When we speak of classicism, we also mean that we want to read Merleau-Ponty just as one reads a classic author. Commentators insist on the fact that Merleau-Ponty teaches us the way in which he must be read. Because the truth of an author is not an object that can be circumscribed, because it resides in an unthought which inhabits it through and through without being formulated anywhere, the reading must be an interpretive appropriation, an active intersubjectivity, an echo. If this means simply that no interpretation is a mere repetition, that the reader reconceives the work on the basis of its own difference without anyone being able to say that this is an arbitrary projection, this is obvious. But the risk is that by means of the authority of this obvious fact, we dispense with a scrupulous reading and go straight to an 'intuition' of Merleau-Ponty that would only need to be reactivated differentially, instead of paying careful attention to the movement and concepts across which this intuition is elaborated. In our eyes, Merleau-Ponty's always luminous thought is still arduous, sinuous, and dense. By remaining as attentive as possible to the text, we propose simply to try to explicate it, just as one explicates a classic author; no one would think of exercising this dimension of active appropriation first in relation to a classic author. It seems to us not only that the richness of the texts at our disposal justifies a work of reconstitution but also, because of their density and their incompleteness, that they require such a work of reconstitution.
(Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, pp. xxxii-xxxiii), my emphasis
That there is an unscruple at the heart of the scrupulous reading, reading which demands giving the best of yourself, that is, reading which requires, among other things, creativity and a genuine practice of freedom, is obvious. Scrupulous reading, however, is not defined by any one scruple or its other–ah, but there's the rub. Is the unscruple also a scruple? Now it appears to be neither scruple nor unscruple. It's as if the scruple always had to be decided phronetically, as would then the unscruple. Can this pass as definition? Can we ever precisely know what a scruple is with respect to reading or any other pursuit? A scrupulous reading of Barbaras' text also requires that the reader be free to interrogate Barbaras' reading of Merleau-Ponty, which means of course putting into question Barbaras' readerly scruples. Scruples? What kind of reader am I after all? A man whose intelligence and creativity I admire puts years of study into a reading of an oeuvre and yet I would dare to question his scruples? But he gave me the idea? It's completely juvenile, I know. Asinine. Please forgive me.
Labels: Barbaras, echo, intersubjectivity, reading
Who is Emmanuel Levinas, whose centennial seems to have been marked, posthumously, only yesterday? I'm reading texts by Levinas, complicit in a work of evocation, elicitations, replication in every sense. Should I–out of respect for the person, or a superseding fidelity to meaning– suspend the tradition of talking about the author in the present tense? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy restricts itself to speaking only of Levinas the philosopher. Is such a figure of the thinker required in order to read thoughts in the best sense, in order to read by the author? It must be said that, given an alternative configuration of textual life, thoughts could be published anonymously. I suspect that when we characterize we often wind up thinking we know far more than we can adequately be responsible for. (The more you know about me, the more you may be inclined to regard my suspicions with suspicion. I exhibit symptoms. My love of close reading is born of necessity.) "Words are disfigured or 'frozen', when language is transformed into documents and vestiges. The living word struggles against this transfer of thought into vestige, it struggles with the letter that appears when there is no-one there to hear" (Levinas, "The Transcendence of Words" (trans. Seán Hand, in The Levinas Reader, pp. 143-149), pp. 148-149).
Is the figure unambiguously good, an unequivocally positive valence? The word "figure" also has ghastly harmonics. A dissonance rages between the figure, not just the figure of the author, but also figures of readers, all manners of figuration on the one hand, and, on the other, living, the living word, and the discordance plays out not just between these polarities, but amid them, each within the other, the living word within the figure, the figure within the living word.
Here are some words for Yusef, whom I surmise will be ambivalent about bifur/bifurre, but who nonetheless may appreciate Levinas' call to criticism: "The primordial status of the notion of erasure affirms the simultaneity of multiplicity, and the irreducibly ambiguous nature of consciousness" (p. 146). Who am I kidding? These words are alive for me. And hasn't Yusef in an important sense also already animated these words for me, illuminated them one might say, with his discussions of bifurcation? I don't go into reading alone, and I don't come out alone. Levinas won't dare and contradict me. (Go ahead ask me about living grammar. (I taunt taunting, fwiw.)) For Yusef, for real: "But in these bifurcations and erasures Leiris is less concerned to go down the new paths opened up or to latch onto the corrected meaning than he is to capture thought at that special moment when it turns into something other than itself. It is because of this inherent ambiguity in bifurcation that the very phenomenon of the association of ideas becomes possible" (ibid.).
