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Ten: Reading like Angels
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ten Reading like Angels Derrida and Augustine on the Book (for a History of Literature) Mark Vessey Ellipsis (1): Literature and Testimony Derrida with his finger on the sixth seal of Blanchot’s Apocalypse: In memory of its Christian-Roman meaning, “passion” always implies martyrdom , that is—as its name indicates—testimony. A passion always testifies. But if the testimony always claims to testify in truth to the truth for the truth, it does not consist, for the most part, in sharing a knowledge, in making known, in informing , in speaking true. As a promise to make truth, according to Augustine’s expression [Conf. X.i.1], where the witness must be irreplaceably alone, where the witness alone is capable of dying his own death, testimony goes always hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie. Were this possibility to be eliminated, no testimony would be possible any longer; it could no longer have the meaning of testimony. If testimony is passion, that is because it will always suffer both having, undecidably, a connection to fiction, perjury, or lie and never being able or obligated—without ceasing to testify—to become a proof. (DM 27) The possibility of fiction is a condition for the truth-claim of testimony, a possibility that is also a living passibility, since not even a martyr’s death can prove the truth of what is asserted. This (un)truth condition of testimony, Derrida argues, is common to all our mortal experience and utterance, both to what we call literature and to what we may think of as other-than-literature: Caputo/Scanlon, Augustine 12/2/04 10:09 AM Page 173 Here, in any case, the border between literature and its other becomes undecidable . The literary institution has imposed itself; it has also imposed the rigor of its right to calculate, master, neutralize this undecidability, to make as if— another fiction—literature, in its possibility, had not begun before literature . . . (DM 92) As testimony labors under suspicion of falsehood, so “literature” bears the burden of being named under an external law, of being no more than a name, of being a name without the thing, of not being. That is the ultimate passion of literature: There is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not exist . . . . No utterance, no discursive form is intrinsically or essentially literary before and outside of the function it is assigned or granted by a right [un droit], that is, a specific intentionality inscribed directly on the social body. . . . Its passion consists in this—that it receives its determination from something other than itself. Even when it harbors the unconditional right to say anything . . . its status is never assured or guaranteed permanently. . . . This contradiction is its very existence, its ecstatic process. (DM 28) These theses on literature are familiar to us from other writings by Derrida. What is singular about their expression here in Demeure, aside from the numbering of passions suggested by his host in Louvain, is the historical juncture indicated , on the one hand, by the citation (DM 23–25) of Ernst Robert Curtius’s 1948 book on European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages and, on the other, by the joint reference to Augustine’s Confessions and to an understanding of martyrdom that dates from the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire. Martyrdom and confession are cognate forms of Christian testimony. Before Augustine ’s time, the role of confessor was understood to be heroic. To “confess” the Christian faith was then to suffer all but the extremity of death itself. With the ending of intermittent persecution by the Roman state, Christian confession assumed new heroic forms, prominent among them the civil death of monastic life. The monks, like the martyrs before them, carried their testimony to the physical and legal limits of Roman civitas. These are just a few elements of the history that Derrida evokes as having “counted greatly in the institution and the constitution of literature, in its relation to religion and politics” (DM 21), in order to pose the larger question of the (in)dissociability of that institution from LatinRoman -Christian culture. To put the question this way is certainly to differ from Curtius, who, as Derrida points out (DM 24), modeled his ideal totality of European literature on Roman citizenship under the Empire, but then made Latin “literature” an unreflecting translation of Greek grammatike and Homer its founding hero. Curtius’s...