The Time of My Life
2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/10418385-4208406
ISSN1938-8020
Autores Resumo. . . A period of mourning has kept me away from music, so my head fills with static bombs instead. I usually like to work with some sort of sonic signature. A subtle incentive laying down a basic beat, musical accompaniment allows me to pummel at a stubborn knot in life. In his work on cryptonymy, Laurence Rickels has claimed that background music rings a death knell. That may be so. I’m always hitching a ride on the death drive—the flex of my drivenness—a sure fire way to language. Doing without the rhythmic support that music supplies has presented complications in the mostly monogamous relation to writing. Ach! Despite my willingness to integrate silence and random noise into phrasal regimes, I become a bit sissyish when drafts recede so that nothing on the order of language assertion comes my way. Plunk, plunk. OK, so I’m still learning. As panic shivers through me: muteness happens.In some sectors the mute burble constitutes an upgrade in the grapple with the poeticity of being. But, let’s face it, regressive sputtering rarely scores points on my beat. At most, I can make something of “muttering”—or, with ears tuned to the German language, “mothering”—and stick it onto the subphenomena that constitute speech at its lowest capacity to say or mean. I am thinking of the registry of innovative sighs and groans, the low yowl that Friedrich Kittler locates as the start-up of German literature. Even here I invent, haplessly, for Kittler sees literary articulation originating only in the Seufzer, the sigh: Ach!1 But, still. What is the sigh but a feminine accent placed near or on language’s spareness? In Richard II the sigh and groan duke it out in a dance of sexual difference. Men groan, women sigh—signaling different letdowns in the poetry of speechlessness. Elsewhere, famously, “the rest is silence.” . . . When the music lets off, and you’re shifting down to inert being, you sometimes need a jolt—a someone or something to slap it out of you, bringing you back to language, even without the sound track. So I say thank you to the editors of Qui Parle, to Simone, for rousing me from an overdrawn account of guarded lament. There are times when we all need our Claudius factor—the sensible portion of a Shakespearean dose to knock us out of grief, ringing the bell to stir us into action.There is no accounting for the schedules that land grief or offer reprieve from the unrelenting experience of loss. Writing and remembrance deliver a momentary flicker, an estranging but welcome wind tunnel of hope, a kind of expectancy. Who’s speaking, you’ve asked? I’m not certain that it’s a matter of “who.” The psychic division of labor rotates out to rumored relay posts and unmarked domains that define our way, if unconsciously or with purposeful abandon.We went through this years ago, in negotiation over the title of the journal, on fast spin cycle: do we underscore “who” or stay with the “what” that speaks? There was Wordsworth’s refrain in the “Idiot Boy” that went “to-who, to-who,” sending up a flare of noncognition, sounding out the owl’s nocturnal relay and a collapse of human subjectivity. Ach! Sometimes I just wanted to howl, Allen Ginsberg style. At the time we were debating this or that title—asking who or what speaks—Jean-Luc Nancy came out with the book, edited by Peter Connor and Eduardo Cadava, with my input and participation, Who Comes after the Subject? The decision to settle on who speaks, Qui Parle, resonates with the publication of that volume.2 The fact that the title remained in French, emanating from Berkeley, in itself framed somewhat of a defiant pose that was not lost on the early readership. By contrast, Representations seemed staunchly Anglo-American, well-manicured and historicist, our adversarial alterity. I’ll return to the posited standoff momentarily.. . . Ach! I am too often seized by a spectral broadcast system that makes me say and commit to things I barely comprehend. Some checkpoint in me redirects ancient grievances or stubborn parasites, some of which are commensal, so we get along, we rumble. Interruption shapes the way. Every day I report to the internal secretariat several fade-outs, different rhythms that suspend the work; a palpitation. Smack, smack, smack. These days an interruptive force unsays and capsizes the paragraphs that form in my head, or wherever. (Nietzsche places thought in the stomach, and I do host a pit there.) I mostly reflect on the intrusive quality of the past months, a blur of punctuation marks. Celan, in the Meridan speech, said, “It speaks”—a flex of the original title of the journal, Qui Parle.3 In the beginning, to be clear, it bore the name, Ça Parle, which turned out, we thought, to indicate bias in the direction of Lacan. Smack, smack, smack. By midmorning voices from the bleachers call out, reoriginating in me: “I can handle this, I can woman-up.” We were all on some level