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Singularities: On a Motif in Derrida and Romantic Thought (Kant's Aesthetics, Rousseau'sAutobiography)Author(s): Ian BalfourSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 46, No. 3, Romanticism and the Legacies of JacquesDerrida: Part 2 of 2 (Summer/Fall, 2007), pp. 337-360Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25602108 .
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IAN BALFOUR
Singularities: On aMotif in
Derrida and Romantic
Thought (Kant's Aesthetics,
Rousseau's Autobiography)
let thy tongue tangwith arguments of state; put
thyself into the trick of singularity. . .
?Shakespeare, TwelfthNight
CAN
ONE WRITE OR THINK WHAT IS ONE AND ONLY ONE, WHAT IS MERELY
single or singular?One might say thatDerrida's thinking has tirelessly
engagedthe idea and the actualities of difference andwould not themost
differentof differences, as itwere, be thatwhich isonly one? Not nothing,not two or three, and not anything else. Only
one.
In Derrida's writingon thinkers and writers of the Romantic era?
broadly conceived, that is, as an historical period of the late 18th and early19th centuries rather than as amovement
typified by the most "Romantic"
of thinkers,poets, and artists?the matter of what is singular isparticularlyresonant, notably in his readings of Kant and Rousseau.1 In what follows I
tryto tease outwhat is at stake in theproblematic of singularity,principally
by considering certain aspects of Rousseau, in the Confessions, and Kant, in
The Critique of udgment,with attention to how Derrida addresses Rousseau
inOf Grammatology aswell as in the long essay "Typewriter Ribbon" and
how he analyzes Kant in the "Parergon" essay, all of them works on the
subject of the subject. (I follow a tangent or two not so explicitly treatedbyDerrida or addressed in detailed fashion, though Iwould like to think thateven those remarks are in the spiritofDerrida and indeed my own think
ing in thesematters is likelymore massively indebted tohim than I know.)
1.Though I am not concerned in this essay to readRousseau and Kant in relation to each
other, one might note that "Rousseau and Kant" are not just any couple. The former greatlyinfluenced the latter, of which the anecdotal evidence of Kant's daily walks only ever being
interrupted by the publication of certain works by Rousseau is only one striking index.
SiR, 46 (Summer/Fall 2007)
337
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338 IAN BALFOUR
The singular is in some sense a decidedly unphilosophical topic. Does
notphilosophy
move in the realm of the general and the universal, the do
main of logic and what is susceptible to logic, the universe of thought that
isby definition or in principle able to be formulated in language and madeavailable to all in thatmedium? To be sure, philosophy has to come to
termswith particulars but does it not tend to operate in amode that re
solves those particulars,as in the natural sciences, into some
higheror more
inclusive category or class? The sheer particular or the sheer singular, if
there is such a thing, could be said to be thatwhich most successfully resists
philosophical discourse?and it resistsphilosophy inpart because it is resis
tant tolanguage, period.
The fate of the singular in thehistory ofWestern philosophy surely tooka
significantturn when, almost all of a sudden, in Descartes, a certain phi
losophy turned things on their head or turned things "to" the head, one
might say, shiftingfrom the object to the subject as its startingpoint and its
ground, in the formulation of the cogito ergo sum.2Descartes' path of
thought, his meth-odos, led back to and then out again from the thinking
subject, an itineraryrecounted, not incidentally, in the strikinglyautobio
graphical account that isThe Discourse onMethod.3 And when Locke subse
quentlyundertook to
investigatethe
workingsof the human understand
ing, he advocated nothing other than turning into oneself, examining in
painstaking fashion what went on in one's "own breast." Empiricism, then,
began at home in the solitude of the single self, the new source, inLocke
and his progeny, of property and the proper.4 Thus the so-called Copernican revolution of Kant's critical philosophy?dedicated
not just to know
ing but to examining the conditions of knowing and theirvery possibilityin the human subject?had actually begun to "revolve" before him, even if
Kant's protocolswere more radical than his great predecessors and with
him the "revolution" would be complete. So the challenge for thisphase of
philosophy?and we have not simply left this "phase" behind in the past?was to construct, beginning with "the subject," consequential frameworks
of knowledge and thought thatwould have a purchase on the objective,
2. For a trenchant account of this process, see Theodor W. Adorno "On Subject and Ob
ject," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans.Henry W. Pickford (New York:
Columbia UP, 1998) 245-58. Heidegger comments on the switch in orientation and termi
nology with regard to "subject" and "object" in his "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and
Mathematics," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993)303 ff.
3. For Derrida's reflections on method and related matters inDescartes, see the first two
chapters (but especially the second) inEyes of theUniversity, ed. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford
UP) 1-42.
4. See the classic if still debated analysis by C. B. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism: The
Political Theory of Individualism (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1962).
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 339
the truth, and what could be shared, in principle, by everyone, by everyone.
Let us begin by considering how singularity figures inDerrida's most
general characterization of the project of the Critique ofJudgment and itsmechanisms:
The thirdCritique is not just one critique among others. Its specific
object has the form of a certain type of judgment?the reflective
judgment?which works (on) the example in a very singularway. The
distinction between reflective and determinant judgment, a distinction
that isboth familiar and obscure, watches over all the internaldivisions
of the book. I recall it in itspoorest generality. The faculty of judgment ingeneral allows one to think the particular as contained under
the general (rule, principle, law).When the generality is given first,the operation of judgment subsumes and determines he particular. It is
determinant (bestimmend), it specifies,narrows down, comprehends,
tightens. In the contrary hypothesis, the reflectiveudgment (reflekt
ierend)has only the particular at itsdisposal andmust climb back up to,return toward generality: the example (this iswhat matters to us here)is here
given prior
to the law and, in its
very uniqueness
as
example,allows one to discover. Common scientific orlogical discourse pro
ceeds by determinant judgments, and the example follows in order to
determine or,with a pedagogical intention, to illustrate. In art and in
life, where one must, accordingto Kant, proceed
to reflective judgments and assume (by analogy with art:we shall come to this rule fur
ther on) a finality the concept of which we do not have, theexample
precedes. There follows a singular historicity and (counting the
simulacrum-time) a certain (regulated, relative) ficture [sic]of the the
oretical . . . (51, 59?60; Derrida's emphases)5
First things first, then,when it comes to the aesthetic inKant's Critique of
Judgment,a
critique which is not, Derrida underscores, "one among oth
ers," notjust any critique. It emerges, in this general account of generality
and particularity ("I recall it in itspoorest generality"), that thiswill be a
singular critique not least because singularitywill turn out to be the verystructure of the aesthetic and in such away as potentially to disallow the
importation of a pre-existing conceptual framework appropriate to realmsoutside of the aesthetic. As if to emphasize hyperbolicalry the situation of
the singular in reflective judgment, Derrida refers to itworking (on) the
example "in a very singular way." A thingor a situation should either be
5. The English word ficture is indicated as "rare" in the Oxford English Dictionary. It
means, inEnglish, a feigning. It corresponds to the almost equally rare French word ficture.
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340 IAN BALFOUR
singularor not but here reflective judgment's relation to the classical status
of the example (itselfalways in some sense singular and not) is said to be
"very singular" [tres singuliere],an
impossible but strangely apt formulation.
