Discourse, Figure

NOTES ON FIGURES AND PLATES

481 Figures figure 1. Double-page spread chosen for its syntactical and plastic complexity. At the top of the page, in block italicized letters, the fragment of the statement Si c’était le Nombre [If it were the Number], which itself allows for two articulations: (1) le voile [the veil of the engagement between the Master and the Ocean] chancellera, s’affalera, comme si c’était le Nombre [will falter, collapse, as if it were the Number], and (2) soucieux, expiatoire et muet rire que si c’était le Nombre, ce serait le Hasard [anxious, expiatory, and muffled laughter that if it were the Number, it would be Chance]. These two sentences give rise to two different meanings: sentence 1 suggests the hypothesis that the possessor of meaning (the Master holding in his clenched fist the dice whose sum provides the meaning or Notion) will not yield to the blows of the Ocean (of Chance, of mere place) without releasing the dice, and thereby asserting meaning; sentence 2 stresses the fact that, even in this case, even if the work were to be produced,it would remain Chance,illogical [non-sens],and this the Master realizes and finds laughable.The segment c’était le Nombre appears here, therefore, in a kind of syntactical and semantic suspension, to which on the same page the syntagm le Hasard puts an end. However, the latter is also indexed at two different points of the discourse: as object of (3) un coup de dés jamais n’abolira . . . [a throw of dice never will abolish . . .],and as attribute of (4) c’était le Nombre, ce serait [were the Number, it would be . . .]. But this time, in the word’s double anchoring, meaning is not thwarted but consolidated, and writing itself inscribes itself on the other space, that of the sea. After which choit la plume . . . [falls the quill . . .], insofar as the signification that it could generate (as the author’s pen) is itself no more than the trace of insurmountable confusion , or that the hesitation to throw the dice (which it embodied in the symbolic system of Un coup de dés) is trivial. The commentary on the page’s form would not only take time, but actually be interminable . Here I can only indicate the directions that the commentary should take: the nature of the different typographical bodies involved; their coded value in relation to meaning, a value that appears when referring to the other pages; the spatial positioning of the written fragments: here we are no longer in the presence of blanks (in plural), as with the intervals between letters in typography, but of blankness, of the sea, Chance, in which graphic signifiers are suspended. After italics, roman type will reappear on the following page, in the same body that was used before the comme si, comme si [as if, as if] began, and no longer in the future tense (chancellera, s’affalera [will falter, collapse]), but in the future anterior (rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu [nothing will have taken place but the place]). Thus on this NOTES ON FIGURES AND PLATES 482 notes on figures and plates double-page are intimately combined the discourse’s signified (what it says), its reference (what it speaks of, which is nothing but the literary metaphor of what it says), and its signifier (its plastic metaphor). But this combination itself is possible only so long as the signified is the unsignifiable. And it is in fact much more than a combination: it is figural space, already present in the space of the text, that seeps under the graphic signifier and makes it float. We are thus dealing with a relation of double reversal: the discourse of signification haunted from within by the deconstructions specific to Mallarmean stylistics, but affected in its exteriority of (graphic) signifier by the same “primary” spatial play. figure 2. The schematic rendering seeks to bring out the imbrication of the two spaces— figural and textual—in the dropped initial reproduced in Plate 1. figure 3. At first, thickness or difference is located in the holy Scriptures, whose imagery (in eleventh-century miniature painting, up to and including Duccio’s painting) is a plastic signifier constructed analogically with the graphic signifier. With Masaccio, this thickness or difference shifts to the referential pole when desire ceases to speak the world through a symbolics (the Scriptures) and must represent a world that can no longer be accounted for by mythical discourse...