of the signifier Lacanians in those days, but we didn’t want to hand the future of the journal’s legacy to his corpus. We were also irrevocably compelled by Derrida and caught up in his fascinating itineraries. In fact, Derrida supported us strongly and, with his customary generosity, delivered manuscripts to our door. Wait. I’m having trouble focusing. The newsfeed that has accrued to the past months, overburdening this period of mourning, hit home. Like so many others, I succumbed to a supplementary curl of events, by no means located merely on the margins of our collective existence, such as it is; nor was the shocking detail of the 2016 elections readjusted by acts of asserted overcoming, pushing through. The destruction of America, its imaginary capaciousness, has seemed irremediable, despite strong indications of resistance. It’s as if Henry Miller’s descriptions in Tropic of Capricorn linking obscenity to America (“America is pacifist and cannibalistic”)4 were coming back four-fold. Ach, ach! In class I track violent surges in the history of the philosopheme “America”; I sit on broad fictions, mining their referential temptation, and try to hold the name to its promise.In my own past, for the duration of the Berkeley chapter, things seemed different. I was phasing out of my immortal claims but convinced that the world could be changed. I was hopping mad. Into the streets, onto the page. On the phone, in the classroom, I was attuned to the exigencies of moment, on your case, in your face. Hitching a ride with the Weltgeist, I was pumped, attuned. With Act Up and other insurrections modeling the way, we strengthened defiantly on power pills of righteousness—sometimes to the point of ethical overkill. I’ll dial it down; still, the urgency of those swollen days should not be undermined or in any way forgotten. The overreach, though never enough to my way of thinking, was dictated by a sense of necessity. In matters of rebelliousness, one should overshoot one’s goal, part of me thinks. (I learned about the merits of overshooting from Bataille’s interpretative handle on Manet.) We needed to score points, maintain our resolve. Now there’s a strain of trepidation flavoring the relation to world, a fraught hesitation detectable at least from my quarters, coming from a stomach-sinking dread. Or is the loom of historical dread just an accommodation, part of my newly set limitations? Perhaps it is just I who feels she can’t guarantee another round of resolute pushback? Then, without discernible prompting, I suddenly become battle-ready, locked and loaded. It goes back and forth, the encroaching sense of defeat and the retort, “They don’t know whom they’re messing with: watch out, asshats!”Cratered by the recent election, I am surely not the only one to feel existentially benched much of the time. In the throttled stagnation of disappointment, I sit in anticipatory bereavement of the next years. Trying to rouse, I set about looking for energy surges and the stores of public language that let me coalesce with other citizens of rage. Like a schizo sprung from Deleuze’s pages, I am running, for the most part, to the count of stationary mobility. I guess that’s OK in the end, if your job compels you to run without stabilizing a destination, and you’re just a tracker of minoritized traces—in other words, a writer.Our work, for the most part off the table as concerns ratings sweeps on any side of the political spectrum, must still go on as we hope for favorable headwinds. You can surveil rhetorical missteps and referential destructions, go after the vanishing specter of authority, scale subterranean redirection, all the while contesting dominating tropes and archaic sovereignties. Maybe something will spill over and produce historical stains or trackable stops one day. You can’t be sure what the outcome might be of a kind of dogged “purposiveness without purpose” (Kant). But the sure aim of the other side is what we’re up against: even hesitation is an affront to the stupidly assured aims of murderous hatred. Our little drips and drops, the homeopathic language dispensers and noncanonic utterances—the sighs and groans, the howling, bitching, and moaning without an off switch—maybe these determined microinterventions will succeed one day in effecting a subtle shift in the force of a nihilistic disclosure that stares us down. In our numbing and dumbing days, will this get anyone very far, make an ethical dent, I wonder? Is it OK to keep pitching language into the emptiness? . . . Did you know that OK came from army language, meaning “0 killings, zero killings”? The acronym SNAFU comes from the “militerary” zone as well, I tell myself, in the works of Kleist that carry unfigurable intrusion, the transcendental SNAFU: “Situation Normal All Fucked Up.” Despair, rage, impotence, without accompaniment. These are the kinds of prods that, despite it all, make one want to shake off the dust and get to the writing desk if you’re an offspring of Benjamin and Kraus’s “rights of nerves”: When things rile you up—or lay you out—you spring to, report for duty no matter how messed up you feel. You’re pushed, or ejected, from inert distress by a force coiled up in Heidegger’s notion of Stoß, yes: a prod. You’re prodded, pushed around, violated/caressed, poked at, and stoked.Stoked, prodded, locked and loaded: That must have been how Qui Parle started up, in my Berkeley days. Peter Connor (who now teaches French and comparative literature at Barnard)—Peter and I decided to launch a journal, group together graduate students and their celebrity mentors, our teachers whom we read and revered, putting them in print. In jubilant imitation of the Athenaeum, or maybe it was Acéphale, we wanted to break through, create community with or without communion, as Bataille imagined. The Schlegels and their group created a scandal with their journal, the Athenaeum, by putting out a call for submissions, the first such call in a fit of democratic openness. Henceforth, anyone could submit a paper, which would be judged whether or not you were a heavy hitter, without regard for how much authority your signature carried. Wait. What?!? In the end, a sort of overdemocratization pushed us out, and a new team took over. We had not protected ourselves very shrewdly but invited everyone in, given away voting powers, and so forth. Thus, when our ideas became too wild or whatever for an increasingly politically correct climate, we were shown the door—a door of our own making! I think one of us fell into a depression at that point and threshhold.Stationed in Berkeley, we had craved community. We hung out among our various groupuscules: we worked round the clock, teaching, writing, shivering with anxiety over this or that futural flash in the bucket, but we still put out a demand for community. Building up a journal, singular in its outlook and expectations, seemed to be the way to go, fanning out in so many ways, trying to establish a uniquely irreverent yet serious profile. We were determined to make our mark, change the menu of Berkeley’s theoretical assumptions and predilections. As disdaining spitfires, we set about rivaling those gathered around the aforementioned Representations, an uptown well-behaved and polished publication, should those urban maps work here. We—we were different, deviant upstarts, new in the neighborhood, demanding a recount, filing down a different angle and a consistently maverick POV. It helped to cut up the neighborhood in that obstinate way, taking our positions with exaggerated clarity. The antimimetic rivalry increased the efficiency of the prod that put us to work in the wee hours of the night.But this is now. The anniversary that is being marked in this issue, so many years later, touches me and has made me scroll down to the days when I was in conversation with Ann Smock, Marie-Hélène Huet, Denis Hollier, Pierre Alferi, Ann Banfield, T. J. Clark, Anne Wagner, Fred Dolan, David Cohen, Marianne Constable, Howard Bloch, Stephen Greenblatt, and so many others who held my esteem, shared a glass of wine, and, to a large extent, continue to stay on the line. Still, the very fact of flagging an anniversary gives an uneasy tug. Not that I want to sponsor that part of me bent on being a killjoy, but—full disclosure—anniversaries tend to bring me down. Of course, I am hardly the only one who must power through darkness, allow for mourning, in order to arrive at the celebratory affect associated with anniversary. Nothing could be more common than to shun such a marker, and want to fold shop. I might as well surrender to that nearly instinctual pull: for a provisional screening, I can examine the underside of anniversary before making claims about having the strength to receive such returns and their freeze-dried implications! So. Let me consider those that haunt and hound me, how to get around the anniversarial bend, if only to lean into the emptiness of recurrence, its inescapable undertow. At least if you’re living/dying, somehow living on, in my head, you’ll need to go dark before anything else happens.(I’ll say something else, in an aside or off the internal wall: writing to or for Berkeley disturbs my sense of address and provisional directionality, gives me a jolt as I face an unmasterable past, ach! . . . )☾ ☾ ☾Ach, ach! It’s das Man’s world, I tell myself.5 There are some anniversaries worth celebrating, like the launch of Qui Parle. Other observances hold you hostage, as if they were prevented from recurring but stick in your side day in, day out. Despite what has happened or has failed to happen owing to the commemorated day, some spin-off anniversaries still bear and sustain momentum; others hit the pause button in a free fall of psychic standstill. If I may be permitted to take the off-ramp now, let me recount one such debilitating anniversary that in a disturbing way returned recently—or has never left. I know that my approach is staggered, delayed, that there is static on the line. . . . Let me move