In the discourse of particularity and generality in the natural sciences, atleast, the particular is always, in
principle, resolved into some"higher" ge
nus or species that includes any number of examples, each ofwhich, in
principle, has exactly the same status.Yet this latter sortof example obtainsin aworld inwhich one can know the law, rule, or principle towhich the
example relates: asingle crustacean (to take one of Kant's unexpected
ex
amples of the beautiful) can belong, unproblematically, to its larger class of
crustaceans, all ofwhich are, at a certain level of abstraction, indifferently
alike,with all non-pertinent differences obliterated or suspended. One factor thatmakes the thirdCritique singular, so very singular, is that it isby no
means self-evident that one cansimply translate a
conceptual schema ap
propriate to understanding nature, thatof logical judgments (as inThe Cri
tiqueofPure Reason) to a realm of purely singular feelings. It is a question ofthe conceptual schema doing justice to thematters at hand, even if those"matters" are
feelings.
What might authorize Derrida's otherwise illogical formulation, "very
singular," is that ifKant is correct?and even if not "correct," we shouldtake seriously what he posits?aesthetic experience entails the experienceof something singularwhose possibly pertinent larger group is not given,certainly
notgiven in advance. It is, in the first instance, only singular and
the relation to alarger genus or
species is, at least momentarily,an open
question. Such is the structure of reflective judgment and all aesthetic judgments (of the beautiful, the sublime) are of this order. In aesthetic judgment then, for Kant, there is a certain temporal and "conceptual" priorityto the example,
to the single, singular judgment. "The
example precedes,"
as
Derrida stresses. And prior to the aesthetic judgment proper, there is some
thing even more singular, ifthat expression can be allowed: the feeling that
prompts the judgment. For prior to the priority of the aesthetic judgmentlies the sheer feeling of the beautiful or the sublime or any other aesthetic
experience. The judgment takes place, as itwere, silentlybut it is "less silent" than feeling itself.Feeling isnon- or pre-linguistic, in the sense thatone can have any number of feelings that are not
accompanied bya use of
language.6 This is the case even ifour feelings are also or inpart formed and
informed discursively. The feeling of aesthetic experience does not?or not
yet?take theform of language.
6. On the status of "feeling" in Kantian aesthetics, especially of the sublime, see JeanFrancois Lyotard, Lessons on theAnalytic of theSublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford:Stanford UP, 1994).
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 341
Philosophy has almost always had itsproblems with feelings.With the
determination, in Plato, of philosophy as the discourse of logos, feeling
poses something of a threat, anunruly, irrational or a-rational force resis
tant to its being mastered by its supposed counterpart or opposite: reason.
True, even some of the most "rationalistic" of thinkers give feeling its due,
such as Descartes, with his attention to the "passions" of the soul or Hume,
even though few would go so far as he in describing reason as the "slave of
the passions," much less in thinking that such a dynamic were somehow a
proper stateof affairs.7 nd ifHegel could maintain that "nothing greatwas
everaccomplished without passion,
"8that dictum seems not nearly
as char
acteristic of his thought than the farmore often quoted slogan, "the ratio
nal is the real." Feelings resistphilosophy, even if,in thewake of the development of psychoanalysis and psychology, one can sometimes discern a
"logic" in those feelings, that is, even if they, in some sense, make "sense."
Feelings are generally thought primarily to be of the order of the sensibility,which seems closer, as the very word suggests, to the realm of the sensible
than that of the intellectual. For Kant, aesthetic experience, priorto aes
thetic judgment, is amatter of feelings, "nothingmore than . . .
feelings."9
Indeed, any given pure aesthetic experience is amatter of afeeling of plea
sure, unadulterated by anyadmixture of mere charm or
agreeable feeling,to say nothing of the over-determinations of commercial culture or any
economies ofmeans and ends: a single feeling of pleasure in a single subject
responding to a single object, a tulip, say, and preferably, forKant, awild
one. Even ifwe hastily might think thatflowers or tulips or wild tulips are
in general beautiful, we would be making, accordingto Kant, a category
mistake as far as the aesthetic is concerned just by providing a category, for
it is alwaysamatter, at the outset, of sheer singularity. As Derrida remarks:
The tulip is not beautiful inasmuch as it belongs to a class, correspond
ing to such-and-such a concept of the veritable tulip, the perfect tulip.
This tulip here, thisone alone isbeautiful ("a flower, for example, a tu
lip"), it, the tulip of which I speak, of which I am saying here and
7. For an excellent account of the stakes in thesematters from the vantage of contempo
rary theory, see Rei Terada, Feeling inTheory: Emotion after theDeath of theSubject (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), especially Chapter One, "Cogito and the History of the
Passions."
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie derGeschichte, Theorie-Werkausgabe,Vol. 12 (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp 1970), 38; my translation.
9. I am here rehearsing (including recalling once again, irresistibly, the Barbara Streisand
song behind this phrase, quoting itwithout quotation marks) a number of points about the
Kantian aesthetic in relation toRomantic poetry made inmy essay: "Subjecticity: Kant and
the Texture of Aesthetics," Romantic Praxis, ed. Forrest Pyle, February 2005. <http://
wwAV.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/balfour/balfour.html>
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342 IAN BALFOUR
now that it isbeautiful, in front ofme, unique, beautiful in any case in
its singularity.Beauty is always beautiful once [unefois], even ifjudgment classifies it and drags that once [lafois] into the series or into the
objective generality of the concept. This is the paradox (the class
which?immediately?sounds the death knell of uniqueness in
beauty) of the thirdCritique and of any discourse on the beautiful: it
must deal onlywith singularitieswhich must give rise to the universal
izable judgments.Whence theparergon, the importation of the frames
in general, those of the firstCritique in particular. (93, 105-60; Derri
da's emphases)
At the end of theparagraph Derrida veers out to theorganizing principle ofthe essay as a whole, the motif of the parergon, that which stands "outside"
but adjacent to thework, to the ergon itself that is the work of art. The
frame of a painting is a paradigmatic example of thatwhich somehow pertains to the work of art, framing the painting as awork of art?and yet is
patently or apparently distinct from the painted canvas. The frame is the
non- orquasi-work of art that marks out the work of art as such. Derrida
shows, characteristically, that the neat separation of the outside and inside
of thework isnot soeasily
maintained.Furthermore,
he demonstrates how
theproblematic of the frame in a discursive sense is also crucial to the elab
oration of the thirdCritique insofar as it isno smallmatter to decide what
sortof conceptual "framework" should be brought to bear on the aesthetic
when the subject matter, so tospeak, of the aesthetic is so
categorically dif
ferent from the objects of logical judgments (things of nature, say) as laid
out in theCritique ofPure Reason. (Derrida rightlyqueries a sensitive pointinKant's argumentation: why should one think that the feelings of aes
thetic experience should correspondto aesthetic judgments in the same or
strictlyanalogous fashion as objects of nature correspond to logical judgments? Why should the frame of categories appropriate to the knowledgeof nature [as, for example, the grid of quality, quantity, modality and rela
tion] correspond to those appropriate to sheer feelings of sheer pleasure?)But theprincipal burden of thisparagraph is to show what is atwork and at
play in the aesthetic experience per se and how it leads to the aesthetic
judgment that follows it "as the night follows the day," only faster: almost
immediately or, in effect, immediately. Derrida's gloss here underscores the
immense role language plays in constructing the "bridge" toward?and
against all or most odds?the universal. (Kant describes the architectonic
function of the thirdCritique as a "bridge" between the first and second
Critiques.) For the subject, it appears, is not content simply to register the
unadulterated pleasurea
tulip affords. Rather, for one reason or another?
