-le, remercie-le],
‘caress it’ [caresse-le], ‘win it over’ [apprivoise-le], ‘you must risk an
actual, physical death’ [tu dois risquer une mort physique définitive].[26] In
doing so Genet’s text functions as a poetic manifesto, the statement of a
poetics concerning the way Genet will address his own art, his own material.
This will involve a passionate, erotic investment in the instrument – the wire,
the words – ‘you will love it, with an almost carnal love’ [Tu l’aimeras, et
d’un amour presque charnel] – such that the acrobat’s dance, the turns or
tropes on the wire are not an expression of the skill or prowess of the dancer,
of their ego, but of the wire itself – ‘Give your metal wire the most beautiful
expression, not of you, but of it’ [Ton fil de fer charge-le de la plus belle
expression non de toi mais de lui].[27] It
is the wire that is brought alive by the funambulist: ‘Your leaps, your
somersaults … you will execute them successfully, not for you to shine, but so
that a steel wire that was dead and voiceless will finally sing’ [Tes bonds […] tu les réussiras non pour que
tu brilles mais afin qu’un fil d’acier qui était mort et sans voix enfin
chante].[28]
Such an expressivity will demand the artist’s removal from sociality – ‘Cruelly,
he repels any curious person, any friend, any appeal that might try to incline
his work toward the world’ [Cruellement il écarte tout amour, tout ami, toute
solicitation qui tâcheraient d’incliner son oeuvre vers le monde].[29] But
it will also demand a fundamental solitude and death – ‘deadly solitude’ [une
solitude mortelle], ‘you will dance on in a desert solitude’ [tu danseras sur et dans une solitude
desertique], ‘an absolute, incommunicable solitude’ [cette solitude absolue,
incommunicable].[30]
The transformation also comprises the death of the subject, their disappearance
– where are they in the field of phenomena? Genet asks: ‘But if it is the wire
that dances motionless, and if it is your image that it makes leap, where,
then, will you be?’ [Mais si c’est lui (le fil de fer) qui danse immobile, et
si c’est ton image qu’il fait bander, toi, ou donc seras-tu?].[31] The funambulist dies before performing – ‘Death
– the Death of which I speak to you–is not the one that will follow your fall,
but the one that precedes your appearance on the wire. It is before climbing
onto it that you die’ [La Mort, la Mort dont je te parle, n’est pas celle qui
suivra ta chute, mais celle qui precede ton apparition sur le fil. C’est avant
de l’escalader que tu meurs].[32] The death or detachment of the dancer from social
or terrestrial attachment is, as the text suggests above, their aesthetic
apotheosis; the dancer becomes Image: ‘The one who dances will be dead, bent on
every beauty’ [Celui qui dansera sera mort, decidé à toutes les beautés], and
this mobile image that belongs to the wire, that is its expression, is
fascinating, an object of fascination, a performance of exactitude.[33] The
dancer must thus disappear into their image and become an embodiment of
absence, ‘a block of absence’ [bloc d’absence], as Genet puts it.[34]
This transformation, of the dancer into Image,
seems to me eminently Hegelian, it reads like a sublimation, a dialectical
sublation; Death, here is part of a process, the becoming Image or Art of the
dancer. Genet prescribes an abject appearance and social status to the
funambulist (and thus to himself), to counter but also to prepare for the
sublimation that takes place on the wire, in the act, and the funambulist’s art
is a transformational, sublating movement from abjection to the sublime.[35]
However, if we recall the etymological sense of abjection and of the sublime,
the gestuality of the fall or rejection downward of the former, and the sense
of suspension in the latter – sublime = to be suspended in the air – another
sense comes to the fore, another sense of death. As Genet insists, the
acrobat’s suspension means that there is a risk, and that death is also a risk,
not simply a process. ‘I will add, though, that you must risk an actual,
physical death’ [J’ajoute pourtant que tu dois risquer une mort definitive].[36] The
beauty of the dance will only be on the basis of the risk of death, as in those
other ‘cruel games’ - ‘poetry, war, and bullfighting’ [La poésie, la guerre, la
corrida].[37]
The risk of death requires precision on the part of the acrobat, and this
precision will make for the beauty of the dance – cette exactitude sera la
beauté de la danse, but also – the
audience will see death as ‘impudique’, a rude presumption, threatening the act
of beauty; they will see it as a threat to the aesthetic beauty of the dance:
You,
you must know how to dance so beautifully, with such pure gestures, in order to
seem precious and rare; thus, when you get ready to make the midair somersault,
the public will be anxious, and almost indignant such a graceful being risks
death. But you succeed in the somersault and return to the wire, while the
spectators cheer you, for your skill consists in saving a very precious dancer
from an indecent death.
