Blessing and Partage: No Pasarán; On Celan and Derrida

"No, I will limit myself here to the aporia (to the barred passage, no pasarán:  this is what aporia means)."

"...A date is mad, that is the truth.
And we are mad for dates.
For the ashes that dates are.  Celan knew one may praise or bless ashes.  Religion is not necessary for that.  Perhaps because a religion begins there, before religion, in the blessing of dates, of names, and of ashes..."

"A date always remains a sort of hypothesis, the support for a by definition unlimited number of projections of memory."-JD

One wonders what Derrida might have thought and said these past few weeks, about the re-casting of a certain enigmatic slogan in the streets of France.  One he always heard, after, as coming through Celan; one so clearly dear to his own heart.  Who could forget those passages?   But also, who would dare to write on them?

When Giovanna Borradori asked Derrida about September 11, and though I wonder if she realized it, what must have come first to his mind was another September, that of Celan's "Huhediblu"..."date of Nevermansday in September." 

Another Long Sundayan has already remarked, in suitably derisive manner, on the subject of this slogan–itself a "veritable knot of radical associations"–being recently adopted on the interweb by a group of impressively soporific blowhards, so we needn't dwell especially there.  Mark commented on the poem "Shibboleth", and later, Amie and I discussed "In Eins," which as Derrida notes is in fact a poem inside a poem, containing "Shibboleth", as it were, within.

No Pasarán.  A slogan, a pebble, with unusual powers, or something of what Nancy calls "partage":   to be capable of dividing, and at the same time blessing waters ("partition" and "partaking"...how often Derrida remarked on the theme of this...disastrous movement).  Also Shibboleth, watchword, at once demarcating a certain line or border, and a community, one marked by an act of crossing over.  A word Derrida also connects to necessary departure–departure from belonging, and in order to address the other.   A word, a pebble, like a tombstone, seeking to mark a date...

It so happens that Celan had been my colleague at the École Normale Supérieure for years without my meeting him, without our ever really meeting each other.  He was a langauge instructor in German.  He was a very discreet man, self-effacing and withdrawn.  So much so that one day, during a meeting about some administrative matters in the director's office at the École, the director said something that implied he did not even know who Celan was.  My colleague in German replied:  "But sir, do you not know that the language instructor we have here is the greatest living poet in the German language?"

[...]

I also remember a lunch at Edmond Jabès place.  Jabès, who knew Celan, invited the two of us to his home–he lived close to the École.  Once again, it was the same:  Celan remained silent during the meal and the time that followed.  I do not know how to interpret this.  I believe there was in him a kind of secrecy, silence, and exactingness that made him find words not indispensable, no doubt especially the words you exchange during a meal.  At the same time, there was perhaps something more negative.  I learned through other sources that he was often depressed, angry, or not very happy because of what surrounded him in Paris.  His experience with many French people, academics, and even fellow poets and translators was, I believe, rather hopeless.  I believe he was, as one says, very difficult, in the sense of both very demanding and trying one's patience.  Nevertheless, through this silence, there was a great bond of affection between us, which I could detect through the inscriptions in the books he gave me.  I believe it was two years later that he committed suicide.  I met him in 1968 or 1969, and thus I am talking about a period of three years at the most...No, a lot less...In fact, this is an  extremely breif sequence, on which I later meditated, more or less constantly.  That's all I can say about these encounters.  It is, rather, the memory of them that, later, after his death, kept on working, reinterpreting itself, and weaving itself into what I heard about him, about his life in Paris, his friends, so-called friends, alleged friends, about all the conflicts of translation and interpretation, of which you are aware.  With regard to Celan, the image that comes to my mind is a meteor, an interrupted blaze of light, a sort of ceasura, a very brief moment leaving behind a trail of sparks that I try to recover through his texts.    (Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, pp.98-99)

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To return to the question, however elliptically, of what may be at stake in  any 'refusal'...and I should be especially grateful for any dedicatedly Hegelian response, perhaps one should first pose the question of relation.

"[To seek] an affirmation of this fragile thing that is relation, precariousness 'itself' when the relation is not posited as an identity (there are no relations between identities, only identifications).  It seems to me, there is no sense to a refusal (other than egotistical) which does not bear this prior and precarious affirmation of 'relation'..."
            -Amie Marker

Prayer and precariousness–the two may be linked through more than etymology.  Is there a more postive sense of 'prayer', one joined to this affirmation, and not only as a vain desire for "security" but precisely as a sort of  'blessing'...?