For Michael–but not just for Michael, for all those who read along with Michael, including those (those figures, am I calling upon nameless figures too?) who also read along with me:
By creating beauty out of nature, art calms and quietens it. All the arts, even those based on sound, create silence.
This silence may be the result of bad conscience, or it may weigh heavy, or cause dread. This need to enter into a relation with someone, in spite of or over and above the peace and harmony derived from the successful creation of beauty is what we call the necessity of critique.
(p. 147)
I find it necessary to criticize the following quotation, and I call upon Levi, who will also be critical, to momentarily suspend his judgment, for our sake, in the event that there is in fact a sense in which this position means something more to us than a hegemony over the real, the material, or the natural: "The sounds and noises of nature are failed words. To really hear a sound, we need to hear a word. Pure sound is the word" (p. 148). We can appreciate Levinas' dialogism even as we maintain our critical distance: "because thought is symbolic, ideas can link up to form a network of associations. From then on. . . this network, further enriched by all that the signs of writing can then evoke, is important not for the way it displaces one idea onto another, but because it assures the presence of idea in another" (p. 146). How can we not hear in every dialogism the echo of other dialogisms? Or is it pure dissonance? Perhaps we need to hear what Levinas is saying more fully, what he is saying in these texts by Levinas, because he too has a sense of what "real" means.
As I review this last quotation, my thoughts are with Shahar, while at the same time they wander back over the territory of thoughts about the imagination that has become familiar to me–a certain quotation from Bachelard comes to mind:
The use of the word wrenches experience out of its aesthetic self-sufficiency, the here where it has quietly been lying. Invoking experience transforms it into a creature. It is in this sense that I have been able to say elsewhere that criticism, which is the word of a living being speaking to a living being, brings the image in which art revels back to the fully real being. The language of criticism takes us out of our dreams, in which artistic language plays an integral part. Certainly, in its written form, it in turn generates new criticism. Books call up books–but this proliferation of writings halts or culminates at the moment when the living word is installed and criticism blossoms into teaching.
(p. 148, my bold)
I butcher a chicken, I thank the chicken. Foul thanks. How can I thank Levinas? How can I? Levinas the creature? Never. Too creepy. Yet isn't there a sense in which I desire to be such a creature, a "man who speaks"? Chthonic replicant, reader of the autochthonic. Whichever way I turn it appears I am forced to abdicate learning, to subvert a loyalty, or turn my back on a critical engagement. Levinas? The inexpressible sadness of echoes? Are those my words now? Hardly. I don't keep them from you, fellow students of melancholy. Nor do I ask you to accept them uncritically. It is an irony that "the inexpressible sadness of echoes" says something about the sadness of echoes. I feel it.
Labels: chicken, dialogism, echo, language, learning, Levinas, reading, silence
Every question is the reverberation of a questioning. No question escapes a history of questioning–but is this really true? Are there no spontaneous questions? This is similar to the question of whether questions are creative. How would we ask a spontaneous question if we didn't already know how to ask questions? What is the distance between knowing how to do something and knowing what that something is, between a spontaneous question and spontaneous questioning? To think of a method of questioning is to travel the distance between a question as search and a questioning as research. Perhaps to search intently means also to step back from the search, to search with care. Could it be possible that people practice research without knowing what a search is? Carefully?
Is questioning really a mode of searching? I'm not sure that seeking is a good metaphor for asking. To ask is to ask someone, some person. More explicitly, to ask is to ask something of some person. When we speak of questioning things, or inquiring into things, are we speaking figuratively, are we completely eliding an addressee, or do we somehow have in mind some ideal person who would take our questions and possibly even provide answers? Do we project our future selves into or through the question? Conversely, is the question the opening of an encounter with another person? If you've read this far, how would you describe your coming to be involved in this question?
Does the question have its own voice? I doubt that the question truly owns its resonance. On the other hand, what if that's all it owns? Of course it might be said that resonance can't be owned at all. Can there be things that are truly given but never owned? Is a question given voice? For whom? Cavarero again: "Free from the presence of Narcissus and from Ovid's textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice."
Labels: Cavarero, echo, questions