perhaps ultimately for the sake of reason itself?one finds oneself saying
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 343
something on the order of "this tulip isbeautiful." The feeling is translated
into a judgment, a passage from the sheer subjective feeling to a judgment
seemingly not subjective in the least.What lies behind the proposition is
themere subjective feeling, yetwhat itprompts does not take the form of asubjective proposition. Kant maintains in The Critique ofPure Reason that
the phrase "I think" [Ich denke] could accompany any proposition and we
might in our turn, glossing the stock scenario in The Critique of udgment,
say that the phrase "Ichfuhle," [I feel] could accompany any aesthetic judgment. Yet the virtual "I feel" is effaced and the resulting judgment has, to
all appearances, the look of a logical judgment, as if itwere an objectivestatement characterizing the ontological status of an object: "this tulip is
beautiful." This is the linguistic turn from feeling to judgment, wherebythe singularityof the experience of aesthetic pleasure gets transformed into
something apparently other and more than singular.
Derrida also emphasizes, via his calling attention to theword once (beautyis always beautiful once) that the aesthetic judgment is an event: it isnot justthatone is looking at and taking pleasure from a single, singular (preferably
wild) tulip. It is a one-time gaze at the tulip, a singular encounter with a
singular object in the case of the beautiful or something?not necessarily a
"thing"?that triggersa
feelingof the sublime.
Thus, doublyor
triplysin
gular: the one-time experience bya
single subject of asingle "object."
Even ifone were repeatedly to derive such pleasure from a series of wild
tulips, there would be no pertinent relation between one beautiful event
and the next. "Einmal istkeinmal," runs the German proverb (sometimesinvoked byWalter Benjamin), literally"one time isno time." But the "one
time" is the only possible time of the aesthetic, as far asexperience is con
cerned, and the aesthetic isnothing but amatter of experience, in the first
instance, asposited by Kant.
Is there a language adequate to thismultiply singular experience of theaesthetic? Derrida intimates that the turn to
language, the seemingly inexo
rable movement in Kant's account, is itself violent, in subsuming the singu
lar to the universal.What is the general voice (allgemeine timme) towhich
Kant appeals? Can one pass so easily and so assuredly in the real of aesthetic
judgment from the subjective feeling to the (demanded) assent of, in prin
ciple, absolutely everyone? The desire tomake sense of the singular in
terms that are not themselves singular isunderstandable, indeed inevitable,
to the extent that language cannot possibly be of the order of the sheer singular and stillbe intelligible: there cannot be a discourse of single termsfor
every single object or experience, as if itwere a vast network of absolutelyproper names.
Elsewhere Derrida underscores, in a somewhat different mode, how the
work of art, especially the visual work of art, is at odds with language:
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344 IAN BALFOUR
As for painting, any discourse on it, beside it or above, always strikes
me assilly, both didactic and incantatory, programmatic, worked by
the compulsion ofmastery, be itpoetical or philosophical, always, and
themore sowhen it ispertinent,
in theposition
ofchitchat, unequaland unproductive in the sight ofwhat, at a stroke [d'un trait] does
without or goes beyond this language, remaining heterogeneous to it
or denying any overview. (155)
And then, with more particular reference to some works by Valerio
Adami:
And then if Imust simplify shamelessly, it is as if there had been, for
me, two paintings in painting, one, taking the breath away,a
strangerto any discourse, doomed to the presumed "mutism" of the thing
itself, restores, in authoritative silence, an order of presence. Itmoti
vates ordeploys, then, a poem or
philosopheme whose code seems to
me to be exhausted. The other, therefore the same, voluble, inex
haustible, reproduces virtually an old language belated with respect to
the thrustingpoint of a textwhich interestsme. (155-56)
It isnot simply that the visual work of art is in some obvious way "silent":
indeed, the "scare quotes" indicate Derrida is suspicious of the easy pre
sumption of the "mutism" of thework of art.But he does see language as,
in animportant way, "heterogeneous"
to the artwork and vice versa.10 The
singularity of the visual work of art, then, would be an even more pro
nounced version of the resistance characteristic of artworks in general. But
Kant, againstsome odds, so builds into aesthetic experience the turn to lan
guage and thus to a certain objectivity thatwhat risks resistingphilosophy
altogether?the sheer feeling or pleasure or (in the case of the sublime)
negative pleasure?turns out to constitute, retroactively, the bridge between knowing and acting, understanding and reason, with the imagina
tion articulating itself ith theunderstanding (beautiful) or the reason (sub
lime). Thus the singularity of aesthetic experience bears an extraordinary
burden for thewhole project of the critical philosophy.11
io. Derrida is often accused of fetishizing language when, on the contrary, he argued ex
plicitly and tirelessly against it.This is in part based on amisunderstanding of his pronounce
ment?turned into a slogan?"il n'y a pas de hors-texte," usually translated, not so precisely,as "there is
nothingoutside the text." Derrida
is,of course,
scrupulousin his attention to the
workings of language but he is at least as interested inwhat resists language and thus in the
violence language imposes.11.On the structural burden of the aesthetic in the architectonics of the system, see Paul
de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in his Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis:
U ofMinnesota P, 1996) 70-90, Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the
Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, and David Martyn, Sublime Fail
ures: The Ethics ofKant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003).
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 345
If the irreducibly singular experience of the aesthetic poses something of
a threat to philosophy, might not the "subject" writ large or at large presenta similarobstacle, as the locus of feelings, desires, ideas and a body, and thus
the locus of something other than thought proper, the putatively properdomain of philosophy?
The insistence on singularity takes a different, though not unrelated, form
in thewritings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and inDerrida's reading of them,not least regarding the singularity of Rousseau's person or persona as in
scribed in his texts.Derrida's tracing ofRousseau extends from his early,
ground-breaking Of Grammatology to a late, lengthy essay entitled "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink
(2)"focused on the
Confessions.The
topicof
the subject, of the "I," inRousseau is not "one among others." That dou
ble-edged phrase, however, so often favored byDerrida, might stand as an
apt title gesturing towards the extraordinarily complicated relations be
tween self and other inRousseau as well as toward Rousseau's divided
"exemplarity" in the two not easily compatiblesenses of the term: one
among many others, with noparticular differences among them, and one as
the exampleto or
for others. In this regard Derrida has occasion to cite, in
his "Typewriter Ribbon," the opening rhetorical gambit of the once scan
dalous Confessions, featuring perhaps the most extravagant claim to singu
larityon record:
I have resolved on an enterprisewhich has no precedent [exemple],and
which, once complete, will have no imitator.My purpose is to displaytomy kind [mes semblables]a portrait in everyway true to nature, and
theman I shall portraywill be myself.
