Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts

6 Sero-Positives: Belatedness and Affirmation in Joyce, Cixous, and Derrida

201 6 SERO-Positives: Belatedness and Affirmation in Joyce, Cixous, and Derrida Laurent Milesi How can it feel to be writing after Joyce? “It is very late, it is always too late with Joyce, I shall say only two words” (TW 22/15). Or, at the beginning of Glas, “a sort of Wake” (TW 28/30): “what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?” (G 1a/7a), in a book having a tilt at Hegel’s Sa (savoir absolu, but also sounding like “her”), whose bicolumnar structure is deceptively reminiscent of the catechistic format of the “Lessons ” chapter of Joyce’s encyclopedic Finnegans Wake, where the twins swop sides and roles like self-righteous or upright Hegel (left) and sinister Genet (right) in Derrida’s death knell (French glas) to dialectic and absolute knowledge . Two famous beginnings not untypical of Derrida’s awareness of coming after—Hegel or Joyce—and making do with writing their remains in their wake(s). Beckett’s solution was to swerve to a diametrically opposite style of increasingly minimalist terseness after the pre-postmodern, yet neoclassical plenitude of the Wake, but what of Cixous and Derrida (the latter being somewhat curiously left out of Hayman and Anderson’s 1978 In the Wake of the “Wake”)?1 And what if this lateness was not already “pre-programmed” as assent by Joyce himself, to use Derrida’s characterization of the Joyce effect both in “Two Words for Joyce” and “Ulysses Gramophone”? Let us listen again to two famous endings, this time, the second one only made up of two words, in two works by Joyce: and then he asked me would I yes to say yes [. . .] and yes I said yes I will Yes. (U 18.1605–9) Yes, tid. (FW 628.11–12) 202 DERRIDA AND JOYCE But also, much earlier, to Gabriel Conroy’s resigned double acquiescence toward the end of “The Dead,” first when he imagines the death of one of the two aunts: “Yes yes: that would happen very soon,” then as the final symbolic movement unfolds: “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland” (D 223). Whether in the ironic undertones of a disappointed husband’s “generous ” resignation, in Molly’s insistent yeses in the final monologue of Ulysses, or in ALP’s more discreet, enigmatic acceptance expressed in the proclitic rhythm of her textual flow at the “end” of Finnegans Wake (FW 628.15–16), Joyce’s fictional masterpieces close on affirmation long awaited but delivered too late perhaps since its consequences can only be envisaged in the imagined fiction, twice removed from “reality,” of a post-textual world—will Gabriel Conroy indeed undertake his spiritual journey westward into the heart of a once despised nation, which the long-lost lover of his wife stands as a accusatory symbol of, and will Molly make breakfast for Bloom on 17th June 1904 and maybe resume full sexual intercourse with him?—or even fed back into Vico’s eternal cyclical scheme of events—when it is not downright an equation for the unavoidable acceptance of death (“The Dead”). Foreclosed or de-finitized, Joyce’s belated yeses raise more doubts than they fulfill promises, though of course it may be argued that they best ensure the survivability of the opus, beyond the faint glimpse of the cycle of death and life’s renewal (Dubliners), a final full stop in an otherwise relatively depunctuated final chapter (Ulysses), or the pretense of a forever returning textual loop (Finnegans Wake). The inscription of Anna Livia’s final, yet always deferred yes may be counterpointed with its conception in Derrida’s philosophy of affirmation , one of whose iterations can be found in “Nombre de oui,” a short text originally published in a memorial volume for Michel de Certeau and here paying homage to his ability to make us think the significance of this peculiar performative element of language, its originary repetition as “cutting opening”: That a yes should be presupposed each time, not only by every statement on the subject of the yes, but also by every negation and every opposition, dialectical or not, between the yes and the no, this is perhaps what immediately gives the affirmation its essential, irreducible infinity. (PSII 232/240)2 For Derrida after de Certeau—but also in his reading of “Penelope” in “Ulysses Gramophone”—yes is already a...