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parle

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Madness is no exception. Whenever the archives that have held apart politics and history, power and the past, become accessible, we regularly find that the apparent marginality of madness was effected by a politics of knowledge. With the usual delay of thirty years--too late, therefore, to be effective itself--Minerva's owl can recognize a simple strategem: the exclusion of madness from a given culture serves to conceal its place in the system. Whatever that culture itself labels alien, borderline and unbearable, belatedly proves to be one of its constitutive forms. And this not by chance. According to Foucault, culture's constitutive forms are historically specified rules of talking and writing, of discourse organization and discourse networks. A system of rules wherein the switchboard is normally operated by madmen.

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Starting out from the convergence he discovers between psychoanalysis and the modern technical media, which already double, within psychoanalysis, as analogues for unconscious structures of thought, Benjamin draws the analogy, at the furthest reach of this outline, between the visual media of magnification and psychoanalysis; in their separate takes, both bring into focus that which otherwise remains merely outside a normal range of the senses. What film, for example, projects is in fact projected in psychoses, hallucinations, and dreams. These states of isolation in turn  plug into the common or communal currency of the waking state in films featuring "figures of the collective dream such as Mickey Mouse orbiting the globe."

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Louis Wolfson's "jeune *öme *sqizofrène" (265) and Paul Antschel/Celan will, I hope, NOT be subjected to discussion here. The languages they grew up with and out of left their traces BETWEEN the tongues. American English is the mother tongue Wolfson's "*öme" refuses to speak. German German, Celan knows, is the language of the Holocaust. What hope there is in Wolfson's work springs from daringly obsessive expeditions into other tongues, French above all, but also German, Russian, and Hebrew. Celan's writing, his mother tongue being inescapably German, takes place in translation from the outset. He writes German, George Steiner noted, "like a foreign language." OTHER tongues offer sustenance, and inspiration: Rumanian and Yiddish in his native Czernowitz, Hebrew in his religious education, French at school and in Paris, the city in which he lived and died. In the posthumous volumes are also translations from Russian, English, Italian, and Portuguese into German.

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You know the story. Heidegger has claimed the sign for the cutting edge, language's blade runner, Zeichen being sculpted out of the Latin secare, to cut. "Ein Zeichen sind wir" (Hölderlin): we're cutting out. He figured it out; we felt it all along the expecting horizon. The schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart; perhaps, even, how to cut the shit.

...

THE WAKE-UP CALL:
        Someone is calling you elsewhere.

When the disappearance of long-distance impresses itself upon you, it sometimes becomes necessary to make a conference call to the question itself of technology, the place where a call can break into a body (the body politic, the "body without organs," or simply the orificial openings of a subject). Historically, the organization of the schizobody, with its break-ins and technological deposits, took place sometime after the death of God, when the transcendental signifier came crashing down and every body was on the line. This line, still engaged, is what we try to cut into, if only by emergency verification. I have traced a call, through its umbilicus, to the telephone apparatus, in order, on the one hand, to probe the possibilities for a genuine Ferngespräch or long-distance call. Hence, Heidegger. Hence, Schizophrenia. They are linked by a hidden telephone monopoly whose effects I shall try to read with you. This reading I call a "speculative telephonics.”

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        Why speak of the sun? The sun is here, it has always been here. Before I was the sun was. It migrated and came to life, this disaster has no beginning or end. First the earth broke off from the sun, it broke up with the sun and made it with a thousand other fragments of exploded stars. Earth divorced from its eternal husband, and that was its first big chance. For the sun may send the substance of life to earth, but it must precisely keep its distance in the sky. We humans (chthonic "earthlings," made of humus) are possessed by a burning desire to bring our parents back together. The subject of technology is doing it, but doesn't want to know anything about it.

We've been trying for so long to get them back together. The true marriage: not between man and woman, between the sun and the earth.