Myself alone [moi seul\. I know my own heart and understand my
fellowman [leshommes].But I ammade unlike any one [comme ucun]I have ever seen; I will even venture to say that I am unlike any of
those in existence. Imay be no better but at least I am different \je uis
autre].Whether nature did well or ill in breaking themould inwhich
she formedme, is amatter that can only be judged afterone has readme.
Let the last trump sound when itwill, I shall come forward with
thiswork inmy hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge,and
proclaimaloud: "Here iswhat I
have done. WhatIhave thought,what I have been." I have said the good and the bad with the same
frankness.12
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Pen
guin, 1953) 17. (Translation modified here and elsewhere.) The French original is Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Vol. 1, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond
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346 IAN BALFOUR
The proximate occasion forDerrida's "Typewriter Ribbon" was Paul de
Man's essay, "Excuses," devoted to the Confessions and focused on the
performative character of Rousseau's text. Derrida expandson de Man's
concerns by attending to, among other things, swearing, promising, excus
ing, and the like, along the lines of the first installment of "Limited Inc," a
response to John Searle regarding aspects of Derrida's still earlier essay,
"Signature Event Context" that had engaged J.L. Austin's theory of speechacts.We shall follow elements ofDerrida's argument, dwelling on some of
the enigmatic complexity of this passage from Rousseau in terms of the
figure of singularity.Upon citing the opening of theConfessionsDerrida re
marks:
Commitment to the future, toward the future, promise,sworn faith
(at the risk of perjury, promising never to commit perjury), all these
gestures are exemplary. The signatorywants to be, he declares himself
to be at oncesingular, unique and exemplary, in a manner
analogousto what Augustine did in a more
explicitly Christian gesture.. . .But
taken formyself (moi seul:Rousseau insistson both his solitude and his
isolation, forever, without example, without precedentor
sequel,
without imitator), the same oath also commits, beginning at the ori
gin, all others yet to come. It is a "without example" that, asalways,
aims to be exemplary and therefore repeatable. (140)
Not only is the enterprise of this autobiography utterly singular (no prece
dent, no future imitation), its subject or subject matter (which here
amounts to the same thing) is also absolutely singular. In crafting this por
trait true to nature, Rousseau finds that nature, in itswisdom, has broken
the mould of its creation, eventhough it apparently
was used onlyonce: a
"one-off"production,
a
hapax legomenon
in the realm ofpeople.
The claim
for this singularity is then doubled or re-doubled by the similar claim for
the uniqueness of the text, asingular accounting for the singular life. Auto
biographyas a genre is, to a
point, always predicatedon the irreducible sin
gularity of the individual subject but Rousseau's "enterprise" seems all the
more singular in itspretensions. Yet the opening passage complicates some
of its own claims to singularity: on the one hand, Rousseau insists that
there isno one like him [fait ommeaucun], neither among those he has seen
nor even in all of existence; on the other hand, the passage invokes his
"semblables," those who resemble him. Which is it? esemblance or no re
semblance? Rousseau addresses his kind to say that he isnot of theirkind,that he is suigeneris. Perhaps the claim to singularity lies in the difference
(Paris: Pleiade, 1959) 5.Relevant page numbers will be given in the body of the text, first to
the English, then to the French.
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 347
between what is similar and what is the same?Others might be similar to
Rousseau but no one is the same. Still, there is somethingmore than faintly
paradoxical about the utterly singularJean-Jacques Rousseau addressing his
story tohis semblables, ith a claim to individuality thatgoes farbeyond the
common-garden-varietyones of modern bourgeois culture with its pre
vailing ethos of individualism.13
At some level, the fact that ousseau's autobiography is addressed to the
similar ones, les semblables, makes sense in terms of the genre, which tends
to imply a certain substitutabilityof writer and reader. Not only is autobi
ography structured as the performance of a self readinga
prior version or
versions of itself ut implicitlyor sometimes explicitly the textof autobiog
raphy holds open the possibility of the reader putting herself or himself inthe position of thewriter, despite possible and considerable differences of
race, class, sex, language, and/or historical period. Some of this is legible in
the extravagantwritings ofGertrude Stein, who takes itupon herself not
only towrite The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas?how exactly does one
write the autobiography of another person??but also the even more im
possibly entitled textEverybody's Autobiography. Surely few people could
completely identifywith so singular a figure asMalcolm X, not able fully
to substitute the one "I" for another, and yet it is inkeeping with the logicand rhetoric of autobiography that,for example, Spike Lee's film,Malcolm
X, could have a whole slew of young schoolchildren proclaim,one after
another, in the film's coda: "I amMalcolm X." The history of autobiogra
phy is riddled with such exemplary "I"s, however much the genre mightalso and at the same time appeal to its subject's singularity.
How did this "I," this Imore or less substitutable "I," come to be what
it is?Here is the virtual opening ofDerrida's "Typewriter Ribbon" refer
ringto a certain
"they"before
any propernames have been
divulged:
Here, they told us, iswhat happened to them before coming down tous. Both of them are sixteen years old. Several centuries, more than a
millennium apart. Both of them happened, later, to confess their re
spective misdeed, the theft committed when each was sixteen. In the
course of both the theft and the confession, there was at work what
13. The Reveries du promeneur solitaireopens with a similarly paradoxical positioning of the
self as itsown society in the absence of society proper, singular in himself but to such an ex
tent that his identity is a question mark: "Me voici done seul sur la terre, n'ayant plus de
frere, de prochain, d'ami, de societe que moi-meme. Le plus sociable et le plus aimant des
humains en a ete proscrit par un accord unanime. . . .Mais moi, detache d'eux et de tout,
que suis-je moi-meme? (Oeuvres Completes i: 995). [Here I am then alone on the earth, no
longer having any brother, acquaintance, friend, or society other thanmyself. The most so
ciable and loving of humans has been proscribed by a unanimous accord . . .But me, de
tached from them and from everything, what am I,myself?] (my translation).
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348 IAN BALFOUR
we could call in Greek a mechane, at once aningenious theatrical ma
chine or a war machine, thus amachine and amachination, something
both mechanical and strategic. (71)
Only in the next paragraph do we learnwho exactly is involved in this
double scenario of somewhat mechanical theft and confession: "Augustineand Rousseau not
onlywrote or confessed what thus happened
to them.
They confided inus or letus understand that if hat had happened had not
happened thatdaywhen theywere sixteen years old, iftheyhad not stolen,
theywould probably never have written?or signed?these Confessions"
(71). Derrida then glosses this scenario thus:
As if , as ifsomeone saying /got around to addressing you to say,and
you would stillbe hearing it today: "Here is themost unjustifiable, if
not themost unjust, thing that I ever happened to do, at once activelyand passively, mechanically, and in such away thatnot onlywas I able
thus to letmyself do itbut also thanks to it,or because of it, Iwas able
finally to say and to sign J.
