One Step Not Beyond . . . the Grave

One Step Not Beyond . . . the Grave

The intellectual differences between Didi-Huberman and his antagonists turns out to be surprisingly slight: both sides agree that “it is impossible, indeed, to bear witness from the inside of death” (105); while his critics want to put an end to all images, Didi-Huberman merely wants to preserve—that is, read-- a select few, and these few, moreover, do not require any rethinking of what he calls the dual system of reading images as veils that cover and torn veils that reveal Didi-Huberman uses to read all images deserving of our attention. In place of optical unconscious, we get a “torn consciousness; in place of the four photographs, we get a generalized account of the way images appeal to “the incessant desire to show what cannot be seen” (133).

Didi-Huberman’s category of the legitimate because inadequate “in spite of all” image / testimony has as much conceptual integrity in his eyes as the exaggerated and distorting “all” image have for his critics. The category enables to Didi-Huberman to form a new way of classifying the dead: “Between the healthy victims who did not want to speak and the victims to weak to speak if they wanted, Didi-Huberman says there is “a third position. It is no less extreme, such is its incomparable force. It is the testimony formulated and transmitted in spite of all by the members of the Sonderkommando” (105). He assigns a different kind of box to testimonies, imagining that the sending, transmission, and reception of these notes and photos is a closed matter, the last word. Didi-Huberman even acceding to their theological title for the notes:

They form what is called—with reference to the megliot of the Hebrew Bible, the scrolls of the “Lamentations of Jeremiah” in particular—the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Writing of the disaster, writing of the epicenter, the Scrolls of Aushwitz constitutes the testimonies of the drowned who were not yet reduced to silence, who were still capable of observing and describing. Their authors ‘lived closer to the epicenter of the catastrophe than any other prisoner. They were present, day after day, at the destruction of their own people, and were aware, in the global scale, of the process to which the victims were doomed.’ Their whole effort was to transmit the knowledge of such a process as far as they possibly could. A knowledge that would have to be searched for in the blood soaked earth, in the ashes, and in the heaps of bones in which the members of the Sonderkommando disseminated their testimonies in order to give them some chance of surviving” (108).

The closure of the category of testimony, enfolded into the concept of the archive as a box, is all that matters to Didi-Huberman, apparently, since it allows for a narrative sequencing of death and life, a topography of transmission of, even if that means that testimony becomes a homogenous category, regardless of the medium specificity of its contents and their fragmentary nature. Didi-Huberman’s “third position” amounts to a stabilizer, a tranquilizer, and stands as the non-paradoxical inversion of Agamben’s no man’s border land paradoxes of homo sacer.

The singularity of what Didi-Huberman singles out as a “not all” image (and the endlessly revisable narrative it generates) is really not singular at all, just a repetition, like his many insistent repetitions of the phrase “in spite of all,” like his repetitive characterization of the not image as a rethinking of history. Like his critics, Didi-Huberman does not interrogate want it means to construct the camp within the camp, to represent death from the “outside” of death, and so remain stuck in a stop and go loop—a live wire with a dead end, so to speak.

But whoever does not try to think and read the part of the fiction and thus of literature that is ushered in by sucha phrase in even the most authentic testiomony will not have begun to read or hear Blanchot. This holds for the majority of his political prosecutors, among others. (47)

Before we can address the relation between un(repeatability) and (un)readability in order to return once again to the Scrolls of Auschwitz, we first address a question demanded by Derrida’s own text: how readable or unreadable is it? By addressing this question through a close reading of the macro-structure of Demeure, we will link (un)readability in relatin to (un)repeatability) and to (ir)replacebability. We begin by consider Derrida’s an implicit demand to read the text as a remainder outside a remainder generated by parallels between the ending of the text and the beginning of the postscript. A problem of knowing when and how to end arises in the last pages of Derrida’s text and, conversely, a dictum to read beyond the beginning emerges in Derrida’s post-script, specifically, as a citation, entitled “Reading ‘beyond the beginning’; or, On the Venom in Letters, Postscript and ‘Literary Supplement’” (104). Derrida ends his essay rather self-consciously by dealing his own ending with series of directions toward the future made in the present in the form of citations on endings by Corneille, La Fontaine, and Plutrach.