on this nonetheless. . . . January 20, noted indelibly by the great poet Paul Celan, ended our ability to tell time.6 It was a catastrophic date. According to the poet, the unique date haunts our relation to temporality and marks the stoppage of history. Time ceased on January 20, a marker of the shadow of time, announcing the vanishing of Enlightenment buoys that carry historically prized notions on which discerning folks tend to count and existentially float—in good or bad times, in the warp of time, even when one is out of time or in the tunnel of untimeliness, one straps oneself to notions pumped by a touch of transcendence such as “progress,” “perfectibility,” “the end of prejudice,” “human dignity,” “the relinquishment of superstition,” and so forth. Celan’s date announces and voids these hopeful levers. As in Blanchot’s essay, “The Indestructible,” the poet’s language states that something has happened on the order of the human capacity to destroy, revealing to us man’s delivery to his own destruction, completing a run of unstoppable impairment.On this date—the hollow of which returns every year to hit us in some unconscious place of troubled receptivity—on this date, in 1942, senior Nazi officials and SS officers were convened at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to engineer “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Celan’s taut reflections on January 20 prompted Derrida to think about signature and date, what it means to sign off with a date, even one that stalls any advance, including the simplest return of a given date, in terms of calendrical time.7 The term, a termination, is penciled in every year again, reappearing faintly, yet as a permanent lesion that cannot be removed from the remotest horizon of historical becoming. Even the notion of “horizon,” as basis and background—as supporting field and limit, hermeneutically set—was shattered by the zero hour. January 20: a date to end all dates, the final date, charged with finality, determining the phantasm and implementation of the depraved idea of a final solution, the destruction of a neighbor, a friend, a civic alterity, my lover.☾ ☾ ☾The German American Donald Trump does not measure up to the unprecedented insolence, the event that decided Jewish extermination. Yet, something pernicious keeps returning, and civic prohibitions, after so much reparative straitening, have been lifted. The unsayables are mouthed by the obscene broadcast system named “Trump”—the type of name that Thomas Mann, or Flaubert before him, would write into a narrative that seeks to capture mediocrity and a promiscuous capacity for unrelenting wreckage. How did this come about on our watch, at the time allotted here and now for inhabiting this earth, attended by a particular stopwatch checking being and nihilism, when fundamental values are upended?To the degree that we are still related to the possibility of advent, counting in our largely hapless ways on the future, marked inwardly by dates that recur or continue to disturb and cease historical humming, the revenant and breach of the time, the date January 20, must be accounted for. The obsession with a date’s return is not a flex of science fiction or mystical anticipation but part of a congruency that bears reflection, calls up ethical responsiveness and a sense of haunted time, already written up, on the rebound and off the rails. At once unprecedented in terms of arrogance of office and overreach, the era of Trump also brandishes a series of regressive collapses, backsliding to racist grammars, reigniting, in terms of sanctioned public discourse, the nearly snuffed-out inflammation of white supremacist mania, misogynist blowback, and archaic bordering systems. Infantile modes of aggression motor the polluters of the good breast, to speak with Melanie Klein’s analysis of the greedy predator.Since Kafka made it a point to open the gates of our penitentiary culture—always near and intrusive, if underground or relocated to a border island, unconsciously encroaching—our bodies have been seen as exposed to retaliatory write-ups, strapped into historical writing machines that stamp and date us, leaking archival inscription. January 20: the date and what it stands for may seem remote, yet figures of Nazism keep returning, as if on automatic replay, citing the traumatism of a historical repetition compulsion. As distant as the imaginary field of reception must seem at times, its tireless reach is awesome, spills into the way we move or stagger through darkened fields of political comprehension. . . . Ach! I am calling our teachers. Events turning on time still hit you in the gut and make your immune system give way, not only because of this or that decimating decree or violent dispatch. Nietzsche, first philosopher to put his body on the line, warned against the way political events and recurring destructions would disturb your organs, making you want to puke. Retching and shuttered down by migraines, Friedrich Nietzsche has also