Angela writes:

"Names confer identity as if positing an unconditional presupposition.  Like all such assertions, it is not simply the declaration that one has discovered the path to a different future in an existing identity that remains questionable.  More problematically, such declarations are invariably the expression and reproduction of a hierarchy of value in relation to others."

Identifications, too easily obliterating and simplifying away this thing called "relation",  translate into hierarchy, and in so doing may even avoid the very problem, the situation, of translation.  Is there any form of identitification (as opposed to fragile relation) that does not also presume or impose a form of  violent sovereignty?  And what does any of this have to do with Paris, and with poems?

This is admittedly all a little vague, and I may be stretching things.  Let's lean on Derrida again (he was well used to it):

Shibboleth marks the multiplicity within language, insignificant differences as the condition of meaning.  But by the same token, the insignificance of language, of the properly linguistic body: it can take on meaning only in relation to a place.  By place, I mean just as much the relation to a border, country, house, or threshold as any site, any situation in general from within which, practically, pragmatically, alliances are formed, contracts, codes, and conventions established that give meaning to the insignificant, institute passwords, bend language to what exceeds it, make of it a moment of gesture and of step, secondarize or "reject" it in order to find it again.

Multiplicity within language, or rather heterogeneity.  One should specify that untranslatability does not stem only from the difficult passage (no pasarán), from the aporia or impasse that isolates one poetic language from another.  Babel is also this impossible impasse, this impossible pass [ce pas impossible]–and without transaction to come–stemming from the multiplicity of languages within the uniqueness of the poetic inscription: several times at once, several languages within a single poetic act. The uniqueness of the poem, in other words, yet another date and shibboleth, forges and seals, in a single idiom, in eins, the poetic event, a multiplicity of languages and of equally singular dates. "In eins": within the unity and uniqueness of this poem, the four languages are certainly not untranslatable, neither among themselves nor into other languages. But what will always remain untranslatable into any other language whatsoever is the marked difference of languages in the poem.  (Derrida, 29, my emphasis in bold)

And again:

The poem is this anniversary it sings or blesses, this given ring, the seal of an alliance and of a promise.  It has, it belongs to, the same date as the one it blesses, it belongs to it, it gives and gives back again the date to which it at one and the same time belongs and is destined. At this point, in this place always passed, always to come, the border is effacted between the poem's "external" circumstance, it's "empirical" date, and its internal genealogy. But this genealogy is dated; this is not an essential, universal, atemporal movement. A shibboleth also crosses this border; for a poetic date, for a blessed date, the difference between the empirical and the essential, between contingent exteriority and necessary intimacy, no longer has any place. This non-place, this utopia, is the taking place or the event of the poem as blessing, the (perhaps) absolute poem that Celan says there is not (das es nicht gibt!).

With this distinction between the empirical and the essential, a limit is blurred, that of the philosophical as such, philosophical distinction itself. Philosophy finds itself, finds itself again in the vicinity of poetics, indeed, of literature. It finds itself again there, for the indecision of this limit is perhaps what is most thought provoking. It finds itself again there, it does not necessarily lose itself there, as some believe, those who, in their tranquil credulity, believe they know where this limit runs and timorously keep within it, ingenuously, albeit without innocence, stripped of what one must call the philosophical experience:  a certain questioning traversal of limits, uncertainty as to the border of the philosophical field–and above all the experience of langauge, always just as poetic, or literary, as it is philosophical.  (Derrida, 44)

The date (signature, moment, place, gathering fo singular marks) always operates as a shibboleth.  It shows that there is something not shown, that there is ciphered singularity:  irreducible to any concept, to any knowledge, even to a history or tradition, be it of a religious kind.  A ciphered singularity that gathers a multiplicity in eins, and through whose grid a poem remains readable–thus giving multiplicity to be read:  "Aber das Gedicht spricht ja!"  The poem speaks, even if none of its references are intelligible, none apart from the Other, the one to whom the poem addresses itself and to whom it speaks in saying that it speaks to it.  Even if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it.  Address takes place.

