Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm HaverkampЧитать онлайн книгу.
Crucial in a sense, yet perhaps inconsequential, there to be passed beyond—is that of the condition or the fate, shall we say, of literature today?
My subject is that combination of importance and inconsequentiality known as the lyric—which for me at least is the most economical if not quintessential instantiation of literature.
Jacques Derrida has always written about authors deemed literary but recently he has dealt more frequently with the idea of literature itself. For example, he speaks of literature as
[an] historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to Institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution … The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.1
Here is another passage from the same text; an interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (1992):
This experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing more than language, change more than language. ... In order for this singular performativity to be effective, for something new to be produced, historical competence is not indispensable in a certain form (that of a certain academic kind of knowledge, for example, on the subject of literary history), but it increases the chances.2
Or again, Derrida remarks that deconstruction, in this historical moment, is crucially conditioned by “l’événement de la littérature depuis trois siècles, en tant que système de possibilités performatives. Elles ont accompagnées la forme moderne de la démocratie. Les constitutions politiques ont un régime discursif identique à la constitution des structures littéraires” [“the event of literature for the past three centuries, as a system of performative possibilities. They have accompanied the modern form of democracy. Political constitutions have a discursive regime identical to that of the constitution of literary structures.”]3
Finally, here is a passage from “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” which recapitulates with a difference:
Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secures in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain non-censure, to the space of democratic freedom. No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. It is always possible to want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes, … But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it. … The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together—politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.4
Thinking about literature thus seems directed to work eventually to elucidate a certain relation between literature and democracy: is it a metonymical relationship (where literature is linked to what gives rise to democracy), or a metaphorical relation (where literature’s performativity is at least analogous to that of acts of constitution), or a relation of identity of discursive regimes, or a relation of mutual entailment (you can’t have one without the other)?
The relationship as sketched here seems based on two interrelated factors—two factors which bring together the modern ideas or institutions of literature and democracy: first, a freedom which involves a special kind of responsibility, a hyper-responsibility, which includes a right to absolute nonresponse. The writer, like the citizen, must, Derrida writes, “sometimes demand a certain irresponsibility, at least as regards ideological powers … This duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility.”5 There are important questions to be pursued in this domain, apropos both literature and democracy and the freedom and responsibility they involve; but the wager is that these questions will more likely be elucidated if, as they are pursued, the cases of literature and democracy are kept in view together.
The second connecting factor in these passages is the performativity of literature and of the discursive regimes of politics, both of whose discourses work to bring into being the situations they purport to describe. Since appeal to the notion of performativity has become very widespread of late, as the success of Judith Butler’s brilliant Gender Trouble has led people in gender studies and queer theory to take up the notion, it is important to stress that performativity is the name of a problem rather than a solution, that it draws attention to the difficulty of determining what can be said to happen, under what conditions, and to the fact that the event is not something that is simply given. Once again, it is the conjunction of literature and politics through the notion of performativity that gives the complexity of the problem a chance of being elucidated.
But the idea of literature that emerges from such deconstruc-tive reflections on the relation of literature and democracy is not itself my subject, though I hope we may have the opportunity to pursue it. In discussions of the sort I have been quoting, Derrida distinguishes between literature—this modern institution, with its possibility of tout dire—and something else: poetry (or some times belles lettres). And so it is in this context, where literature is linked with democracy and described in terms of a certain hyper responsibility and a performativity of the word, that I want to ask about poetry, particularly the lyric. To put the problem most simply, if we can maintain “no democracy without literature,” it seems considerably harder to imagine claiming, “no democracy without poetry,” or vice versa. What, then, can we say of lyric? What is its relation to the freedom and the performativity that are crucial to the modern idea of literature?
Northrop Frye defines the lyric as utterance overheard, a notion Paul de Man partly takes up in calling it “the instance of represented voice.”6 In an essay on Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire writes of the lyric, “Constatons que l’hyperbole et l’apostrophe sont des formes du language qui lui sont non seulement des plus agréables mais aussi des plus nécessaires … ” [Note that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only the most agreeable but also the most necessary to it].7 And it is in this tradition that de Man, Barbara Johnson, and I have argued that the fundamental tropes of lyric are apostrophe (the address to something that is not an empirical listener) and prosopopoeia (the giving of face and voice to and thus the animation of what would not otherwise be a living interlocutor).8 Both apostrophe and prosopopoeia work to create I-you relations and structures of specularity, which seem characteristic of the dramas projected by lyric. Whether we think of the address to apparently inanimate objects—”O Rose thou art Sick!” “O wild West Wind!” “Sois sage, o ma douleur!”—or the address to the beloved, apostrophes are not only endemic in lyric, they are the moments chosen for satirizing poetic discourse, as in, for example,
O Huncamunca, Huncamunca,