Occasional Deconstructions

Chapter 5. Eternity and a Day or, an “Endless Foreword”: Tout dire

Chapter 5 ETERNITY AND A DAY OR, AN “ENDLESS FOREWORD”: TOUT DIRE So there was a movement of nostalgic, mournful lyricism to reserve, perhaps encode, in short to render both accessible and inaccessible. And deep down this is still my most naïve desire. . . . The discursive forms we have available to us, the resources in terms of objectivizing archivation, are so much poorer than what happens (or fails to happen , whence the excesses of hyper-totalization). This desire for everything + n— Jacques Derrida All historical narratives contain an irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation. The historian has to interpret his materials in order to construct the moving pattern of images in which the form of the historical process is to be mirrored. And this because the historical record is both too full and too sparse. Hayden White I T he chapter that follows is an amended version of a paper originally “given” at the University of Staffordshire’s “Deconstruction Reading Politics” conference, in July 1999. I put the term “given” in quotes because I was unable to present the paper myself, which duty was performed by the conference organizer, 115 Martin McQuillan, to whom I am grateful for, quite literally, standing in for me, and allowing me to “speak” through him—an act of ventriloquism , mimicry, and haunting—by which means I managed a momentarily spectral manifestation. What follows provides the beginnings of a reading—a reading that will never be completed—of the conference title, its strange structure and logic, as a way of addressing the fraught relationship that the terms of the title open to view. In extending the original paper, which, in its shorter version had already oriented itself around a particular scene from Theo Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day, I have sought to bring to the fore in a more explicit manner the question of spectrality that was already implicit. Haunting—spectral persistence— imposes an impossible necessity on us: we have to be attentive to ghosts, as the work of Jacques Derrida reminds us on several occasions, and there can be no final word, no coming to rest or closure, whether one is speaking of literature or politics, narrowly conceived. Indeed, to take one of the two examples just given, inasmuch as “there is no essence or substance of literature,” and given that “literature is not,” that “it does not exist” and that its experience “rests on the very thing that no ontology could essentialize ,”1 literature can only ever be received as hauntological in that, lacking and resisting all determination strictly speaking, “it” exceeds and overflows ontology. The reason for this is that there is always something other within any structure that disturbs that identity from within, and which, in excess of the structure, enjoins, entitles, us to continue in our attentiveness, to listen, to seek to read, and to respond. This “excess,” this opening of structure within, onto, and beyond itself—an it-self—so as to initiate a move elsewhere is caught both in the impossible phrase an endless foreword, and in the impossible registration of tout dire: that, on the one hand, one can say everything, while, on the other, that one can say anything, without constraint. And this, perhaps, is what is given to be heard in the occasion of the title deconstruction reading politics. II The question here, then, the one with which we begin at least, has to do with titles, of what they entitle us to address. The question of titles and their entitlement concerns the ways in which they determine and demand our response. Who is entitled? To what are we entitled? And what are we 116 Apparitioning entitled to say in response to a conference title such as deconstruction reading politics? Perhaps it is the case that part of our entitlement is uneven and unpredictable: it is that which we may lay claim to but, conversely , it is also that which is demanded of us by virtue of the fact that a title designates us as its subjects. It represents its readers as being the agents or subjects of a particular effect, action, or condition. Reading the work of the title, before addressing its specific terminology, the title qualifies and assigns apparent possession. It furnishes us, in principle at least, with a rightful claim, as well in an obscure sense with the entitlement to write under particular titles or headings, even though we...