Deconstructing Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Ashbery, Derrida, Blanchot Author(s): HERMAN RAPAPORT Source: Criticism, Vol. 27, No.

4 (fall, 1985), pp. 387-400 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23110451 . Accessed: 16/02/2014 21:55
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HERMAN

RAPAPORT

Deconstructing Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Ashbery, Derrida, Blanchot

All life
Is as a tale In tones told to one totally and in a dream audible one wakes alas, never

Or understandable,

to hear more, asking Wishing For more, but one wakes to death, Yet one never to that, the tale Pays any heed Is still so magnificent in the telling. John . . . and remembers distant Yehuda Jerusalem" Ashbery, the memorial on a marble holocaust. Amichai, . . . "In "Litany" grove plaque a

. . .

the Mountains

of

One

does

not

have

to read

far into

John

nize a system is usually collapsing, if not always already disarticu lated. Ashbery himself is quite obliging in discussing this feature of his work. At one point in Three Poems he admits,
The alone backing the which center one system past up was to breaking down. The and that one led the the who to had wandered feel, the many happenings the primal vein along the extremities one's way events to began his center,

Ashbery's

poetry

to recog

beginning

of a hiccup
to makes

that would,
of to where

if left to gather, explode

life, suburbs is.1 through country

Although
he

Ashbery is addressing
refers us inside

a conceptual
what appears

system or problematic,
to be an urban space as

well as a living body, and it is, oddly enough, the hiccup of the body which threatens to annihilate the entire system, as if an occurrence in one analogical register bears upon the others. In Ashbery, one can only suppose, analogues somehow do not metaphorically refer to one another but inhabit each other and hybridize. But rather than de scribe this peculiar
Copyright

analogically

use of catachresis

at length, I will focus merely

Michigan 48202

Criticism, Fall, 1985, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, pp. 387-400. 1985 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit,

387

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388

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

upon

the

in the very beginning,

heard yet once more in

hiccup

itself,

since

this

little

explosion

or

outburst,

at

least

has an apocalyptic
the syllables

tone, a ring that can be

Derrida's Glas.

In Glas the gl is an example

nor voiceless une voix either. sans vol le Derrida voix

of a syllable
of the un

of Jacques gl that

neither voiced
it is ou un caillot d'un d'un ou la de

entirely,
lait sur

says

etouffant

dans la gorge, le rire chatouille

le glouton, votre nuque, et tout tantot ce

ou le vomi glaireux d'un bebe

fond froid enfle dans coup impassi

sanglot

ble philosophe

d'un imperial repace qui nom gluant, glace, pissant

teuton, au begaiement
un le conduit

notoire, tantot liquide

roucoulant, fosse tympa

sur le voile du palais, nique, le crachat ou l'emplatre orgasme de la glotte ou de la luette, la glu clitoridienne,
cloaque rythme. de . . . l'avortement, le hoquet de sperme,

gutturo-tetanique, cloche dans qui

goitre ou

1' le

l'hiatus

(a voiceless
the aroused ravenous

voice stifling a sob or a clot of milk in the throat,

laughter, the or the vomit theft filled of with the phlegm person of a who imperial a rapacious

lands
of a

a blow on the nape of your neck, the name sticking, frozen, the cold pissing of an impassive teuton philosopher,
notorious stammering, sometimes liquid and sometimes

baby,

guttural-tetanic, a swollen or gurgling goiter, everything that clogs in the eustachian tubes or the tympanic pit, the spit or
scum the on the velum, glue, the the clitorian of the glottus orgasm cloaca of abortion, the or of the uvula,

the rhythmic hiatus.

Gl, sesses the occasion itself for a of humor, the

. . .)2
Rabelaisian sticking in catalogue the throat

spurts

of sperm,

which

quickly the

dispos death

of a sound,

rattle, the last gurgling noises

spits, the and tries

of the dying man who bleeds,

time, the sounds of a baby almost

vomits,
chok

ing on its mother's

choked up

to speak

at the

same

milk, a baby who vomits on the breast, but too of

or the chanteuse. This sound, this inaudi

lover

ble murmuring is carried not on the breath but on or in the body's fluids and becomes the channel or current for the gl, that sticky sylla ble which makes us laugh even while a protagonist drowns to death between glugs. The gl is the result of a spasm, like laughter, maybe, or like that of the body's response to asphyxiation, as in a gas cham ber. It is a syllable whose death knell is spasmodic, like the urination
of an against icy person, the cattle perhaps cars as a German people who were at one hauled time out bothered to to piss extermination