. . . Which is anyway the same in a mythopoeic imagination which yearns terribly in the "feminine” way forever and ever more for the sun-master to come fill the lack-in-being, the lack that came to be in this feminine hue "man," which has come to assume the earth's desire for the sun, for totality, completion, and oneness.

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L'Amante anglaise presents the reader with various enigmas. We learn at the very beginning of the novel that a crime has been committed. However, we are not told what the crime was, who the victim was, or who committed the crime. Only slowly are the pieces of the puzzle given to us: we learn in the first three pages that a woman between the ages of 35 and 40 was killed, that her body was cut into separate parts, and the parts were tossed into several trains passing by the viaduct in Viorne. After 30 more pages, we learn––again in a piecemeal fashion––when the crime most likely was committed ("Dans la nuit du 7 au 8 avril"2), who the victim was (Marie-Thérèse Bousquet), and who was arrested for the crime (Claire Lannes). Because of this process of delayed gratification (providing information to us in bits and pieces) and because of the way the book will be presented to us, as a series of three related but separate interviews with Robert Lamy, with Pierre Lannes, and with Claire Lannes, Duras forces us to ask several questions. Who is this woman (Claire Lannes)? What did Marie-Thérèse represent to her? Why did she kill Marie-Thérèse And finally, Why did she cut Marie-Thérèse's body into pieces (if Claire did indeed commit the crime)? The answers to these questions––and the fact that we ask them––reveal a general strategy of L'Amante anglaise––a manipulation of the post-Oedipal subject who confronts the disordered stuff of the pre-Oedipal and of the unconscious.

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C'est dans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle que la machine fait son entrée dans la littérature, et Zola, à l'instar de beaucoup d'autres, lui fait une large place. Cette apparition ne date d'ailleurs pas de Zola; mais alors que jusque-là la machine ne jouait qu'un rôle anecdotique, avec Zola sa présence prend des dimensions envahissantes.

Que l'on prenne la définition de Stendhal (Un roman: c'est un miroir qu'on promène le long d'un chemin) ou celle de Zola lui-même (le romancier se contente de dérouler devant nous des tableaux pris dans l'existence quotidienne), c'est le côté phénoménologique de l'entreprise que l'on souligne: le roman s'occupe d'abord de ce qui est immédiatement apparent...

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Representation, defined as lacking (a Real), is evaluated as a totality from an inside (signified truth) irreducible to it. This begins the tracing of an opening, through which the antithetical conception of the literal enters, and presumes to be signified by, literature. The enforcement, by which this nonliterary knowing (this literal knowing) holds the field of representation, is the closure of irony into the structure of a binary repression. This repression of an originary presence, through the production of a representation (a neurosis, an ideology), enforces the stopped unit of the Sign as a local, or contained negativity, for this repression is precisely the delay which unites signifier and signified in a reduction of what was written to what was meant. As Sign, this negativity or reduction is itself contained, as a delay or secondary repression, in an overall movement of accumulation; the "declining negativity" which is the recuperation of Presence.

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In his essay "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin defines "heteroglossia" as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refractad way" (The Dialogic Imagination 324). Put another way, heteroglossia is the word's sensitivity to its context, which, in a novel, may well consist of a language or languages innately strange to the word and to each other. From the collision of languages, the dialogic nature of the novel is born. The use of montage and the tangle of voices which typify the "dialogic" novel were hallmarks of avant garde fiction during the twenties; in Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) a schizophrenic many-voicedness (or "schizoglossia") simultaneously obscures and illuminates the "moral."

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The filmic image marks the event of transformation, the subtle shift in presence from subject to shade. Roland Barthes writes, "the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” And yet this transformation is never a transformation, never the dialectic synthesis of loss and incarnation, never the metaphysical closure of catastrophe. The photograph can never efface completely the subject it displaces:

“It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures.”

Filmic transformation suspends the metamorphic moment, dividing the moment from itself, creating a memory of the moment in the instance of its conception. The presence of transformation in photography thus inscribes always only the trace of this presence, the spectres of a subject no longer there, not yet here.

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