This event of the theft in itselfand in conjunction with the latter-daynar
ration of it is so crucial that it comes to be themain event in the formationof the "I," the subject of the autobiography to come, virtually the condi
tion of itspossibility. Derrida draws our attention to a strikingconjunctionin the autobiographies ofAugustine andRousseau, texts thatbear the iden
tical title of Confessions, stressing once again the determinant role of the
theft in the constitution of the "I":
Has anyone ever noticed, in this immense archive, that Augustine and
Rousseau both confess a theft? nd thatboth do so inBook 2 of their
Confessions, in a decisive or even determining and paradigmatic place?This is not all: in this archive that is also a confession, both of them
confess that, although itwas objectively trifling, this theft had the
greatest psychic repercussions on theirwhole lives. (80)
The overlap is indeed uncanny, though ifwe did not confine our "search"
to protagonists aged sixteen,we could addWordsworth to the listof auto
biographical thieves (his two thefts ccur inBook 1of The Prelude), aswell
asMalcolm X and JeanGenet, among others.Why might theftbe so pecu
liarly formational for these exemplary subjects, these model autobiogra
phers? Though Derrida does not explain it in quite these terms,one might
say that theft, more than most events, more than mosttransgressions, helps
delineate what belongs to the "I" and what does not. And it tends to con
jure up the other or others rather more dramatically than other events, be
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 349
cause whatever is stolen tends tobelong
to someone. Few things settle and
unsettle the subjectso much as
stealing.
The occasion of deMan's essay?among other things?prompts Derrida
to ask ifone can think "the event and themachine" at one and the sametime. The most particular focus of de Man's essay is the epoch-making
event inRousseau's lifewhen, as young man (or is it an old boy? Rousseau
claims to have been old since he was young and stillboyish when old14) he
steals a ribbon and upon being questioned about it,he lies?or, in effect,lies?and blames the young girl in the household named Marion, who is
subsequently dismissed from her job. The misdeed, cast byRousseau and
underscored by deMan as decidedly mechanical, hauntsRousseau, for de
cades and decades. It is arguably themajor turning point inRousseau'searly life and in the Confessions, asDerrida seems to contend.
Rousseau's account of the event in the Confessions begs many questions,
not least because his self-accusation assumes the form of an excuse, with a
number of phrases seeming calculated to distance Rousseau from his re
sponsibility in thematter. "Marion" emerges as "the firstobject thatpresented itself" [lepremierobjet qui s'qffrit],hich de Man takes tomean that
he would have blamed the firstperson (or thing,were itpossible) thatpre
sented itself: itjust happened thatMarion was the first. e are asked to believe thatRousseau had no illwill, no intention of harming or even blam
ingMarion for the theft?though he unambiguously did both blame and
harm her. Rousseau's more or less contorted account issues in the hopeor
prayer or entreaty: "May I never have tospeak of it again."
Yet he does just that, returning to the scene of the crime decades later in
the Fourth Promenade of theReveries.15 If the phrasing in the Confessions
already tried to absolve Rousseau of some or all of the responsibility forhis
misdeed(but
ithaunts him as ifhe wereresponsible!)
he isarguably
even
more off the hook, in his own view, when he returns to the episode in the
Reveries. Twice, as Derrida makes clear (following de Man), Rousseau has
recourse to the figure of themachine inhis account of his (verbal) actions:
"My heart followed these rulesmechanically beforemy reason had adoptedthem" and "Thus it is certain thatneither my judgment nor my will de
tailedmy reply, but that itwas themechanical effect [1'effectmachinal] of
my embarrassment" (51; 1032, 1034). Already at the heart of the self?the
heart of all places?one notes the effectof themachine. This figure of the
14- "These long details of my early youth may well seem extremely childish, and I am
sorry for it.Although in certain respects I have been aman since birth, Iwas for a long time,and still am, a child inmany others" (Confessions 169, 174).
15.One notices that the category of the "promenade" sounds here like an established lit
erary genre, one whose dream, inRousseau's case, would be to do justice, inwriting, to
what one thinks and feels while walking.
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350 IAN BALFOUR
machine is no merefigure,
not one among others, since, for de Man and
Derrida, the machine operates in and through the text whether or not it is
thematized as such. Derrida quotes de Man as follows: "There can be no
use of language which isnot,within a certain perspective thus radically for
mal, i.e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed
by aesthetic, formalistic delusions," amechanicity de Man usually associates
with grammar.16 More specifically, de Man sees the sequence of guilt,ex
cuse, more guilt (forhaving excused, forwriting the excuse, formakingthe crime the matter of a confession that one
publishes inmore or less self
serving fashion) as amechanical and inexorable one, even iftheprecise tex
ture of the reflections (and some of their content) are undeniably Rous
seau's own.
De Man's analysis of the singular and yet exemplary crime and its singularyet exemplary textual elaboration helps prompt Derrida to ask in amore
general way:
How, then, is one to reconcile, on the one hand, athinking of the
event, which I propose withdrawing, despite the apparent paradox,from an
ontologyor a
metaphysics of presence (itwould be a matter
of thinking an event that is undeniable but without pure presence)and, on theotherhand, a certain concept of machineness [machinalite]?The latterwould imply at least the following predicates: a certainma
teriality, which is notnecessarily
acorporeality,
a certain technicity,
programming, repetition or iterability,a cutting off from or independence from any living subject?the psychological, sociological, tran
scendental, or even human subject, and so forth. In two words. How
is one to think together the event and the machine, the event with the
machine, this here event with this here machine? In a word, and re
peating myself in quasi-machinelike fashion, how is one to think together the machine and the event, a machinelike repetition and that
which happens/arrives [arrive]. (136)
The event and themachine should be mutually exclusive. The event
would entail an "insistence on the arbitrary, fortuitous, contingent, alea
tory,unforeseeable. An event that one held to be necessary and thus pro
grammed, foreseeable, and so forth, thatwould be an event" (158). The
event, then, would also be of the order of the singular, whereas the ma
chine produces, by definition, what is not singular: the (necessarily) re
peated, the general, and the not-at-all individual. But the analysis of events
16. The passage Derrida cites comes from Allegories ofReading (New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 1979) 294. It is cited in "Typewriter Ribbon" 105. On a related matter in
Wittgenstein, seeMichael N. Forster, Wittgenstein on theArbitrariness ofGrammar (Princeton:Princeton UP, 2005), especially Chapters 2 and 3.
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 351
as they come to us in texts suggests the mutual implication of text and
event such that the task is,Derrida suggests, to think both at once. Even a
reading focused on the event-character of the eventwould need to account
for any effects of the machine, the non-singular and the singular at the
same time.
Some of thisdynamic might be inscribed in the seemingly innocuous ti
tle: "Typewriter Ribbon." What is a typewriter? It suggests, at aminimum,a machine that enables writing
or a mechanical writing,a machine that
produces the same letter in the same form every time the samekey is
struck. Derrida, following de Man, raises the suspicion that the writer is, to
a limited extent but also by definition, a kind of typewriter.When asked
his opinion ofJackKerouac's On The Road, Truman Capote caustically remarked: "That's not writing, that's typing." That is to say: merely mechan
icalwriting. Yet there is a more neutral and not at all dismissive sense in
which allwriting is typing, in twoways: i) insofar aswriting cannot tran
scend or circumvent itsmechanical character and 2) insofar as what appears
to be singular and particular emerges rather as not so singular, a kind of
"type," rather as when, in analyzing comedies, Aristotle contends that the
characters, with apparently proper names, only appear to be individuals
(Poetics 1451b). Poetry, Aristotle claims generally, "aims at generality,"as
"has long been obvious in the case of comedy." The individual isnot (so)
individual, the seemingly singular not (so) singular.All writing is typewrit
ing, because one cannot write what is only one, what ismerely particular.