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Herman

Rapaport

389

sites during World War II. The gl, a peculiar reminder or remainder of genocide, haunts Glas with inappropriate and yet unrelieved hilarity,
as if the sound itself were not

but a far more subtle

symptom.

kind of humiliation

simply

a curse,

intended

and

executed,

on the order of a bodily

It is in terms of this gl that we must bear witness to the approach of an apocalyptic tone, a spasm of the ethical which is mundane, au tomatic, inevitable, and often hardly noticed, like a hoquet or hiccup. But can we hear it? Can we sense this death knell, this gl directed at

our being and which passes beyond our ability to separate mind from body, speech from biology, eras and thanatos? This knell which we
cannot

In both Glas and Three Poems we ought to hear the spasm

text and the breaking as down textual a un of the fractures, ecrireglce system, explosions, n'est what in both Derrida Ashbery Ce these appear que ou je un d'un catastrophes. pas une ou la structure

properly

mourn?

of the
and

cherche

quelconque,
chine, rythmee c'est ce

un systeme
roman, qui passe, anneau.

du

signifiant
une ou loi, moins

ou
un

du

signifie,
une

une
ma

poeme, plus

desir par

bien,

stricture

not any kind of structure, a (That which I try to writeglis system of signiner and signified, a thesis or a novel, a poem,
a law, a desire or a machine: it is that which

less through the rhythmic stricture of a ring or sphincter.)3

The accede spasm to be neutralizes, something makes impossible nullifies any the text which to would write

passes

more

or

within a particular genre or type of writing. It is the corporeality

the tion own premeditated of a classical kind rhythms or and outbursts text, its an own which outburst kind of impede which analytic. the systematic discourse, or produces If we

particular,

attempt

and
its see

produc

this in Derrida and Ashbery, we have seen it before: in Milton's

das with its curious outbursts interruptions, but not or in George

of systematic

Lyci

Herbert's

quiet, muffled, "ejaculations."

tion calls of spiritual it "le spasme outburst rather saccadance

Derrida's
far, d'une

Glas, of course, takes the no

without good le reason. clapet He syn

cope de la langue et des levres" ("the jerked spasm of a ulation, the syncopated clap of tongue and lips").4 Here the bell is grafted onto metaphors of the body and here hybrid is the result. Derrida's term for it is invagination.
vant for us, however, is not so much this type

eructojaculation,

belched

ejac the tolling of too a curious What is rele

or ca

of condensation

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390

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

tachresis aroused What

but in

the

sense

of catastrophe, is a brief

violence,

or

cataclysm

which

is

the

reader. to pursue overview of a postmodern genre or

I wish

style of writing which defines itself in terms of what Derrida calls an apocalyptic tone, what Maurice Blanchot calls I'ecriture du desastre. My argument will be that John Ashbery is not so much interested in
working

stressed, but that he stylistically participates in the writing of texts like those of Derrida and Blanchot which do not make cataclysm or disaster climactic or apocalyptic in the sense we usually have of the
word. ubiquitous whose the He takes and catastrophe monotonous, as that something we live pervasive this end and of man banal, to the so end

through

poetics

of

indeterminacy,

as

some

critics

have

each day, exist against

style other a we arts, song not so have too, of

the backdrop
We For vacuity a chamber see course. the

of a deathwork
this in not only example, of urban piece of Laurie

or thanatopraxie
literature Anderson's or response passive but in "Big Karl to trans a

become.

Science," heinz death,

about

development, written in as

Stockhausen's are

Adieu, much

missions of it. In the paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, or in a film like Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, the disaster is again tediously inhabited as a style of life whose oppression lacks a certain
density an or weight, whose oppression end have is we even are luminous eternally insouciant owes and suspended. tone, some debt what me considerable style, casual "what inviting, enveloping Ashbery's thing to amounts inherited the disaster poems, from in whose of course, Frank of

expressions

catastrophe

a flat but

and

O'Hara

which

weightlessness to an evasiveness

American masked

conversational over by a

worry?" delivery.
cere that

It is this false neutrality, this mastery of the insin

does not mock so much but

poses
"calm perhaps

of producing
world." cannot Yet,

Ashbery

a limpid zero degree

in this even-tempered is an there

of writing which he calls a

style whose voice does or not, spas disquietude

exploits

for

the

pur

raise,

modic outburst like the beginning

of a hiccup. It is,

involuntary

a jagged kind of mood that comes at the end of the day, lift ing life into the truth of real pain for a few moments before subsiding in the usual irregular way, as things do. These were as much there as anything, things to be fumbled with, cringed before: dry churrings of no timbre, hysterical staccato
passages lucid, that but one cannot master or above turn

things led into life. Now

weightless,

they are gone but it remains,

everything and

away

from.

