'Another origin of the world'

As other "Theory"-literate and serious denizens of the blogosphere duly note, Specters of Marx is a book that continues to look better with each passing year.  Generous, intricate and faithful expositions of Derrida's later political thought, meanwhile, are so few and far between that a recent article by Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang (ProjectMuse) is most welcome, and also conveniently works as a rather natural continuation of our Spivak (and Europe, and technology, and democracy) discussions. 

Suffice to say that many familiar themes make an appearance.  I provide some brief excerpts and comment below the fold, as the authors are friends and were kind enough to share a copy.   (Those interested and without Muse access may I suppose ask very nicely via email.)   The excerpts are by no means generous enough, as indeed the article covers quite a lot of ground, including responsible forays into anonymous internationalism (composed of "no one" who is , nevertheless, "not just anyone" – cf. Thomas Keenan; recalling also Blanchot's communism), Spivak's (partly just) criticisms in Ghostwriting, Derrida's distinctly atheist transformation of Benjamin's 'weak messianism' and Roland Barthes' reflections on the photograph among other things.  The bold and truly excellent SUBSTANCE Magazine was once kind enough to grant us a generous "fair use" permission to quote from its "Counter-Obituaries" issue on Derrida from some time ago...so consider this too a first step, if you will, toward a more precise engagement there. 
    
From the key orienting and introductory 'graph (or rather, a bit of graft on my part, as the  framing, justifying work performed by introductions certainly is important to get right):

As admirable as [their] aims may be, Habermas and Derrida’s proclamation inevitably raises the question of their global bias.   Although their article closes by “renounc[ing] Eurocentrism,” it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world.    American political philosopher Iris Marion Young objects to the publication’s premise in an essay for the web-based journal openDemocracy.  She asserts, “Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.”   Young points out that the anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003 were planned at a World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in January 2003 and, moreover, took place in hundreds of cities throughout the world.   Such a “coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.”   Though [Iris Marion] Young correctly calls into question their geopolitical assumptions, a closer evaluation of Derrida’s key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text* [...]   

Contrary to his press, Derrida never made a secret of his allegiance to the European Enlightenment.    Our title, “the last European,” is meant as a tribute and a provocation, a corrective to the idée fixe that “deconstructionism” seeks to corrode Enlightenment ideals.   The allusion to Blanchot’s Le dernier homme notwithstanding, it is unlikely Derrida himself would have recognized the descriptive pertinence of the phrase or accepted its eschatological pathos.   We certainly do not wish to suggest that he clung to the Continent.   On the contrary, the globe-trotting itineraries of his teaching and lecturing – in particular his numerous visiting professorships in the US – imparted a decisively non-European competence and tonality to his numerous public stances.   The topic of European identity, he admitted, is predictably tired:  “Old Europe seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and counter-discourse about its own identification” (Other Heading 26).   And yet, paradoxically, European identity has never really been taken up in the promise that it holds for the future.   For Derrida, this at one and the same time old and young identity is a fine example of Hamlet’s famous declaration that “the time is out of joint.”   In the following, we argue that this temporal rift is precisely what compelled him to speak in the name of Europe.

  The authors proceed to engage first with Derrida-Valéry in a manner that deserves to be quoted at some length, though again I will limit myself:

Valéry’s texts figure in The Other Heading, then, as telling, modernist examples of the Eurocentric idealism that continues (in a somewhat threadbare mode) to animate the West’s cultural politics.   To Jameson’s account of Derrida’s strategic use of Valéry we would only add that Valéry does not simply function as the object of an ideology critique.   His outmoded Eurocentrism also serves, paradoxically, to advance Derrida’s deliberation on the future of Europe.  Valéry forcefully elucidates the expansive limits of a high cultural European self-understanding, and thereby, points a way out from within....

* [Sadly and rather inexcusably, the actual Habermas statement co-signed by Derrida appears to be unavailable online...or at least eluding my night's efforts.]

