Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
AND WAR
ABSENCE AND THE CHANCE
OF MEETING
SEAN GASTON
www.continuumbooks.com
B2430.D484G385 2009
194–dc22
2008048768
List of Illustrations vi
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xi
Notes 159
Bibliography 184
Index 213
1. Antwerp, 2007 31
2. Hermitage, St. Petersburg 2007 39
3. Towards the Alexander Column, St. Petersburg, 2007 59
4. The National Archaeological Museum of Athens, 2007 82
5. Kronberg Castle, Elsinore, 2007 101
6. Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, 2007 137
7. Brussels, 2007 149
vi
vii
viii
ix
chances of (not) meeting: of the figure with her back to us, of the
reflections of images behind and in front of glass, of cannons point-
ing out to an empty sea, of a crowd of people seemingly arranged in
a set pattern that can only be random.
These photographs, and their place in this work, were also informed
by both of us reading a largely unknown text by Derrida, “Demeure,
Athènes” (1996). In this short work, Derrida responds to a series of
photographs taken in Athens by Jean-François Bonhomme. Derrida
is fascinated by a photo from the Acropolis in which a camera is
standing on a tripod not far from the photographer, who is sitting
down and seems to be asleep. The photographs by Jane Brown in this
book also tell us of the photographic experience. They are a series of
snapshots, of moments, of intervals or intermissions that remain and
linger on and on and cannot help but reflect the conditions of their
own possibility: the diaphanous curtains on the windows of the
Hermitage, the toy horse in the shop window and, most starkly, the
hat on stand in the window that looks like some sort of animal, and
reveals the reflected image of the photographer. As Derrida remarks
on the photos of Athens, these images – as a reading of the strained
relation between absence, chance, literature and war – leave us with
“un gout d’éternité désespéré”, a hopeless taste of eternity.1
7 February 2008
A SERIES OF INTERVALS
(TM, 23b, 22d). Your stories, your eternally childish and naive
fictions, are no more than a response to a series of intervals that have
lasted an eternity.
“What particular name could we assign to a general science end-
ing nowhere [à aucune région]?” Derrida asks in his reading of
Condillac in The Archaeology of the Frivolous (1973).2 How does one
register the beginning of a series of intervals, of a seriality of gaps
and lapses, of a narrative of absence and chance meetings in times of
war? Can one begin with the first interval before the series has begun?
Or does one start with what already needs to come both before and
after to be identified as a series? And can one start if this relation,
determined by what precedes and succeeds, is constituted by nothing
more than a pause, an intermission that seems to last an age, an eter-
nity even? (AF, 38–9, 42–3). For the Egyptian priest in the Timaeus,
the impossible origin of fiction, of stories and narratives without end
is found in the recurrent intervals of destruction (διαφθορα). These
repeated elemental destructions, diapthorà, have sustained the earth,
have secured its ancient genealogies to this very moment, the moment
of a genealogy without the father (TM, 22d).
When it comes to the snapshot of the relation today between phi-
losophy, literature and war, one has to keep in mind what Derrida
called in “Demeure, Athènes” (1996), the inexhaustible temptation
for “the instant [that] gathers us once and for all” (DA, 43). As
Derrida writes, this is the “very desire of philosophy”: the “destruc-
tion of delay [retard]” (DA, 45, 59). It is the ruses and traps of this
“desire of philosophy” for the snapshot that one has to resist in
thinking about the relation between literature and war, or what I will
call the (mis)chance of la chance de la rencontre. It is also far too easy
to dismiss this temptation by constructing a frail architecture, a
seamless series of perfectly calibrated escape clauses that proclaim a
magisterial indifference, a theoretical slight of hand founded on an
empirical presumption. For Derrida, the challenge is always to “think
the instant again starting from the delay”, to read and think of the
snapshot – of a photograph or apparent representation of “war” – as
a series of intervals (DA, 46).3 Such a reading and thinking could, he
suggested, become “the enigmatic thought of the aiōn (the full inter-
val of a duration, an incessant spacing of time, one sometimes also
calls eternity)” (DA, 46).4 The aiōn can be seen as a duration or inter-
val that lasts a lifetime: a series of snapshots that last a lifetime – and
more.
For Derrida, this raises the problem “of the fortuitous encounters,
of the tukhē that collects them on the way, there where they find
themselves by chance”. The chance meetings or duels between phi-
losophy, literature and war constitute a moment that draws itself out
of itself, a moment that drags on, that lingers beyond itself and is
repeated in a series of regular–irregular intervals (DA, 47). This series
of intervals or chances can also be seen as the possibility of a life-
time, of a time of life, of experience and its others, of fiction and its
others. As Derrida suggested, like Socrates waiting to see the sails
from the headlands to announce his death sentence, “this time is not
calculable, nor the delay, because navigating takes a long time and
the winds are sometimes, unforeseeably, contrary” (DA, 50). For
Derrida, it is always a question of “a hopeless taste of eternity”
(un goût d’éternité désespéré) (DA, 60).
Condillac was convinced that in a discriminated sequence “meta-
physics as such must develop and not degrade the metaphysics of
natural instinct” (AF, 38). What law, Derrida asks, could there be to
account for this sequence, this series set out and sequenced by a
natural interval that remains “in the midst of going away”? (AF, 53).