These

calm,
every

drifting

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Herman

Rapaport

391

body like the light in the sky, no more to be surmised,

remembered from down, us that In how but ged must such was us are not many remembered. on top of us unrelated as so things The as we that light had remain drinks at equal the dark but not far, even and far the

only
sinks from life

distances

in some

other, going

to happen the remoteness massive we are, so

sphere. to us.5 of is as the the

expected This was

passages whose is

effects

becomes which "slurped and goes

an

index unnamed The real jag

of

ubiquitous into mood not

and ambit

catastrophe says, as

Ashbery much

up." the

subsides

and is irregular. It is "as much there as anything."

above all is the distance or farness which

produced

sustained,

pain the

What we
allows

consider

voice to say, "This was not even the life that was going to happen
us." As

to

In La folie du jour by Maurice once embodied and disembodied.

Parfois, la peine, je me c'est disais: "C'est la

if experience

and

discourse

were

somehow

incommunicable.

Blanchot,

the narrator or voice is at

mort; Mais

rien dire. A la longue, je fus convaincu que je voyais face a face la folie du jour; telle etait la verite: la lumiere devenait
folle, la clarte avait sans perdu regie, tout sans bon but. sens; elle m'assaillait der aisonnablement,

impressionnant."

malgre souvent

tout, je

cela mourais

en

vaut sans

(At times I said to myself, "This

thing, it's really worth it, with it's the

is death.

In spite of every
But often That I lay

dying without saying anything. In the end, I grew convinced

that I was face to face madness of the day. was

impressive."

the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all
reason: it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.)6

Not unlike Ashbery's voices, his "us" which speaks in the passage from the Three Poems, the voice in La folie du jour is trying to deter mine what life might be involved with it; but for the moment there is only the sense of distance, and of lights and darks. If in Ashbery the

light drinks the dark and sinks down, and if that light participates in an unrelated sphere, in Blanchot's recti the light is itself the madness of day, an unrelatedness into whose ambience the voice is uncontroll ably caught up.
There but is not simply or as a stream Ashbery of consciousness says, at work movements, in these words texts and spasmodic, irregular

expressions

which

disappear

and

protrude

in a limpidity

neither

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392

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

prose and mind

nor direct and

poetry, text, the

voice

nor in

writing. of words.

The are

hysterical muffled in outbursts

staccato the and eerie

passages calm of lead

encounters

Ashbery

sedation

The

into life only to be dissipated there, leaving in their wake a calm, drifting, and genreless writing which turns into light, distance, far
ness, center difference, or locus otherness. where The subject are or cogito is and not so much a identifications resolved counterpointed

spasms

but a pervasive

field or saturation of vocal and attitudinal densities conveyed through a calm or limpid style. One might say that through the tone of the writing the subject is evacuated or dissipated, the voice estranged or made remote to itself. In this way the voice achieves

a passivity at the same time that it asserts itself most clearly and lucidly in what Blanchot has called the madness of the day. The "I" has achieved what Emmanuel Levi What has happened? nas calls a difficult liberty, a break in particiption with the life-world as world. We are on the brink of infinitude, since in the negativity of the difference between selfhood and otherness is non-participation given up, and intelligibility too gives way to a certain madness or dis equilibrium. Whatever holds the life world together is by means of a difficult freedom unhinged and the subject vertiginously swept into
an abysm or or catastrophe what the since terms there, of relations has ethical. the been where unloosened. no word This moment, before that serves is the though which is to reob jectify which can be systematize moment words radi

Levinas uttered

It is a silent word stops

cally other, prostrating itself before the Autrui. It is at this passive moment, this articulated silence, that the ethical manifests itself and
gives be shelter to meaning. to an "To have meaning," that is, to Levinas come from writes, that "is alterity to situated relative absolute,

that is not absorbed

only arising as a miraculous in the ever

in its being perceived.

