Infant Figures: The Death of the 'Infans' and Other Scenes of Origin (review)

Christopher Fynsk, Infant Figures: The Death of the 'Infans' and Other Scenes of Origin. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000. ix + 199 pages.

In the fictive polylogue that forms the central portion of Infant Figures, Christopher Fynsk pursues the speculative "supposition" that a death haunts the limits of representation. He supposes an imaginary that interrupts the image and a real that escapes represented reality in an event of exposure that he calls "the death of the infans." The latter event may be taken as the (dis-)joining hinge of the three sections of this volume that Fynsk proposes as a triptych in the fashion of the late Francis Bacon.

Infant Figures thus offers new folds to Fynsk's previous books: Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986/1993) and Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford, 1996), both presenting and performing what he terms a "pragmatics" in different modes of creative invention (art, literature, and thought). Arguably "freer" than his previous works in its writing and its format, Infant Figures nevertheless continues his approach to a thought of a human experience at the edge of language, offering figuratively concrete ways of thinking facticity. Its essays trace three paths at the limits of language.

The first part of the volume steps back into images of this abyssal limit through a treatment of paintings by Francis Bacon and a study of the motif of cruelty in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. The two essays of this section, "A Preface on Cruelty" and "What Remains at a Crucifixion," run parallel to one another, juxtaposing on each page Nietzsche's "cruel" enterprise of self-examination and Bacon's practice of "nailing down" the image. Their counterplay clears a space for the infans in the following section by exposing a bodily experience of alterity, what Nietzsche envisioned as "a translating of the human back into nature." A thought of such exposure may be found in Fynsk's previous work, as in the passage on Luce Irigaray's "mystérique" in Language and Relation (161). Here, in Infant Figures, exposure to the "brutal fact" of existence (as Bacon describes it) is pursued through the scene of crucifixion as it is multiply transfigured in Bacon's own painterly acts of "self-examination." We find here an "ethics of the self" that may recall Foucault (cited in the opening pages of the section on Nietzsche) even as it pursues what Fynsk defined in Language and Relation as "the exigency of another relation."

The fact that response to this exigency is a response to the call of language is more thematic in part two, where Fynsk reads a fragment from Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster and Lacan's seminars VII and XI. As a relay of prior dialogues (notably in Blanchot) and a medley of interregnum voices, the language of this section refuses easy distinctions--as, for example, the difference between thought and fiction. Here, the infans emerges in a space that is pre-Symbolic and beyond the hold of phallic signification (thus Fynsk can be seen to take a step back from Serge Leclaire's own very admirable On tue un enfant [trans., Marie-Claude Hays, Stanford, 1999], a book that nevertheless offers what Fynsk seeks in his own "thinking usage": un acte d'intelligence réelle). Tracing the opening of this space, Fynsk follows Blanchot in folding over "what we have called two versions of the imaginary, this fact that the image can certainly help us to recapture the thing in an ideal way, being, then, its vitalizing negation, but also, on the level we are drawn to by its own weight, constantly threatening to send us back, no longer to the absent thing but to absence as presence, to the neutral double of the object, in which belonging to the world has vanished" (The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, eds. George Quasha and Charles...