The Echo of the Subject

I've been looking around for an online version of Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, "The Echo of the Subject," in Typography:  Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.  It would be a useful and provocative starting-place, I think, to assist in weaving certain themes together.  But maybe, in the end, it's better not to blog about such things, or at such length as would be necessary.  I'll settle for quoting just the very beginning, to give a taste.  (Let it be said that I'm not at all sure this is a great idea, however.  Maybe it's still a good idea, if it encourages some people to read further, or at the very least:  "it's pretty bad but nothing terrible.")

The Echo of the Subject

It must be confessed that the self is
nothing but an echo.
–Valéry, Cahiers





I propose to take up in the following pages something (a question, if you will) that not only remains for me, I admit, without any real answer, but that to a certain point I am even unable to formulate clearly.

What I want to understand, in fact, are two propositions or statements, to declarations, that for a long time now "speak" to me or "say" something to me–consequently, intrigue me–but whose meaning has always been very obscure.  The two declarations remain nearly impenetrable, and thus, in a sense, too difficult, at least for what I feel are my capabilities.  They mark in this way the frontier (where, like everyone, I constantly stand) of that properly placeless and undefined domain of all one "knows" only in semi-ignorance, by furtive presentiments, vague intuition, etc.

The two declarations are more or less alike.

The first is from Hölderlin.  It probably dates, if "authentic" (and this is plausible), from the period of his so-called madness.  Like many others of the same kind, it was reported by Sinclair to Bettina Brentano (Bettina von Arnim), who mentions it in a famous chapter of her book Die Günderode.  It runs as follows:  "All is rhythm [Rhythmus]; the entire destiny of man is one celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm.

The second comes from Mallarmé, and it too is very well known.  It appears in La musique et les lettres.  Mallarmé is speaking of the vers libre, and says simply, in the turn of a phrase, "...because every soul is a rhythmic knot."

Propositions of this type are to be found elsewhere, of course:  in Nietzsche, for example, or in others.  (Still, these others are few; although the idea may be an old one, it is only the rare writer who has known how, or been able, to take it up.)  But I will limit myself to these two, and with no other justification, for the moment, than the obsessive hold they have had on me, and continue to have.

Such statements are a kind of emblematic formula.  Or better, they are legends.

I have ventured to inscribe them here, liminally, in order to indicate the horizon of the problematic.  This amounts to positing:  these are the phrases that have dictated this work; this is the enigma that oriented it.  Nothing more.

This is why the question from which I will start remains still at some distance from these phrases, and from this enigma.

Subject (Autobiography, Music)


With regard to theories which pretend to reduce all art to imitation, we have established concerning the latter a more elevated conception; and that is, that it is not a servile copy but a presentation of objects mediated by the human mind and marked with its imprint.  Similarly, with regard to music, we have established that its principle is sensation in a less material sense, namely as a general relation of representations to our own state and quality of internal sense.
–A.W. Schlegel, Lessons on Art and Architecture

My point of departure is the following:  What connection is there between autobiography and music?  More precisely, and to make things a bit more explicit:  What is it that ties together autobiography, that is to say, the autobiographical compulsion [Zwang] (the need to tell, to confess, to write oneself), and music–the haunting by music or the musical obsession?

Such a point of departure is abrupt and has every appearance of being arbitrary.   I can imagine that the very use of terms such as "autobiographical compulsion" and "musical obsession" might be surprising.  Let me quickly justify them...

[....]

That every philosopher should be inscribed in his (or her) discourse, that he should leave his mark there, by or against his will, that it should always be possible therefore to practice an autobiographical reading of any philosophical text, is hardly new.  Indeed, since Parmenides, this fact has probably been constitutive of philosophical enunciation as such.  Nietzsche writes somewhere near the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil:  "Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy has been:  namely, the personal confession of its author."  Provided we observe the greatest caution in regard to psychologism" that inevitably burdens every declaration of this sort, there is for us, today, something incontestable here (and certainly, also, too quickly acknowledged).

More interesting, however, is that, since Kant, since the interdiction imposed upon the dream nourished by all the Moderns of a possible auto-conception (in all senses) of the Subject, the question of the subject in general–and of the subject of philosophical discourse in particular–has fallen prey to a certain precipitation.  I would even say, thinking here precisely of Nietzsche, its first victim (or its first agent), a certain panic.  Examples are not lacking:  whether it is in the speculative transgression of the Kantian interdiction, or conversely, in fidelity to Kant (as with Schopenhauer or even Nietzsche); whether in all the attempts to absolutize the subject or else in its most radical an dmost intransigent critiques; whether in philosophy "proper" or else in its undefined "outside" (its heart perhaps), that is, in literature, according to its modern (Romantic) definition–everywhere, this obsession with the subject leads or threatens to lead to "madness."

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[Kenneth Rufo]

I love me Philippe.