FUN Vol. 2

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Number 2

contents

Spring 2015

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notes from the editor

Notes from the editor

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Julian Butterfield

Lesson for Three Voices

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Polina Zelenko

Godard, Marker, and the Void

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Geordie Kenyon Sinclair

Mistranslation and Textual Authority in Infinite Jest

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Fan Wu

The Private Discourse of Psychosis: Schreber’s Resistances and Resonances with Freud

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Stańczyk Bokiemski

Heidegger on Truth and Suicide

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Dean McHugh

Empathy and Narcissus

Editor-in-chief Associate Editor Editorial Committee

Catherine Ribeiro Tyler Prozeniuk Taylor Ableman, Bahar Banaei, Daniel Glassman, Geordie Kenyon Sinclair, Nicolas Mertens

Print Layout Design Inspiration

Tyler Prozeniuk New Left Review circa 1968

Undergraduate writing is no party—oftentimes just as little for the consumer as for the producer. The common injunction placed upon such writing—Demonstrate!—often precludes adventure, humour, and any unsure insights. The standards of the undergraduate paper are meant to be constrictive: Ask only the questions you are fit to answer; do not take on too much. Limit your source material; limit your response material! The imperative is economic: invest only what can ensure a good return; otherwise, be sparing. Misused words will sooner compromise you than be read with generosity.

Ideas seem most beautiful to us in those early stages of understanding, where they seem to radiate outward in all directions. Knowledge which is too complete, too fortified, feels stale to the curious writer. The most compelling essays, for this reason, always remain unfinished. No support is sufficient, and no question is answered. Not only does language always seek to escape elsewhere upon new, fuller forms of expression, but concepts and narratives are never complete unto themselves. The initial stage of fascination precedes by some time the stage of comprehension, but it is the sweet spot for writing. Comprehension, which we are meant to demonstrate, is not a state readily experienced by the curious, for whom the work of knowing is never done. Before ideas are too familiar, they seem like seeds of endless invention. Free from the injunction to demonstrate comprehension, one’s undergraduate career could be the time to follow these fancies of invention. The undergraduate writer doesn’t produce bad writing because she is untrained, nor because she doesn’t know anything yet. Rather, those are her assets. Undergraduate papers are a naturally a bore because one can only impose limits on one’s own work as a gamble. One doesn’t know, early in writing, which footnote is truly the thesis.

The curious writer is under a self-imposed injunction to appeal not only to intuitive, immediate comprehension, but also to give the reader something new.

It isn’t yet her duty, but this writer cannot help but refract onto the written text some form of herself, some remainder. Demonstration is not enough. Fully meeting the standards of clear expression stops the writer short of producing the sort of writing that is most joyful to read, writing that is stunning and evocative, that begs to be read slowly or many times over.

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Training oneself to write better consists in learning, daily, to produce for others a whole bunch of stock that will be alternately venerated and rejected, misunderstood or recognized a little too keenly. It is to enter into a community of imperfect objects, and to understand one’s work as constantly modifying itself based on external standards, both real and imagined. Perhaps the most frightening part of writing is that it reproduces the experience of living with such ruthless clarity: It distills subjecthood to its essential metaphor: A trajectory of self-alteration through the temperament of others, eventually coming upon versions of yourself or your thought which aren’t what you would have thought going in.

There are a few ways we know of giving ourselves up to others. Writing might be the most intimate of them, with the most disappointing physical rewards.

We are afforded certain liberties in the Literature and Critical Theory program, our private haven in the university. Regimented pacing—a hallmark of good, solid, A-grade writing—is dispensed with in our seminars. We are coached in our writing not to pass too quickly through thoughts, lest we fail to defend them, nor to remain too long with any fragment that deserves less attention; however, we have the special luxury in our seminars of passing through ideas with the alternating swiftness and ease that better matches the processes of thought and communication. If invention proceeds upon fancies, our small home in the university allows us to follow them. It is a home where such instincts in writing are not trodden upon. If the task of writing is somehow to pay most generous tribute to our forebears while at once inflecting an unmatchable, irreplaceable voice of our own, there is no better place for it than in our little program.

Julian Butterfield

• LESSON for three voices (1, 2, 3; to be performed by whichever voices without further rehearsal)

It is with great pleasure and excitement that we are able to publish some of the pieces produced in (and proximate to) our haven. Thank you to the editorial committee, without whom they would have gone unpublished. Thank you to Rebecca Comay, whose encouragement throughout the process was a guiding light; to Fan Wu and Alexa Winstanley-Smith, who started it; to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, on my own behalf, without whom I may at some point have made the mistake of being satisfied with thought.

Enjoy.

2

3

1. exhaling:

observe rhythm: do not deviate from the breath

indicate the voice with exhalation

observe the effort required to suggest the voice, then offering:

where is the pitch natural? observe

if it isn’t natural immediately, change it until it is

accommodate the voice to its nature. (this includes a final aptitude for silence, when appropriate— inhaling:

indicate silence with inward breaths*

2.

* Respond as much to 3 as 3 does you. Grow to accommodate THIS

** Respond as much to 3 as 3 does you. Grow to accommodate THIS

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far back in the throat: accommodate each phoneme to the first voice, one per breath, in no order, as this grows chant with two voices: repeat as many times as necessary H

Y

R

G **

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3.

appeal from the available materials to the manifestation of a form

this involves

1) a decision regarding the potential of the image in its formless

state

2) its embodiment, transforming the second voice’s phonemes

H into TH

Y into I

R into S

G into Silence

by bringing them from the back of the vocal apparatus to the front

only engage with the second voice in this order: if phonemes appear

between the order

H Y R G

remain silent for their duration

repeat as many times as necessary

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the event

“This” distinguishes itself at every moment. Its existence, which is its distinction according to every circumstance we pass through, is a constant and constantly changing event. This is always with us—there is always some “this,” so long as we are—and yet what it specifically names at any moment is subject to vast change. If a person walks through a garden, “this” at any moment might name a gardenia, a hyacinth, a family of snails, or a dead rat, depending upon the route that she takes through it and where or how closely she looks. “This” is distinguished not independently by the thing it names, and likewise not by the person beholding that thing, but by the event of their encounter, and the absorption or intimacy of basic sensation.

Indeed, it is helpful to think of “this,” or the process of distinction it describes, as an event: whatever it names does not merely exist as such and is neither deliberately chosen, but happens—or is happening—quite naturally at all moments. Provisionally, we might locate this event in the constant, ever-changing point of contact between subject and object.

Of course, the distinction between subject and object, and the notion of contact that it carries, however, is only extrapolated from the basic event itself by language, according to demands of expression or communication.

Let us consider an example. The sentence, “She looks at a flower,” certainly describes an event, which, pleasantly, we might now picture. In the desire to explain to us precisely what happens therein, the speaker must break his observation into pieces: the image is now constituted by two separate parts, “she” and “a flower,” who maintain the same, united image through a specific act of relation. Perhaps arbitrarily, this act is attributed to the lady, who becomes the subject to the flower: her object. The lady likely becomes the subject because she has a history as such: she can use language to distinguish herself as such for us. The verb “to look,” carried out by the subject, becomes the way in which the speaker clearly expresses the image’s mode of relation or unity from the less distinct label of “subject-object contact,” itself linguistically expressed in turn from the verbally indistinct, original event of “this-ness.”

For the parties involved, this original event was quite different from how it comes to be expressed in language. Unless the person looking at the flower is narrating her action at the very moment it takes place, the event at the basis of the sentence “I look at a flower”—the present moment at which the relevant, potential “this” of this statement is given potential—has very little to do with any distinctions between subject, object, and their point of contact. “Event,” in what it most basically names, actually erases the relevance of such distinctions by focussing on the complete system, whereas “action” implies the agency, subjectivity, and difference of the event that language then, by its organizational nature, determines. Being neither distinguished independently by what it is named, nor by who beholds and names it, the event in which “this” is potentiated is conversely a moment of profound interdependence: dependence unto indistinction. Here the (provisional) entities exist in an extreme, contingent intimacy, which language tears asunder—in the interest of communicability; reformation— shortly thereafter. Certainly, we have been subjects up to this point, and will be reconstituted as such immediately hereafter, but in the event taking place now—which language always comes after, no matter how momentarily—such a distinction is impossible.

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According to Georges Bataille’s poetic theory of Mystical Participation, “The fusion of object and subject requires the transcendence of each party as soon as it enters into contact with the other.” 1 However, as we have seen that object, subject, and mode of contact only effectively come into being when the event is adjoined with linguistic expression—always slightly after the fact, as it is chosen and not necessary—the basic, contingent, and nonverbal state of the event is this transcendence, or indeed the immateriality of any difference: the profound intimacy or basic inter-dependence of any experience. Whereas one could argue that in order to speak about it at all the subject has to have existed throughout the event, this does not disagree with my proposition: I argue that the mechanism by which the subject continually (re)constitutes her own existence in acts of language— subsequently or otherwise secondarily choosing to verbally locate herself according to “this”—emerges exactly from the immediate, necessary event of the intimacy between her provisional internal and external reality. In a sense, this agrees with the quickly-becoming-commonplace theory that the subject is “a function both of the contingent laws of language and of the always singular history of objects of desire.” 2 In the event then-called “looking at the flower,” there is no significant difference between the person and the flower, until the actual language of “this,” having been potentiated in the basic experience, is spoken: “I am looking at this flower.” Immediately after this point, and indeed during the specific event itself, the provisional subject experiences the same intimacy with all the other things she can name “this” at that very moment.

Likewise, in the event called “looking at her looking at a flower,” there is no difference between myself and her looking at the flower, until, having been potentiated, I can express the this-ness of this situation, and reconstitute the traditions of her and my subjectivities: “I see her looking at a flower.” The event need not only apply to “external” potential objects, but also to events of memory or imagination, which only become different from the subject when language, in explaining them, demands so.

Thus the event of intimacy, absorption, or no-difference, in the potentiation and indeed authorization of language, which its this-ness provides, tends to destroy itself. “This,” in transferring its distinction into our voice, into language, establishes us in the structure of subject-object-contact. In Bataille’s theory, the failure of poetry is in the fact that, although it is essentially made possible in the Mystical Participation of the subject and object, “at the same time as it releases the objects, it tries to seize this release” in language. I argue that this is the same process involved in every experience: as soon as this-ness exists in the event, it is available for its own language— the spoken word “this”—to cast us out of it by demanding difference, and furthermore asserting that it was always there. 3 To this end, Bataille concludes that “In a sense, poetry is always the opposite of poetry,” aligning itself with our conclusion that in potentiating a language of distinction, the event, which distinguishes this-ness destroys the intimacy it originally constituted. 4 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil. London: Penguin, 2012, p. 34.

Ibid, p. 6.

Ibid, p. 34.

4 Ibid, p. 35.

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2 3

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the performance In a certain sense, LESSON is an attempt to address this failure, or inbuilt tendency for the self-destruction of both poetics specifically and basic, fundamentally mystic experience generally. It should be noted that this is the same tendency that produces the ability to speak. It does not seek to prove false or transcend this quality, although I find these possibilities to be both viable and fascinating potential projects. Rather, with it I intend to induct, watch, and participate in the event wherein the profound intimacy between the its participants, by potentiating language with the absorbing contingency of each others’ presences, is in the same process both conceived and terminated. The piece comes out of several previous attempts at naming this event in literal poetics—two of which are presented peripherally here—which to my mind demonstrate Bataille’s theory of seizure: in each, the release of the subject object relationship itself becomes the literal object, rendering only a provisional explanation of the event itself rather than an active experience of it. My response was therefore to transfer this poetics from literal language into the very arena it addresses, experience towards language, or at least performative mode that exaggerates the components of the selfsame event for its participants.

Most importantly, then, with the performances of LESSON—which may and ideally will be performed by many trios, in many contexts—I attempt to address a relationship between theory and practice that exceeds mere demonstration, representation, or allegory. The ideal is to collapse the boundary between theory and performance by instantiating and indicating the conditions of the theory with the piece’s basic commands. For the participants, the experience of performing LESSON should not merely represent and express the theoretical understanding put forth here for an external audience, as in a play, but rather should function as the lesson, or active embodiment of this theory for the performers themselves. To perform LESSON is ideally to be its audience, and as such to be exposed to and acutely aware of our own, present experience of intimacy, potentiation, and expression that allows “this” performance to complete itself.

To this end, it requires from each participant an alignment of personal presence and deep, attentive absorption with their counterparts that grows so close as to mean effectively the same thing. The observations it requires in vocal acts are not mere, directed observations, but demands for the accommodation, fusion, and transcendence of agency. Through these basic, instructional appeals toward intimacy and potentiation, the participants should ideally come to regard themselves and indeed function as a single vocal apparatus, operating almost effortlessly along the same breath pattern, and allowing their individual vocalizations to merge to the point that the final “THIS” effectively indicates the completion and lack of further need for intimacy or participation: the completion of the event, and the reconstitution of difference. Concluding the performance, the participants ideally will be acutely aware of the fundamental presence of the same, albeit less exaggerated, condition of contingency and intimacy between provisional subject and object in every living moment: the condition by which language and the constant, relational reassertion of one’s subjecthood—effectively the same thing—are enabled.

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In the failure of any of these fairly brash ideals, and the weighty theoretical mechanism that would animate them, I would like to conclude by proposing an alternate justification and explanation for LESSON, which relies upon a far less dense premise: practical understanding. In “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that interpretation, conventionally understood as being enacted by the subject regarding her object, as in the act of reading a book, for instance, lies more in the reciprocal relationship between the parties than any directed action or individual agency. He specifies hermeneutics as “a process of communication,” and cites the developing familiarity between its participants that allows it to become successful, and in itself, ethical. 6 His statement “Discussion bears fruit when a common language is found” shifts the emphasis in the process of understanding away from the acting subjects individually and onto the relation that they are able to discover: the condition by which their fundamental difference as individuals can be transcended, or at least made less concrete. 7 To this end, Gadamer makes the exquisitely simple, potent statement that “everything understanding mediates is mediated along with ourselves”: understanding, if achieved, unites its participants in its affect. 8 If a common language is indeed found, and difference rendered insignificant, the affect of the interpretative process, or understanding itself, is naturally and equally sustained by all its participants. The appeals in LESSON toward the accommodation and unity of all its performers’ voices in the production of a single, final, ultimately understandable result performs the notion that the generation of understanding for its participants is achieved through, and indeed the same as the transcendence or fusion of their individual identities as such. In tandem with the theory of Mystical Participation, Gadamer’s ethical hermeneutics emphasizes the primacy in a subject-object interaction of the total event, rather than the enactment of the subject that establishes her difference with the objects. In pursuing the ethics of human understanding, Gadamer like Bataille focusses on the event of profound, unifying intimacy (and its remarkable effects) implied or possible in every moment of subjective existence. Very basically, this is what LESSON attempts to address and engage its participants in. It is a very basic lesson in being together, and its dynamic relationship to language, enacted through the simultaneous distinction and dissolution of this intimacy.