More substantially yet, and along lines Agamben might well appreciate:

In defending the European Spirit, Valéry does not speak in the name of Europe alone, but on behalf of humanity in general.  The rhetorical maneuver by which European man can come to stand for humanity in general (and viceversa) Derrida discerns as the paradox of exemplarity:  an inscription of “the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (Other Heading 72).  This resourceful figure serves to resolve a series of exemplary antinomies for Valéry.  The paradox explains, for example, how cosmopolitanism can go hand-in-hand with nationalism, or how the sense of being French can coincide with the feeling of universality.  Far from simply dismissing this paradox as a logical aberration that mistakenly (and arrogantly) conflates the local with the universal, Derrida insists that it belongs to the structure of any identity claim.  “No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man” (Other Heading 73).  Without this paradoxical exemplification of the universal in one’s very singularity, any individual, national, or transnational subject risks stiffening into a nonrelational self.  This is why Derrida does not oppose Valéry’s Eurocentrism by simply championing in its stead non-European and minoritarian cultures, selfidentical differences. Paradoxically, the colonizing and universalizing impetus of European culture can only be dismantled by escalating its paradoxical exemplarity, or rather, its exemplary paradoxicality.  This requires bringing the paradox past the point of its capacity to resolve contradictions, to the point, therefore, of a contradictory and double injunction.  On the one hand, the rethinking of European cultural identity must respect “differences, idioms, minorities, singularities,” and not least of all, the non-identity or difference with itself that forms the basis for any relationality, identity, and culture.  On the other hand, it is necessary to guard “the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia” (Other Heading 78)....

This last part deserves to be unpacked a little, I think...to avoid either the usual complete neglecting or conflation of one of these movements into the other (with all the glib dismissal this then permits) or for that matter the reduction to the merely banal (ditto)...What in fact Derrida is arguing (or at least, I should say, arguing in Chang and Benjamin's reading), is that the linguistic operation by which Valéry comes to substitute European man for all of humanity is, at least on a formal linguistic level, indispensable.

I am curious what people make of this.  That is, there seems to me something of an interpretive leap (namely, inspired by Agamben) at work in moving from the desciption of any claim to essence or identity, to the prescription of a "relational self."  I'm wondering if Derrida would have followed that prescription, with at least its potential echoes of a unified subject-self, that far.  Granted, I may be entirely wrong about this.  The word "paradox," for instance, would seem to imply that this tension (or more strongly, contradiction) between the singular and the universal is in fact sometimes and by bare necessity at rest (or that it oscillates in a manner subject to dialectical laws, or something like the event).  I wonder about this because if the authors are correct, then those forever taunting deconstruction as some sort of cheaply nihilist presciption for the dissolution of the self might then have even less hot air to stand upon.  And yet the thinking of the double injunction in the way Derrida sometimes construes it would seem, in its most strict moment, to almost prevent this relationality (much less "identity", or "culture").   But, moving on.

There follows what I sometimes prefer to call a brief note to aspiring neoLeninists:

When Derrida evokes the duty in his reading of Marx to “quit the terrain of philosophy as ontology” (“Marx & Sons” 213), his point-of departure is the shudder of unease that past and future provoke in the present.  In a later reflection on the premises of Specters of Marx he defines the book’s central question as follows:  “Is what has come down to us from Marx, or will yet come down to us, a political philosophy?  A political philosophy qua ontology?” (“Marx & Sons” 214).  In contrast to the urge, exemplified by certain Marxist thinkers, to read Marx ontologically, interpreting the rubrics of “class,” “the Party,” “dialectical materialism,” “use value,” and so forth, as firmly established, unshakable categories (an approach shared by those who would consign these notions to a concluded and superseded era of the past), Derrida attempts to take up Marx’s work “in conformity with the concept of inheritance,” which he defines through the lens of spectrality:  …one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. (Specters 54)  The conception of inheritance that frames Derrida’s reclamation of the legacy of Marx is not conducive merely to reproducing Marx’s ideas as a stable framework or ontological system. It is not possible, Derrida argues, to take possession of an inheritance as if it were already complete and did not need to be actively re-appropriated and transformed. ...