In a language, in the poetic writing of a language, there is nothing but shibboleth.  Like the date, like a name, it permits anniversary, alliance, return, commemoration–even if there were no more trace, what one commonly calls a trace, the subsistent presence of a remainder, even if there were scarcely an ash of what one thus still dates, celebrates, commemorates, or blesses.

This slogan, as derrida would have it, carries reference not only to a date, and to the promise of a date to-come, but also to that fundamental aporia (though never without the demand of a certain step).   "No Pasarán is already very close to shibboleth"  (30):

Shibboleth does not cipher something. It is not only a cipher, and the cipher of the poem; it is now, the from outside-of-meaning where it holds itself in reserve, the cipher of the cipher, the ciphered manifestation of the cipher as such. And when a cipher shows itself for what it is, that is to say, in encrypting itself, this is not in order to say to us: I am a cipher. It may still conceal from us, without the slightest hidden intention, the secret that it shelters in its readability. It moves, fascinates, and seduces us all the more. The ellipsis and the ceasura of discretion are in it; there is nothing it can do about it. This pass is a passion before becoming a calculated risk, prior to any strategy, prior to any poetics of ciphering intended [destinée], as in Joyce, to keep the professors busy for generations. Even supposing that this exhausts Joyce's first or true desire, something I do not believe, nothing seems to me more foreign to Celan.  (Derrida, 27)

On both sides of the historical, political, and linquistic border (a border is never natural), the meaning, the different meanings of the word shibboleth, are known: river, ear of grain, olive twig. One even knows how it should be pronounced. But a single trail determines that some cannot while others can pronounce it with the heart's mouth. The country, of the community, of what takes place in a language, in laguages as poems. Every poem has its own language; it is one time alone its own language, even and especially if several languages are able to cross there.  From this point of view, which may become a watchtower, the vigilance of a sentinel, one sees well:  the value of the shibboleth may always, and tragically, be inverted. Tragically because the inversion sometimes overtakes the initiative of subjects, the goodwill of men, their mastery of language and politics. Watchword or password in a struggle against oppression, exclusion, fascism, and racism, it may also currupt its differential value, which is the condition of alliance and of the poem, making of it a discriminatory limit, the grillwork of policing, or normalization, and of methodical subjegation. (Derrida, 30)

"Like the September roses, the no one's rose calls for the blessing of what remains of what does not remain, what does not remain in this remainder (singbarer Rest), dust or ash.  The mouth of the heart that comes to bless the dust of ash comes down to a blessing of the date.  It sings, yes, amen, to this nothing that remains (a nothing does not remain), and even to the desert in which there would be no one left to bless the ashes."

Comments

[Keith]

When reading certain parts of this, I was reminded of On Kawara, and thinking of Nancy's take on him as well.

[s0metim3s]

Really excellent post, Matt.

Indeterminacy, by another (ie., non-sovereigntist) reading, is the condition of politics.

[s0metim3s]

One could also add something about Plato and the ends of (the borders) the political, in its sovereign senses. All those demands that poets be deported and all ...

[Amie]

matt, many thanks for this.
as you know, for the past several days i've been trying to write about this as well, ever since these no pasarán pics caught my eye - and heart - and awakened the memory of the celan poems and derrida's comments. (i think you had asked me what i thought of the events in france and i mentioned the pics and how they reminded me of celan and derrida.)
the website where i was going to post about it is still not up. so i'm glad you took the initiative.
i'm still hoping i can post about it soon. in any case, thanks for presenting these texts that pose essential questions.

[Matt]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

Keith, I wasn't aware of that connection, or had forgotten it. I don't always follow Nancy 100%, but maybe someone else–yourself?–could draw it out. the influence does seem clear enough.

thanks for the support, sometim3s. Of course this is all still pretty scattershot and vague. I don't suppose you had a particular reference in mind?

Amie, thank you, for the private conversations that spurred this on, and for your comment. still looking forward to your post whenever and wherever it appears.

[Matt]

There's probably good room for debate here, though. I may as well mention another impetus for this post, at the risk of the faux pas of cluttering my own thread.