Reprinted in After Philosophy: End or Transformation, ed. K. Baynes, J. Bohman & T. McCarthy, Boston: MIT, 1987, pgs. 319-38.

6 Ibid, p. 336.

7 Ibid. p. 336.

8 Ibid, p. 336.

5

Polina Zelenko

Godard, Marker, and the Void

In the lecture at the centre of his 2004 film Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard says the words: “Oui, l’image est bonheur, mais près d’elle le néant séjourne, et toute la puissance de l’image ne peut s’exprimer qu’en lui faisant appel” (“Yes, the image is happiness, but close to it sojourns nothingness, and all the power of the image cannot be expressed but by making appeal to it [nothingness].”)

The first words spoken in Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil are as follows: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.” We see the image (a shot of about seven seconds); it disappears, and the voice continues: “He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and that he had tried several times to link it to other images; but it never worked.” As the final few words are being spoken, we see a shot of a fighter jet descending into the hold of an aircraft carrier—as the image disappears, the voice starts again: “He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

Each is a kind of riddle that conceals a certain thought about the nature of images; a riddle that is in neither case easy to solve. Marker and Godard are both, of course, great theoreticians of the cinema, but both filmmakers always do their theorizing in and through the cinema; both are constantly probing the possibilities of the medium, but their investigations are always in the form of creations—as Zsuzsa Baross puts it with reference to Godard, his cinema creates what is possible for the cinema by actualizing its possibilities. 1 Marker, I believe, is no different from Godard in this respect.

Thus, their films present difficulties when it comes to the task of expressing or explicating what exactly is being said in these works, which seem to say so much—but the point, of course, is that it is not that something is being said, but that something is being shown. For both filmmakers, the question is always what is possible for the cinema, and thus, what amounts to the same, “What is cinema?”— André Bazin’s question which “becomes a quest, a mission and a permanent problem (as the revolution was believed to be permanent) for the cinema itself.” 2 The question is: what is cinema specifically; what can it do that only it can do? The dedication to this problem explains, I think, why Godard and Marker shy away from expressing ideas directly—always tending toward the poetic or the fragmentary while seeming only an inch away from the clarity of a proposition. All this means that to speak or write about a film by Godard or Marker in a theoretical mode—to translate into discourse what we might say is non-discursively theorized in their films—is something like sacrilege, or at least something that can only be done in consciousness of an inevitable inadequacy.

Zsuzsa Baross, “Jean-Luc Godard” in Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed.

Felicity Colman, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, p. 135.

2 Ibid, p. 135.

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Nonetheless, I intend to extract a theory of the image from each, compare them, and then set out immediately to the application of these theories.

Of course, I chose these two segments because of their superficial affinity (they both speak of images which are associated with happiness—for Godard generally and for Marker singularly—and of nothingness—“the black”), and accordingly I hope that the thoughts contained in them will bear a similar affinity. I also find a certain affinity between these two films, Notre Musique and Sans Soleil, as films that both seem themselves to be hard at work thinking about images and through images, and so I expect to draw out other ‘image-thoughts’ from these films in the process of working over them.

“The Image is Happiness”

The quotation taken from Notre Musique appears following an story told

by Godard of a young peasant girl, in the time of Napoleon III, who claims to have seen the Virgin. She is shown, by a bishop and a mother superior, plates of masterpieces; Raphael, Murillo, etc.; but the girl does not recognize her vision in them. When she sees a plate of the Virgin of Cambrai, an icon painting, she falls to her knees: “It’s her, your grace!” As Godard is telling the story, we see a shot of a young girl in modern clothes sitting at the bottom of a staircase, flipping through a nondescript picture book. .

The girl is flipping through the pages quickly, until, when Godard reaches the part of the story when the girl is shown the Virgin of Cambrai, she stops on one page and stares. When the girl of the story falls to her knees in recognition, we see a version of the Cambrai Madonna (fig. 1) and Godard speaks over the image: “No movement; no depth; no illusion: the sacred.”

As he then begins to speak about the image and nothingness, the camera pans over a photograph of a skeleton which has just removed its paper mask to reveal its face, bare to the bone except for a pair of sunglasses.

What to make of all of this? First, the girl on the staircase: flipping through the picture book, absorbing the images, collecting them in her memory, assembling an archive. We imagine, of course, that the images in the book are the same ones being shown to the girl in the story; we imagine her as that girl. The question that the image asks then is: would this girl recognize the Virgin herself if she appeared, burdened as she is by all of these representations, this archive of masterpieces? She pauses on a page at the same time as the girl in the story sees the icon. She does not fall to her knees—she holds the page ready to turn it, her expression unchanged— but the icon has caught her eye. It is easy to see why; an icon is still very distinctive even if one does not identify it with the sacred, for the very reasons Godard gives—essentially that an icon does not so much represent as invoke, giving no illusion of realism but, in and through this lack of illusion, retaining a certain power. An icon is an image that presents itself as an image—the tattered one that Godard shows us (not the original Cambrai Madonna, which is in much better shape) hardly allows the viewer to see the features of the Virgin’s face, only to recognize that the image refers to her. But more than this, what we see is the image crumbling away to reveal the void that underlies it. This is a literalization of the metaphor that follows, of the nothingness that sojourns or lies nearby (or underneath) the image—hence the next image, of a mask being pulled off to reveal, not the true face of the wearer, but only a skeleton.

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We can see then, how the images are working together, but what is this néant exactly; what is its significance? To say that there is a void that underlies every image is to say that an image is close to nothing; it is suspended tenuously over a space that would extinguish it completely if it were to fall, but over which nonetheless it stands. The image has a substantive reality; a certain autonomy which comes from its separation: to say that beside the image lies nothingness also means to say that images are radically separate from ‘the world,’ ‘reality,’ or whatever we call what lies on the other side of the void that lies next to the image. This, I think, is the sense in which “the image is happiness”—it is absolute (in the sense in which this word means separate as well as complete), without dependence, without referent, without need. It is clear by now that we are talking about images precisely not in their representational capacity: aside from the quest mentioned earlier, Godard has another quest, which is to find out what images can do other than represent reality (their ability to do the latter being in any case tenuous at best, in the same way as all representation).

There is a void that separates images from the world—and, Godard says, the power of the image cannot be expressed except by making an appeal to this void. We can see how the icon shown in the film makes an appeal to the void (precisely by picturing it, in the crumbling away of the paint), and how icons generally make such an appeal (by eschewing representation or any attempt at semblance—that is, of direct relation to worldly reality), and how these images gain their power thereby.

We will see the way in which Chris Marker makes his appeal to the void.

The Synthesized Image

The non-representational possibilities of the image are also a chief concern for Marker in Sans Soleil—he even (under the guise of Hayao Yamaneko) develops a strategy for stripping images of their representational correspondence in on order that they may “proclaim themselves to be what they are: images; not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality” (fig. 2). In the synthesized images of Marker’s film, we see representation crumbling away to reveal the void underneath, just as we do with Godard’s icon. But what is the power that these images are granted in making this appeal to the void, in showing themselves for what they are?

Sans Soleil is premised on an analogy between images (specifically photographic images) and memories. The analogy is both historical (images coming to increasingly take over the function of memory) and ontological (images and memories being, in a certain fundamental way, analogous).

I want to draw out a few theses from Sans Soleil on this commonality or fraternity between images and memories, in order to come closer to understanding what specific power or potentiality of the image Marker is illustrating, or perhaps actualizing, in his film.

Theses on Memory and Images

1. An image can have all the power of a memory (the narrator says: “I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I 13

remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.

They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory”), but, at the same time, images are stricken with the same poverty as are memories (“We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”)

2. Memories and photographic images are both subject to the same operation of découpage, of being cut out and cut off from their origin. Memory cannot render accurately all of the dimensions of experience (sensations, such as thirst for instance, cannot be made present in memory), as experience cannot render accurately all dimensions of reality—memory must frame experience as a photograph is framed; “memory must make do with its delirium, its drift,” but also with its technological limitations.

3. Like images, memories are plastic, manipulable, subject to alteration après coup—and not just in the way that Marker’s synthesizer manipulates images. Montage is a function of memory just as it is of cinema, and it has an equal power in both apparati to alter the function of an image or memory (what other images or memories it recalls, what it signifies or communicates), without necessarily altering the object itself. In his Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard says that “what has passed through cinema and been marked by it can no longer enter elsewhere”—in other words, cinema has the power to fundamentally alter images, by imbuing them, irreversibly, with the property of signification. All this without laying a hand on the form of the image itself. Sans Soleil allows its memory-images to retain something of their delirium and drift, but it does not eschew entirely the artifice of montage, with its effects of semiosis, symbolization and narrativization—it weaves its images into a discourse on themselves, not unlike the way in which the subject weaves its memories into a discourse on itself (a phenomenon of central concern to psychoanalysis).

Marker’s appeal to the void that underlies images is simultaneously an appeal to the void that underlies memories, which are, in the same sense as images, cut off, separated, and therefore absolute. But this absoluteness is only felt when an image or a memory is divorced from all of those functions with which it has been imbued (representation, signification, symbolism, narrative function) and which are not proper to it. To fully enact this detachment of the image in order to render it absolute; to fully realize the sovereignty of the image (even an image)—this appears to be Marker’s aim in the opening sequence of Sans Soleil, which I will turn to now.

“The Image of Happiness” Sandor Krasna proposes placing his image, “the image of happiness,” all alone at the beginning of a film, next to a strip of black leader. Marker does not do this; he places next to it (not quite right next to it—there is a bit of black separating the two) another image: the fighter jet being lowered into the hold of the aircraft carrier. The image appears as the words, “but it never worked,” are uttered. Is it a rhetorical move, an expression by demonstration of Marker’s lack of faith in the idea of a pure image, which cannot be 14

linked with other images (and is thus not susceptible to the technology of montage)? In this case, the image is placed there to show that indeed it can be linked with other images. I think that this is one possibility, but that there is another one: that the placement of the second image is, in a sense, involuntary. We must remember that the film itself is structured in resemblance or mimicry of the cognitive process of memory—each image is linked with other images by way of this process of association (memory’s own technology of montage, as I mentioned before). The film even falls asleep at times and recalls images from its waking life—the sequence in the train, for instance, when the film drifts between consciousness and unconsciousness (we see, alternately, people sleeping on the train and then images from television and others that we have seen earlier in the film), or the scene of the “neighbourhood celebrations” in Tokyo, where, as the music lulls us into a trance, the film ‘remembers’ an image of a man paddling a boat, and then one of an emu (both of which we have seen earlier).

So, as we gaze upon the “image of happiness,” another image is called forth or summoned—perhaps by its contrast: pastoral happiness and impressive military technology.

But this placement does not exactly betray the autonomy of the first image (and perhaps the néant of several seconds placed between them is part of the reason for this, or at least signifies an according intention)—they are tied together only by the discourse that overlies them. Sandor Krasna says that he has tried several times to link the image to others, but that he never succeeded—perhaps his error was precisely in trying to link it, rather than letting “the memory work of the image itself” 3 establish its connection, if this is what Marker has done. In any case we have two very different images, floating in “the black” that surrounds them, and there is a sense that these two autonomous images are floating in the very space of the archive, which, like the process of memory, is constantly at work drawing lines between images, linking them together (with tenacity or tenousness) by their resonances with one another. The link between these two images is of the more tenuous type—barely a connection, certainly not stable. It is not the type of linkage we are used to seeing; the kind which explains itself with reference to an external logic (narrative or otherwise). As with the rest of the film, the logic of progression from one image to the next is entirely internal to the images themselves—either by visual similitude or a common thematic element, or by a thought which an image conjures up, leading to the recollection of another image, and so on.

As for the image itself, it would be easy to say that yes, the image does evoke happiness, indeed very strongly, in a way that is perhaps inalienable.

But the perception of the image is so colored by the name given to it, “the image of happiness,” even after the fact (the name is only given after the image is gone from view), that it is almost impossible to tell, when we go back and look at the image, whether we are seeing just the image, or if we are seeing it through the name, as the memory we have of it, as “the image of happiness.” It has passed through the cinema, and cannot enter elsewhere—even the cinema again—intact. If Marker had chosen to carry out Sandor Krasna’s proposal (in fact his own), there would be no question— the image would speak for itself. Not any image could do this; this one is particularly promising for its lack of any particular symbolic weight or external significance. Nothing in it points to happiness (the children are not even smiling). If we were to grant it the name, “the image of happiness,” 15

it would be by virtue of this very lack. Again, like the icon, no illusion (the children are all staring directly at the camera). The image promises happiness, in the sense used earlier—of fullness, of lack without need (lack of depth, illusion, realism, symbolism, signification), of being absolute—but that happiness is denied it as soon as it is given its name. It is not the linking of the image with another image that denies it its substantive reality, but the linking of image with discourse.

Of course, this theft is not the greatest of crimes, and the rest of Marker’s film shows all-too-well how images and discourse can be woven together into a productive relation. But it does so under the admission that it is dealing in two non-exchangeable currencies—an admission made through this prayer to the void that opens the film.

• In closing, I will make a (brief) application of what I have gleaned from Godard and Marker by way of a theory of images. The recent and sensational film by Leos Carax, Holy Motors, plays out quite ingeniously the ontology of the image that I have been discussing. Oscar, the principal character, is a kind of perpetual actor—we observe him moving from role to role, but in a kind of mise en abyme in which each moment of apparent authenticity is revealed to be artificial (most humourously in the penultimate sequence in which he is apparently going home to go to sleep; only it is not the home that he left in the morning, and, what is more, his family is of a different species than he). In Holy Motors, the spectator is put into the abyss at each revelation, which is precisely the revelation of the abyss (void, néant) that underlies all images—thus the increasing humour of the film, which is a self-deprecating one: the viewer laughs at herself for having believed in the authenticity of any of it. Indeed, it makes one laugh at oneself for ever having believed in such a thing as the authenticity of images.

Fig. 1: Icon painting, Notre Musique

Fig. 2: Synthesized image, Sans Soleil

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Geordie Kenyon Sinclair

Mistranslation and textual authority in Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996) is famous for its virtuosic use of English. Hal Incandenza—the novel’s central character, in this reading—and his mother Avril are both experts in English grammar and usage, like Wallace and his own mother. 1 In the book, “Infinite Jest” is a rare but lethally-entertaining film directed by Hal’s late father James. Anyone who views it is reduced to irreversible catatonia, desiring only another view: much of the novel’s action deals with attempts by Québécois secessionists to locate a master copy to use in terrorist action against North American viewers. French is the novel’s second language: the proximity of its Boston-area setting to Québec (Avril’s home province) is prominently thematised, and the terrorism plot includes many francophone characters, as well as dialogue that diegetically takes place in French, rendered through English. 2 In contrast to the hotshot English style (e.g. “He hated it that she could even dream he’d be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he’s always so pleased to play along,” 3), the French is riddled with often-comical errors. Words are misgendered, the wrong prepositions are used, words are misspelled and made up, and conventions of French usage are evaded. This paper explores the role of this language of errors in the novel, descriptively and interpretively. Because they present a parallel between Hal and the implied author’s 4 respective relationships to French, this particular case sheds some light on the opaque affinities between Wallace, Hal, and the novel’s narrator(s). Such affinities are palpable throughout the novel, but those shown by the novel’s French show the link especially clearly, because of the level of textual authority involved: the erroneous French carries the mark of intention attributable to the implied author. This elucidates an internal origin story in the novel: Infinite Jest itself stems from a mind like Hal’s, and this identification helps clarify the relationship between the book’s tone and Hal’s fate.

