Phantasmic Radio (review)

Book Reviews poetic texts, in the illuminations of mystics and the delirium of logophiliacs or mental patients," an other side that Lecercle dubs "the remainder" and which may be said to be an instance of "language speaks" (5-6). Lecercle remains by method a linguist, yet reminds linguistics of its shortcomings relative to the "remainder being the 'other' of langue" (141). The central chapter of the book, "A Theory of the Remainder," devoted to Heidegger's tautology, "die Sprache spricht," puts forth the four rules not of langue but of the "remainder": flouting of rules, paradox, rhizomework , corruption. TAe Philosophy of Nonsense extends the analyses of The Violence of Language through a reading of the Victorian genre of nonsense literature. The book answers the question of why nonsense exists as a genre, first "anachronically" explaining how "the works of Lewis Carroll anticipate the main aspects of the current philosophical debate on language, or the discoveries of generative grammar," and second "diachronically" showing how the "genre attempts to solve by imaginary means a real contradiction in the historical conjuncture" (2). Ana- or synchronically, "nonsense is on the whole a conservative-revolutionary genre" (2), based on a dialectics between "I speak language" and "language speaks" that shows its status as metosense (a discourse on language ). Diachronically, the nonsense genre is a by-product of normative knowledge-acquisition in educational institutions. Through readings of the Alice books, especially the "Humpty Dumpty" chapter in Through the Looking-Glass, Lecercle shows the naivete in the works of J. Searle, in H. P. Grice's "Cooperative Principle" and J. Habermas's "consensus," against which he develops his "Principle of Struggle," one of the jewels of his analysis. Moreover, nonsense literature is governed by a dialectic Lecercle dubs transversion. Language in the genre is perverted. Perversion or subversion triumphs, yet is only inversion: the perverted world is the inverse of the idealized, cooperative world. Rather than convert to the inverted world, nonsense literature transverts or deconstructs. What interests Lecercle in nonsense literature is that "the philosophical programme of twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language is already present, in nuce, in Victorian nonsense" (115). Through the disjointedness of what I say and what I mean thanks to iterability, Lecercle pushes the dialectics of subversion and support towards radical non-sense within nonsense, discerning a radical saying without meaning, which the nonsense genre quickly represses. In such manner, "nonsense transverts, in advance, the analytic philosophy that stems from the same intellectual tradition" (163). Nonsense literature, finally, is an institution, an inscription of the social. It is a reflection upon Victorian education, a transversion of the ideological educational apparatus. What remains most inspiring throughout Jean-Jacques Lecercle's investigations is precisely the unique blend of analytic with continental philosophy, Anglo-American linguistics with French linguistics and psychoanalysis, contemporary theory with literary analysis. We eagerly await his forthcoming 77je Pragmatics of Interpretation. Thomas Dutoit Université François Rabelais-Tours Allen S. Weiss. Phantasmic Radio. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 122. $13.95 paper. It is 50 years ago this year that the events which gave rise to Allen S. Weiss's study of radical experimental radiophony "took place." In 1948 Antonin Artaud's obscene radio broadcast Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu was banned by the very institution that had commissioned it to begin with. It was in 1948 that magnetic recording tape first became available. Artaud's unique broadcast/event became a tape-recording destined to find its true audience a generation later. In 1948 John Cage discussed plans for what would become his 4'33" (at that time referred to as "Silent Prayer") negating orchestration to release the latent music of the present moment. In 1948 Olivier Messiaen completed his Turangalila Symphonie, expanding the possibilities of Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 145 L'Esprit Créateur Western orchestration to include "Hindu and ancient Greek scales, Balinese sonorities, Gregorian plainchant" (43). In 1948 Pierre Boulez wrote that "music must be hysteria and collective bewitchment, violently present—following the direction of Antonin Artaud" (45). In May of 1948 the first piece of Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète was broadcast. It was, as Weiss notes, a...