abundance, recommenced an effort or tone

Such an alterity is possible

surplus to addresses of attention clarify the its own

inexhaustible of language which

manifestation."7

It is

the

voice

absolute

from this liberated calls the apocalyptic.

fied and or centered or deconstruction

aspect, this catastrophic horizon which Derrida Its tone is part of a plural which cannot be uni
institutionalized, will operate as however recuperative much code postmodernism words to the

vulgar for such purposes.

wavering, jagged, a hiccup. In "D'un ton apocalyptique

rida writes,

Moreover, the apocalyptic tone is irregular, spasmodic, like the burst of a gl or the beginning of adopte neguere en philosophie" Der

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Herman

Rapaport

393

votre des

Si de fa?on tres insuffisante et a peine preliminaire,

attention sur l'envoi narratif, dictee l'entrelacement adressee, des envois dans l'ecriture ou c'est que

j'attire
voix dans et

l'hypothese ou le programme d'une demystification intraita ble du ton apocalyptique, dans le style des Lumieres ou d'une Aufkl'drung du XX siecle, et si on voulait demasquer les ruses, bref tous les interets du ton apocalyptique
drait sans doute des etre tres attentif tons a cette ferentielle voix et des qui les pieges, roueries, seductions, machines de guerre et de plaisir,

aujourd'hui,

il fau
dif

d'une pluralite distincte et calculable. On ne sait pas (car ce n'est plus de l'ordre du savoir) a qui revient l'envoi apocalyp a l'autre (et un lieu est tique, il saute d'un lieu d'emission toujours determine a partir de remission presumee), il va d'
une destination, d'un nom et d'un ton a l'autre, il renvoie comme pas que ou en 1' le au nom et au toujours avant ete la et devant core homme terminal la dans soit de le cet present le central ordinateur est la mais qui encore n'etant ou venir, plus du recit. Et il n'est assure pas de ces sans lignes fin. telephoniques ton de l'autre

demultiplication divise peut-etre

au-dela

draw so

attention your of voices and envois because great

(If, in a very insufficient and only just preliminary

to the narrative in the dictated no doubt sending, or addressed would the

way, I

interlacing I do writing, to be given

attention

have

this differential reduction or gearing down of voices and tones that perhaps divides them beyond a distinct and calcul able pluralityat least in the hypothesis or the program of
an intractable and

style of the Lumieres or of an Aufkl'drung of the twentieth cen

tury, if we wanted to unmask war tone the ruses, do seductions, interests it is lyptic no of the the engines of and pleasure, We today. to trickeries, traps, in short, all the not know the (for whom apoca of emission to one name, and to

demystification

of

the

apocalyptic

tone,

in

the

longer dispatch

apocalyptic of the order returns;

the other (and a place is always

emission); tone to the it goes other;

of knowing) it leaps from one from one

determined
refers

place

starting from the

name

presumed one and

destination, to the

the and the the nal

tone of the other that is there but as having been there before yet coming, no longer being or not yet there in present of the r'ecit. And there is no certainty that man is exchange (middle) of these telephone lines or the termi of this computer without end.)8

it always

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394

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

The apocalyptic tone is a dispatch (envoi) which leaps from one place of emission to the other. As such it manifests what Derrida in De la
grammatologie calls the movement of the trace, an articulation of a re

lationship to alterity, difference, or otherness, a relationship which is characterized by veiling and unveiling, or what is called "dissimula
tion." It is well known how the movement of the trace is informed by

ton apocalyptique" Derrida In "D'un differance or undecidability. the emission or which is the trace in terms of dispatch problematizes But instead of stressing mainly disseminative and telecommunicative. the question
ends, Derrida

of temporal
considers

priorities, either in terms of beginning

anticipation of truth as end in terms

or

the

of a

loss of determinate the sujet suppose.

nounced, moored apocalyptic out from tone of

sites: the sender and the receiver, or, if you will, tone comes unan In this sense, the apocalyptic
or, more accurately It not is only in to be that this somewhere context spasmodic, that like un the the and be receiver.