The novel’s French-English dynamic is made up of mistranslation in both directions: errors in the English of French-speaking characters, 5 and errors in the French throughout the book. While the first type of linguistic difficulty predominates, simply because this is an English-language novel, the second type is more interesting for its lack of an obvious explanation.

For an intimate tour of Wallace’s feelings and family heritage vis-à-vis English grammar, see his essay “Authority and American Usage,” published in Harper’s in April 2001 and his book Consider the Lobster in 2005.

2 In this paper, I emphasise the distinction between the “diegetic world,” in which the novel’s events take place, and the narrative itself, which presents the diegetic world to the reader.

3 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, Little, Brown, 1996, p. 451.

4 The “implied author,” discussed below, is a concept formulated by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed., Chicago, U Chicago Press, 1983).

5 As well as speakers of a few other languages.

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A typical example of stilted English can be found in any of the many chapters detailing the conversation between Rémy Marathe, a representative of the A.F.R., a Québécois separatist terrorist group, and Hugh Steeply, an undercover operative representing the (post-NSA/-CIA) “Office of Unspecified Services” of the (post-NAFTA) O.N.A.N. 6 continental government. Marathe, implicitly translating his thoughts out of French, often speaks in comical locutions: U.S.A. has previously been hated. Richly so. Shining Path and your Maxwell House company. The trans-Latin cocaine cartels and the poor late M. Kemp with his exploding home. Did not both Iraq and Iran call U.S.A. the Very Large Satan? As you hatefully say they have Heads of Rags? 7 Instances like this—what can be called mistranslations in Infinite Jest’s English—thematise the complexities of speaking in a non-native language.

But in other cases, they perhaps inadvertently show the complexity of rendering diegetic speech in one language in a text that speaks another . In an odd passage, Thierry Poutrincourt, a Québécoise member of the Enfield Tennis Academy, where Hal studies, switches from awkward English (“My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.” 8), to French: “‘Very well then look:’ she said (Poutrincourt did, in Québecois), ‘pubescent stars are nothing new to this sport’”. 9 Here, her correct Québécois French is rendered, by contrast to her flawed English, as correct, colloquial English. A few pages later, still diegetically speaking the same correct French, Poutrincourt’s speech is rendered by faulty English: “Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected.” 10 In this scene and a few others, the fact that good and bad French alike are represented by variations of textual English becomes somewhat confusing: Wallace uses altered English syntax to represent French, sometimes regardless of whether that French is diegetically supposed to be correct or not.

The inverse and more interesting error—incorrect French—is found both in the mouths of fluent and less-fluent French speakers. Hugh Steeply, the undercover agent, a non-native speaker, speaking as “journalist” Helen Steeply, asks Poutrincourt (prompting the language-switch just described): “Veux que nous nous parlons en français? Serait plus facile, ça?” 11, 12 The effect is similar to that of Marathe’s English quoted above, although without the same degree of comical detail. The first sentence at least lacks a word (“Veux-tu”), and suffers from a convoluted and incomplete structure, using the reflexive form se parler (evidenced by the second “nous”) in what could be an instance of hypercorrection, when parler would have been simpler on its own (“Veux-tu parler en français?”). The second sentence is also improperly structured, with “ça” tacked on as if making up after the fact for a lacking pronoun (e.g. “Serait-il”). Together, these lines suggest formal study of French (for example, the use of the reflexive), but less experience with sentence assembly on the fly (a practiced speaker would never start a question with “Veux que”)—linguistic shakiness that realistically depicts typical errors by someone not well-practiced in a language.

Organization of North American Nations.

Wallace, p. 365.

Ibid., p. 575.

9 Ibid., p. 576.

10 Ibid., p. 578.

11 Ibid., p. 576.

12 “Do you want to talk to each other in French? That would be easier?”

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Errors like these abound in the French of Infinite Jest’s non-native speakers, and are natural and realistic enough, and the characters themselves are aware of them: Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe. 13 While the errors in Steeply’s French, for example, correspond to those in Marathe’s English, errors are also often spoken by characters who have uncomplicated native-speaker French skills, or found in the narrator’s language, where they are not explicable as “realistic touches.” These are the most interesting examples of mistranslation in the text, and the frequency at which they occur demands an explanation.

Strange little errors are common, like when Marathe says he spent time “in l’infirmière,” 14 apparently meaning “in the infirmary,” but actually saying “in the nurse.” An A.F.R. member says: “‘Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. Il faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’était toi, faisait-elle?’” 15, 16 The accent on collègue points the wrong way, but then the last sentence has two subjects: what should be “Ou était-ce toi qui la faisait?” has been rendered with both the addressee and the soup as grammatical subjects. Someone says, out of context at a party, “A du nous avons foi au poison”, 17 probably meaning “We have faith in poison,” but garbled beyond recognition. Misspelling is also common: Poutrincourt says “Japonois,” for “Japanese”—though it should be “japonais.” 18 An unmarked narrator refers to a tennis tournament as a “terre-batu-fest”: 19 “terre battue” is the term for clay (tennis) courts. A sequence permeated by Marathe’s voice in free indirect discourse says that “The hills of upper Enfield, they were de l’infere of difficulty,” 20 the faux-French apparently meaning “de l’enfer,” which would mean “from hell”—which fails to fit into the sentence grammatically anyway. The most notable and most frequent “misspelling” involves the name of Marathe’s organisation, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, or “The Wheelchair Assassins”—though the correct French would be “Assassins des fauteuils roulants.” “Wheelchair” is also repeatedly rendered as “fauteuil de rollent,” 21 complete with superfluous preposition. The label on a video cartridge reads “IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR”:22 that should be “poursuive.” While “rollent” can be explained as a semantic hint to anglophones, by its resemblance to “roll,” and the same might be said of “infere,” by its resemblance to “infernal,” I can come up with no explanation for any of these other errors.

The most amusing examples may be the use of made-up terms or expressions: “chiens-courants” (“hounds”) and “Sans-Christe” are used by Québécois characters as insults, 23 both usages purely arbitrary—though this is not Ibid., p. 456.

Ibid., p. 639.

15 Ibid., p. 419.

16 “Unfortunately, your colleague is deceased. He made an excellent pea soup... No? Or was it you who made it?” [lit. “Or was it you, did she make?”]

17 Ibid., p. 207.

18 Ibid., p. 581.

19 Ibid., p. 732.

20 Ibid., p. 622.

21 E.g. pgs. 87, 622.

22 Ibid., p. 416.

23 E.g. p. 414.

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quite the same as calling them “errors.” Marathe interjects at one point: “D’éclaisant” 24—not a recognisable French word, but perhaps modeled on éclairer, “to illuminate.” Québec is repeatedly referred to as “Notre Rai Pays” 25

by Québécois in the book—perhaps a corruption of “vrai pays” (“true country”). The A.F.R. characters also repeatedly say “demi-maison” (“halfhouse”) for “halfway house,” 26 a literalist but nonsensical translation. The superfluous “e” on “Christe” conveys something of the Québécois pronunciation of “Christ”—when used as a sacre, typically rendered as “crisse,” and the malapropism “demi-maison” has a clear origin. But no explicit back-story is given for any of the other errors and none of them reference any Québécois idioms or common errors in the spoken language.

As if to double the work of italics in marking them as foreign, French terms are obsessively majusculed (like “Sans-Christe,” as though imitating German), even though French uses much less uppercase than English— what might be described as an inserted interlinguistic formatting error. A similar species of error is the overuse of articles and prepositions in French.

James Incandenza’s burial plot is described as located in “Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert,” 27 or, literally, “The Cemetery of the St. Adalbert.” And the articles and prepositions used are often the wrong ones. Marathe describes a snack: “But yes. French-Canadian-type pea soup. Produit du Montreal. Saveur Maison. Prête a Servir.” 28 Here, some accents are missing, and Montréal is given the wrong preposition: it should be “de Montréal.” Orin himself is puzzled over prepositions at one point, asking Hal: “The Fronte Liberation [sic] and so on? The Fils de Montcalm. Or is it maybe du?” 29 Finally, some errors in Infinite Jest’s French are in grammatical gender. The FLQ is identified in the book as “Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec,” 30 while in reality it was called “Front de libération du Québec”: note the added articles, unconventional capitalisation and missing accents, and especially the misgendering of Québec as feminine by the use of “de la” in place of “du.”

Exploring the origin of these errors depends on figuring out the implied standard of French usage in the novel. While the familiar rules of “Standard” English seem to hold in the novel (as well as those of other forms of English, in which narration is occasionally given) 31, it is also clear that other, unfamiliar usage rules exist as part of the novel’s world and future setting, like those of O.N.A.N. bureaucratese, and of Incandenza family slang. The apparently distorted French could be interpreted as a sign that the rules of French are no longer in effect, perhaps under dystopian anglocentric O.N.A.N. hegemony. An even simpler explanation might be that reference to standard French usage holds, and that the novel’s francophone characters are being depicted with the same faulty French as the likes of Steeply. This would imply their ignorance of, indifference to, or disconnection from the French linguistic tradition. Both of these possibilities seem unlikely for the fact that there appear to be different degrees of incorrect French to be found: the francophone characters’ usage is more often correct that that of the narrator(s), and that of non-francophone characters is least correct of all.

Ibid., p. 371.

E.g. p. 414.

E.g. p. 618.

27 Ibid., p. 875.

28 Ibid., p. 367.

29 Ibid., p. 858.

30 Ibid., p. 134.

31 E.g. pgs. 42-3.

24 25

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But since all are, nonetheless, riddled with errors, it could also be concluded that these are genuine mistakes, inserted unintentionally on Wallace’s part, and overlooked in the editing process. While such shoddy editing is hardly inconceivable, some of the errors simply defy the suggestion of inadvertence, such as “Notre Rai Pays,” or the made-up insult “chiens-courants.”

In light of this, if the errors are intentional, while we may still read some of them as originating with the characters, others must originate elsewhere.

It is in this respect that the concept of the “implied author” applies to the novel. For these errors to have originated with Wallace—the real historical author—would make them genuine mistakes, and require them to have evaded editing. The implied author, on the other hand, is in part a creation contained within the fictional work. Wayne Booth writes of “the author”: “As he writes, he creates not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in general’ but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet” in other books, whether by the same or by different (historical) authors. 32 This is the image of a creator not “neutral toward all values,” 33 and who sets the tone, terms, and norms of the novel’s narrative.

Although the implied author may strongly resemble the historical author, by differentiating them, an interpretation can avoid imputing traits to the person who wrote the book on the sole basis of the name on its cover. The picture of the implied author is one built “only partly by the narrator’s explicit commentary; it is even more derived from the kind of tale” that the narrative consists of. 34 In the other direction, the implied author can be separated from the narrator “by large ironies,” which is certainly the case with many of Infinite Jest’s narrators. This concept divides the book’s “people” into four tiers: the author who generates an implied author in the book, who is the controlling force behind the narrator(s), who let us access the characters.

The “implied author” is needed to interpret Infinite Jest in part because the concept provides a way to negotiate the space that unites the various narrators, as well as characterising the logic that orders “choice of character and episode and scene and idea.” 35 The phenomenon of faulty French spans various narrative voices in the same way as the implied author’s presence does, and is found in various characters’ reported dialogue. Various narrators in the book convey faulty French, but no narrator can be identified (even ones heavily permeated by the voices of Québécois characters) who seems to have a handle on correct French. Errors in the narrators’ language should be considered approved by the implied author. While Orin, as a character, himself comes up with “Fronte Liberation,” the narrators who consistently give the faulty “Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec” speak from a level of higher textual authority, and the consistency of the error points to the implied author’s acquiescence. The “hand of the author” is visible in this play with the author’s figure, and the most interesting implications of this come out of the connection between Hal’s perspective and that of the omniscient narrator. This establishes an explanatory link between two great creative minds in the novel: Hal and the implied author.

Hal’s voice resembles the narrator’s in its irony, erudition, sense of humour, and preoccupations. While it is sometimes clear that he is narrating, Booth, p. 70.

Ibid., p. 71.

Ibid., p. 73.

35 Ibid., p. 74.

32 33

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more often, it is clear that he is not, though like many other characters, his words often permeate the narrative in free indirect discourse. The predominant narrative voice is more-or-less omniscient and clearly detached from Hal, as here: Hal could hear the phone console ringing as he dropped his gear bag and took the room key from around his neck. The phone itself had been Orin’s and its plastic case was transparent and you could see the phone’s guts. 36 Sometimes the narrator sounds like it may be Hal, and sometimes there is no ambiguity: I myself, having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn’t even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope until fifteen, more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. 37 The transition between the narrator’s voice and Hal’s is one of the novel’s smoothest: it is not marked by a radical change of lexicon or style. Hal’s narration includes the same range of slang, pharmaceutical terminology, esoteric vocabulary, and creative syntax. Significantly to my purpose here, they both seem to know French just as well.

Although Avril Incandenza is Québécoise, Hal only has a bit of French, and not Québécois: “Poutrincourt teaches only in Québecois French, which Hal can get by in because of his youthful tour through Orin’s real-French Pléiade Classics.” 38 He attributes better French to his brother—calling him “the one with the Pleiades and the 5 on the French Achievement boards and the ability to trill your R’s;” Orin answers: “‘That’s Parisian.” 39 He has even less Québécois than Hal, and lacks even the experience to identify the accent: he is fooled by the “putatively Swiss” woman who seduces him on behalf of the A.F.R. 40—though this may have more to do with his libido than his French. It seems at least a little odd that their Québécoise mother did not pass any French on to her sons. This may point to a concealed family issue (it would be one of many): more than just ignorant of it, Hal seems hostile: it is a language he “has never all that much liked, particularly sound-wise, Québecois being a gurgly, glottal language that seems to require a perpetually sour facial expression to pronounce.” 41 Hal’s pejorative view of Québécois is shared rather than repudiated by the narrator, but with a larger dose of palpable irony. Québec and its people play many roles in the book, and although their culture and language are mocked by people implicitly ignorant of their finer points, Québec and its separatists are cast as the last (somewhat deluded) David standing up to a Wallace, p. 127.

Ibid., p. 68.

Ibid., p. 272.