To play devil's advocate, but only slightly, one person who takes issue with this formulation, as made by Amie, is Gillian Rose. Particularly when she writes, in Mourning Becomes the Law (37):

The thought of the French Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, has fast acquired the canonicity in modern philosophy that Maimonides has in medieval Jewish philosophy. His thinking, above all, has made Judaism available to the end of philosophy–philosophy which has discovered that it has no ethics, and which turns to Judaism as the sublime other of modernity. Levinas's Buddhist Judaism offers an extreme version of Athens versus Jerusalem. Knowledge, power and practical reason are attributed to the model of the autonomous, bounded, separated, individual self, the self within the city, 'the alliance of logic and politics'. The self, according to this new ethics, cannot experience truly transforming loss, but plunders the world for the booty of its self-seeking interest. To become ethical, this self is to be devasted, traumatised, unthroned, by the commandment to substitute the other for itself. Responsibility is defined in this new ethics as 'passivity beyond passivity', which is inconceivable and not representable, because it takes place beyond the city–even though Levinas insists that it is social and not sacred.

This new ethics denies identity to the other as it denies identity to the actor, now passive beyond passivity, more radically passive, that is, than any simple failure to act. But the other, too, is distraught and searching for political community–the other is also bounded and vulnerable, enraged and invested, isolated and interrelated. To command me to sacrifice myself in sublime passivity for the other, with no political expression for any activity, is to command in ressentiment an ethics of waving, whereas, as Stevie Smith put it in her poem Not Waving but Drowning.

Nobody heard him the dead man
    But still he lay moaning
I was much further out than you thought
    And not waving but drowning.

speaking of waving, or sitting and waiting...

[s0metim3s]

A Plato reference? Plato's Republic, Book III, I think. As much about exiling poets as it is about identification - and not without some irony.

Also, Lacoue-Labarthe's "Typography" (in Typography) - which I think both Derrida and (from a different tack) Rene Girard discuss somewhere I can't recall, though it would be worth following up if you're inclined to.

Or are you asking for something on indeterminacy and decision? The 'concluding' paragraphs of this is what I had in mind.

[Matt]

Yes, got the Plato reference (or was it Book X?). I was wondering if you had a particular reading of the reference in mind. Thanks for the other one; I can't say I understand it fully, but will read it again.

About Girard, do you know where that is he mentions Typography? There is secondary material, for sure...

[Matt]

Imagine a smiley after that first sentence, if you will.:)

[s0metim3s]

Girard in 'To Double Business Bound': Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology, eds. Livingston and Siebers.

[Matt]

Ah, thanks so much.

Well, this is going to be a comment that might belong under the unfortunate category of "there are better things to do, but..."
I'm sorry to inflict this on LS, but I do find it necessary to respond to a recent post on PAD, in which MC refers to a comment I made on Charlotte Street and to the above post.
I really do not want Matt or anyone else to think that I want to "slander" him or spread "malicious, inaccurate gossip". So I'd like to try and clarify things if possible. I have no reason to wish Matt anything but the best in his personal life. But yes, I do have a bit of a problem with some of his online behavior.
Let me try and address this with respect to the above post, since MC refers to it, and because he is right that I have a problem with it. I'm sorry if this gets long. But since I want to avoid "inaccurate gossip", it is necessary to provide precise details.

