Marking Time: Derrida, Blanchot, Beckett, des Forêts, Klossowski, Laporte by Ian Maclachlan (review)

In this ambitiously wide-ranging and lucidly argued study Ian Maclachlan brings together some of the twentieth century’s most challenging writers, each of whom, he argues, shares a questioning commitment to the event of literature without it ever being possible to say unambiguously in what that event consists, and in any case without it being subordinated to that self-regarding, specular economy of the book or text that so radically bedevilled discussion of modern literary works some decades ago. Maclachlan’s opening chapter, which is also his longest, is given over to a searching consideration of the implications of Derridian différance for an understanding of narrative temporality. For if différance, as Derrida once had it, serves to name the ‘becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time’ (p. 31), it is only in so far as it is necessarily withdrawn from time and space as conventionally understood, not, however, as negative transcendence, but as the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of narrative progression, as what Maclachlan, explaining his own title, calls the ‘double sense of a temporal inscription and a persistent deferral or delay’ (p. 38). Différance, in other words, by dividing the present from itself as that which is paradoxically never fully present, is what gives writing its inventive and unpredictable chance that is ever and always to come. This leads on to a perceptive and acutely probing analysis of Derrida’s thinking of the gift, specifically in relation to the literary, as that which enables economic exchange while remaining irreducible to it, making narrative time possible even as it interrupts its circulation. Having set out the conceptual framework for his inquiry in this way, and with exemplary clarity and rigour, Maclachlan goes on to explore each of his named authors in detail, which he does with impressive patience, responsiveness, and understanding. In respect of the diverse texts addressed in this second part of the book (which include Blanchot’s 1951 story Au moment voulu, des Forêts’s resolutely unclassifiable Ostinato, Beckett’s late prose in both English and French, Klossowski’s trilogy Les Lois de l’hospitalité, and Laporte’s Fugue series), Maclachlan examines, among other things, how the opposition between narrative time and narrated time, on which much narratological analysis turns, is not abolished but is nevertheless dislocated and suspended, to the exclusion of any stable or founding presence, and with an acute sense of repetition as an engine of difference, ‘at once the doom of singularity and its only chance’ (p. 142). Reading here becomes ‘the uncertain site of a tension between finitude and interminability’ (p. 100), and writing a necessary, affirmative exposure to textual instability, generic uncertainty, and impending but ungraspable futurity. Each of the texts selected by Maclachlan is in equal measure fascinating and intractable, alluring and recalcitrant. To write about them at all is to embark on an infinite task. Readers can but be deeply grateful to the author for demonstrating so expertly how it is nevertheless possible to respond to that task and in so doing encourage other readers and other readings.