39 Ibid., p. 858.

40 Ibid., p. 485.

41 Ibid., p. 273.

36 37 38

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ferociously dystopian O.N.A.N. Goliath—a respectable role, even if ultimately doomed. The A.F.R.’s insurgent methods are portrayed absurdly, and Québécois French is a source of consternation for the narrator no less than for Hal. In a footnote, “N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninflected grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect.” 42 For the most part, none of the book’s French is recognisably Québécois, although one possible interpretation of the errors could be a faux-imitation of its apparent absurdities to those approaching it from the perspective of European French.

While the register of French found in the book suggests that our “official scribe” 43 has a passing acquaintance with the language, its errors indicate a casual approach: the book’s French has not been subjected to a dictionary.

But French-language reference texts are mentioned in a footnote, in a telling yet deeply-buried connection. The note reads: Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur’s [i.e. James Incandenza’s] anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called ‘Fast Fourier Transforms,’ though what the hell ‘ALGOL’ is is anybody’s guess, unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, ‘l’algol,’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid. 44 223

Steeply mentions ALGOL on 423, conversing with Marathe (they are discussing whether the film “Infinite Jest” [“the samizdat”] might be holographic). The scene then cuts to a childhood reminiscence of James Incandenza’s, then an account of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The Marathe-Steeply conversation is resumed, then interrupted for a long scene set in the E.T.A. administration. The in-text reference to note 223 comes at 456, where they are discussing mythological analogies to the film “Infinite Jest”: ALGOL has not been mentioned in over thirty pages. Even relative to the inherent evasiveness of Wallace’s footnoting, this instance is exceptional for its indirect path of reference. The mention of “dictionaries or on-line lexical sources” is significant here: first, because it belies the narrator’s omniscience; the discussion between the two operatives touches on topics that our narrator fails to understand. The mention establishes the availability to our narrator of reference texts in Québécois French, and places the voice within the diegetic world (the “IL/IN Grids” are features of the O.N.A.N. telecommunications network). If the narrator, confused by the term “ALGOL” (it is a computer programming language), had recourse to French reference texts, this narrator could also have checked other aspects of the book’s French.

Most importantly, this mention portrays the narrator as someone with some competence in French, but generally puzzled by it, Québécois in particular. The narrator resembles Hal in this respect, in addition to their similar mastery of English—this is itself a case for interpreting Hal as the novel’s main character.

Ibid., p. 880.

Booth, p. 71.

44 Wallace, p. 880.

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One footnote does not singlehandedly permit broad conclusions about narrative position in the novel, since this position is fractured and modulated. However, this mention seems to undercut the proposition that the errors in the book’s French could be explained by a suspension of usual linguistic rules, and it provides explicit information that links the narrator’s voice to Hal’s. They both have decent French experience, and are à la fois cavalier enough to make plenty of silly errors yet generally defensively intimidated by the language. Along with a larger corpus of less-explicit stylistic and temperamental attributes that identify the narrator with Hal, the fact that the similarity holds tightly in the more specific case of French sanctions the interpretation of the novel as a story about Hal’s mind.

While the linguistic dynamic of Infinite Jest cannot simply be reduced to a plea for pluralism, it contains something of a warning against monolingualism. The book does not have a happy conclusion. Hal, as he is seen in the opening pages (which, it becomes apparent, are the chronological end of the novel’s unfolding) suffers from utter communication breakdown. As he narrates it, “My eyes are closed; the room is silent. ‘I cannot make myself understood, now.’ I am speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Call it something I ate.’” 45 The others in the room perceive his response differently, as they collectively narrate: ‘But the sounds he made.’

‘Undescribable.’

‘Like an animal.’

‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’

‘Nor let’s not forget the gestures.’

‘Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?’

‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’

‘This boy is damaged.’

‘Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.’ 46 Whether drug-, trauma-, family-issue-, or linguistically-induced, the complete deterioration of Hal’s communicative skills is the novel’s central tragedy. From his narration, we can see that his inner monologue has retained the same acuity—it has just lost all reference to his embodied behaviour, and he is now completely self-enclosed. We meet him in the book as a lexical genius and a tennis prodigy, and though we leave him still playing tennis well, his communication breakdown has reached the level of completely depriving him of the possibility of doing anything with this remaining skill. Like his father, a filmmaking genius and tragic suicide, Hal ends the book as a failed genius.

This is another sense in which Infinite Jest is a book about itself. The title is often taken as a reference not only to Hamlet and the fictional James Incandenza film at the centre of the plot, but also to the book’s own girth, scope, and irony. Like the title, the theme of genius reflects on the book itself. The book opens with several pages that quote “extraordinary acclaim for Infinite Jest”: 47 many reviews refer to its genius, and in combination with the scene of Hal’s meltdown that follows, the acclaim is heartbreaking for a re-reader. 48 What does it mean for a book to be a work of genius when its opening scene is that of a destroyed genius, foreboding the theme Ibid., p. 20.

Ibid., p. 23.

47 Ibid., p. 2.

48 It is additionally sad and poignant in light of Wallace’s 2008 suicide.

45

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of genius’ failure? Hal and the implied author are both to some extent monolingually chauvinist, with their dismissal of French and of the Québécois, and Hal’s placid indifference to the O.N.A.N. government that is the picture of monocultural hegemony. The situations I have described that link the narrative voice to Hal’s, in giving the novel an “origin story” as the product of a mind like Hal’s, also implicitly suggest doom.

The novel’s tragedy is not only Hal’s fate but its own. The book acts like Hal, and in showing his communication breakdown it seems to threaten its own. Just as it deals with the seductive pleasures of entertainment while, as a novel, proposing the same, the novel is conflicted about its own status and potential.

Infinite Jest has not yet appeared in French translation. Without specifically analysing it from the perspective of translation, this paper has touched on many aspects of the novel that will pose difficulties to a sensitive French translation. When a translation does appear, it will be especially interesting to note its response to the issues of mistranslation described in this paper (Éditions de l’Olivier had promised a publication this year [2015], but the most recent news on the project dates back to 2013). The fact of translation will effectively reverse many linguistic situations, which will either have to be re-constituted or dissolved, and it may prove impossible to retain the erroneous French, or to do so while conserving its impact, as I have interpreted it here.

Fan Wu

The Private Discourse of Psychosis: Schreber’s Resistances and Resonances with Freud

At the very beginning of The Schreber Case, Freud confesses to a limit—perhaps the limit—of psychoanalysis: We cannot accept patients suffering from this disorder [of paranoia], or at least cannot retain them for long, given that we set the prospect of therapeutic success as a precondition for our treatment. It is thus only exceptionally the case that I am able to gain a deeper insight into the structure of paranoia, whether because the uncertainty of a diagnosis… justifies the attempt of exerting some influence, or because I submit to the requests of the next of kin and agree to treat a patient of this kind for a time in spite of an assured diagnosis. 1 Freud’s reservations about excluding paranoia from the category of treatability, and more pointedly from psychoanalytic practice altogether (if not from psychoanalytic theory), are trenchantly reflected in the indecisive tone of this passage: he moves from complete denial of the paranoid subject by the clinic (“we cannot accept”) to reluctant admittance of the paranoid subject into the clinic (“at least cannot retain them for long”). Then, in the next clause, he immediately makes it clear that the paranoid subject is exempt from treatment, though he negates this exemption by formulating the exemption through reluctant positive phrasing (“we set the prospect of therapeutic success as a precondition for treatment”). It is not rare for Freud to present psychoanalytic disorders as complex problems, whose successful treatment theories are elaborated concomitantly with the treatments themselves; but right at the outset of the paranoid case, Freud signals defeat. Even if he admits paranoid patients, it would only be to perform an empty and staged treatment on them to please their “next of kin.”

Freud spends the remainder of his introduction defending the suitability of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as a text which is able to give theoretical insight into paranoia. Like Freud, I want to take Schreber’s Memoirs seriously as a lucid, provocative account of a particular psychotic case which has bearings on some of the generalizable structures of paranoid psychosis. But I will also extend Freud by having Schreber answer some of Freud’s confusions about the tensions between paranoid psychosis and psychoanalytic practice. I will attempt to answer three interrelated questions: What are the aspects of (Schreber’s) psychosis that 1

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Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber, New York: Penguin, 2003, p. 3.

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define it as non-locatable or untreatable by Freudian psychoanalysis? Or, more emphatically, what are the mechanisms of psychosis that make life livable—the antidote in the poison—for the psychotic subject that might also be threatened by psychoanalysis? And—reversing the question by reading backward—how does Schreber’s case show that psychoanalysis, an ever-performative therapeutic method, is itself founded upon its own particular, private delusions?

It may help to delineate the terms of psychosis and paranoia. I will use the former term to refer to that which exceeds neurosis in terms of the extremity of its symptoms, namely the foreclosure of reality and the substitution for reality of a private world. Psychosis and neurosis are not, however, mutually exclusive; rather, psychosis extends outward from neurosis—as I will show later on in the essay, psychosis redescribes neurosis by casting it under its sign. Paranoia, on the other hand, is an explanatory device used

by Freud for that which triggers psychosis, and, as an affective position, exists within and alongside psychosis, perpetually causing the psychotic state of disreality. Psychosis is the more general term for Schreber’s state, while paranoia comes into use to describe a hermeneutic operation of cause and effect.

The Privacy of the Psychotic World

Schreber’s delusional reality is defined by Schreber’s personal relationship with God, which Freud will interpret through the theory of narcissism and which makes him the powerful and privileged—as well as abused and degraded—centre of his God’s world. I will bring up two crucial mechanisms, birthed by Schreber’s relationship with God, which mark the separation of his private reality from a “public” one which operates at least under the pretense of communality. The first mechanism, namely the miracles that Schreber experiences, provide Schreber with a means both of explaining the social world in accordance with the system of his world and of reinforcing the self-perceived importance of Schreber in the Order of the World: “God… likes to make the effects of His miracles on me the subject of conversation; this seems to flatter the rays’ peculiar vanity… I have made innumerable similar observations of the miracles causing my mouth, my hand, the tablecloth or the napkin to be dirtied when I was eating…” 2 At this stage, psychosis has stabilized its private reality: the shame of ‘embarrassing’ behaviour in public is annulled because Schreber’s agency is given over to the miracles of God. The definite relationship between cause and effect gives psychosis a consistency which renders the world bearable by its new and apparent objectivity. Schreber’s psychosis transforms the symptom into the result of the will of his God. The symptomatic actions of breaking plates and dirtying himself, which in hysteria would be non-recuperated and inexplicable, are hijacked by a justificatory process which reinforces the self-directedness and narcissism of Schreber’s actions. Schreber recognizes this narcissism, but in an external object—that is, in the rays and their “peculiar vanity.” The vanity of the rays allows Schreber to absolve himself of the charge of narcissism that might be levelled against him.

The possibility of these gestures being perceived as self-serving is dissolved Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, New York: NYRB, 2000. p. 264.

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by the psychotic projection which both allows Schreber’s symptomatic behaviour to endure while at the same time marking that behaviour as beyond his control.

Paranoid delusion stabilizes the world of the psychotic with its explanatory mythologies. The second mechanism keeping Schreber’s reality from the possibility of its being shared is his insistence on the apocalyptic scenario which has already occurred, and in which he stands at the centre. In the “Final Considerations” chapter of his Memoirs, Schreber encapsulates the importance of his existence in the deferral of an event that would end the world: If it be true that the continuation of all creation on our earth rests entirely on the very special relations into which God entered with me, the reward of victory could only be something very extraordinary for my loyal perseverance in the struggle for my reason and for the purification of God. 3 This passage is striking for its kindergarten-fantasy tone, which Freud will later pick up on as infantile narcissism. Schreber sees himself as having the ambivalent privilege of bearing the burden of the continuation of the human species, all other human beings having been replaced by “fleetingly improvised men.” Schreber’s psychosis includes in its narrative a forfeiture of the social world’s importance: the public world can no longer threaten Schreber’s existence because it has collapsed into arbitrariness; there are no longer any consequences in the social sphere.

Schreber perceives himself in the position of Jesus Christ, 4 albeit a Jesus Christ who has the upper hand over God (who is in a state of defilement) and who, more importantly, saves not individual human beings (which would involve participation in the social) but the abstract notion of humankind. The element of “reward” for satisfying God and for righting the Order of the World is endlessly deferred; so long as the possibility of salvation is dangled before him, Schreber continues to view his suffering as necessary and righteous. At the late stage of his psychosis we can see how Schreber has infused tortured equilibrium into his world, fashioning a new version of everyday life and constructing himself as a subject who is able to integrate into sociality precisely by rendering other people either ignorant (of the inner workings of God’s miracle-world) or meaningless (through their fleetingly-improvised nature).

Schreber’s Discourse: Self as Institution

Throughout the Memoirs, Schreber weaves an unprecedented discourse out of his experiences for the reader, and introduces us to a private vernacular of “writing-down systems,” “soul murder” and other terms which systematize an understanding of his illness. In his essay “The Institution of Rot,” on the mystical privacy of psychosis, de Certeau identifies two major levels of discourse production in Schreber’s case: 3 4

Schreber, p. 258.

Ibid., p. 258.

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He [Schreber] is the last frontier—the putrescent—before total decomposition, and he can allow himself no rest and no absence, for there is nothing other than this discursive proliferation. In order to make this exhausting wager, he generates the homogenous; he becomes a mother who loses nothing, and from within the network of divine rays he spins, he is able, in 1898, to consider himself ‘entitled to shit on the entire world’… This discourse… escapes the institution by substituting itself for it. 5 De Certeau identifies the singular discourse produced by Schreber as a defense against the “total decomposition” of a “discursive proliferation” that threatens him. Schreber’s text represents a production of the self and institution all at once. Part of Schreber’s hallucinatory content is his “compulsive thinking,” in the form of an overflow of language pumped into him by the rays: “Compulsive thinking has been defined in Chapter 5 as having to think continually; this contravenes man’s natural right of mental relaxation.” 6 The rays speak a fragmentary language into Schreber, causing him to expend all his energy on completing those fragments 7 and making into them full sentences. It is no surprise that Schreber documented his psychosis so well—its very nature was to fill him ceaselessly with discourse.

Schreber states this explicitly in varying degrees of intensity. At its height, Schreber writes in hindsight, “for about almost seven years… I have never had a single moment in which I did not hear voices.” 8 It is unclear whether the justificatory discourse of putrescence, of Schreber as “last frontier” against God, was produced before, during or after Schreber’s compulsive thinking; but no matter the timing, this compulsive thinking serves to alienate Schreber’s understanding of language from ordinary discourse.

Accordingly, Schreber’s private discourse of rays and nerves substitutes itself for the languages of any and all institutions which might attempt to use their explanatory language to describe or categorize his experience.

In fact, against the institutions of mental health, religion and science, he claims just the opposite: that his experience radically redescribes those institutions. Throughout the Memoirs—and especially in the First Series of the Postscript—Schreber refutes Flechsig and other mental health officials’ diagnoses. His appeals to the legal courts in which he was once an esteemed participant ask for simple, pragmatic things, like freedom from institutionalization, 9 but—as Schreber’s attachment to the publication of his memoirs indicates—the court system is another place where he can seek recognition for the reality of his delusions. He proclaims himself “not a lunatic in the ‘ordinary’ sense”; 10 he asks the public to recognize the validity of an experience to which only he has access. If this is not a paradox, then it is at least a wish that his audience have faith in him.

