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

1. INSTANTIATIONS

Chapter O N E INSTANTIATIONS I For example Fine art [Die schöne Kunst] shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully [schön] that in nature we would dislike or find ugly [Dinge, die in der Natur häßlich oder mißfällig sein würden]. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and so on are all harmful [Schädlichkeiten]; and yet they can be described, or even presented in a painting, very beautifully. There is only one kind of ugliness [Häßlichkeit] that cannot be presented in conformity with nature [der Natur gemäß] without obliterating all aesthetic liking [ohne alles ästhetische Wohlgefallen zu Grunde zu richten] and hence artistic beauty [Kunstschönheit]: that ugliness that arouses disgust [Ekel; Kant’s emphasis]. For in that strange sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination [Einbildung], the object is presented as if it insisted, as it were, on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting [gleichsam, als ob er sich zum Genusse aufdränge, wider den wir doch mit Gewalt streben]; and hence the artistic presentation of the object [die künstliche Vorstellung des Gegenstandes] is no longer distinguished in our sensation from the nature of this object itself, so that it cannot possibly be considered beautiful. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement1 This I am happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again. As when a man, having found at last what he sought, a woman, for example, or a 1 2 Radical Indecision friend, loses it or realizes what it is. And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. Samuel Beckett, Watt2 One “thing” alone is inassimilable. It thus forms the transcendental of the transcendental, the untranscendentalisable, the unidealisable, and that is: that which is disgusting [le dégoûtant; what Kant calls Ekel]. . . . It is no longer a case of one of those negative values, or ugly or harmful objects which art may represent and thereby idealise. That which is absolutely excluded [Cet exclu absolu] does not even allow itself to be accorded the status of an object of negative pleasure or of ugliness redeemed by representation. It is unrepresentable. And at the same time unnamable in its singularity [innommable dans sa singularité]. Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis”3 Let me begin, then, with an example. In the late 1940s a middle-aged French woman by the name of Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, an accomplished pianist with an enthusiasm for literature and theatre, was tirelessly hawking round the of- fices of various French publishers a series of manuscripts written in French by her partner, an Irishman by origin, who before the war, in Dublin and London, had established a minor reputation as a prosewriter , novelist, and sometime book reviewer, and at the time was eking out a living in Paris as a translator and occasional art critic. But despite the support of influential figures such as Max-Pol Fouchet and Tristan Tzara (who had been instrumental in obtaining publication in French of an earlier novel), Suzanne encountered rejection after rejection. It is hard to say how many times the work was turned down. Some have said it was dozens; others have identified at least six established publishers who declared themselves unimpressed. This failure to find a publisher probably came as no surprise to those involved. Already some ten years earlier, a previous novel written Instantiations 3 in English had also been rejected several times over; and even as Suzanne was devoting her energies to the French manuscripts, a further novel, also written in English, was unsuccessfully doing the rounds on the other side of the Channel; by April 1953, according to the author, it too had been turned down by “a good score of London publishers.” But finally one of the manuscripts Suzanne was struggling to place found its way into the hands of a young, twenty-six-year-old publisher by the name of Jérôme Lindon, who two years earlier had taken over as head of...