Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (review)

Readers familiar with Leslie Hill's previous distinguished studies of Beckett, Duras, Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossowski will not be disappointed with this challenging and erudite exposition of 'radical indecision' as Hill teases out the future in and of literary criticism from select writings of his current trio of authors. The task and responsibility of criticism, Hill argues, are an essentially ethical encounter with the other, with the singular writing of others as an event whose very possibility depends, paradoxically, on the unreadability of literary texts. A detailed introduction to the question of (un)readability, the aporetics of evaluation and judgement, and radical imponderability allows Hill to proceed to offer sustained analyses of the protracted engagement of his three writers with 'some of the most difficult and unreadable of so-called literary texts' (p. 70). In Barthes's case, Hill gives a brilliant synthesis of his protean intellectual interests and personality, from the problematics of his early work through to his 'incisive contribution to literary criticism' (p. 107) with S/Z, his procrastination around the project of the Vita Nova, and his later 'slippages' (p. 146) into (the work of) Proust. Barthes's Neuter as a radical alternative to thought, together with the infinity of the event(s) of writing and reading, provide Hill with a smooth transition to interrogate Blanchot's use of Sade as a 'test case' (p. 162) for the (im)possibility of critical discourse, whereby Sadian irony as a mode of radical undecidability comes to mirror Blanchot's own concerted efforts in the 1960s to undermine the authority and self-assurance of critical writing as such. Blanchot's political engagement with the events of May 1968 is then offset with his textual engagement with Celan's poetry and Duras's La Maladie de la mort. In the final chapter Hill privileges Derrida's early and later readings of Artaud, the 'detour' via Mallarméin 1969, and the 'singularly irreducible event of writing' (p. 300) that is Derrida's work on Hegel and Genet in Glas. Hill engages too with Genet's later, more explicitly political writings, and in particular his involvement with the Palestinian Revolution, his alleged anti-Semitism, and his posthumous text Le Captif amoureux, demonstrating that 'passing judgement' and doing 'justice' to a text can lead to reading encounters (with the other reader) that are outright hostile. Nevertheless, Hill delivers overall a highly persuasive account of the way the literary work, escaping all definition (except of what it is not), invokes the laws by which it demands to be read and simultaneously suspends those laws in a perpetually unactualizable future. Hence, while the brief conclusion deliberately avoids any sense of closure, it is in the more than one hundred pages of compact endnotes that Hill remains faithful to the task of criticism he advocates, for far from confining themselves to bibliographical notation, many notes are expository and exploratory, indicating that, for Hill at least, the future of criticism as 'the provocative intractability of reading as an experience of radical indecision' (p. 336) is always already in the work still to come.