Through the cosmological and theological developments he makes, he calls for a revision of Christian principles: “Even if many, particularly Christian dogmas hitherto accepted as true, would have to be revised, the absolutely certain knowledge that a living God exists and the soul lives on after death could only come as a blessing to mankind.” 11 Schreber also holds a Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 45.

6 Schreber, p. 197.

7 Ibid., pgs. 198-9.

8 Ibid., p. 271.

9 Ibid., p. 4.

10 Ibid., p. 257.

11 Ibid., p. 259.

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contradictory relationship with science, which he believes could attest to the veracity of his experience. Even if Schreber’s body could be dissected after his death to verify that his physiology accorded to his claims of nerve-voluptuousness, it would still be a physiology exclusive to him. The institution of science would only serve the privacy of the reality; what it potentially makes public is solely the essential unknowability and irreproducibility of Schreber’s experience.

As much as Schreber’s discourse escapes pre-established institutions by its singularity, Schreber himself is fascinated by institutions and continually tries to insert himself into them. The advantage to remaking the self as a one-man institution of itself is that it escapes the repressive mechanisms of the mental and legal institutions, which, beyond being unable to respect Schreber’s private world, also seek to stifle his transgendered self-expression (as noted in a transcription of a court case on page 435).

Freudian psychoanalysis is thus left in a difficult position. As we see it at work in the Ratman case, psychoanalysis depends on supplementing (if not, in many instances, outright substituting) the analysand’s discourse with its own. The explanation that Freud gives to Schreber’s severance from reality relies on the translatability of Schreber’s case into the discourse of libido theory: he writes “The patient has withdrawn the libidinal investment hitherto lodged with them from the people around him and from the world outside as a whole; everything has thus become indifferent and unrelated to him and has to be explained through a secondary rationalization as ‘miracled up, fleetingly improvised.’ The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since he withdrew his love from it.” 12 In this description of Schreber’s condition, Freud defines psychosis as the libido’s lack of relationality and its confinement from the external world, in contrast to other cases in which libidinal investments are merely displaced onto different objects.

Here Freud encounters two interrelated problems. The first is psychoanalysis’s impotence in the face of another discourse: it can recognize that there is another language here—though it is a language set apart by quotation marks—but it cannot converse with this language, and there is no possibility of interchange: Freud’s vocabulary of the “libidinal investment” and of “projection” can only replace Schreber’s text.

The second problem relates to the priority of explanatory mechanisms.

The label of “secondary rationalization” which psychoanalysis applies to Schreber’s discourse can be turned against psychoanalysis itself. Without a subject present who could internalize the discourse of psychoanalysis— and even if Schreber had been one of Freud’s patients, the dissolution of the privacy of the subject’s world would still be unlikely—the lack of any possibility of therapeutic success forces psychoanalysis to place its powers of intervention at the level of an explanatory mechanism which, unlike Schreber’s own explanation, does not have the benefit of an intimate experience with psychosis. In the non-conversation between psychoanalysis and Schreberian discourse, these two institutions of description can only stand beside one another as ways of coding Schreber’s behavior; but by and large the former is structured in order to refuse and reject the latter.

11

Ibid., p. 59.

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The Neuroses of Psychosis

Let us turn to that zone of indistinction which is the tenuous line of separation between neurosis and psychosis. The “Case of Obsessive-compulsive Neurosis” (the Ratman case) provides us with points of contact and points of divergence from Schreber’s psychosis. As we have seen in Schreber’s case, psychosis has a self-perpetuating function built into it, and Freud notes the same function in the Ratman: “Our patient had developed a particular skill in avoiding information that might have helped him toward a decision that would resolve his inner conflict.” 12 In both cases, the faculty of reason is abstracted, then imbued with unreasonable content; in the Ratman’s case, this is expressed in various “If… then…” statements 13 which follow a propositional movement, but whose contents have fallen outside of recognizable logic. Unlike Schreber’s psychosis, however, the Ratman’s neurosis is intricately and consciously connected to an other outside of himself, even if this other (in this case, the father) has been transformed by neurosis into an object no longer recognizable in reality. After the Flechsig soul-murder paranoia has dissipated, Schreber’s late-period psychotic state has no such routing into the connection with an other who has even the hint of reality that we see in the Ratman.

Obsessional neurotic symptomatology, or what Schreber calls “compulsive thinking,” 14 is a constitutive element of Schreber’s world. Though compulsive thoughts cause him suffering, Schreber also suggests that they are necessary to prevent other, more dire consequences. The neurotic symptom of compulsive thought marks the border of what could be called ‘absolute psychosis’—a hypothetical state of total dementia, in which both thinking and writing would be impossible—as the unknown and unknowable exterior to Schreber’s condition. Schreber gives a summary of his neurotic rituals, which he has made efficient over time: “Apart from reciting poems it is apparently sufficient simply to count in the nerve-language in order to convince God of His erroneous idea that He is dealing with a person deprived of his ability to think, i.e. who is demented. Therefore bellowing does not occur as long as I count continuously” (Schreber 301). For Schreber, the neurotic patterns of compulsive thought are the last frontier for preventing certain behaviours, such as “bellowing,” which are more explicitly psychotic behaviours in that they reveal the extent of Schreber’s disconnect from the outside world. But considering Schreber’s cosmological makeup, neurotic behaviour also prevents the collapse of his world: that is, the victory of a corrupt God in the moment of Schreber’s dementia, and the concomitant failure of the Order of the World to regain equilibrium.

Compulsive thinking, propelled by the promised and deferred salvation of the Order of the World, is Schreber’s difficult safe harbour.

Psychoanalysis, as that which is poised to treat neurosis as its specialty, runs up against the Memoirs’ demand that it recast its treatments of neurosis in light of psychosis. In The Schreber Case, Freud is aware of the stability and livability that psychosis grants to Schreber after years of painful induction into its world: “[Schreber] builds [his world] up through the work of his delusion. What we take to be the production of the illness, the formation of the Sigmund Freud, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, trans. Louise Adey Huish, New York: Penguin, 2002, p. 187.

13 Ibid., p. 183.

14 Schreber, p. 197.

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delusion, is in reality the attempt at a cure, the reconstruction.” 15 Psychoanalysis takes Schreber’s manifold symptomatic behaviours—actions with delusional aims given by hallucinated agents—as the “production of the illness.” But the metaphor of “construction” is apt: each building block of Schreber’s life—playing the piano, reading a poem, attempting to sleep— is a different behaviour fitted to the stringent demands of his compulsive thoughts. The structure that is built from these neurotic pieces of everyday life would be the house in which psychosis dwells. The world of the psychotic, Freud admits, is built “not more splendid perhaps, but at least in such a way that he can live in it again.” 16

Psychoanalysis and Its Delusions of Persecution

At this nascent stage of psychoanalysis, Freud is not only ill-equipped to treat psychotics; he is also vulnerable, in the construction of psychoanalysis, to the same paranoia that he uses to diagnose psychotics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the moment of Freud’s interest in Schreber’s psychosis coincided with the beginning of Freud’s breaks from both Adler and Jung, and the coincident production of several discourses of psychoanalysis in rivalry with one another. Eric Santner, in his My Own Private Germany, writes that, “Freud stages some of his own defensive manoeuvres against influences [of Jung and Adler] that would compromise the originality and integrity of his own authorial voice.” 17 This sentiment is bluntly reminiscent of Schreber’s insistence on the publicizing of his unpublicizable private experience: Freud must be both the genius who launches his theory from the ramparts of his imagination, and the messenger who delivers the message of psychoanalysis and defends it against competing discourses, whether they be psychiatry or rival psychoanalyses. In his paranoid state, Freud sees the multiple psychoanalyses of his pupils as infringing on the authority of his discourse. At the conclusion of The Schreber Case, he writes: “It will be for posterity to decide whether there is more delusion in the theory than I might like, or more truth in the delusion than others are today willing to believe.” 18 Freud marks his own paranoia by stating the possibility of his theory’s delusional nature and leaves its verification for the future and for “posterity.” The evolution of psychoanalysis, in this atmosphere of self-uncertainty, will be bound to the paranoia—reminiscent of the paranoid statements throughout Schreber’s Memoirs—which constantly works to evade and parry persecution from other institutions.

The repressed homosexuality that Freud reads into Schreber’s case carries Freud’s own life experiences into psychoanalysis. Santner quotes Freud himself reflecting on his overcoming of the paranoiac’s sexuality: “A piece of homosexual charge has been withdrawn and utilized for the enlargement of my own ego. I have succeeded where the paranoiac fails.” 19 If Freudian psychoanalysis is in danger of persecution from outside institutions, Freud’s struggles with repressed homosexuality render his interior world paranoiac as well. Freud’s self-contribution Freud, The Schreber Case, p. 60.

Ibid., p. 60.

Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996, pgs. 22-3.

18 Freud, The Schreber Case, p. 66.

19 Quoted in Santner, p. 19.

15

16 17

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Stańczyk Bokiemski

to psychoanalysis, cloaked as a theoretical apparatus in The Schreber Case, demonstrates a delusional encasement in his private world: he believes he can universalize for all subjects the particularity of his engagement with homosexuality. The regression from sublimated homosexuality into narcissism 20 is precisely what Freud avoids by consciously withdrawing his homosexual attachment, and what Schreber (in Freud’s eyes) fails to avoid because his homosexuality is entirely unconscious. Schreber the ‘patient’ thus becomes a negative of Freud’s private processes, defined by the traps of the psyche which Freud noticed and subsequently sidestepped. What is delusional is this move from self-understanding to other-understanding and, more drastically, from self-understanding to systematic (psychoanalytic) understanding. This is not to make a value judgment on delusion and to say that psychoanalysis is annulled by its delusional qualities. Rather, it is possible that such performative mirrorings, such flourishes of the psychotic in psychoanalysis, are necessary for Freud to take first steps into the understanding of psychosis.

Heidegger on Truth and Suicide ‘If one were drafting an ontology in accordance with the basic state of the facts, of the facts whose repetition makes their state invariant, such an ontology would be pure horror. […] Good would be nothing but what has escaped from ontology.’

Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics.

Psychosis and Everyday Life

What is difficult to process about psychosis in Schreber’s case is not his ability to construct elaborate interior world-systems. If anything, the reader may be sympathetic to Schreber’s means of coping with the normalizing pressures of institutions. As a documentation of the fraught means of escaping from discourses of power, and as a means of self-treatment over a prolonged period of suffering, Schreber’s Memoirs earn Schreber our sympathy, if not our admiration. Rather, the difficulty of coming to terms with Schreber’s account of himself arises in Schreber’s confusion of self and world, of particular and universal. The convictions of his fantasies, inaccessible to the experience of outsiders, Schreber nonetheless believes to have extreme bearing on the rest of the world. Psychoanalysis shares Schreber’s will to access the universal and Schreber’s desire to have the veracity of its theories proven. Though these two theoretical machines are too absolute in their descriptions of the world to speak to each other, they nonetheless appear as sister-discourses, intertwined by shared motivations and dream-wishes.

Neither of the discourses proves absolutely convincing as a descriptor for how reality operates: the symbolism of Schreber’s world seems distant from our personal experience; and the structural components of psychoanalysis, namely its insistence on the role of homosexuality in libido theory, make it a risky proposition as an absolutized discourse. Nonetheless, we may find our own private worlds become porous to the influences of these singular discourses. As we adopt psychoanalytic modes of explaining human behaviour, we also find ourselves thinking that our clumsy body movements at the dinner party were caused by miracles. Psychoanalysis— and Schreber’s psychosis—open their private discourses in accord with the openness of readers engaging on the textual level, affected in minute ways by their indomitable totality, taking resonant details from those two systems into their own intimate interior worlds.

20

Freud, The Schreber Case, p. 62.

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In Section 44 of Being and Time, “Dasein,2 Disclosedness, and Truth,” Heidegger claims that a skeptic, understood as a Dasein who doubts the intertwining of its own being with truth “…has extinguished Dasein, and thus truth, in the despair of suicide.” 3 By lingering with the implications of this claim, which appears to be merely rhetorical, I want to indicate how the possibility of the suicide of the skeptic poses a threat to fundamental ontology as Heidegger construes it in Being and Time. In particular, I suggest that the possibility of the suicide of the skeptic Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 122.

With the term ‘Dasein’ Heidegger indicates that weird entity that we call the ‘human being,’ ‘person,’ ‘subject,’ or ‘agent,’ when speaking in a more general mood, or, should we feel like speaking in a more specific mood, ‘guy,’ ‘gal,’ ‘dude,’ ‘babe,’ ‘Marxist,’ ‘Neo-conservative,’ ‘jerk,’ ‘loser,’ ‘goofball,’ ‘citizen,’ ‘asshole,’ ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘intersex individual,’ ‘gender-queer individual,’ and so forth. The deployment of ‘Dasein’ as a central locution, like everything in Heidegger’s writings, is as tactical as a good bit of black propaganda. By naming the subject matter of phenomenological research after the most formal and empty of ontological designations, namely that of ‘being (t)here’—rather than naming it after, say, ‘being conscious,’ ‘being the subject of experience,’ ‘being rational,’ ‘being embodied,’ ‘being human,’ and so on—Heidegger intends to ward off the interpretive tendencies he suspects these designations carry along with them due to their entrenched traditions. While deploying a neutral term to ward off interpretive baggage, Heidegger, by reserving it for Dasein alone, attempts to charge it with the uniqueness of the shocking, eminently strange event of language. By reserving the term ‘Dasein’—which in ordinary German usage stands for the existence (the ‘it happens to be there’) of any old thing—for beings to whom the fact of being there is exemplary and explicit to them in and through language, Heidegger places the stress on the manner in which language implicates us in our being-there in a way that non-linguistic beings do not appear to find themselves so implicated.

3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010, p. 229.

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implies that Heidegger’s attempt to articulate Dasein as a unified structural totality fails. Suicide, I argue, serves as a poignant reminder that the unity of ‘being-in’—what Heidegger designates the ‘who’ of each respective Dasein—and ‘the-world’ 4 is nothing that can be taken for granted, let alone analyzed and explored, as an essential and necessary constitutive factor of being-in (in-Sein). 5

1. A few indications of the phenomenon of suicide

In Being and Time, Heidegger devotes only one full passage and a few passing remarks to suicide—the negative response, as it were, to the existentiell question, ‘To bear or not to bear the burden of being?’ Given the rather morbid tone of so much of Being and Time—specifically the central role of Dasein’s relation to the possibility of its own death in the analysis of Dasein—the attentive reader might find it weird that Heidegger should pass over a phenomenon that, as I will attempt to show in the following section, might pose a serious problem for the alleged structural integrity of ‘being-in’ with ‘the-world.’