taught us to dance, to take measure and calibrate steps as we engage the necessity, when something hits home, of Dis-Tanz, dance of distance.When darkness threatens to drown out my ability to push back, throw that punch, shout out in fist-shaking fury, I remember the way Nietzsche has filled my dance card, sometimes taking me for a solitary spin; other times, by opening and inventing a new lexicon of rage, the last philosopher, as he was called, scripted a world-class swirl around futural sites of calamity. In the darkest night, Nietzsche threw himself into the rhythm and possibilities of music and its ecstatic flare. Nietzsche, graduate of Bayreuth, knows all about Woodstock nation and the spirit of music to get us up. I wonder, my friends (I understand the temptation to sit this out, to freeze in stupefied ignominy, even when we send holograms out to the streets of protest): Can I still have this dance, can I ask you to unclench sufficiently, or just a little bit, so that language can happen upon us and thought, tuned to our mournful disordering of sense, might return? (This is not the place, but when he goes wild on us and Dionysian, “throwing up” in the Nietzschean vocabulary is a good thing—signaling not only part of the heave of cleansing but also a way to reverse dialectics. But this is another story. Or is it? Can Hegel and analytic philosophers dance their way out of the knob of history?)☾ ☾ ☾Given the grave appointment of moment—it was in the cards to collate the January 20s—the report of the not-my-president’s actions remains taped to the dates of calamity checked off by Celan and Derrida. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls a week after January 20 (though Werner Hamacher has argued that there is no “after” the Holocaust, for time has stilled in an unreadable frozen pose)—a week later, according to ontic calendars (materially indifferent, mechanically turning around the blighted sun)—the successful miscreant, whose narcissism demands of him a turnout of crass acts of power, issues a decree to shut out Muslims of seven nation-states. Severed of its Abrahamic brother, the world takes a hit and opens to the fallout of the unbound. In more Arendtian terms, he has cut into existence, developing repressive disavowals of world-binding relations. Even though time has stopped, even though something keeps ticking, its shadow progression offers dates to check off: there is something like a January 21 that lines up, presenting itself, though without matching the mood of triumphal bragging rights or the fantasy of overcoming the wounding pinch of the precedent date. There is little hope for moving beyond what Celan and Derrida signed off as “January 20.” But this is what we’ve got, this is what I’ll take, with the understanding that January 20 and 21 are evermore toggled together, if only for an ambiguous flash or lurch forward. January 21 limps along, wanting to make time return along an axis of viability. A surge, a remembrance of uprising and the power punch of protest, still pulsing without certitude of outcome, still straining despite the strong turnouts, January 21, 2017, delivered a response to the dispiriting call relayed from January 20 on our shared timetable of wounded acknowledgment. . . . For a moment, there was a January 21.Nearly unexpected, cued up by the call of a newly keyed rhetoric of destruction, a licensed throw-down of hatred, a January 21 turned up the sound system of Echo to drown out, if momentarily, a damaged national Narcissus. However minoritized Echo may be in myth and susbsidiary narratives that surround her, she, in the end, may just have the upper hand, the righteous stance of a first responder that knows no gag order. In terms of adding a date to the time suspension of January 20, a different relation may start to rouse in terms of harm done in and by time, a harm that remains irreversible. The second and secondary appointment may not overtake the destructive propensities of January 20 but shifts ground enough for something different to rise up, if not the fresh, new sun. The adjusted date, January 21, does not cancel out the injurious date that it must somehow succeed, but it tends to its wounds.☾ ☾ ☾I would like to examine the consideration due to a grieving citizenry and the anxiety of nonaddress. Let us move to the second day, if we can push on the sense of that week, according to a nonlinear flight plan, knowing that January 20 will not budge. The 2017 Women’s March—massive, elegant, to the point—invites us to look into the nature of protest, the way we file by sites of inequity or are filed down by disturbing flare-outs of injustice. My principal focus in recent work is on civic grievances. How do we understand the form of address constituted by complaint or the grievances that weigh in or hang back? The march of January 21, at once exalted and dispiriting—we hit a wall, it wasn’t Mexico—made every one of us level with the way civic grievances are bound to be diverted by those