Most interesting (not to mention, difficult to acknowledge) of all, perhaps

If the New International calls for new forms of counter-collectivity
in this time of “wears and tears” – a radical enlightenment, an
oppositional public sphere, an alter-globalization (“altermondialisation”) – then it does so only on the condition of possibility it shares with globalization itself:  the “instantaneous” dislocations of the “living present” effected by the advent of “real time” broadcasts and virtual technologies [...]

For Derrida, spectrality is as determinate as a voice on the telephone or an image on a TV screen that insist they are “live.”  These transmissions make present here and now something taking place elsewhere. But, at the same time, they are ghostly duplications of actuality that separate the “living present” from itself, virtualizing and mediatizing it, in essence “spectralizing” it.  Though we would dispute Spivak’s casual remark that, “For [Derrida] hi-tech is all good, and only the media, albeit broadly defined,  is ‘technologically invasive,” it suggests a useful schematization of his dense comments on the subject (“Ghostwriting” 68).  On the one hand, Derrida insists on breaking down teletechnology as an instrument of capital.  Less than ever can we consider radio, television, fax, e-mail, the Internet, simply as conduits of “information” or “communication.     Rather they are crucial relays of globalization – and not just circuits for the consumption of commodities – but also machines that shape value, social relations, and our experience of time and place.  Derrida is especially incisive in describing television’s domination of the public sphere: its invisible and highly filtered construction of actuality (“artifactuality”), the linguistic and cultural homogenization of network programming (“homohegemony”), the “spontaneous[. . .] ethnocentricity” of the news, the violently restrictive and artificial conditions of televised discussion or debate.   Just as he argued against conceding to the decisionist urgency and unicity of the “day” that informs journalistic discourse, Derrida calls for intellectuals to resist the temporal constraints imposed upon their televisual interventions. Such resistance entails puncturing the inexorable rhythm of broadcast time, whether through visible and audible silence or the invention of new rhythms of response....

With that in mind, at this point I am simply going to continue to let the authors speak for themselves, as it makes for superb reading (of which frankly, those unaffiliated with any institution should not readily be deprived; if there are any complaints, I will gladly and promptly reconsider.)

Derrida depicts the spectral encounter with the recorded image of the other in a remarkable recollection of his own experience appearing in a scene of the film Ghostdance with the actress Pascale Ogier. In the scene, he asks her, “Do you believe in ghosts?” and she replies, “Yes, now I do, yes.” Three years after he acted out this scene with her, Pascale Ogier had died, and he watched the film again:  “Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead woman’s face, come onto the screen.  She answered my question: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Practically looking me in the eye, she said it to me again, on the big screen: ‘Yes, now I do, yes’” (Derrida and Stiegler 120).  Derrida discerns the pathos of this
situation in every confrontation with the recorded image.  The technological capture of the “living present” reveals the living dead at its heart.  On television, the temporal disjunction is all the more fundamental for being instantaneously erased.  As with Derrida’s “face-to-face” encounter with the ghost of Pascale Ogier, the supposed spectacular relation produced by televisual technology is reversed: the viewer is transfixed by the “visored” gaze of the ghostly image, watched instead of watching.

Our blindness as “spectators” is a situation of heteronomy parallel to the situation of inheritance as a relation to an anterior other.  According to Derrida, the spectral gaze of recorded images can greet us with the force of law.  In order to explain more fully this injunctive power, he augments Roland Barthes  conception of the “reality effect” of the photographic image.  For Barthes, the affective power of the photograph lies in its indexical capture of the living thing. Through the inscription of light, every photograph preserves an “emanation” of its object.  Derrida goes a step further:   If the “reality effect” is ineluctable, it is not simply because there is something real that is undecomposable, or not synthesizable, some “thing” that was there. It is because there is something other that watches or concerns me. . . . I have an even greater sense of the “real” when what is photographed is a face or a gaze, although in some ways a mountain can be at least as “real.”  The “reality effect” stems here from the irreducible alterity of another origin of the world.  It is another origin of the world. (Derrida and Stiegler 123)

This notion of “another origin of the world” underscores the democratic possibilities of virtual technologies.  Unlike some dystopic media theorists, Derrida does not associate the heteronomy of the teletechnological “gaze” solely with its menacing surveillance potential, though he recognizes this as an inherent threat.  For him, the scopic dissymmetry, the “visor effect” of spectral images, demands due regard for the absent and the dead.  The structure of anachronistic surveillance does not disable our ethico-political vigilance, but rather enables it: “my freedom springs from the condition of this responsibility which is born of heteronomy in the eyes of the other, in the other’s sight.  This gaze is spectrality itself” (Derrida and Stiegler 122).