First I will entertain one possible ground for why Heidegger passes over the phenomenon of suicide in his pursuit of the general sense of being.

This is the fortunate circumstance that, at least on the face of it, suicidal is not how Dasein is, proximally and for the most part. That is, the character of suicide seems to go against Heidegger’s method of letting Dasein initially show itself in accordance with how it initially and for the most part is, namely in its average-everyday, non-suicidal manner of being. In a study that takes its orientation from the phenomenon of everyday existence, it seems that the most radical possible withdrawal from everyday life—suicide—has no place.

Another possible motive for ‘leaving suicide aside’ in the Daseinsanalytik is that suicidal Dasein constitutes a revolt against, rather than a development of, fundamental ontology. The prospective suicide does not ask, ‘What is the meaning of being in general?’ Rather such a Dasein asks—though in most instances perhaps more tacitly or non-thematically than a philosophical skeptic would—‘To be or not to be?’ and decides to answer in the negative. If it is fair to construe the suicide of the skeptic as constituting perhaps the greatest imaginable revolt against the foundation and methodological focus of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, then the fact that these opponents happen to be dead renders them no less formidable a threat to the ontological inquiry. The reader might note that Heidegger seems, rhetorically, to be dismissing the skeptics at Section 44. But I think the questions they leave us with are rather grave ones. Given that, on Heidegger’s account, Dasein is ever on the hunt for ways of evading the burden of its own being, why should any Dasein take up the burdensome task of explicating being, when it can simply free itself of the burden of its Heidegger hyphenates ‘being-in-the-world’ (in-der-Welt-sein) in order to indicate the essential structural unity of this phenomenon (Being and Time, p. 53).

5 In this paper I will bracket the thorny question of how or if Heidegger sees an important distinction between ‘totality’ and ‘wholeness’ in his analysis of Dasein’s ontological structure.

However, I will indicate a possible reason why Heidegger’s quest for ‘fundamental structure’ drops out of his thinking not long after the composition of Being and Time.

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being altogether—through suicide? In everyday discourse one often hears of the suicide that life became ‘too much to deal with’ or that the suicide ‘couldn’t take it anymore,’ ‘it,’ again, vaguely referring to being in the world as a whole. In the strange case of Heidegger’s skeptic, however, it seems that what gets discovered is that there was nothing, at bottom, to ‘take’ or ‘deal with’ in the first place. The self-understanding skeptic finds that neither understanding nor attunement discloses anything like the truth of being: the strangeness of the suicide of the skeptic perhaps consists in the circumstance that such a suicide occurs in the realization that Dasein’s orientation toward ontological truth is unbearable precisely because there is no truth in the world to bear.

Of course Heidegger’s project in Being and Time runs against the claim that the disclosedness of world could open up on nothing but falsehood.

The identification of truth with disclosedness means that assertions like ‘The chalkboard is black’ are true due to Dasein’s discovering comportment toward the chalkboard in its being-black. 6 Would the skeptic be forced to deny the truth of all assertions? I think not. For the suicide of the skeptic is not premised upon the falsity or untruth of an assertion or any body of assertions about states of affairs in the world. The doubt of the suicidal skeptic concerns the presupposition that Dasein itself is in the truth as disclosedness. Should the disclosedness of Dasein as being-inthe-world show itself to be totally false or untrue, the discoveredness of innerworldly beings would only serve to intensify the suicidal horror by way of an obscene contrast between itself as a posture toward a horrifying whole, on the one hand, and the triviality of isolated facts, on the other. In a false opening or disclosedness—that is, in a false world—the being-true of whatever innerworldly states of affairs the skeptic happens to encounter would strike the skeptic as a disjointed, fragmented, or shattered whole of irrelevancies. The absurd juxtaposition of beings renders the untruth of the world still more obscene than it would be if there were no trivial facts or meanings to uncover: “The world is horror”/“The snow is white.” The false world of true states of affairs presents itself as a sort of obscene mutual obtrusiveness, comparable to the way beings are given to Roquentin in his nauseé: the only discernable relationship between them is that of being in each others’ ways. 7 The states of affairs, no matter how true they happen to be in isolation, when taken together appear like mutually suffocating presences in a hideous, standoffish charade. For a Dasein who perceives that its capacity to let innerworldly beings be in a true wholeness or togetherness is a sham, ‘Nothing’ seems the only appropriate response to Heidegger’s question concerning the meaning of being.

The central role of death in Heidegger’s Daseinsanalytik may also leave the door open to the suicidal skeptic. The primary aim in Being and Time is to demonstrate finite temporality as the horizon of the meaning of being. The finitude of time, in turn, can be explicated only on the basis of Dasein’s anticipation of its own death. Death has a uniquely individuating character, on Heidegger’s analysis: it is exemplary, in that there is no ultimate sense in which any other Dasein can take away or represent its death to it as such. 8 The possibility of my death is the possibility of my not being in the world anymore; it is the possibility of my no longer relating concernedly to any Ibid., p. 218.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander, pgs. 128-9.

8 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 240.

6 7

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further possible, meaningful projects as my own. 9 Crucially, the wholeness of the care structure, that is, Dasein’s manner of being ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered, 10 is ensured by Dasein’s ability to comport itself toward its own death. Ever on the go in the pursuit of its own future being, without a relation to its own death, the care-structure would lack determinacy and would thus remain non-comprehensive: a sort of superficial or inauthentic totality. 11 If the possibility of death is the only thing that can secure ontological determinacy, then it seems that suicide may provide a simple shortcut to an otherwise arduous process of interpretation, one that ends in the oblivion of the question of being in any case.

But I think the worry may run deeper than this. If, in its inquiry into the meaning of being, Dasein does not come to terms with the finite (deathbound) character of its inquiring activity, then the question of the inquirer’s understanding of being in general—that is, the only understanding of being available to Dasein in its finite condition—would become a fantastical, phenomenologically groundless exercise in concept-construction.

Individual Dasein, the ontic condition for the development or explication of being, would lack any sense of its own involvement in the question as the finite and limited being it is. Consider that Being and Time ends with a reiteration of the questions with which it started: “Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?” 12 It is clear from some of the passages in Being and Time that, for all its moments of proto-fascist grandiosity, the Seinsfrage admits of no ‘Final Solution.’ In bringing the finite or limited character of thinking to bear on the subject matter in each case, any response to the question of being is bound in time to be shaken, unsettled, or deconstructed. The death-bound character of Dasein renders its grasp of any kind of being, including its own, horizonal in character. That is, the questioning of various beings in terms of their way of being is open-ended, not in the sense that it is infinite or boundless, but rather in the sense that the responses Dasein finds to its questions will inevitably show themselves as inadequate or incomplete upon re-inspection or closer inspection. To put the question more starkly than before: if Dasein is thus inadequate to its own essence, as an understanding of being in general, then why not just save oneself the all the trouble of dead-ended interpretation by answering the question in the negative?

In Heidegger’s famous interpretation of death, the theme of suicide comes up as part of an effort to clear away a potential misunderstanding of being towards death. In particular, Heidegger warns his reader that an authentic anticipation of one’s own death does not mean or imply that authentic Dasein would bring its own death to pass. Anticipation of death does not mean bringing the possibility of death closer through reckless behaviour or actualizing it in a suicidal act. 13 Clearly it is a gross misinterpretation of authentic being toward death to think of it as a bringing about of death in order to render Dasein complete or authentic. But such a misunderstanding of authenticity would be a phenomenon entirely different from the suicide of the skeptic mentioned in Section 44. Most importantly, Heidegger does not Ibid., p. 250.

Ibid., p. 192.

Ibid., p. 233.

12 Ibid., p. 437.

13 Ibid., p. 262.

9

10 11

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claim that the suicide of the skeptic must be based on a misunderstanding.

On the contrary, he construes such a suicide as a self-extinguishing that results from a proper self-understanding on the skeptic’s part, particularly a proper understanding of what it would mean to be devoid of truth. What does such a self-understanding look like?

2. A phenomenological sketch of the skeptical suicide: the severed da The full passage at Section 44 reads: If the skeptic, who denies the truth, factically is, he does not even need to be refuted. Insofar as he is, and has understood himself in his being, he has extinguished Dasein, and thus truth, in the despair of suicide. The necessity of truth cannot be proven because Dasein cannot first be subjected to proof for its own part. It has no more been demonstrated that there has ever “been” a “real” skeptic (although that is what has, at bottom, been believed in the refutations of skepticism, in spite of what these undertake to do) than it has been demonstrated that there are any “eternal truths.” Perhaps such skeptics have been more frequent than one would innocently like to believe when one tries to overturn “skepticism” by formal dialectics.

Here Heidegger suggests that a radical skeptic, construed as someone who denies that there is truth, or that there is any truth to which we have access, amounts to a suicide. What is it exactly that motivates such a suicide?

Suppose I were a skeptic who tried to follow through with Descartes’ method in the Meditations. In order to determine an absolutely indubitable ground for knowledge, I ran through all the claims to knowledge I had hitherto taken for granted. I considered every judgment false if it admitted the slightest room for possible doubt. 14 Suppose further that, unlike Descartes, I failed to be persuaded by any argument, based on what was given in my indubitably existent cogito and its cogitationes, that I might reestablish access to the people or the things that once seemed to populate the world outside my mind. Heidegger thinks that Descartes, in his failure to attend to factical being in the world, passes over the basic structure of the sum, which is being-in-the-world. 15 If we follow Heidegger by going along with the evidence of factical being in the world, given in mood, then we can see that for the sum to be stranded within the confines of the cogito means the estrangement of the sum, the ‘I am,’ from its own being, and that such estrangement compels, or is really just identical with, the decision to self-exterminate.

How would it be possible to go on in such a state? To suffer the mental condition of doubting all things except the existence of the finite self: What could be worse than that? And things get worse still. The Cartesian Demon is even so diabolical as to open up the possibility that the worldless cogito might doubt the truth of its own former being, of the routes and René Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” trans. Stoothoff, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 18.

15 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 24.

14

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situations that used to show themselves to the self in the habits and hidden narratives of its daily routine. The past appears to the radical doubter as irretrievably lost. Indeed the Cartesian Demon is so nasty that it casts its shadow over the truth of the self’s openness to future ways of being and situations, too. In a state of radical doubt, one ceases to trust one’s understanding of the existential projects in terms which one once perhaps found some confidence in one’s ways of dealing with the implements and obstacles of everyday life. Thus possibilities are nullified: Descartes’ demonological method is as ruthless as that—at least for those thinkers who do not consider being in the world a matter of intellectual representation, but rather of facticity disclosed primarily in attunement. For the mood-conscious ontologist as for the existential theologian, doubt is truly accessible only in and as despair.

reference to the possibility of improving the health of Dasein. For the suicidal posture the pills are there to numb Dasein into final obliteration. In short, phenomenologically, the useful thing approached as an implement of suicide is constituted by a reference that revolts against the very ground of the possibility all further reference, namely Dasein and the disclosedness for whose sake useful beings can be useful at all in the first place. Owing to its experience of the world as utterly false or void of meaning, skeptical Dasein moves ineluctably toward the obliteration of all usefulness. Innerworldly beings suddenly appear divested of any use whatsoever. It is finally impossible to determine whether the suicide ‘uses’ a rope, a rifle, a bottle of pills, or a balcony in any meaningful sense of the term ‘use.’ (This is perhaps the ontological ground of the common enough description of the suicidal act as ‘senseless.’)

Heidegger’s point in the above-quoted passage, I think, is that a radical skeptical posture requires that Dasein disavow or withdraw from the condition of the accessibility of all beings, namely from the disclosedness that constitutes the usual way in which Dasein exists. 16 For the world— the wholeness or whole context—of beings to be ‘external,’ such that a skeptical Dasein could doubt the disclosedness of world, means that Dasein is already on the way towards extricating itself from the world in the commitment of suicide, namely in its deciding upon the commitment that there is no truth whatsoever. The Augenblick or moment of decision for skeptical suicide befalls Dasein, the ‘who’ of being-in, as a decision to free itself from the world, specifically as a whole that has lost all truth for it. The decision on skeptical suicide transpires in the element of the experience of the loss of truth as a whole: its clearing opens upon a void, perhaps similar to the suspension of meaning in Angst, but somehow beyond any contrast with a significant totality. In what follows I will attempt to demonstrate how this decision can only take place once da has been severed from Sein. In other words, I will argue that the decision upon skeptical suicide depends on the brokenness or separation of the meaningfulness, ambiguous truth, or ‘clearedness’ of the clearing (ie. ‘the-world’), from the clearing itself (ie. ‘being-in’). The da, in the moment of decision upon suicide, is a nothingrather than a being-in, strictly speaking: it has been severed from the significance that once convicted it of its own involvement in a whole of beings, or a meaningful world. Just prior to extinguishing itself with what I will call its invisible hand (laissez faire), such a severed da—so long as it remains in its decision upon nothingness—haunts a world it may have once felt, but no longer feels, is there for its or anyone else’s sake.

In the hope that it might bring the phenomenon of the suicide of the skeptic to greater clarity, I will pursue the horrid being of these (non-) implements a little further. The rope is tied in a noose and looped around the neck: nothing is any longer of use, and yet the rope has been used in order to…well, nothing. The chair—initially and for the most part used for sitting, for the sake of dining or conversing more comfortably with other Dasein, or perhaps for the sake of taking down a few notes or the day’s ‘to-do’ list—the chair is there only in order to be kicked away—“forever.”

The use of the chair, like that of the rope, is to consummate the end of all usefulness or relevance of something together with something else. In this suspension of the ordinary usefulness, the chair and the rope stand in no relevant signifying relation to one another or to a ‘toward which,’ the work that is supposed to hold useful beings within their context. The impending oblivion of usefulness, the impending nothingness of the relevant belonging together of, say, the pen and paper with which the suicide wrote a final message to those who will remain—this impending void is not a ‘work’ or a toward which. Since the ‘toward which’ is what the ‘in order to’ of reference refers to in constituting the handiness of useful things ontologically, it seems clear that the being of the “implements” of suicide is as ontologically mysterious—or, perhaps, as is said often enough, as senseless—as suicide itself.

Insofar as Dasein in each case finds itself in a context of useful things, the withdrawal from truth tout court must find itself reflected in the implements that surround Dasein. The rope which may have been serviceable for some task or other can now be there only in-order-to strangle all of Dasein’s possibilities. That for the sake of which such a useful thing would have been useful, namely Dasein’s own being, disappears insofar as the future reveals itself to suicidal Dasein as having nothing significant to reveal.

Or the rifle that now hangs on the wall: it is not there in order to hunt for the game that would nourish Dasein, for the sake of Dasein’s continuing to project forward along the path of its existence, but rather in order to blow away all possibility of concern for its own being. Or skeptical Dasein might consider the pills, whose truth in everydayness consists in their 16

Cf. ibid., p. 133.

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The useful things have lost all relevance, though not in the way Heidegger claims the totality of relevance retreats from Dasein in the attunement of anxiety. The suicidal skeptic no longer feels able to discover beings as useful; and most crucially, such an individual no longer feels able to stand in meaningful relation to other Dasein in the co-disclosure of world.