nowhere,

sender can

considered

Hence its difficult gl, but extremely violent, sudden, unassimilable. with the life-world which concerns break in that liberty, participation that Levinas. It is the infinitude or negativity of non-participation, difference between self and other, I and you. It is also, to recall Levi
nas, the ethical moment and

emission
terms invest of an

whose
day to uncritical reflects

precisely

because

it concerns

violent

dispatch
day trust. these

escapes

our ability to comprehend

in whose speech admirable acts we

it in
often

communication

or at least stylistic relaxation Such

Ashbery

ideas

on

tone

with

effortlessness

when he writes in Three Poems,

particulars you mouthed, all leading back into the un derlying question: was it you? Do these things between peo
ple partake translucent of themselves, or each are to matter carrying of authority? For we never the rings knew, us together. a congeal joined Perhaps only of no Special notice.9 deserving a subtler they a compromise kind distance

of

outside painfully never knew what ing of closeness,

Certainly
self and

there is an indeterminateness
an other, but it is not so much

about
the

the relationship
of the

of a

vagueness

attach

ment but the tone itself which is significant. For this tone (the writ ing's pose, rhetorical staging, manner of informality, precision, etc.) quietly establishes through the iteration of small, almost impercepti

ble shocks, a difficult liberty, one that articulates the relationship to alterity uncovered in the familiar and the intimate. Here, as in Der

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Herman

Rapaport

395

rida,

the

voice

disembodies

itself,

recovers

itself

as

uninvested in a specific sender or a specific receiver. disembodied, "Was it you?" Ashbery asks. Did "you" say these "particulars"? And more ambivalently, "Do these things between people partake of or themselves?"that the themselves the is, people things them
selves, so hard to tell which. Or are we subjected "For never speech as and trickeries, we can or to

always

already

tler, something
establishes knew what because rious Derrida what is not the tone a joined

"outside
"compromise us as not

the rings of authority,"

distance"? together." someone's recuperable sources traps, We

something

sub

something
never know knew, because or

which
never the

recoverable what which calls is

intention but a

affection, cu what of

anything destinations, seductions,

Ashbery's tone the of engines the

evades ruses,

above

war and pleasure,

Like voi Derrida, returns. Rather,

or "all the interests of the apocalyptic

admits it just seems that to we leap cannot and know refers to to the

tone today."
whom tone en of the

Ashbery

other "that is there but as having been there and before yet coming, no longer being or not yet there in the present of the r'ecit," as Der rida says above. What is of most importance, perhaps, is that in Ashbery, as in Levi
nas ical and Derrida, the tone does address apocalypse to stress that and we within are not an eth context. However, it is important talking

about the kind of apocalyptic address which moralizes, but the apoc alypse in its Levinasian ethical perspective. "For the ethical relation
ship which subtends whose discourse," ray emanates Levinas from writes, the I; "is it puts not a species I in ques of consciousness the

tion. This putting in question

course, Levinas the or apocalyptic "is of being tone, perhaps or insists,

emanates
as defined In

from the other."

language, as the very Levinas, and power

This dis
to break

emanates to be

"Language," Derrida,

and Ashbery this thought is not only considered,

terms alypse of holocaust. that we will It is under further the sign our of this discussion, pursue

continuity

of history."10

Blanchot,

but is thematized
century it is here apoc since

in
that

twentieth

the ethical dimension of postmodernism In Three Poems Ashbery writes, There was, however, a residue, a oped parallel to the classic truths that heroic but commonplace age) foreseeable majesty of a holocaust,
went

makes itself felt so strongly. kind of fiction that devel of daily life (as it was in as they unfolded with the an unfrightening one, and
and grandeur from this

like the illegitimate

unrecognized,

offspring of a king. It is this "other tradi

drawing

force

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396

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

been

tion" which we propose

too well rehearsed but the history

to explore.
(I'm speaking oral kind that

The facts of history have

needless goes on in to say not without of you

written

your having to do anything about it) to require further eluci dation here.
Later, had Ashbery played adds, "From trick on the outset it was apparent There are that two someone holocausts

a colossal

of which Ashbery speaks: the one is foreseeable, recognizable, plain, and political; the other is fantastic, imagined, visceral, but also ex tremely remote like something hard to remember. The historical is a
kind of inaccessible

something."11

conceive

of objectified facts which, like things, resist penetra tion. The "other tradition" is what is achieved by a difficult liberty, what goes on inside one without one's having to do anything about
it. The latter, not unlike like in the the hiccup, does threatens or not voice recoil the in at coherence Blanchot's the of the system. the Moreover, tradition" oral tradition texts,

outside

reality

or

otherness

which

we

know

but

cannot

"other

majesty of a holocaust: for with the recognition of a difficult freedom an indifferent tone emerges, one that is unfrightened. The catastro "It phe is neutralized, sopped up, forgotten, muffled, understated.
was apparent that someone had