The sense that freedom might emerge from being caught in an invisible gaze, from being blind before “another origin of the world,” played a significant role in Derrida’s search for an “other heading” of Europe.  Certainly, he placed himself “in the eyes of the other” when he turned to Marx as an untimely means of breaking with the new world order.  Derrida was convinced that, in the age of telematic spectrality, the unaccomplished inheritance of Europe calls for a responsibility before a world that Europe cannot fully “see” or apprehend.

-Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

 

I wonder if anyone else has had this particular experience, one this thought of the gaze as spectrality calls to my mind.  One stands transfixed before an especially charismatic speaker, say.  Usually, in my experience, he is wearing sunglasses (in response to which I always tend to fixate on the mouth; so much so that I am paralyzed nearly speechless).  Or, as David Foster Wallace once iconically described something very similar, as a child held hostage by the ghost of the unblinking eye of a suddenly blackened television screen, its momentary residual trace of light and threat from vague corneal memory lingering ever-so-briefly and sinisterly on the darkened screen.  A primal scene, of sorts.  What was that phrase, again? 

"Stiffening...into a nonrelational self."

It detracts little from Derrida's analysis of the spectral image to point out that the ghost of Hamlet's father actually wears his visor up, as Horatio at first insists and Hamlet later himself  recognizes (indeed, Derrida himself recognizes this explicitly, on page eight of the English translation).  If what was once a close-reading sometimes becomes a somewhat indulgent metaphor, well then metaphors are after all–though it pains conservatives everywhere to admit as much–often no less "real", that is to say present for being metaphors.

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

Theodore W. Jennings' Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul (published by Stanford) deals with Derrida's later political thought, for those who can bear the grossness of reading a book that includes stuff about the Bible and religion and stuff (God being dead and all...).

[Swifty]

I look forward to commenting but first I need new ink for my printer because I can't read it all on screen. I finally broke down and started buying refills for my ink cartridges. $10 each. I don't know if they work yet -- they're coming in the mail. Awful bother you can't order these things 'online' and they just appear, preferably already installed and ready to go.

[matt]

maybe find a nearby university. (there's a lot to be said for being a parasite.) thanks adam.

[Michael Dorfman]

No need to publish this comment, Matt-- I just wanted to thank you for this piece. I'm one of those "unaffiliated" folks, and the nearest university is a half-hour by plane, so I had not read the original Substance piece, but your generous quotations and patient reading did an excellent job of opening up the problem-space.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Thank you, Matt - I enjoyed this very much. I tend to think that Spiegler's a bit more on target than Derrida when it comes to the questions of time and artifact as they relate to spectrality, but I love the idea that freedom emerges like a deer in the headlights, caught in the gaze of a spectrality it cannot control. The same freedom that likely brings death from or damage to the machine, but then, that's probably the point.

[Swifty]

I found this essay very rich. A big theme for Derrida, not only in the writings discussed in the essay but elsewhere as well, is 'Europe' and he spent time at various European events that discussed this theme at some length. I want to quote from an Italian treatment of 'the idea of Europe' that I think is working along the same lines. It's clear that in both discussions, the idea is not to denounce or 'affirm' Europe but to take it seriously as an inheritance that can't just be shrugged off. If we can't just shrug it off, we want to do some serious reflection about what it is. Anyway, here's Biagio de Giovanni from his recent book, 'La filosofia e l'Europa moderna.' Feel free to skip the Italian and go straight to my attempt at translation, which I hope isn't too bad.