The merely "one" cannot quite exist in writing,no matter how deter
mined or over-determined the textmight be. This has, once
again,conse
quences for the writing of autobiography, the genre with perhaps the
greatest claim to being the textual mode of the singular subject.17Ifone were to look for the likeliest formal marker of the
identity,self
sameness and continuity of the human subject, and thus the ability to sign"I," itmight well be the proper name. The body and the face change, as
does the mind, but the name remains?or tends to remain?the same.
Even if language in general hardly operates with the perfection of a di
vinely authorized Adamic naming of things (or people or animals), the
proper name seems to hold out the possibility of unambiguous, unique
naming and indeed in a good many instances of daily (or other) life, the
name does function perfectlywell. And yet one and the same proper name
could always refer to more than one person: "Jane Doe" or "Kwame
Appiah" does notnecessarily
name one and onlyone person.
Some of what is at stake in the proper name emerges powerfully in
17. As we take leave of the subject of typewriting, one might note thatRousseau himself
was variously employed as an engraver and a copier ofmusic, a kind of typewriter.
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352 IAN BALFOUR
Derrida's reading of Levi-Strauss and his Tristes Tropiques, a text inwhichthe modern-day anthropologist pays tribute to Rousseau as the founder of
anthropology and amodel still to be emulated. Levi-Strauss studies there
"the lostworld" of theNambikwara, a people apparently innocent of orfree fromwriting. One isperhaps astonished to learn that thispeople haveno proper names, or, more
precisely,no proper names on first acquain
tance. The anthropologist learns from young girls in the tribe thatbeyondthe "nicknames" for everyone, people do have "secret" proper names. The
elders prohibit the use of such names, an extraordinary state of affairs that
(nonetheless) prompts Derrida to comment:
This prohibition is necessarily derivative with
regard
to the constitu
tive erasure ofwhat I have called arche-writing, within, that is, the
play of difference. It isbecause theproper names are already no longerproper names, because their production is their obliteration, because
the erasure and the imposition of the letterare originary, because theydo not supervene upon a proper inscription; it is because the propername has never been, as the unique appellation reserved for the pres
ence of a unique being, anything but the original myth of a transparent legibility present under the obliteration; it is because the propername was never possible except through its functioning within a
classification and therefore within a system of differences, within a
writing retaining the traces of difference, that the interdictwas possible, could come into play, and, when the time came, as we shall see,
could be transgressed, transgressed, that is to say restored to the oblit
eration and non-self-sameness [the im-propriety, non-propriete] at the
origin. (109)
Thus what
appears
to be so unusual?the
example
of a tribe that "has" but
also prohibits proper names?occasions aninsight into the fundamental im
propriety of the seemingly "proper"name. Derrida can show how, in
Levi-Strauss' own terms, drawn from the latter's The Savage Mind: "one
never names . . . one classes."18 Names have to function in a system, have
to be legible, repeatable and thus always potentially or actually not quite as
proper as they appear. Derrida "concludes": "The death of absolutely
proper naming, recognizing in a language the other as pure other, invokingit aswhat it is, is the death of the pure idiom reserved for the unique"
(110). Or as he summarizes bluntly: "the proper name is improper" (111).19
18. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1966)181.
19.On the problematic of the proper name and the signature, see the following authorita
tive studies: Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution ofAuthorship (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1988) and Geoff Bennington, Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilee, 1991).
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 353
A stable proper name, however, or the stability of the entity to which
the proper name refers,would seem to be one condition of possibility of
autobiography. In this regard it is not amatter of indifference thatRous
seau sometimes adopted and was addressed by numerous other proper
names: the anagrammatic Vaussore (Confessions, Bk. 4) or the more im
probable Dudding (Confessions,Bk. 6). The former he adopted at a time
when he noted he was "not reallyhimself" and the latterwhen he did not
wish to be recognized for who he really was (but rather an English
Jacobite!). Rousseau seems to oscillate between the two poles staked out byDescartes and Montaigne, two of his great autobiographical predecessors:
Descartes, who thought that ourthoughts
were"entirely within our
power" (Discourse onMethod) andMontaigne, who maintained that "we arenever at home with ourselves" [nous
sommesjamais chez nous].20 Rousseau
does seem, from virtually the outset of his Confessions and elsewhere, al
ready divided against himself. The opening page's formula "je suis autre" [Iam different, I am other]might be less radical thanRimbaud's laterprocla
mation: "je est un autre" [I is another].21 But Rousseau is so
eminentlyca
pable ofmultiplying his uneasily co-existing selves that the "I" does indeed
seem at least something of an other?even to itself?from the very start,
ratheralong
the lines of how Rousseauwould, contemporaneous
with the
Confessions, write a series of dialogues under the rubric Rousseau, Juge de
Jean-Jacques, premised on a split in the self that allows for the distance of
judgment, including judgment of oneself.22 The text presents a distanced,
20. Descartes maintains in the Discourse onMethod that "My thirdmaxim was to tryalwaysto conquer myself rather than fortune, and to altermy desires rather than change the order of
theworld, and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely within
our power but our own thoughts. ..." The Philosophical Works of escartes, Volume i, trans.
Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (no place of publication: Dover, 1931) 96?97. [Matroisieme maxime etoit de tacher toujours plutot a me vaincre que la fortune, et a changer
mes desirs que l'ordre du monde, et generalement de m'accoutumer a croire qu'il n'y a rien
qui soit entierement en notre pouvoir que nos pensees. . ..]The passage fromMontaigne is
from The Complete Essays, trans.M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991) 11 (from essay no.
3 in Book 1, "Our emotions get carried away beyond us).21. As ithappens, Gilles Deleuze invokes this slogan fromRimbaud in his "On Four Po
etic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy," inEssays Critical and Clinical,trans.Daniel W. Smith andMichael A. Greco (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1997) 27-35.
22. Levi-Strauss stresses not the vainglory of the Rousseauean exemplary, self-divided
subject but its humility: "In truth, I am not 'I,' but the feeblest and humblest of 'others.'Such is the discovery of Confessions. Does the anthropologist write anything other than con
fessions? First in his own name, as I have shown, since it is themoving force of his vocation
and his work; and in thatvery work, in the name of the society, which, through the activities
of its emissary, the anthropologist, chooses for itself other societies, other civilizations, and
precisely theweakest and most humble; but only to verify towhat extent that first society is
itself'unacceptable'" (as quoted by Derrida, Of Grammatology 114).
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354 IAN BALFOUR
divided account of a subject divided and distanced from himself. But this
division?giveneven the precarious unity of consciousness over (a long)
time?is still felt and thought as ifcontained by some more encompassingand still somehow unified subject to the extent that the signature, Jean
Jacques Rousseau, would be referential.