Ashbery

foreseeable

thing," the voice says about the vanishing

catastrophe the inclines to what Blanchot terms

played

colossal

trick

on

some

of millions of people.
the passe passif, an

Here
apoc

alyptic passivity
calm, Blanchot regular speaks

which
of this

makes
in

up the banality
genocide. disaster of the

of historical
of writing

process,
and

movements

of industrial terms

ments on the passe passif in this way. Comment

meme science ne (ni

avoir rapport avec

saurait s'absenter se

dans la presenter de l'obscurite d'une

le passe passif, rapport qui lui

lumiere d'une con inconscience)?

(How can one have a relation with the passe passif, a relation which itself cannot present itself in the light of consciousness [not absenting itself from the obscurity of an unconscious]?)12 The
sented

passe
as

passif is that which

such, nor forgotten

can neither be remembered

completely and absented. It

or pre
is what

Blanchot terms the limitrophe, the threshold that one obscurely expe riences as a distant happening which is painfully intimate. It is this passe passif which the writer struggles to bring forward out of the dark into the hyper-luminosity of day, the forum of consciousness,

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Herman

Rapaport

397

and
the

It yet it is a bringing forth which is by definition impossible. slurps us up, Ashbery says. For Blanchot the holocaust is precisely
light which which cannot be rescued from the shadow of a certain exis

tential and phenomenological

of the subject and is cast as

obscurity; it is the disaster in the midst

a voice among that a chorus of voices, a

tone which slips in through writing, hence the ecriture du desastre.

Both Blanchot Derrida

lyptic tone exceeds naming, a point Ashbery implicitly shares when he talks about the colossal trick "someone" played on "something." In L'ecriture du desastre, Blanchot considers this in the following man
ner.

recognize

the

envoi

of

the

apoca

Le nom inconnu, hors nomination: L'holocauste, evenement absolu de I'histoire, historiquement date, cette toute-brulure ou toute I'histoire s'est embrasee, ou le
mouvement du Sens s'est abime, ou le don, sans

consentement, s'est ruine sans donner lieu a rien qui puisse s'affirmer, se nier, don de la passivite meme, don de ce qui ne peut se donner. Comment le garder, fut-ce dans la pensee, com ment faire de la pensee ce qui garderait l'holocauste ou tout s'est perdu, y compris la pensee gardienne? Dans Vintensite mortelle, le silence fuyant du cri innom brable. (The unknown name, beyond nomination: The holocaust, absolute event of history, historically dated, this burn-all in which all history is itself set ablaze or illumi nated, in which the movement of meaning is swallowed up, in which the offering, without pardon, without consent, is destroyed without giving place to anything which could affirm itself, anni hilate itself, offering of passivity itself, offering of that which cannot give itself. How does one preserve, however it may be in thought, how does one think that which would preserve a holo caust where all is lost, or comprehend such a vigilant thought? In mortal intensity, the silence flees the unnamable cry.y3
To ness, Blanchot, an the holocaust event is an absolute in itself event recognizes of history, its own an other unnamable which

pardon,

sans

ment

race, by forcing about a denial of the name (genealogy, means of a the of numbers on paternity) by reinscription, tatooing arms: I'ecriture du desastre. It is this expression, this inscription of oth erness which breaks the continuity of being and history, and it is here that the ethical projects itself, that a curious genealogy of morals re veals itself in the midst of cataclysm. Yet, if the ethical intrudes upon

estrange

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398

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

its own veiling, it maintains its withdrawal in terms of the radicality of a break whose facticity eludes thought, and whose morality is
eclipsed Hence by "the the unnamable, the unspeakable, is swallowed the up," unrecuperable. even if its trace movement of meaning

still makes itself known to us. Derrida

postale Le

refers to holocaust
he notes, grand

and the disaster

of writing in La carte
un les brule-tout nos les fe

when

un symbole? enfin ou nous noms, tiches, les etc. lettres, Et s'il

incendie avec les rien.

