The Test Drive

Part 2. Trial Runs

 Trial Runs Part 2 Trial Runs     I stand on light feet now, Catching breath before I speak For there are songs in every style, But to put a new one to the touchstone [basanôi] For testing [es elegkhon] is all danger. – Pindar, Nemean Ode  (-) For once In visible form the Sphinx Came on him and all of us Saw his wisdom and in that test [basanôi] He saved the city. – Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (-)  Trial Runs Prototype .01 In the interview accorded to Salomon Malka, Levinas announces,“I prefer the word épreuve to expérience because in the word expérience a knowing of which the self is master is always said. In the word épreuve there is at once the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the‘scene.’”1 When Levinas overhauls experience or experiment with the type of endurance implied by épreuve, he opts for a kind of trial: a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk. The call for “verification” – the quotation marks indicate the provisional character of verification – announces a life submitted to incessant probes,unfaltering revision,what in Nietzsche is governed by the principle of rescindability . In The Gay Science every proposition, every subproposition – life itself – is subjected to the rigors of the épreuve. Prototype .02 We must start over. You wake up one morning to find yourself on trial,interminable trial.You are placed under arrest; or,at least,something has been arrested.Incidentally , it’s your birthday. Nonetheless, every possible sense of renewal has been erased from the site of your happenstance date of birth. Instead of enjoying the flickering phantasm of regeneration, you are made to witness something else: a destruction of your becoming. There is nothing reassuring about the fragmented,aphoristic,and bursted character of the text in which you find yourself. You wake up one morning, dizzy and fresh, dissociated by some contingent barrier from your past.You try out your new little legs. You can barely move. You wake up and you don’t know what has become of you. Is it a joke? A test? A destinal wager? You, big shot,Übermensch, have become one of Nietzsche’s animals,part of his legacy in an experiment gone awry. . . . U     Kafka, one of Nietzsche’s most scrupulous readers, responded to the call for a mutant form. Irony for irony, the exchange between Nietzsche and Kafka produced a number of trial runs as they set about transmuting the figure of man. Ever in consultation with one another, they worked, we could say, in the same laboratory, each conducting his own experiments according to a shared logic or logos. Each fleeing a woman. Prototype .03 We must start over. Start from scratch. Regress. Psychoanalysis belongs in the lexicon of the test drive: part of the culture of experimentation, it proceeds by relentlessly refining the conceptual probity of acts of testing. Paradoxically, the case for testing is all the more rigorous when it appears to be introduced in terms of an irremissible warp or omission.2 In the Prefatory Remarks to the Fragment of a Case of Hysteria (),Freud opens the Dora files by stating some anxiety about the exigencies of testing of which his study appears to fall short: “Certainly it was awkward that I was obliged to publish the results of my inquiries without there being any possibility of other specialists testing and checking them,particularly as those results were of a surprising and by no means gratifying character.”3 Testing consists of two significant axioms, the first of which involves an internal control apparatus; the second axiom postulates a community of verifications and double-checkers. Freud introduces a third area of testing when he formulates the basis for a particularly potent type of psychic probe: the reality-test. None of these controls exclude the possibility of further innovation, for the test site is at each point reconfigured to include “every one.” Everyone has a hand in the Freudian experiment. When he addresses the contested status of his study on dreams, which was seen to lack solidity in terms of verifiability ,Freud offers,“there was no validity in the objection that the material upon which I had based my assertions had been withheld and that it was therefore impossible to become convinced of...