Bisogna dunque affrontare il problema guardando a quelle connessioni che fanno nascere l'autorappresentazione filosofica dell'Europa dall'interpretazione del rapporto suo con la storia del mondo, dal suo farsi "spazio" obiettivo, in cui confluiscono forme e forze che lo disegnano e che entrano fra loro in una tesa dialettica. L'Europa moderna è anzitutto un punto di vista sulla forma del globo, scoperta finita e sferica, e poi sulla storia del mondo perché è un punto di vista su se medesmia, sulla propria capacità di possedere una visione unitaria del mondo, del suo spazio, della sua storia. L'Europa è uno spazio anzitutto, che si costruisce intorno a un'idea, a una coscienza di sé, uno spazio non dato ma nettamente costruito, pensato, uno spazio-evento, mobile, aperto, dai confini indeterminati eppure continuamente ricercati, destinati a dar forma e mobilità all'idea; l'Europa è un tempo della storia, man mano che la razionalità occidentale ritrova le connessioni fra la ragione-spazio e la ragione-tempo, e la spazializzazione della ragione (fino a Kant) diventata con Hegel filosfia della storia. Hegel è un punto d'arrivo e di chiarezza: storia universale e geografia, riconosciemnto della dimensione geografica della storia universale, collegano il tempo-spazio nella forma del concetto, unificando il mondo nella forza del logos, per "natura" eurocentrico, per natura capace di appropriazione e di universalizzazione . . .

It's important to confront the problem while considering those connections that caused the birth of the philosophic self-image of Europe, which occurred through an interpretation of its relation with world history, along with its capacity to create an objective "space" in which the forms and forces that make it up flow together and interact in a dialectical tension. Modern Europe is first of all a point of view concerning the globe, revealed as finite and spherical, and then on the history of the world because that is a perspective on Europe itself, on its own capacity to have a unitary vision of the world, of its space, of its history. Europe is a space first of all, around which is constructed an idea, a self-consciousness, a space that is not given but rather constructed, thought, a space-event that is mobile, open, with indeterminate boundaries that are constantly tested, and thus destined to give form and mobility to the idea. Europe is a period of history that coincides with a Western rationality that has rediscovered the connections between reason-space and reason-time, and the spatialization of reason (up to Kant) becomes the philosophy of history with Hegel. Hegel is a culmination and a clarification: universal history, geography, recognition of the geographic dimension of universal history, the linking of time-space in the form of the concept, unifying the world through the force of the logos, by "nature" Eurocentric, by nature capable of appropriation and universalization . . .

I will have more to say soon directly on the article.

[Swifty]

Below are some questions that have occurred to me while reading the article on Derrida as "the last European." My questions may not match other reactions, and so no one should feel they should 'answer' the questions unless they think it would be interesting to do so.

On what basis does Derrida appeal to Europe? Is it merely tactical? That is, we wouldn't be hearing about Europe from Derrida if it weren't for the threat posed by the United States. Does that explain why Derrida was willing to sign the text authored by Habermas titled "Rebirth of Europe"? (139) The authors themselves comment a little blandly on this. True, they say, Habermas and Derrida close their appeal by renouncing Eurocentrism, "it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world."

The authors write: "a closer evaluation of Derrida's key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text" (140). That doesn't sound right. Derrida signed it, that means he read it, that means he could have chosen not to sign.

I find the inheritance theme very suggestive. "Europe does not designate a federation of nation states or a cultural revival movement, but rather, an inheritance open to alteration" (140). An inheritance is something that you can modify even while granting and accepting the weight that comes with it. The emphasis is on the capacity to transform through the elaboration of elements that are already there. Do these kinds of thoughts bring Derrida into some kind of alignment with Gadamer's hermeneutics of tradition?

[Matt]

Wow, thanks for the translation John. Particularly interesting with respect to borders.