Rousseau's multiplenames would be one index of this self-division,
thoughDerrida's Of Grammatology suggests thatwriting itself s arguably the
pre-eminent medium of Rousseau's alienation from himself. It is one of
the great achievements of Derrida's text to have analyzed with such pro
fundity and tenacitywhat is at stake forWestern thought in the idea and
the fact(s) ofwriting. Derrida accords Rousseau a singular place in the his
tory of the thinking of writing, poised "between Plato's Phaedrus andHegel's Encyclopedia" (97), constituting a kind of intensification of the
"modification," asDerrida terms it,from object to subject associated with
the name of Descartes. Within thismore circumscribed epoch, that be
tween Descartes and Hegel, Rousseau, according to Derrida, "is undoubt
edly the onlyone or the first one to make a theme or a system of the re
duction of writing profoundly implied in the entire age" (98). At once
typical and singular,Rousseau makes legiblewhat is at stake in the subject
ofwriting. And he does this in both theory and practice, that is, in generalreflections on writings, as in the SecondDiscourse and theEssay on theOrigin
ofLanguages, where he laments the loss of immediacy and indeed even the
loss of a possibility of thepublic in an age inwhich thevoice of orators can
no longer even be heard and inwhich one is reduced to viewing placards
saying "Give Money,"23 aswell as inhismore or lesspurely autobiographical writings.
Derrida's general account of the subject of writing draws on, among oth
ers, his great predecessors Saussure and Freud, who argued variously that
language "is not a function of the speaker" (OfGrammatology 68) and posited a fundamental "unconsciousness of language," such that Derrida, after
them, can write:
With orwithout these propositions the complicity of their authors, all
these propositionsmust be understood as more than the simple
rever
sals of ametaphysics of presence or of conscious subjectivity. Consti
tuting it and dislocating it at the same time,writing is other than the
subject, in whatever sense this latter is understood. Writing can never
be thought under the category of the subject; however it ismodified,however it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, itwill
23. I am summarizing brutally here a more complex and ambivalent position. Derrida
conducts themost painstaking analysis of the relevant works by Rousseau throughout Of
Grammatology.
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 355
refer,by the entire thread of itshistory, to the substantialityof a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the selfsame [le
propre] in the presence of self-relationship. (68?69)
Subject to the relentless sway of difference, the subject cannot master the
language of its own utterances, aswriting always exceeds them. The subject
cannot be simply andwholly subject, ifwe understand that term to entail a
more or less popularized version of theCartesian "I," transparent to itself
and master of its owncertainty.
The consequences for thewriting subject are nowhere more legible than
in the genre of autobiography, to say nothing of the autobiography with
themost explicit claims to singularityand exemplarity. If the opening of the
Confessions announces a self-assured subject in command of just what ittakes towrite his own autobiography (e.g. "I know my own heart"), anynumber of subsequent passages come to
complicate the self-same identity
of that subject on which the success and integrityof the text seem to de
pend. To judge from Rousseau's own account, the best presentationor
representation of his selfwould be one that corresponded to hismost "pedestrian" thoughts:
In thinking over the details ofmy lifewhich are lost tomy memorywhat Imost regret is that I do not keep diaries ofmy travels.Never
did I think somuch, exist so vividly, and experience somuch, never
have I been somyself (tant etemoi)?if Imay use that expression?asin the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is somethingabout walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts.When I
stay in one place I can hardly think at all.My body has to be on themove to setmy mind going [il faut que mon corps soit en branle pourymettre mon
esprit].(157-58;
162)This isbad news for the project ofRousseau's autobiography, since it is so
very difficult towalk and write at the same time. The writing of theCon
fessions isnecessarily the product of conditions (being sedentary or station
ary) that are not at all conducive tothought. Staying in one
place,or espe
cially sittingat his desk,means thatRousseau, inwriting, can hardly get hismind
"going." Moreover, onemight assume that one is always oneself
(how could itbe otherwise?) butRousseau posits a kind of sliding scale of
being (at one with) oneself,with walking being the condition thatbest allows one to be oneself and to think (about, among other things, oneselfand being oneself). The diary formwould stand as a better account?
though still not immediate?than the belated, retrospective confession,
given the shorter interval between the experience of thought and feelingwhile walking and itsbeing written down.
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356 IAN BALFOUR
The brief "forward" to theConfessions, towhich Derrida draws our at
tention, a strange page without any heading (such as"Avant-Propos") and
often printed without a page number that faced the first page of the
Geneva manuscript24 is almost redundant (though coming first) in the lightof the final opening of theConfessions. Itpresents a similar sortof claim to
exemplarity but here the phrasing stresses themotif of totality: promises a
portrait "in all its truth" [dans toute saverite], one of the many claims to to
tality: "Here is the only portrait of aman, painted exactly according to na
ture and in all its truth,which exists and which probably everwill exist"
(3). It corresponds to another famous passage, made paradigmatic by
Starobinski, stressing totality and the desire tomake that totalityknown:
I should like in someways tomake my soul transparent to the reader's
eye, and for thatpurpose I am trying to present it from all points of
view, to show it in all lights, and to contrive thatmore of itsmove
ments shall escape his notice . . . (169; my emphasis)
If totality and truthform the goal of theConfessions, it isnot so fortuitous
thatRousseau, almost always writing retrospectively, has sowildly differingaccounts of his own
capacity for remembering events, things, words.
Rousseau claims to have "no verbal memory"?by which he means princi
pally the aptitude for remembering oral or written passages. The larger pas
sage, however, seems to invoke a less circumscribed mode of memory,
linked with the difficultyofwriting down his thoughts in general:
I have never been able to do anythingwith a pen inmy hand, andmydesk and paper before me; it is on my walks, among the rocks and
trees, it is at night inmy bed when I lie awake, that I compose inmy
head;and
youcan
imaginehow
slowly,for I am
completelywithout
verbal memory and have never been able to memorize half a dozen
verses inmy life. (113?14; 114)
The very nextparagraph, however, underscores the vivacity of his memory
in alarger
sense:
I have studiedmen, and I think I am a fairlygood observer. But all the
same I do not know how to seewhat is beforemy eyes; I can only see
clearly in retrospect, it is only inmemories thatmy mind canwork. Ihave neither feeling nor understanding for anything that is said or
done or thathappens beforemy eyes,All that strikesme is the external
manifestation. But afterwards all comes back tome, I remember the
24. Numerous editions and translations opt not to print this page as prefacing the Confessions.
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 357
place and the time, the tone of voice and look, the gesture and situa
tion; nothing escapes me. (114; 114; my emphasis)
And yet this is the sameRousseau (or is it?)who says a little earlier "... noman has ever
passed the sponge sorapidly and so
completelyover the past
as I" (103; 102). One witnesses an almost systematic oscillation between the
claims to total memory and the total or near total absence of it.25
IfRousseau has "neither feeling nor understanding for anything said or
done or thathappens before [his] eyes" can he be said to experience any
thing at all, anything other thanmemory? Because it all comes back, even
ifnot experience as such in its immediacy. All experience is only experi
enced latterly,n
themode ofNachtrdglichkeit.And"it is
onlyin
memories"that Rousseau's mind can work." Paradoxicallyor not, memory gets in the
way of experience?or experience is always suspended, deferred to its fu
turememory. One might think that the occasional claim to totalmemory
("nothing escapes me") would be an ideal condition for self-presence and
yet at the outset of the very next paragraph (following the claim that
"nothing escapes me") Rousseau notes, "Seeing that I am so little master of
myself when I am alone, imagine what I am like in conversation. ..."