addressed. Sometimes messages may arrive, but no one has demonstrated mastery over their itineraries. Missiles and missives can be disarmed or reassigned at any point of their trajectory. Yes: sometimes, something arrives, against all odds, and lands near programmed routes.Laced with grief, profiling the solemnity of a grieving citizenry, the Women’s March of January 21 was strengthened by its very sense of deflation and the anxiety of nonaddress. We were in a swirl of Mitsein, bulked up by a momentary epiphany of collective determination. But we also held to the abyssal sense of indeterminacy, making points that will not stick with those wielding executive power. Our contestatory field was not level, was on the side of decimated being, glacial sobriety. Am I exaggerating—or, as my students might say, “overexaggerating” my point? I’m not sure that I am, given the protofascist cut of destiny that I’m looking at. The language was spare on January 21. On the downside of exuberance, posters were homemade and fabulously quirky. We were set on a kind of Bataillean march: forming a community without communion, we remained unconvinced of our substantiality, yet moved by a kind of resolve, a nearly Heideggerian Ent-schlossenheit. The tightening of resolve came down on the other side of Heidegger, the one granted by Reiner Schürmann, astonishing philosopher who succumbed to AIDS, capable of drawing the work into its anarchic freedom zones, turning it against the murky intentionalities of its signatory. Resolve contains the capacity for exposure. It also sheds light on the response for which a terrifying disclosure calls. Tensed by civic disappointment, alert to the gravity of the call to responsibility, a crowd of duty-bound responders went out on the streets, showing up in the face of loss. As oddball as this may seem in our day of urgent political collapse, an overall grasp of Derridian codes of delivery alongside the concern the French philosopher articulated with misdirected missives will help orient our sense of “destinerring” intelligence, a system of envois left unprotected by any reliable logic of cognition or recognizable political system.Let me bring back my friend, Werner Hamacher, who was Germany’s contemporary version of Hegel. Werner has warned that protest as form and tactical maneuver may not suffice in the face of this calamity; we must look to something that functions along the lines of ostracization in the Athenian polis. Donald Trump and his destructive horde must be ostracized, with violent precision and unrelenting determination.☾ ☾ ☾The sense of betrayal was so colossal and multiappointed in November 2016 that I don’t know whether I, for one, will rock out of my hellhole any time soon. Still, every other day I am determined to send out a hologram to rally the troops and tropes that might revive a numbed and medicated body politic that feels and looks like roadkill. I go into my obsessive loop, mulling over details of note. What the hell happened here? Is the ascension of Trump a matter, largely, of misogynist apprehension, white masculinist payback, homophobic overflow—just when we thought that gay marriage and divorce equality had settled in, cozy and nauseatingly equalized to straight normativity?Go ahead: give me another smack of misogyny, the way it fastens onto the imaginary body of a maternal shape and shadow. I analyze the lethal prompts of a maternal empire that gets swooped down on according to the logic and habits of military aggression. One could say that the field of anal-sadistic military aggression was my specialty, part of my critical arsenal as I probed the arse-upward maneuvers inherent to my designated “militerary” domains and invested sites of psychoanalytic mappings. I take it as rigorously necessary that Trump’s mouth hole be the flapping aperture to funnel floods of radically unleashed aggression, the toxic spill of excrementalized language, part of his recourse to a crucial intersection where twitterature meets shiterature—a language that Freud has seen as part of the expression of sheer pleasure, puerile and adolescent, involved in an unrestrained propensity to leak language, ugly language, releasing the overjoyed slosh of smut.Pierre Alferi has recently written about various texts of brevity, micrograms in which twitterature figures prominently (or, rather, minutely, nanotechnologically signaling); shiterature is mine, however, part of my contemplation of the “Kaka céleste” series where I dwell, for example, on the common locution—sacred, primal, moving—“holy shit!” But that is another story, another narrative pump, even if it can be seen to drip into our political body and deliver an offensive rhetoric of elimination. . . . Still, in my frisky worlds, America was meant to gather us up in our tattered clothing, pointing us to a certain, if risky, horizon of promise, allowing us to dream according to outrageous protocols of becoming. The shutdown marked by Trump
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