In order to as your pardon for having made things go on so long, in order to end without ending in great haste . . here are several desmormais’s with which both the French language and French literature have distinguished themselves. These desmormais [henceforths] all say--it is certainly not insignificant--something about the compassion and the "complaining" to which, as with remainders, as with a talk, one must know how to put an end."(102)

Derrida finally ends his overlong text at slow speed with a quotation from a French translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: "He knew to write this: henceforth, enough has been said on this point" (105).

Yet Derrida does not the work end there. He adds a seemingly unrelated and irrelevant postscript about attacks on him made in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) that followed his being awarded a Ph.D. by Cambridge University over a period of years. And Derrida links them formally by ending both with a citation. By asking what the relation between the text and post-script is, we may more fully understand its unread –ability and how it bears on reading the Scrolls as storage units that structure the reconstruction of the camp. Derrida’s text and postscript may be linked by Derrida comments on Blanchot’s readability in the text and his comments on reading beyond the beginning in the post script, his characterization of the last page of The Instant of My Death as a (sort of) postscript (even though neither the word “post-script” nor “p.s.” on the last page of Blanchot’s text), and his mention of E. R. Curtius’s European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages in the text of Demeure (23) and the postscript (105).¹² The postscript begins in its very title with two citations, the first one from a TLS review critical of Derrida for Beginners, namely “beyond the beginning,” and the second one from two words of the newspaper weekly’s title, “Literary Supplement.” Derrida’s postscript is a “sort of” postscript, a specifically “literary supplement” to his text, rather like those “sort of” postscripts he finds in Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. In the text of the postscript, Derrida paraphrases the quotation from TLS before giving it italicized, in full: “’beginners’ . . . are not be tempted to venture beyond the beginning of their reading . . . : ‘The worst fate in store for beginners here be that they might be tempted to venture beyond the beginning’” (105). The phrase “Venture beyond the beginning” recurs three times in the last two pages of Derrida’s postscript: "I really think--if they want to understand--that they must "venture beyond the beginning" (107); "But for this, yes, the reader will indeed have to "venture beyond the beginning" (107); "In order to escape obscurantism, one must, on the contrary, I repeat my advice, always, always "venture beyond the beginning" (108). That last sentence with the citation italicized is the last sentence of the book Derrida is taking his critic’s phrase, also occurring in the last sentence of the negative TLS review, to turning it against him, ending by making the repeated riposte typographically emphatic.¹³

In the excessive repetition of this citation, in the recourse to a citation, Derrida and by calling it a “literary supplement,” Derrida opens up a way of reading his text analogous to the way he describes how Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death is to be read:

This last narrative [The Instant of My Death] also marks the repetition of what will always already have been said in Blanchot’s earlier texts, giving them to us to be read again, confirming and thereby relaunching the singular achrony of time of which we of which we are speaking, and of which the text speaks in the first place . . . . Every sentence of [The Instant of My Death] gives us, let us not say a key, but at least a prescription for reading Blanchot’s entire work” (50; 70)

The divided macrostructure of Derrida’s text redoubles the doubleness he sees in Blanchot (Blanchot doubles himself in The Instant of My Death—he is the narrator and the young man), in Blanchot’s two lost manuscripts, both of which are misrecognized, and in Blanchot’s letter to Derrida, both of which Derrida reads together, yoking non-fictional testimony with fiction in the mode of testimony. In Demeures, Derrida does similar to what Derrida says Blanchot is doing, yoking a commentary on fiction (and non-fiction) within which he addresses autobiography with a seemingly conventional autobiographical post-script that is also literary. The postscript reads as an invitation to read Derrida’s book that makes us consider whether reading it is not reading it, as if to say, the end of the book is only a beginning, you not only have read past the beginning but in doing so will have to read past the end because you will never have really gotten past the beginning. The divide between the text and postscript of Demeure marks the death and survival of the text, inscribing / performing / calling on the reader to perform an uncanny temporality of reading beyond reading and not-reading, beginning and ending reading. Out this “passion” suffered by the reader of a complaint made by a reader of philosophical fiction (and vice versa) can there be a compassion for the singular generality of complaining writers to come.