Thus theConfessions,whose project is to tell the story "in all its truth" (in
cluding the truth about lying, stealing and other "faults"), seems to careen
wildly between accounts that suggest authoritative truthful renditions
girded by total memory and self-presence,a
singularly successful presenta
tion of self, overagainst something like its opposite. No memory, no verbal
representation would correspond to the lively thoughtswhen his mind is
"going" somewhere, preferably while walking. Is it any wonder, then, that
this subject of writing, this written life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is precar
ious from the startand throughout?If the subject, the desiring subject, who is same and other, other even to
himself, is remarkably divided from the first, one might think that the
other, the other other, so tospeak, would be more unified and able to be
experienced in his or her singularity,not least because it is so much easier
to render the other, discursively,as
homogeneous inmore or less reductive
fashion. To be sure, any number of others are first presented in their vari
oussingularities through the Confessions only to
give way to a certain sense
2$. Witness also this passage that calls attention to gaps in the record only to assert that
nothing essential ismissing: "There are some events inmy life that are as vivid as if they hadjust occurred. But there are gaps and blanks that I cannot fill except by means of a narrative
asmuddled as thememory I preserve of the events. Imay therefore have made mistakes at
times, and Imay stillmake some over trifles, till I come to the days when I have more certain
information concerning myself. But over anything that is really relevant to the subject I am
certain of being exact and faithful, as I shall always endeavour to be in everything" (128,
130).
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358 IAN BALFOUR
of substitutability.One of themost remarkable dynamics ofRousseau's life
lies in his engagements with women. They tend to take place under the
sign of the mother, not least, perhaps, because Rousseau's mother died
within days of giving birth to him. With the absence of his actualmother?and Rousseau meditated a good deal on the role of themother in
the upbringing of the child, including the importance of breast-feeding?Rousseau's life ismarked by any number of substitutes for the lostmaternal
presence, mostspectacularly in his relation toMadame de Warens whom
he came to call "Mama" before consummatinga romance with her. Can
there be a mother in quotation marks, a mother that is not a mother, but
the citation of a mother, a woman not the mother but called by the
mother's name, not a proper but a
generic
name that nonetheless should, in
principle, onlyever be applied
to one person?to one's mother bya son or
daughter?26 In any event, the force ofRousseau callingMadame deWarens
"Mama" canhardly be overestimated, given that when the sexual relation
shipwas initiated,Rousseau recognized: "I felt as if I had committed in
cest" (189; 197). It feels like incest because this is one forceful instance
when, "the irreplaceable is replaced" (OfGrammatology 145?46). Madame
deWarens is the closest of all the female figures to themother and yet theyall seem to be, at one level or another, substitutes for her, a "chain of sup
plements," as Derrida terms it, resembling each other by their positionwithout resembling each other, blurring the distinction between metaphorand metonymy. And the mother would be only the extreme of these sub
stitutions or almost the most extreme: for weresomething
or someone to
provide absolute pleasure (which perhaps entails a return to the origin) that
would mean death, asRousseau explicitly hypothesizes.
I do not want to leave readers with the impression that singularity,so cru
cial in Derrida's readings of the Romantic era, is confined to the period.
Derrida's invocations of singularity tend to cluster in his treatment of justice, death, especially the death of a friend, the event, thework of art, and
the subject.He has argued, for example, inhis suggestive but enigmatic es
say "Force of Law" thatjustice is always of the order of the singular.Any
"general" application of the law would treat the specificcase as, precisely,
general. Justice requires a judgment that isnot simplymechanical or givenin advance, otherwise a machine or computer could do a
perfectly good
job at it.Justice is always and only singular. Indeed the phrase "doing jus
26. I am voicing a tradition here, not my opinion. There are often perfectly good reasons
(as in adoption) for the term "mama" or its variants being applied to more than one person.On the curiously pervasive form?across many languages?of the term in question here, see
Roman Jacobson "Why Mama And Papa?" in On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and
Monique Monville-Bursten (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1990) 305-11.
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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 359
tice" to something oftenmeans respecting the singularityof thematter at
hand: a text, an event, a person.
Derrida, like a lot good of teachers (Socrates, Jesus,Lao Tzu, Nietzsche),
is fond of a good paradox, and he takes a not-so-secret pleasure in arguingthat even an event which would seem to have an
air-tight claim tosingu
larity could, against all odds, comeagain and again. His great essay on Paul
Celan, "Shibboleth," opens with the seemingly self-evident claim, "One
time only: circumcision takes place only once,"27
onlyto have the essay go
on to trouble?via analysis of the date, the anniversary, the necessarilyre
petitiveor iterative character of inscription?the one-timeness of even that
event, and only partly thanks to the figurative character of circumcision.
Thus often whatappears
to besingular
is revealed to be crossedby anynumber of forces that are something other than singular and often indeed
generic,as with the partly transgressable "law of genre." In eulogizing the
death of a friend, so often and so eloquently performed by Derrida, one
feels the law of genre operating (and indeed Derrida "respects" the law ofthe eulogy, the epitaph, the obituary) even as there isno doubt as to the ir
reducible singularityof the person lost, the singularityof the loss, and the
unique protracted event of individual and group mourning. But even here
thepathos of the individual loss of the individual can pan out to the "pan,"to the "all" or at least the imagined form of the collective, as in the final
moment of his tribute to his colleague and friend Louis Althusser. In clos
ingwhat cannot easily be closed, Derrida cedes the finalword toAlthusser,from the latter's early "Bertolazzi and Brecht":
Yes, we are united byan institution?the performance?but, more
deeply, by the samemyths, the same themes, that govern us without
our consent, by the samespontaneously lived ideology.
. . .we eat of
the same
bread,
we have the same
rages,the same
rebellions,the same
madness (at least in memory, where this ever-immanent possibilityhaunts us), if not the same
prostration before a time unmoved by any
History. Yes, like Mother Courage,we have the same war at our
gates, and a handsbreath from us, ifnot inus, the same horrible blind
ness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We
have even the same dawn and night,we skirt the same
abysses: our
unconsciousness. We even share the samehistory?and that is how it
all started.28
In onequoting the other, not just any other, Derrida's singular voice gives
way toAlthusser's in amemorable formulation of how the singular is tra
27. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties inQuestion: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2006) 1.
28. Jacques Derrida, The Work ofMourning, ed. Pascale Anne-Braut and Michael Naas
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2001) 118.
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360 IAN BALFOUR
versed by any number offerees, historical, linguistic, discursive. Languageand text in thebroadest senses thatDerrida helped give to thosewords?byno means reducible to
language and textliterally
so called?sustain, and
undercut the self, the singular self that language in part, but only in part,made possible in the firstplace.
York University, Canada