Last year, while the CPE demonstrations were occurring in France, I received an email from MC asking me what I thought about what was happening there. It so happens I was writing something about the events, so I responded to him at some length. I told him about a couple of photographs I had seen and how they made me think of certain texts by Celan and Derrida. I sent him the photos in an email, the ones that are in the above post, and mentioned specific connections with specific texts. He asked me if I would co-author a post about it with him on LS. I said, no thanks. He then asked me if he could post about it himself. I said that would be great. I also asked him, in plain english, in no uncertain terms, not to use stuff from my emails, as I was working on developing it myself. He assured me that he would not.
Well, reader, I will leave it up to you to judge whether he kept his word. Let me just point out that he even quotes from my email in the post, sticks my name on the quote without mentioning where it comes from or providing any context.
In his recent post on PAD, he writes that he was "intuitively concerned" (!) that I "might be offended". I confess that I burst out laughing reading that. It is too funny, after all. Though, it is not only funny, I'll leave it to you to provide your own appropriate term.
In the PAD post, he also says that he "credits" me in the above post. I hope some astute reader can help me out here, as I just reread the post and fail to find where I am "credited"? Unless, I am supposed to take his quoting from my emails - when I had expressly asked him not to - as "crediting" me!
He mentions my comment thanking him for the post, which I did do. I confess it wasn't my first inclination, but I told myself to take a deep breath and not fly off the handle. I told myself that it's good this stuff is at least out there, write a thank you note, see what the response is. Well, he thanked me for "encouraging him in our private correspondence." Am I wrong in thinking that he used my emails for more than encouragement?
He says he wrote me after the post and I did not respond. This is true. He wrote me to say that he "valued my friendship" and that he hoped he hadn't done anything "wrong". I'll admit I did not know how to respond to this.
But it did not end there. He did not just send me one email about this, as he says on PAD. He sent me several. I did not reply until I received an email with WTF in the subject heading that "demanded" - his exact word - that I respond. I did, telling him that I no longer wanted to have any private correspondence with him. He then wrote "demanding" that I reveal my "identity" and accusing me of being another blogger. The latter remark made me laugh quite a bit, the former I found creepy. I communicate privately with several bloggers who I do not personally know, some of whom wish to remain anonymous. None of them has ever demanded that I reveal my identity, nor has it ever occurred to me to do so. Are such demands commonplace?
He says on PAD that he doesn't remember any of this. That's possible. But isn't it a bit strange that a "valued friend" cutting off communication wouldn't leave the slightest memory?
In the recent exchange with MK on CS, MC refers to friendlier times between the two of them. I'd like to think that for a while I had a friendly online relation with MC as well. I used to read and comment on PAD regularly, we used to exchange cordial emails, MC invited me to LS. I appreciate all that quite a bit. I don't think it is Writ in Stone somewhere, or in some Sacred Text, whether it is possible or not to be friendly in the blogosphere. I think that it does - to state the obvious - depend on our online behavior. So, I'm not writing this to ferment enmity. If I have had to go to such lengths here - for which I apologize again - in trying to clarify a problem, it is because I am for friendliness. I hope it will be read in this sense, by Matt as well. If I were for enmity I could have the shorter dismissive route of insult and invective. I'd like to move beyond that. Le Pas Au-Delà? Pourquoi Pas?

[Amie]

sorry, that previous comment is from me.

[Matt]

Well, first of all, thank you (again) Amie. And again, I can only apologize for insufficiently crediting you (for photos - though no prohibition, in my recollection, on using those was ever made - and for connective thoughts about 'relation'). It's certainly true that these are texts that I was familiar with already, and issues already thinking about to some degree, as other aspects of the post hopefully help to demonstrate (indeed, it's not just you I quote).

I hope some astute reader can help me out here, as I just reread the post and fail to find where I am "credited"?

That would be the blockquote, followed by your pseudonym (it's all I ever had). The rest of the post is entirely mine (well, aside from other quotations). I'm rather proud of it, in fact.

Our memories absolutely do differ some, but this helps me to understand where you are coming from. I did not recall (obviously) the blanket prohibition on letting your formulations filter at all into my post (nor on the photos). You gave them to me when I asked, after all, and knowing at the time that I was writing about them. Though, again, I respectfully waited quite a reasonable period for you to write something first.

In fact, I think I tried to credit you discreetly and in keeping with a more general desire for distance, and future thoughts, but obviously I failed. It had been a good while since we communicated when I posted this, and as what I hoped would be a gesture of respect, if anything. One should probably bear in mind that all this (particularly the later emails) took place in a certain rather heated and confusing context, though by no means do I claim that as excuse. (It's true that for various reasons at one point I suspected you of being none other than Chabert/Le Tradeur in disguise, but that probably was giving her far too much credit.)

Take care.

[Matt]

It should also be understood that I apologize for quoting at all from your email, when you clearly desired otherwise. Guess I fucked up; I'm sorry.

For whatever it may be worth, I do recall that after waiting for what felt like a significant amount of time, I had hoped this post would, if anything, encourage you to follow-through on writing something more, re: 'no pasaran', Celan and Derrida...and if by any chance you have (google doesn't say) then I'd hope you wouldn't hesitate to point it out. Of course, if this compromises desired anonymity, then I also understand.