--Jacques Derrida, Demeure, 85

Another name for this complaint as compassion might be mourning.  Derrida pointedly mentions Paul de Man in the second paragraph of the first page, just after he returns in his talk to “the context of the relations between fiction and autobiographical truth. Which is also to say, between literature and death. Speaking, then, shortly after his death, of my friend Paul de Man, whose memory I salute since we are here in his country” (15). Along similar lines Derrida, describes Blanchot’s letter to Derrida as having been written the late in life, fore he died.  Moreover, Derrida implicitly links de Man, or calls up his memory, when defending Blanchot at length against prosecutors wish to indict his politics (which Derrida does not specify, though he does concede an element of calculation in the publication of The Instant of My Death.  Derrida refuses a narrowly autobiographical reading of Blanchot which allegorizes Blanchot’s writing as an evasion of a more direct testimonial of his past experience in the Resistance. Derrida invites a similar misreading, a failure to read, the postscript to Demeure in similarly autobiographical terms since he writes in the first person about actual documents and experiences. A suspicious reader might then read Derrida as exonerating de Man by exonerating Blanchot and then by literal ex-onerating himself in post-script; that is, Derrida would be comparing himself to both other writers as the victim of unjust persecutions.  The divide of the text into text and paratext might then be taken as Derrida's irresponsible evasion of distinguishing critics of writers Nazi sympathies during Wolrd War II with critics of his philosophy in the 1990s. Derrida entitles his postscript a “literary supplement” to divert such readings, however, to put the thought police on a false trial. Instead Derrida routes mourning through complaint and compassion in order to make mourning unrecognizable as such, to operate by being inoperable.   Derrida’s division of Demeure marks the achronic time it takes (not) to read, so that Derrida ends his postscript with a goodbye advising the reader to read past the beginning, always.  it's a reading that cannot stop, The post-script has a specifically literary autobiographical element, then, by means of which Derrida can address a phrase in the first line of Blanchot's text: perhaps an error of injustice."  Derrida notes the oddity of the phrase--injustice ordinarily is by definition error.  Errors cannot be corrected by a just mot, or only by lots “mo” mots, by reading, by reading while knowing that the testament or testimonial one reads is "haunted" by the phantasm and spectre of fiction.¹⁴

We may further elucidate an understanding of (un)readability, (un)repeatability, and (ir)placeability if we turn back to the references of postscripts and readability in the text of Demeure. Derrida first mentions postscript to The Instant of My Death in relation to Blanchot’s work is being both readable and unreadable:

We can only judge [Blanchot’s attestation] to be readable, if it is, insofar as a reader can understand it. . . . We can speak, we can read this because this experience . . . remains universal and exemplary. Conversely, this thing here, this sequence of events—having almost been shot to death, having escaped it, etc., --it is not enough for this to have happened, to be able to read this text, and to understand it in the absolute secret of its singularity. (93)

Derrida proceeds to stress the conjunction of universalization with readability, not unreadability:

One understands, everyone understands this narrative in his own way, there are as many readings as there are readers, and yet there remains a certain manner of being in agreement with the text, if one speaks in its language, provided certain conditions are met. This is testimonial exemplarity. Because this singularity is universalizable, it is able to give rise—for example, in Blanchot—to a work that depends without depending on this very event, a readable and translatable work a work that is more and more widely translated into all the languages of the world, or less well, etc., more or less well read in France . . . (94)

The rather muted paradoxical characterization of a work that depends without depending” does not give rise, however, to an account of Blanchot’s unreadability but a characterization of a line from Blanchot’s text-- “What there remains there for him of existence” that is “described,” according to Derrida, “as a sort of tomorrow, a sort of postscript—fifty years—this remainder that remains, the demourance of this remainder will have been but a short sequel of sorts a fall out, a consequence. Nothing has truly begun. . . What remains for him of existence, more than this race to death, is this race of death in view of death not to see death coming. In order not to see it coming (94; 95). When Derrida asserts that “There is a post script. A sort of parergonal hors-d’oeuvre” (97), he has already framed the postscript as “sort of” remainder in a remainder, a metaphor or supplemented by a metaphor, with different amounts and kinds of time—fifty years, tomorrow, not yet begun and “Later . . . the first word to the epilogue” (97). Unread –ability apparently cannot be theorized as such in part because textual places are themselves double (a paratext is a parergon; an “afterword” is called an “hors-d’oeuvre” the word writes Derrida as the single word on the first page Dissemination; the postscript is an epilogue). The yet to be read is a remainder within a remainder that, like death, that one which cannot see coming. The never to arrive unreadable and never written remainder, or remainder “written” as the paratextual spacing between text and post-script, guarantees a kind of readability because reading means not being able ever to read what’s coming, what is yet to be (un)read.