‘I’m tired of it. It’s no use,’ where the ‘it’ is, again, the generalized es of ‘Es gibt,’ the whole of world donated in attunement. The suicidal skeptic has become alienated from its so-called ‘primordial’ link to being. In the Augenblick of suicide, nothing any longer strikes the da—the clearing—as being useful or meaningful in any truthful articulation. Da is severed from Sein, in a horrid, ghostlike hovering outside of the framework of reference.

At some point along the stretch of this moment—which might last days, weeks, months, even years of chronological time—an invisible hand ‘takes care’ of itself, utterly estranged from ordinary, or actually caring, Sorge.

I chose three familiar implements of suicide in order to stay true to Heidegger’s method of remaining close to familiar phenomena, the better to explicate their inherent strangeness or questionability. I will now consider the circumstance that suicides are often discovered by a Dasein who 41

remains, typically a Dasein who knew the suicide personally. How might the “implements” of the suicide show themselves to the discoverer? The Dasein who discovers the suicide might see the chair lying on the floor, for instance, having been kicked away “in order to” let the suicide hang by the neck. In its just-lying-there, on the floor, the chair reveals the utter irrelevance it had for the suicide in relation to the rope and to the rest of things.

For the chair shows itself, through the mood of the discoverer, as implicated in its history of having been discovered by a da who felt the zone of its Sein, the world, sink into total insignificance. The chair was not set aside for future use, but, on the contrary, kicked away from the very condition of its use. As for the rope, there was no work or task to which it was contributing in its serviceability: the suicide of the skeptic is not a work, since the work or toward-which of reference has the character of handiness.

(SZ69-70) 17 For the severed da, whose invisible hand ties the rope, what the rope “refers” to is nothing but its present, sheer uselessness in its ringing of the neck. Or again, suppose the laissez-faire of the skeptic had taken up a rifle to “accomplish the work,” which is really not a work, and which in a non-skeptical time may have shown itself as a truly useful thing for hunting, target practice, and so on. The rifle, as discovered by the Dasein who remains, similarly just-lies-there as though its utility had abandoned it at the moment when the suicidal da indicated its severance from Sein in its decision to pull the trigger. The invisible hand of the da that found itself skeptically severed from its Sein and took up prescription pills, to take our final example, let the prescription drop out altogether. Neither the pill nor the bottle had any relevance whatsoever when the invisible hand took hold of them. The one who discovers the suicide might notice the empty bottle sitting there on the floor or bedside table in the sheer horror of its having been in the midst of an abandoned world.

The abandoned presence of the implements of the suicide transcends the conspicuousness of the broken useful thing, the obtrusiveness of things that require a missing useful thing in order to eventually come into their use, and the obstinacy of the useful things Dasein encounters as bound up with subsidiary projects which must for whatever reason be carried to completion prior to any engagement with the task or tasks Dasein considers more important, urgent or pressing. 18 The “implements” of the suicide remain present to the remaining discoverer—in the brief moment the discoverer dares look at them, before turning away—in the horrifying falsity of implements that have been deployed by an invisible hand against the very condition of all possible deployment, namely da in its unity with Sein.

At p. 76, Heidegger states the following: “When [the] totality [of useful things] is disrupted, the presence of beings is thrust to the fore.” But the Dasein who discovers the rope and the chair alongside the dead body of the suicide discovers them as innerworldly beings that have been radically abandoned by suicidal Dasein in their worldly character. In continuing to be in the world within which those useful beings once had their place in a context of significance, the remaining Dasein may find itself overcome by the attunement of horror. For that into which Dasein has stumbled, probably suddenly and unexpectedly, is nothing less than a concrete instance of the abandonment of beings by being and its truth. (cf. CP(E), 113-114) 19 The abandonment could only have occurred in a decisive moment when the da

of the dead other actually found itself divorced from Sein.

By Heidegger’s account, for an individual to deny that its da has access to truth is for that individual to deny any access to any surrounding world whatsoever. Incapable of retreating back to a time when the self felt connected to truths concerning beings, and also incapable of looking forward in the expectation of some sort of interpretive access to truths concerning itself or other beings in future, the skeptical self has no other place to go in such a shipwrecked present than ‘sideways:’ the self swerves off its path through the world. In other words, the deed of any self-understanding skeptic is suicide.

The radical skeptic, whose suicide is a response to a profound sense that truth no longer is, no longer will be, or perhaps never was, is a clue, I think, to a mode of attunement more basic than Angst, profound boredom, philosophical wonder, and so on. It is the attunement of pure horror. It is a more basic attunement than the others insofar as it is more powerful or overwhelming as such: it dis-integrates or tears apart a structure whose dimensions the others can only reveal. Following Adorno, I think that in some cases suicidal horror might be a mode of attuned responding to one’s being in history. What provokes the horror is not some detached intellectual doubt concerning epistemic access to true states of affairs, but is rather an overpowering sensitivity to the being of the human animal in its daily being with the others in false community.

In the exemplary horror of the da who finds itself, in attunement, severed from Sein, however, perhaps it is possible to detect a longing for a world in which true community would have rendered such severance impossible. My hope is that the reader might leave this section of the paper with a sense that a world is possible in which the unthinkable horror of suicide corresponds to an impossibility of its commitment. In such a world, Dasein would find itself compelled to exist in a universal, spontaneous, communal refraining from the commitment of suicide. In a world where commodification would no longer suffocate the significance of world for the sake of false, monetized community, suicide would no longer present itself as the only means of releasement (Gelassenheit) for those Daseins whose sensitivity to the numbing horror of human history rendered them skeptical concerning the truth of Sein.

If truth in the fundamental sense is tantamount to the meaningful disclosedness of self and world, then it seems clear that radical skepticism should motivate the despair I have attempted to explicate as a severance of the clearing (da) from its being (Sein). Should the disclosedness or worldly character of Dasein suddenly become a matter alien to it, all that is left is an empty clearing with little to no connection with its own being as a being with others or amid useful things.

Cf. ibid., pgs. 73-4.

Cf. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (1936-1938 meditations), trans.

Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2012, pgs. 113-4.

18

19

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3. Implication for the unity of the structural totality of being-in-theworld The severance of the clearing from the truth of its being in the skeptical suicide indicates a suspension that I think reveals something quite different from what Heidegger thinks Angst reveals as the care structure. The suspension indicated by the phenomenon of suicide threatens Dasein more fundamentally than Angst, since, in Angst, the ontological bond with significance is not severed, as it is in suicidal despair. 20 It is important for my purpose to indicate that attunement discloses a whole to Dasein that projective understanding can never fully encompass within any conceptual structure. For Heidegger, the function or aim of every concept in ontology is to indicate or anticipate a fuller comprehension of some general character of being, only emptily or formally at first, but never exhaustively or finally. The content or meaning of a formal indication—such as ‘suicide,’ ‘attunement,’ ‘being-in-the-world,’ and so on— might come to be seen concretely in the constant checking of it against the course of the interpretation for which it provides the first signpost.

21 Although attunement is shot through with the intelligibility of understanding and vice-versa, 22 what attunement discloses reaches beyond the scope of any possible conceptual structure or structuring. 23 The facticity of Dasein is inexhaustible, in the sense that it is never fully comprehensible in any concept. Yet its modes of revealing provide Dasein its first access to the wholeness or togetherness of beings, since it is the grounding disclosure of worldliness (the whole of significance) in Dasein. Attunement is the unor pre-clarified receiving of the subject matter to be thought or brought to partial conceptualization. 24 As suggested above, attunement constitutes the basic, fundamental, or grounding dimension of the disclosure of a significant whole (i.e., world) by way of revealing in and for Dasein its being burdened or encumbered by that whole. All kinds of beings can show up as belonging in the midst of the whole, and attunement discloses Dasein’s thrownness, the brute fact of its hanging out in the midst of all beings, its standing in the midst of beings in their wholeness or togetherness. The disclosure of thrownness, for the most part, involves Dasein in an evasive turning away from the burdensome weight of the world it is in. 25 Nowhere does Heidegger suggest that the wholeness or worldliness, qua presented in Dasein’s mood, is a structured totality. The existing subject is a passionate constellation that it is possible to clarify through thinking, not a thinking endangered by intrinsically bad, dangerous, irrational, or misleading private passions.

As a da that feels itself devoid of Sein (being)—as a clear or open ‘here’ who no longer feels any true contact or relation with other beings in their way Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 187.

Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 440.

22 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 148.

23 Ibid., p. 136.

24 Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, pgs. 24-5.

25 Heidegger, Being and Time, pgs. 136, 139.

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of being—suicidal being-in has, so to speak, said goodbye to Sein in the prior decision of its imminent leave-taking. Da, feeling itself without or abandoned by Sein, is a clearing, a being-in, who has lost contact with a disclosed whole of significance, or with the significance of truth as a whole.

It is the possibility of such a being-less clearing for which I think the Daseinsanalytik cannot account. In the decision to take itself away, the skeptical suicide stands in a zone where what Heidegger defends as the structural or a priori uncertainty of death has, on the contrary, become the sole certainty. Sein has already departed from da, otherwise the skeptic would lack any phenomenal motive for the act: it would not be the self-understanding skeptic Heidegger posits. The invisible hand (laissez faire) of the skeptical da who stands in the desperate clearing of suicide, in a sort of demonic anti-miracle, turns the means of the world—the much-discussed beings ready-to-hand—over to the falsification of their useful being. The loaded gun, the car running in the closed garage, the medication, the rope—for the most part Zuhanden for carrying out projects in the world for the sake of Dasein—become means out of the world for the sake of a ‘here’ that has become hollow and ghostlike, severed from the significance of its being together with itself and together with other beings in a world.

What does this radical inversion of the being of the ready-to-hand reveal about the ontological structure of Dasein? If anything, I have tried to show, it reveals that it is not so securely or unitarily structured as Heidegger anticipates in Being and Time.

In everydayness we have a frequent enough tendency to dismiss the suicide as ‘inauthentic.’ Should the frequently lofty, self-assured determinations reach the point of considering what could have motivated the suicide, what the family or material conditions were like which surrounded the suicide, and so on, the general tendency is to suppress any possibility that the suicide may have been reacting to some horror in which everyone was and remains complicit. Heidegger’s treatment of suicide in the chapters on death seem to imply that it may be some sort of misunderstanding of Dasein’s authentic being toward death. But his remarks on the skeptic leave the possibility open that suicide might be just what the self-understanding skeptic must do or must have done, precisely insofar as that individual is a genuine skeptic.

Like attunement, the phenomenon of the skeptical suicide must withdraw from any effort of final conception. Conceiving of a phenomenon requires projecting it upon a meaning, in terms of which the phenomenon can become intelligible as something. 26 The decision on suicide—in its skeptical form—projects the certain termination of projection and thus arrests the condition for letting its own sense be manifest. In the moment of decision, the skeptic finds the self as senseless, not in the pejorative sense that the da in question is crazy or out of its right mind, but rather in a radical and horrifying “sense” that it finds itself extricated entirely from sense as such.

Such a skeptic is one who has understood him- or herself in his or her lack of being. This means that the suicidal skeptic indicates a pure abyss for thinking as such: a concrete instance of pure Sinnlosigkeit. Whatever trust suicidal da formerly had in the things and the people with which it used to carry out its projects finds itself helplessly transformed into a hovering between being in the world and no longer being in it at all. The da 26

Ibid., p. 151.

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who has come to radically doubt the truth of its own Sein in its being alongside the animals, things, people, artworks, and so on, in their respective modes of being, somehow performs the anti-miracle of transforming meaning and utility into their opposite, into meaningless futility.

I think there are ontic clues for the ultimate inconceivability of suicide as the ‘extreme decision’ on the part of certain Dasein not to be. The effort on the part of the surrounding community to interpret the ‘incident’ tends for the most part to end precisely where it began: with the desperate question, ‘Why?’ In the concession of failure to comprehend or reclaim the loss within some ‘system’ or explanatory framework (‘She was mentally ill,’ ‘Ever since her husband left her she was not the same person,’ ‘He ran out of money, became depressed, and saw no reason to go on,’ and so forth), members of the surrounding community may pay a tribute to the profound loss. In short, they mourn the death more intensely than a death by ‘natural causes,’ insofar as the suicide compels them to the melancholy reflection of their communal responsibility. Could we have provided this person with the support they needed to remain with us? Is the world as it is—the suicidal status quo of consumption, laying beings to waste—a system worth existing alongside? Where is the “alongside?” Where is the togetherness? Where is the community? Thus the suicide, in its incomprehensibility, thrusts those who turn toward its radical withdrawal back toward their complicity in the false, commodified world. In Dasein’s manic, collective rush toward the destruction of its own environment, it seems the individual suicide is nothing less than a mirror image at the individual level of our collective being. So long as the Official State—that is, the self-falsification of society—prevails, suicide indicates the possibility of the impossibility of the truth of the free individual.

On the basis of the phenomenological analysis in this section, I do not think Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as a unified totality leaves room for the possibility of the very skeptical suicide he seems to be dismissing as a challenge to his conception of truth for the mere fact that they are dead.

Through the course of my analysis I have tried to show how the suicide of the skeptic leads to an aporia at the heart of the most crucial of formal indications in Being and Time. Dasein is the being who, in relating to its own being, is concerned about being. 27 Given the possibility of the suicide of the skeptic, the issue of whether Dasein is any longer concerned by being is in each case an issue upon which Dasein decides. In other words, concern for the preservation or continuance of one’s own being is not a given, or some sort of ontological a priori, but rather a decision. In the case of the skeptical suicide, the individual (or group) feels compelled or motivated to interpret some useful thing or things in its surroundings as potential “implements” of self-annihilation. Finally, I have indicated that Dasein harbors the possibility of being assailed by the mood of radical doubt to sever its da from the disclosedness or truth of its worldly Sein. The unity of the phenomenon of being-in-the-world, upon which Heidegger insists with an almost creepy fervor, gets shattered in the decision of suicide. The mood of doubt that corresponds to such a decision might assail any Dasein in the current, collective-suicidal arrangement of being, no matter how ‘well-adjusted’ or ‘cheerful’ that Dasein might seem to others. 28

Conclusion: anticipating a structural totality that has not yet come

Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein as a unified structural totality, I have argued, cannot account for the phenomenon of the very suicide it equates with a radically skeptical disassociation from the truth. The status quo or Official State, qua false, threatens subjectivity with falsehood at every turn. 29 In the face of the possibility of suicide, this does not mean that the self ought to extinguish itself. Rather it indicates Adorno’s imperative that we attempt to think philosophically, from the standpoint of a redeemed world. Such a world would be one wherein the skeptical severance of a da from its Sein would not be desirable in any case. In this paper I have tried to attend to the suicide of the self-understanding skeptic in Heidegger’s Being and Time as an individual attestation or accurate mirroring of the collective suicide of history. I hope to have provided some formal indications in the direction of an attending to those who have gone sideways in their path, that is, to those who have veered off the pathway of the false collective of the present age by their own invisible hands. Unless there is hope for an end to the objective state of affairs, which is pure horror, 30 the possibility of suicide will haunt those who remain with the question of whether human life will remain in the wrong unto its extinction. 31 Here I am referring to Adorno’s fragment, at the end of aphorism 30 of Minima Moralia: “The whole is the false.”

