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

Not a critical commentary about the “origin” of language, nor another reading that would be satisfied by simply affirming the “unsayability” of language through a proliferation of aporetic linguistic constructions, Christopher Fynsk’s triptych volume assumes the modest task of “bearing witness” (2) to an eclectic selection of disruptive works (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Salvatore Puglia, passing through Blanchot and Lacan) that call upon us to think differently (about) our human relation to language. Each part of the volume explores how a “pragmatics” (the practice of writing/art) points in its own way to the limits of language and thought. The first part of the volume juxtaposes on the same page a preface on Nietzsche with an essay on Francis Bacon. In this preface, Fynsk examines how the Nietzschean motif of cruelty functions as a way of entering what the author calls the “ethico-political,” a primordial space from which “the question of political and ethical meaning opens in all its historicity and materiality” (13). Fynsk insists, however, that the experience of the “ethico-political” does not enable political and ethical reflection to take place; that such an “experience” cannot be contained, neutralized and subsumed under the traditional categories of thought; and that any attempt to appropriate it also fails since the self-fashioning subject is exposed to a dimension of material existence that is fundamentally irreducible to meaning and incommensurable to any aesthetic ideology. The essay on Bacon carefully investigates the motif of crucifixion in an attempt to elucidate what is at work, and at stake, in Bacon’s violent realism and radicalization of the traditional relationship between the image and the real.

After the first part, which is intended to open up a space for critical reflection, Fynsk addresses explicitly the major concern of his text—two scenes found in Blanchot and Lacan, each depicting “the death of the infans”—through a fictive dialogue, a doubling of the author’s voice. In this dialogic fiction, Fynsk considers Blanchot’s reflections on Leclaire’s phrase “a child is being killed” and Lacan’s “Father, don’t you see I’m burning.” These “primal” or “originary” scenes, it is argued, testify to the human subject’s mortal exposure to language, to his/her birth to language (that is, the gift of language is knowledge of finitude, of “the capability of death” [67]), and to “another dying,” to the “passivity of the relation” to the il y a, which involves the “anonymous ‘subject’ of the death drive” (68). These point to a trace of this immemorial death (an experience prior to experience) existing in each speaking subject. Furthermore, these scenes/acts of recollection attest to an exigency to figure this human relation to language, and serve to remind us of the infans in all of us. The second part of the volume ends with a brief but original essay on Antigone centered around the question of friendship and exploring Antigone’s ethico-political relation to the other (others).

The third part of the volume addresses the work of Salvatore Puglia. It contains a dialogue between the author and the artist, which focuses on the social and political import of the latter’s aesthetic practice, and a critical essay on Puglia. The essay focuses on the ethical appeal of the artist’s use of anonymous figures (perhaps “an affirmation of community” [171]). It also tells us how these figures demand from us a kind of relation that resists a reduction to an economy of the Same (comprehension of alterity through ontological identification), and how, finally, his uncanny figures call for a relation without relation, that is, a relation to an “incommensurable.” To conclude, in blending theoretical acumen with literary sensibility, Christopher Fynsk’s volume makes an important contribution to the timely and ethical project of thinking otherwise than Being our human relation to language.