X must be found in Y, even though X is of an entirely different order
from Y. Or rather, as Derrida suggests, X and Y are never entirely
different enough to be absolutely different. As Hillis Miller observes,
“it seems that X repeats Y, but in fact it does not.”5 A series of inter-
vals – of a lifetime, of the relation between philosophy, literature and
war – would not even register the X and Y, only the intervals between
X and Y.
For Condillac, Derrida argues, it is perhaps less a question of
“a determined object”, such as the object X and the object Y that
follows it, as much a question of “the very project” of X and Y being
treated as a series of intervals (AF, 61). This is not merely a throwing
against (ob-ject), but also a throwing in front on behalf of what is
out in front (pro-ject). The relation of two ob-jects, X and Y – say
“literature” and “war” – is already pro-jected, already not only found
in a series of intervals, but also finding itself as a series of intervals.
In and as a series of intervals, the relation between “literature” and
“war” is “at once the example and the discovery of this, the produc-
tion of one of these events and the concept of this law” (AF, 61).
“Literature” and “war” cannot keep the possibility of their relation
out of the instance of their relationship. In and as a series of inter-
vals, the would-be objects are projected, in a Geworfenheit if you like,
past that secure the future, Blanchot argued, continually affirm “the
fortuitous resolution of anguish in order to eternalize it and free
himself from all anxiety.”8
One can contrast this eternity of the Proustian interval to
Blanchot’s description in L’entretien infini (1969) of la chance de la
rencontre in André Breton’s work. The chance of the chance encoun-
ter breaks the presumption of continuity: it affirms the surrealist
rupture or interval of one unforeseen moment and one unplanned
place. But treated in this way, the chance or interval can only register
itself in relation to the presumption of continuity. The chance of the
interval must also contend with a plurality, Blanchot argues, with
differing levels, spacings and relations that cannot be directed
towards a gathering-back or returned to a unity. As Blanchot writes,
“la rencontre nous rencontre.” The encounter encounters us. The
chance encounter or duel retains the (mis)chance of meeting. It meets
us – we do not meet it. The one moment of encounter is always more
than a single moment for us. It is already a series of other moments.
The one place of encounter is already displaced, disjointed. There is
always a distance – or what Blanchot calls the neutral unknown, the
neutrality of the stranger (le neutre de l’inconnu) – in the intervals of
the chance encounter. The chance encounter is not a point: it is a gap,
a gap that moves. It is always a series of intervals that resonate within
a single chance encounter, giving rise to a sense of unreality or, rather,
to no longer being able to separate reality and the narratives of
fiction.9 It is the possibility – and the inevitability – of war stories
and the becoming of literature.10 The relation between literature and
war is a series of intervals.
In his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida
associated the “interval in general” with the unavoidable supplement,
the inescapable insufficiency of an addition, an extra, that displaces,
replaces and exceeds. He opens his discussion of “The Interval and
the Supplement” by noting that Rousseau only “divided” the Essay
on the Origin of Languages “into chapters belatedly”: Derrida is
interested in this spacing of the work – this retrospective introduc-
tion of a series of intervals – that cannot be confined to a unified
architectonics.11 For Rousseau, he argues, “the growth of music,
the desolating separation of song and speech” is founded on – and
founders on – the introduction of intervals (and of chapters).
Rousseau writes: “In proportion as it was perfected, melody imper-
ceptibly lost its ancient energy by imposing new rules upon itself, and
The blow never finishes, nor can it ever be isolated, closed down or
closed-off from a series: the trauma, the possibility of the past always
risks the mischances of a worst future that is yet to come. We are try-
ing to finish off what lasts forever, to put a halt to what lives on as
a series of intervals. Derrida says:
from Europe, or the Americas. But this is not at all what hap-
pened. There is traumatism without any possible work of mourning
when evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from
the repetition to come – though worst. Traumatism produced by
the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come rather
than by an aggression that is “over and done with.” (AU, 97)
I have had such worries about sending off [envois] the manuscript
last Wednesday and Friday, as you can see by the date. – Last night
at around sunset I saw the gunshots fired by the French [. . .] I saw
the Emperor – the spirit of the world – leave the city to go on
reconnaissance; it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see an
individual who, concentrated in a single point, sitting on a horse,
extends over the world and dominates it . . . given what is happen-
ing, I am forced to ask myself if my manuscript, which was sent
Animating and sustaining the passing moment, filling and giving life
to the interval, for Nikolai the sovereign becomes a mirror that deter-
mines the duration of the interval. “Seeing that smile, Rostov
involuntarily began to smile himself and felt a still stronger love for
his sovereign” (WP, 246). It is a sovereign interval.
Rostov experiences this sovereign interval in all its force three days
later in this second of the series of his chance encounters with the
sovereign, a chance encounter that takes on all the resonance and
hope of a planned rendezvous:
Rostov did not remember and did not feel how he ran to his place
and mounted his horse. His regret over his non-participation in
the action, his humdrum mood in the circle of usual faces, instantly
went away, and all thought of himself instantly vanished: he was
wholly consumed by the feeling of happiness that came from the
nearness to the sovereign. He felt himself rewarded by this near-
ness alone for the loss of that day. He was as happy as a lover who
has obtained a hoped-for rendezvous. (WP, 254)
He could . . . not only could, but should have ridden up to the sov-
ereign. And that was a unique chance to show the sovereign his
devotion. And he had not made use of it. . . . ‘What have I done?’
he thought. And he turned his horse and rode back to the place
10
where he had seen the emperor; but there was no one now on the
other side of the ditch. Only wagons and carriages drove along.
(WP, 288)
11