jetterions, les photos, n'en reste

holocaustique, notre toute petits . . . objects,

memoire, cles,

(The symbol? a great holocaustic

we will be thrown into, with all

fire, a burn-all finally where

our memory, our names, let

ters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc. And if nothing

remains Elsewhere he of it. . . ,)14

writes, toujours je tres initial sais une nous que distance sommes infinie et que perdus, s'est ouverte ce la nous je ne fut la meme, nous prete, condition con soy sais de ren

ce

Depuis desastre cette

tout du pres encore je n'arrive pas que notre de tout, n'est ce pas, la notre, nous dition de tout ce qui fut donne catastrophe, versement ons l'un a nous l'autre sommes destine, promis, plus nous (I have

commencement, a penser condition ou donne, que

perdul'un that we

l'autre are lost,

tu m'entends? and that this very

initial disaster opens an infinite distance this catastrophe, so near the beginning,
itself the been handed we which I cannot condition of over

always

known

this turning upon

have may us, of even been our

condition,

the condition
or

everything, in

contemplate is which

of everything in which we may have

we are what you destined, more understand?)15 promised,

anymore it not of so,

given over are

I don't know to, lent, lostthe one in the other

Ah shucks, Ashbery might reply. "The

slow burst that narrows to a final release,

great careers are like that: a

pointed one In but not acute, a life

of suffering redeemed
casual next, moment almost of before you

and annihilated
that aware is were

at the end, and for what? For a

here minute Three and Poems gone the the shock

knowing

of it?"16

of collapse

is over; in fact, Ashbery

is most at home with the apoca

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Herman

Rapaport

399

lyptic tone, having

yard among the

domesticated
He

it, or cultivated
too realizes that

it in his own back

the end has always

Like any good psychologist or "crazyologist" (an already happened. the apt bop term) poet must recognize that the problem with people
is that they fear the very thing that has already occurred to them: the

rutabagas.

collapse is past history, a trivial or banal occurrence which the subject still fears, like bill collectors after the bankruptcy. In Three Poems the voice comes from on high, le tres haut. It is flat and absolute, all knowing, yet obnoxiously
call synthesized. It is an

cute and abrasive.

and

It is what Derrida
tenuous tone

might
which

admits that "In the end it falls apart, falls to the ground and sinks in."17 That is, something is swallowed up, imperceptibly, automati almost. It is in this sense that cally Ashbery writes in "Litany" a re mark touching passivity.
Yet What somehow is so it doesn't with bode well that

irregular

sometimes

so apocalyptically

on the passe passif, this engulfing

In your sophistication
heavy

you choose
potential

to disregard
tragic consequences

Hanging above you like a storm cloud And cannot know otherwise, even by diving
Into And What the wish brings shallow not the stream to hear world news of your of innocence and sets fire

together

to it.18

The University of Iowa Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. John Three Poems Ashbery, Glas (Paris: Derrida, Glas, 125b. Glas, Three 138b. Poems, La p. 54. (Barrytown: is by Lydia Staton Davis. Duquesne Hill, 1981), pp. folie du jour The translation Totality and (London: Galilee, Penguin, 1974), pp. 1972), p. 53. 137b-138b.

Jacques Derrida, Derrida,

Ashbery, Maurice

Blanchot,

11 (English). 25 (French); 7. Emmanuel Levinas,

Infinity

(Pittsburgh:

Univer

1969.), sity Press, p. 97. 8. Jacques "D'un Derrida, phic"

ton apocalyptique en philoso adopte naguere in Les fins de I'homme translation Galilee, (Paris: 1981), p. 470 (English in Phi tone recently Jr). See "Of an Apocalyptic by John P. Leavey, adopted in Semeia, An Experimental No. 23 Criticism, Journal losophy" for Biblical

(1982), p. 87.
9. 10.

Ashbery, Levinas,

Three Totality

Poems, and

p. 10. Infinity, p. 195.

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400

Apocalyptic

Rhetoric

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. sage

Ashbery, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Ashbery, Ashbery,

Three

Poems,

Blanchot, L'Ecriture Derrida, La carte Three Three

pp. 55-56. du desastre L'Ecriture du desastre, p. 80.

(Paris:

Gallimard, 1980),

1980), p. 46.

p. 51.

(Paris: postale postale, pp. 23-24. Poems, p. 69. Poems, p. 15. (London:

La carte

Flammarion,

As We Know John Ashbery, is italicized in the original.

Penguin,

1979),

p. 41b.

The

pas

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