Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy

208 Pages·1981·34.437 MB·English

by  Geoffrey H. Hartman

f
DERRIDA
PHILOSOPHY .
Saving
the 1ext
LiteraturelDerridalPhilosophy
Geoffrey H. Hartman
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore and London
Geoffrey H. Hartman is Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Yale University.
Books
The Un mediated Vision. An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,
RilkeandValery 1954
Andre Malraux 1960
Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 1964
Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 1970
The Fate of Reading and Other Essays 1975
Akiba's Children 1978
Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today 1980
Editions
Hopkins: A Selection of Critical Essays 1966
Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose 1970
New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth. English Institute
Essays 1972
Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities. With D. Thorburn 1973
Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. English Institute
Essays 1978
Copyright © 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London
Originally published, 1981
Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1982
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hartman, Geoffrey H
Saving the text.
Bibliography: p. 168
Includes index.
I. Criticism. 2. Derrida, Jacques. Glas.
I. Title.
PN81.H285 801'.95 80-21748
ISBN 0-8018-2452-4
ISBN 0-8018-2453-2 (pbk.)
For the Subject
Was aber bleibet, stiften die Dichter.
(That which remains is founded by poets.)
Friedrich Holder/in
So wenig der Geist das Absolute ist, so wenig geht er auf in
Seiendem. Nur dann wird er erkennen was ist, wenn er
nicht sich durchstreicht. Die Kraft solchen Widerstandes ist
das einzige Mass von Philosophie heute.
(Spirit is not the Absolute any more than it is something that
disappears into being without a remainder. It will only rec
ognize the nature of things if it does not cancel itself out.
That force of resistance constitutes the sole measure of phi
losophy today.)
Theodor Adorno
Riechen wir nochNichts von der gottlichen Verwesung?
auch Gotter verwesen! ... Mit welchem Wasser konnten
wir uns reinigen? Welche Suhnfeiern, welche heiligen
Spiele werden wir erfinden mussen?
(Do we not yet smell anything of the divine putrefaction?
Gods, too, putrefy! ... With what water could we purify
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games
shall we have to invent?)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Contents
List of Figures Xl
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xv
1 Monsieur Texte
2 Epiphony in Echoland 33
3 How to Reap a Page 67
4 Psychoanalysis: The French Connection 96
5 Words and Wounds 118
Notes 158
Bibliography of Cited Works 168
Index of Names 176
Index of Subjects 181
List of Figures
1 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 7 10-11
2 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 8 12-13
3 Valerio Adami, Ich, signature painting 34
4 Rene Magritte, L'fle au tresor 36
5 Rene Magritte, La legende des siecies 37
6 Rene Magritte, Le domaine d'Arnheim 38
7 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument to Replace
the Washington Monument: Scissors in Movement 39
8 Bill Lombardo, Monument Sculpture 40
9 Etienne-Louis Boullee, Tour en cone tronque 41
10 Etienne-Louis Boullee, Pyramide sous ciel gris 42
11 Top, Thomas Bewick, Ass; bottom, Thomas Bewick, Thumbprint
(signature) 43
12 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 251 (part) 53
13 Jost Ammann, Aus dem Geschlechterbuch der Familie Tucker 54
14 Johann Kaspar Hiltensperger, Logocentric Labyrinth 55
15 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 290 68-69
16 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 291 70-71
17 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 290 (part) 76
18 Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 113b 88
19 Alberto Giacometti, La main 91
20 William Blake, signature painting from Milton 114
21 Victor Hugo, signature painting 115
22 Guillaume Apollinaire, signature poem from Calligrammes 116
23 William Blake, signature from title page to Milton (detail) 116
XI
Acknowledgments
I have had the assistance, at various points, of Barbara Johnson, Lise
Davis, and Claudia Brodsky. Jim di Loreto was indispensable in helping to
prepare both the final manuscript and the index. Jacques Derrida generously
facilitated permission to reproduce some pages of Glas. I thank him, the
Editions Galilee, Valerio Adami, the Galerie Maeght, the Bibliotheque
Nationale, and the Musee Victor Hugo for photographs or reproductions
whose copyrights they hold. Also Mme. Rene Magritte and Harry Torczyner
for generously allowing me to reproduce the works of Magritte on the cover
and in the book.
Chapters 1 and 2 were originally published in the Georgia Review while
under the editorship of John Irwin. Chapter 4 was an English Institute essay
in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, edited by me and published
by the Johns Hopkins University Press. An early version of the opening pages
of chapter 5 appeared in Medicine and Literature, ed. Enid R. Peschel (New
York: Neale Watson, 1980).
xiii
Introduction
P
HILOSOPHY, though it has its own classics, has rarely been content
with the dependence of mind on text. It has wished to liberate thought
from a grammar imposed either by language or by those special and influential
closetings of language which every "great book" fosters. (Sometimes it lias
tried, instead, to find an ideal grammar occulted by too mutable a language.)
The conflict of dialectic with rhetoric, of ratio with oratio, or, as Vico would
say, in reaction to Descartes and taking up a distinction made by Aristotle, of
topical truths leading to the certum and of scientific truths leading to more
than verisimilitude, to the verum itself-these are but symptoms of a division
in the world of thought that has lasted so long that it begins to seem fated. By
calling this book Saving the Text I do not imply a religious effort in the
ordinary sense: the allusion is to the well-known concept of "saving the
appearances" (sozein ta phainomena), and my title suggests that we are still
endeavoring to convert thinking to the fact that texts exist.
How can mind accept rather than subvert or overlook (by sophisticated
scanning techniques, which are the opposites of close reading) the language of
great writers, both in philosophy and literature? That struggle is intense and
productive in Jacques Derrida. He is a philosopher who for many is not a
philosopher at all but a strange philologist; students of literature often react to
him with resentful admiration. His discours de la folie blurs genres or engages
in so interminable a mode of analysis that the sanity of writing-its indebted
ness to evolved conventions, as well as its apparent realism-is threatened.
My book has Derrida as its focus, but it is not an exposition of his work. I am
concerned chiefly with Derrida's place in the history of commentary, and
with Glas as an event in that history.
It was Glas that helped me, a nonphilosopher, to approach Derrida and
forgo the scruple that I had too small a knowledge of technical philosophy.
For I was always thinking about the status of commentary, and what the
history of interpretation, in the form of commentary, could teach. Derrida's
Glas presented a challenge. It seemed to substantiate what Valery had fore
seen in his famous essay of 1919, "The Crisis of the European Mind,"
namely, that modern European culture would end up as an "infinitely rich
xv