It should come as no surprise that Derrida introduces his fourth and final film reference the moment he begins discuss the second lost manuscript, placed by Derrida in an epilogue to Blanchot’s text, and comments on the first word of the first sentence of the last page (where): “The epilogue already refers to an anterior later, a later immediately following the war: ‘Later, having returned to Paris . . .’ (Was he thus not in Paris during the war?) Behind this first epilogical sentence an entire film passes by: the end of the war, liberation, the purges, etc. Gallimard, NRF, Paulhan, Drieu La Rochelle, etc. The whole entanglement of a very questionable history . . . ." (8).¹⁵

Derrida reads the second lost manuscript (mentioned on the very last page of The Instant of My Death) as a question the readability of the story as testimony. (The first manuscript Derrida reads as having been confiscated by the Nazi lieutenant who mistook them for war plans.) It has to readable to everyone in order to be universalizable (replaceable--the reader can place himself in Blanchot's / the young man's place). Yet it is also, he says, has a singular generality (it is irreplaceable). Here is the line from the story: “Later, having returned to Paris, he met Malraux, who told him that he had been taken prisoner (without being recognized) and that he had succeeded in escaping, losing a manuscript in the process. It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute, whereas a manuscript would not be" (Derrida cited p. 99). Derrida comments:

Subtle and interesting distinction--as if reflections on art were not a manuscript. Could never be confused with the writing of a manuscript. . . What is a manuscript if it cannot be reconstituted? it is a mortal text, a text insofar as it is exposed to a death without survivance. One can re-write Malraux's books, they are but reflections on art whose content is not bound to the unique event and trace of writing. It is not very serious; one can say even that these things are immortal, like a certain kind of truth. But a manuscript--and this would be its definition, a definition via the end--is something whose end cannot be repeated and to which one can only testify where the testimony only testifies to the absence of attestation, namely, where nothing can testify any longer, with supporting evidence, to what has been. Pure testimony as impossible testimony. (99; 100)

The second manuscript is singular in having been lost without remainder: “Unlike the witness–narrator, the manuscript has disappeared without remainder. . . . Nothing of it remains [demeure]” (100). Yet, Derrida adds: “Unless one could say: without remainder other than The Instant of My Death, the narrative entitled The Instant of My Death, its last witness, a supplementary substitute which, by recalling its disappearance, replaces it without replacing it. The absolute loss, perdition without salvation and without repetition, would have been that of a piece of writing. To which one can but testify, beyond all present attestation, however” (100-01).

Reading Demeure is not reading in the ordinary sense of the word in that we are retracing as we reread an experience that did happened but, as Derrida points out, that may not be relived. We are on the surface, reading the impression of Derrida’s text as were, literalized by the non-space between text and paratext (no blank page separates them), figured as a cinematic screen on which a film is projected.
ROUGH INCOMPLETE DRAFT OF ENDING:

My impulse is to characterize the Scrolls of Auschwitz as having been made unreadable by its preservers (in the same kind of way Derrida says Blanchot's would be prosecutors have not read The Instant, or Blanchot's other writings, many of which, he says, are repeated in The Instant--see p. 50) by being singularized (even though the title repeats Jeremiah and thereby characterizes the notes in advance as jeremiads, prophetic indictments and calls for justice). But the notes are really fragments of a collection of lost and found manuscripts that are meant to be universally readable, translatable. There's a doubleness in them kind of like the doubleness in Blanchot's story (the story witness of the last manuscript as its unrepeatable repetition) and the doubleness of the already self-repeating notes and records (multiplied in the hope their chances of being found would increase). They are dead and buried survivors. Their philological recovery and sanctification does not read their readability and unreadability, tries to put an end to repetition by seeing them collectively as the repetition of a single Jewish prophet's lamentations that do not involve the prophet's relation to death.