From the Benjamin/Chang article:

" Europe bears a privileged relationship to borders. Valéry writes in “La Crise de l’esprit” (translated as “The European”):

What, then, is Europe? It is a kind of cape of the old continent, a
western appendix to Asia. It looks naturally toward the west. On the
south it is bordered by a famous sea whose role, or I should say
function, has been wonderfully effective in the development of that
European spirit with which we are concerned. (312; qtd. in Derrida,
Other Heading 21)

In Valéry’s view, Europe is in actuality a borderland, the geographic
extremity of Asia. But this relatively small “cape of the old continent”
happens also to be graced by its opposite perimeters. Its Mediterranean
border and westward prospect place Europe at the core and limit of
man’s geographic and cultural progress. Underscoring the semantic
surcharge of the word cap, Derrida remarks,

Europe has always recognized itself as a cape or headland [comme
un cap], either as the advanced extreme of a continent, to the west and
south . . ., the point of departure for discovery, invention, and
colonization, or as the very center of this tongue in the form of a
cape [le centre même de cette langue en forme de cap], the Europe of the
middle, coiled up, indeed compressed along a Greco-Germanic axis,
at the very center of the cape [au centre du centre du cap]. (Other
Heading 20; L’Autre cap 24-25)

The matrix of European dominance lies in the accident of its
continental marginality. Europe is both the telos of man’s tropic
movement from Orient to Occident and the point of embarkation for its
restless self-expansion. The spiritual geography of the cap – the jutting
headland and phallic promontory – marks European imperial adventure
as inexorably masculine. Derrida emphasizes the virile logic that informs
the captaincy of European humanism:

The word “cap” (caput, capitis) refers, as you well know, to the head
or the extremity of the extreme, the aim and the end, the ultimate, the
last, the final moment or last legs, the eschaton in general. It here
assigns to navigation the pole, the end, the telos of an oriented,
calculated, deliberate, voluntary, ordered movement: ordered often
by the man in charge. (Other Heading 14)

Relatedly, Valéry conceives European man in terms of his subjective
dynamism, his capacity for radiation and assimilation. The European is
not defined by a particular race, language, or custom, but by the peculiar
genius – the animating Will – that arose from the prodigious trade and
competition between peoples drawn to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Under the shaping influence of Roman governance, Christian morality,
and above all, Greek science, this monstrous variety of races, nations,
and languages came to embody a common Mind or Spirit. “Wherever
that [European] Spirit prevails, there we witness the maximum of needs,
the maximum of labor, capital, and production, the maximum of ambition and
power, the maximum transformation of external Nature, the maximum of
relations and exchanges” (qtd. in Other Heading 112, n. 1). As much as this
characterization of Europe’s driving force draws on a materialist lexicon,
it remains idealist in its conception. The history of Europe’s global
expansion is not at bottom a celebration of work, an “ergontology,” nor
is it an analysis of capital.4 Rather, Valéry is above all concerned with
the fate of Europe’s “cultural capital,” its “spiritual” wares. Derrida
observes: “Ideality stems from that which in capitalization de-limits
itself, that which exceeds the borders of sensible empiricity or of
particularity in general in order to open onto the infinite and give rise to
the universal. The maxim of maximization, which . . . is nothing other
than spirit itself, assigns to European man his essence . . .” (Other Heading)
European man emerges through the ascription of a transhistorical
Mind to various vectors of maximized labor and exchange. The industrial
West’s limitless transformation of its mode of production is not referred
to an impersonal logic immanent to the process of production itself (for
Marx, the drive to generate surplus value). For Valéry, the maximization
of value gives Europe its peculiar identity, but only when seen as a ghostly
silhouette abstracted from historical processes. Only in this spiritualized
form do myriad individual praxes take on universal value. "

-Substance Magazine

[Emily]

"It detracts little from Derrida's analysis of the spectral image to point out that the ghost of Hamlet's father actually wears his visor up, as Horatio at first insists and Hamlet later himself recognizes. So what was once a close-reading becomes a somewhat indulgent metaphor."

But, Derrida in Spectres does discuss the visor being up!

[Matt]

Thank you; yes (see comments). On page 8. He conveniently forgets it later, I believe (as do Benjamin and Chang, at one point, calling his gaze "visored"), but, nonetheless.

An admittedly nitpicky point. (Or, the hazards of relying on memory - no matter how many times one has read something). I will correct the post.