[Toi
il faut que tu saches danser d’une facon si belle, avoir des gestes si purs
afin d’apparaitre précieux et rare, ainsi, quand tu prepareras à faire le saut
perilleux le public s’inqueitera, si’indignera predque qu’un être si gracieux
risque la mort. Mais tu réussis le saut et revient sur le fil, alors les
spectateurs t’acclamment car ton adresse vient de preserver d’une mort
impudique un très précieux danseur].[38]
The dance on the wire is thus suspended between two
deaths, the transformational, dialectical death that takes place in order to
remove the dancer, the artist, from social and terrestrial attachment and in
order to complete their becoming–Image, and Beauty, and the risked
physical death of a fall, death as cruelty and as threat. The
funambulist’s wire is the line which separates one death from the other.
In Glas,
1974, – on the Hegel side (since to
recall that the text is split into two with one side devoted to Hegel, and the
other to Genet), but right opposite that place in the text where he considers Le
Funambule – Derrida is concerned with the death penalty, and with Hegel’s
proposition that the death penalty is the condition of freedom.[39] It
ensures the capacity of man to ‘raise himself above the law’; death is the
phenomenon through which man becomes subject by submitting himself to the
universal law. This ‘raising above’ is, for Hegel, Derrida comments, also a
‘relief’, an Aufhebung. Put crudely, Hegel inscribes the death penalty
and death as a penalty, within the operation of the dialectic, as a necessary
moment in the process of sublation. Suspension
is not sublation, as I said above. On the other side, with Genet, Derrida
highlights the way in which the wire cuts and separates the subject from
it/himself, and as I suggested splits Death in two, the way it structures and
divides Genet’s text itself as a structuring, generative principle. The wire, le
fil, becomes, on both sides of the text, the motif of a separation,
mirroring or mimicking the line that separates the Hegel side from the Genet
side, and which, on both sides, separates presence from itself, separates Death
from itself.
The wire thus
introduces an embodied, performative dimension – the risk of a fall. This risk
and this performance, the risk of this performance, the notion that performance
is always a risk, the possibility of a fall or a failure, are inscribed in
post-structuralism.
[1] Jacques
Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’ [Legs de Freud]
in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud
and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 305.
[2] Ibid., p. 337. The essay on Blanchot in
question is ‘Pas’ in Parages Paris:
Galilée, 1986), originally in Gramma 3-4
(1975). The next essay in The Postcard
is also titled ‘Paralysis’.
[3] See Maurice
Blanchot’s generically unidentified text Le
Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); trans. The Step Not Beyond (New York: SUNY Press, 1992).
[4] ‘”This
Strange Institution called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Acts of Literature (London & new
York: Routledge, 1992), p. 36.
[5] Ibid., p. 41.
[6] Ibid., p. 44.
[7] Ibid., p. 45.
[8] Ibid., p. 48.
[9] Ibid., p. 49.
[10] Ibid., p. 56.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Jacques Derrida,
‘Living On (Borderlines)’ in Harold Bloom (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979),
p. 110.
[14] Ibid. pp. 114-15.
[15] Jacques
Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume 1 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 85.
[16] Ibid., pp. 239-42.
[17] See Patrick
ffrench, ‘Valdemar’s Tongue’ in T. Baldwin, J. Fowler, S. Weller (eds.), The Flesh in the Text (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2007), pp. 229-42.
[18] Jacques
Lacan, Le Seminar Book II: The Ego in the
Theory of Freud and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 131. See also Patrick ffrench, art.cit, p. 239.
[19] Georges
Bataille, ‘Sacrifices’ in Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985), p. 130.
[20] See Georges
Bataille, Guilty (New York: SUNY
Press, 2011), p. 74: ‘On a roof I saw large, sturdy hooks (crochets) placed
halfway up. Suppose someone falls from a rooftop… couldn’t he maybe catch hold of one of those hooks with an
arm or a leg? If I fell from a rooftop, I’d plummet to the ground. But if a
hook was there, I’d come to a stop halfway down!’.
[21] Georges
Bataille, Blue of Noon (London:
Penguin, 2001), p. 105. French version in Romans
et récits (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 112.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid, p. 99.
[24] See Georges
Bataille, ‘Introduction’ in Eroticism (London:
Marion Boyars, 1987), p. 25,
[25] See Paul
Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso,
1997), p. 68.
[26] ‘The
Tightrope Walker’ in Fragments of the
Artwork (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 69, 73. Original
French Le Funambule (Paris:
Gallimard, L’Arbalète, 2010), pp.10, 19.
[27] Ibid., pp. 69-70/10-11.
[28] Ibid., p. 70/9.
[29] Ibid., p. 75/23-24.
[30] Ibid., p. 71-2/13.
[31] Ibid., p. 71/14
[32] Ibid., pp. 71/14-15.
[33] Ibid., p. 71/15.
[34] Ibid., pp. 72-3/17.
[35] See Claire
Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime:
Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 1980).
[36] Genet, Le Funambule, p. 73/19.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid. p. 74/20.
[39] See Jacques
Derrida, Glas (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 99-103.
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