30 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 122.

31 Side note: A world in which the da can find itself severed from Sein (in the despair of suicidal ideation and practice) is a world from which being-in always already finds itself possibly extricated and, in any case, somewhat “not at home,” estranged, or uncanny. In light of the analysis of the suicide of the skeptic, I hope that I have come closer to resolving a tension that has long been a bother to me in the text of Being and Time. At p. 86, Heidegger states: “Dasein is primordially familiar with that within which it understands itself in this way. […] [And] the possibility of an explicitly ontological and existential interpretation of [the] relations [that constitute the world as world] is grounded in the familiarity with the world constitutive for Dasein, which, in its turn, constitutes Dasein’s understanding of being.” But at p. 189, the claim to primordial familiarity gets subverted—the Vertrautheit that was supposed to be the primordial condition for ontological analysis turns out to be a sham or concealment: “Tranquilized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit] of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon” (Heidegger’s emphasis). In light of my analysis above, as well the circumstance that suicides of despair are still occurring in our time, I think that it is fair to find in the Unheimlichkeit Heidegger finds disclosed in Angst a universal predisposition toward the skeptical suicide of human Dasein. Also compare Adorno’s claim in Negative Dialectics (p.

24), that “Angst, that supposed ‘existential,’ is the claustrophobia of a systematized society.”

In any case, I think the claim at p. 86 of Being and Time should be rejected, at least for the time being.

29

Ibid., pgs. 41-2.

Cf. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990, pg. 33.

27 28

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Dean McHugh

Confinada a hablar sola, Digo y escucho, Pregunto y me respondo.

Tarareo, creo cantar, Inhalo, inhalo y no reviento.

Soy nadie.

—‘Eco’, Pura López-Colomé 1

1 The psychologist, reading Ovid’s fable of Echo and Narcissus, would classify Echo’s condition under R48.8, “other and unspecified symbolic dysfunctions” in the International Classification of Diseases. The name is echolalia, lit. the repetition of speech, an impulse necessary to learn language. The will to learn your first language, then, was unconscious; born of a more primal and instinctual self. We are, as Martin Heidegger passively put it, “thrown” [geworfen] into an already named world. Were it not for sociality, Echo would live, like all humanity, as Nature’s mute.

Ovid’s insight into the social essence of language hasn’t been revolutionary for some time. Friedrich Nietzsche understood truth as a poetic, if lacklustre, “sum of human relations.” 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated that language can only be used when it is supported by a community; a collective discrimination of the utterances that makes sense, and those that don’t. There is no language of the individual. Our use of language—frequently our richest source of interiority, an anchor onto which we tether our sense of who we as individuals are—is not one’s own, but subject to continual negotiation within the social sphere.

“Confined to speak alone, / I talk and listen, / ask questions and answer myself. / I hum, I think I sing, / I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode. / I’m no one.”— trans. Forrest Gander, Poetry 194(1).

2 Friedrich Nietzsche. “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense” in The Viking Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1973. p. 46.

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To engage with the world ethically, it is imperative to consider how language frames and informs our experience. Since language is an essentially collective practice, an awareness of how communities manufacture sense and meaning for themselves through language provides a liv-ing archive into the ethical life of a community. The particular terms they employ to con-ceptualize human action serves to condition—and are a precondition for—ethical thought. (Our current most authoritative ethical force, the law, faces a perpetual struggle to regulate language, erecting paradigms of interpretation, training lawyers the negotiate the vaguenesses of words.)

An understanding of verbal language, however, is not sufficient for ethics.

Emotion is also required; the ethical subject thinks and feels its way through the world. The approach taken here will draw on language by positing that empathy can be understood as an emotional reading, and as a kind of linguistic event empathy is shot through with politics.

As reading, empathy is the process of the reception of emotional signification and language, where such language can be verbal, tonal or corporeal.

Empathy is an echo: the emotions of others reflect back into the emotions of the empathizer. Appearance is, moreover, transformed into reality, since the totality of one’s emotional appearances become what communities believe to be the truth of one’s emotion. This strange, unnerving flirtation between the reality and semblance—between authenticity and performance—is a result of emotion’s privacy. Emotion inhabits the body in a way the objects of sight and sound do not.

Pursuing the insight of empathy’s status as reading, I seek to apply the inherently social conception of language to our experience of empathy. As a kind of reading, empathy subsists in and channels the social sphere in which it appears. Although before this enquiry can occur, the place in verbal language of the word ‘empathy’ must itself be understood.

What are we to make of moments when people use the emotions they believe to evoke in others in order to inform their sense of self? What becomes of the self when echoes metamorphose into mirrors? I will focus on moments when we understand ourselves in light of how we think we make others feel about us. I will then consider the role of such narcissistic empathy—‘narcissistic’ in virtue of its self-involvement—as it mediates the interactions between the emotional self and societal feeling.

11 ‘Empathy’ has entered our language as though it were a well-preserved artefact , some vase or mythic tablet, bearing word of an ancient yet resurrected sociality. It sits readily in our arrangement of the social order only because of the meticulous academic era that was nineteenth century German philology. In 1858, Rudolf Lotze translated the Greek empatheia (“passion, emotion”) as Einfühlung; literally, “in-feeling.” The English usage also stems from this single mention by Lotze, channelled through the fin-de-siècle work of Edward Bradford Tichener, a British-American psychologist, who describes it as the acting out of emotion in “the mind’s muscles.” The seventeenth century had observed a devotion to sympathy, —then synonymous with “humanity” 3—as a hopeful vehicle toward enlightenment Norman S. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism” in Journal of the History of Ideas 37(2), (Apr. - Jun. 1976), 195–218, ref. p. 195.

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and the perfection of a universal human community. Indeed “sympathy,” a synthesis of syn- (“together”) and -pathos (“feeling”), carries the notion of unity coded into its etymology. Moreover, Kant’s categorical imperative— the keystone of his ethics—is nothing if not sympathy on a universal scale; the frame for a thought experiment of putting oneself in all of humanity’s shoes at once, only then examining whether the action is rational.

David Hume was the first to suggest that “sympathy” could be understood as a kind of language, namely, “the communication of sentiments and passions.” 4 Hume attached societal and ideological significance to the concept, suggesting for instance that the defining characteristic of a nation it its particular style of sympathy. 5 The domain sympathy then narrowed from the catch-all “fellow-feeling,” described in Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755.

By the end of the long eighteenth century, sympathy became what Thomas Jefferson described as an “irresistible compassion” felt specifically toward the suffering of others. 6 In a letter to Thomas Law, Jefferson outlines a “moral instinct…which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succour [others’] distresses.” 7 This shift away from generic mutual feeling and toward the more specific feelings of pain was rebalanced by the appearance of empathy midway through the nineteenth century, which could be applied not simply to suffering but to all emotions indiscriminately. Empathy thus absorbed sympathy as a more potent and tortured genus. Since then, the demarcations of empathy and sympathy in our ethical landscape have per-sisted unchanged. In the entry on ‘empathy’ in the Oxford British and World English Dictionary (2014) it is noted that, “People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’... whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.’” The use of ‘empathy’ employed here draws on a sense of communicating not the concept of a particular emotion, but the emotion itself.

Using the term ‘narcissistic empathy’ I want to suggest a specific form of empathy that has operated within human sociality, which brings about a conceptualization of self in terms of its affect on the other. Since empathy allows one to inhabit the subjectivity of another, the condition also opens a path to emotionally consider oneself from the perspective of another. This ‘self-centric’ or ‘narcissitic’ empathy describes an extrospection by which we our reflected through our society. Narcissistic empathy may appear so peculiar and specific that its influence on human affairs is negligible, although certain categories we use to conceptualize ourselves rely on it. Most pervasively, the lover’s self-consciousness is formed through empathy; being a lover turns on how one alters the feeling of another. Most recently, Alain Badiou has emphasized the intersubjective experience of love. In his short treatise, In Praise of Love, the philosopher asks, “What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm), 2010 (1738), III.3.2.

5 Ibid., II.1.9.

6 Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, Washington, D.C., 1903. Vol. XIV, p. 141.

7 Ibid., p. 141.

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when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.8 The recognition that one is loved presupposes identifying oneself within the feeling of another, rather than their thought. Furthermore, for Badiou the event of this witness is a demonstration of empathy of a second-order, insofar as one’s self-conceptualization as a lover is not an event of one’s thought, but of emotion: “love does not think itself (s’impense). A familiarity with love certainly demands that the power of love has been experienced.” 9 To love and to be loved are feelings (or, to transliterate, love in-feels itself)—empathizes. Explicitly, what it means to be a lover is therefore the emotive consciousness of oneself as evoking certain emotions in another.

The conception of particular forms of identity that are mediated through narcissistic empathy can be generalized to an array of categories of self, each designated in reference to some emotion. They include: aggravator, pleaser, hater, humiliator, bully, liberator, oppressor, shamer, terrorist, offender; and, insofar as their modes of expression affect the receiver, artists, religious leaders, performers, and writers.

The ricochet of ourselves from the social–emotional realm is simultaneously political. Narcissistic empathy returns as an echo of the feeling of others, abounding with political resonance. Narcissistic empathy would seem to be ultimately harmful to the stranger, the outsider. For consider the following identity–political questions that employ narcissistic empathy: How will my bosses react when they find out I’m pregnant?

What will my parents feel about me if I come out?

If I Anglicize my name will society treat me with greater respect?

Each question speaks of a desire to inhabit the subjective feeling of another while taking the speaker as referent. They demonstrate a yearning toward mastery over the emotional politics of their selves. Such mastery, however, appears as a deference to the emotions of those who wield some power over the asker; their sense of self is filtered through the emotional politics of their communities, on whom they rely for various senses of belonging.

Narcissistic empathy becomes Stockholm syndrome, whereby one empathizes with those who are antagonistic to some dimensions of oneself. In cases where identity stands in dissonance with community, narcissistic empathy prophecies imprisonment, and threatens Narcissus’s fatal absorption into appearance. Where some aspect of the self does not belong, the bonds that anchor the self to its community transform to chains; the self is reflected through it social mirrors, internalizing society’s regimes of emotional legitimacy — narcissistic empathy is not simply the self wearing its received masks, but expecting them to comfortably fit. Or, as Žižek puts it, “In our post-modern, however we call them, societies, we are obliged to enjoy. Enjoyment becomes a kind of weird perverted duty.” 10 For an archetypal study of the politics of emotion, we may cite Camus’s The Stranger. The protagonist, Mersault, expresses a blasé attitude during 8 9

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012, p. 22.

Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum, 2008, p. 183.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2012.

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his mother’s funeral, only to then kill a man. At a pre-trial briefing, his lawyer is anxious about “the charge of ‘callousness,’” 11 although Mersault cooly responds that he had been fond of his mother and truly wished she hadn’t died. The protagonist’s hamertia is not his incapability of verbalizing his emotions, but of performing them; not a conceptual but an emotional untranslatability between the stranger and civil society. It is Mersault’s opacity of emotional appearance that convinces the law of his actual guilt: “The Judge heard the doorkeeper’s evidence. On stepping into the box the man threw a glance at me, then looked away. Replying to questions, he said that I’d declined to see Mother’s body, I’d smoked cigarettes and slept, and drunk café au lait. It was then I felt a sort of wave of indignation spreading through the courtroom, and for the first time I understood that I was guilty.” 12 As the punishment of decapitation is declared, Mersault spies in the faces of those present an “almost respectful sympathy.” 13 In the world of The Stranger, civil society—those who belong, who are therefore ‘inside’ and ‘unstrange,’ all Mersault is not—secures its legitimacy in law; to paraphrase Weber, dominant culture possesses a monopoly of legitimate feeling. Given a conception of empathy as a kind of reading, such a monopoly is only to be expected of society at large, since the ability to make sense of signifying behaviour requires consensus of meaning within a community.

Or, as Camus later put it, “the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” 14 We are led to the following concern: what good is an empathy of the oppressed? Is empathy from marginalized groups toward dominant society not, as suggested above, a form of Stockholm syndrome? Is not the feeling of powerlessness precisely that which emancipatory politics strives to efface? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then empathy is one trigger of what Rick Roderick has termed “the critic’s paradox,” tellingly, in a lecture on Foucault.

Roderick states one horn of the dilemma thus: “The more powerfully the critic paints the ills of the society… the more hopeless the people feel who could do anything about it.” The rejection of how others feel about oneself is so immensely difficult precisely because of empathy’s sway over politics; the visceral pain of unbelonging that inevitably springs from those who rupture politically sanctioned discourses. Movements of resistance, pride and self-determination are fuelled by a conviction for oppressed groups not to feel as dominant forms of media attempt to make such groups feel.

feeling for rich and socially resonant feeling, to enter an ethical order in which one’s feelings stand in fluid reference others, at once threatening one’s exclusive status as a feeling individual, and empowering one’s inclusive status as a feeling member of a community.

Empathy, therefore, is conservative. As a medium of emotional communication, it buttresses regimes of belonging by giving those networks emotional legitimacy, at the same time buttressing regimes of alienation by delegitimating the feelings of the marginalized. Empathy is an extension of prevalent discourses into the emotional realm: where language creates regimes of truth, empathy creates regimes of belonging. Our emotional lives are as constituted by, and subject to, our society, just as much as the very words we use to describe that life. Yet empathy is as perspectival as it is conservative. Empathy offers all communities, including the oppressed, a common ground of feeling, and although empathy threatens disempowerment should oppressed groups listen too closely to how the oppressor feels in reference to them. Empathy also enables such marginalized groups to form mutual emotional bonds, and thus begin a struggle for emancipation. Apathy is power in the lens of oppression. Who we choose as our emotional mirrors is vital to our self-consciousness.

As emotional participants in communities, there is an agency to be discovered in critically questioning how we feel, an agency that rises from the comprehension that feeling is subject to historical and socio-political change and revision, in order for renewed forms of politics, sociality, and expression to echo back at ourselves, bearing witness to the necessity of others in our understanding of ourselves. Through the social essence of empathy, we feel who we are, and who we have the potential to be.

When one positions oneself in the reflection of empathy through a perspective antagonis-tic to one’s own, empathy is borne as hegemony.

Conversely, for one to empathically reflect through another who holds a concordant point of view, as is the case in love, empathy is a force for belonging and social cohesion, extending into the realm of emotion what language already does in speech. To empathize is to sacrifice dumb interior Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1946, p. 41.

Ibid., p. 56.

Ibid., p. 67.

14 David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 27.

15 Rick Roderick, “The Disappearance of the Human” in The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP79SfCfRzo), 1993.

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