The Ethics of

Community
 The Ethics of
Community
Nancy, Derrida, Morrison, and
Menendez

Ana M. Luszczynska
Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

2012 by Ana M. Luszczynska

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission
of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luszczynska, Ana M.
Community as ethical event : Nancy, Derrida, Morrison, and
Menendez / Ana M. Luszczynska.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2885-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-2885-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. American literature
Minority authorsHistory and criticism. 2. Communities in literature.
3. Philosophy in literature. 4. Continental philosophy. 5. Ethics in
literature. 6. Nancy, Jean-LucInfluence. 7. Derrida, JacquesInfluence.
8. Morrison, ToniCriticism and interpretation. 9. Menendez,
Ana, 1970Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS169.C65L87 2011
813.5409896073dc23
2011026685

EISBN: 978-1-441145666

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in India
Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1
1 Nancy and Derrida: On Ethics and the Same
(Infinitely Different) Constitutive Events of Being 26
2 Nancys Community 43
3 Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community,
and Derridean Witnessing 69
4 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 93
Conclusion 142

Notes 145
References 159
Index 163
 Acknowledgements

Writing about community and extension, indebtedness and the other,

while being slapped in the face with the impossibility of going it alone
has been a strange and often overwhelming experience. I have found
myself in need of help like never before. The effortless generosity that
countless people have shown me not only allowed me to complete this
project but further, changed my life in unfathomable ways.
The inspired Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY BuffaIo
consistently fed my intellectual curiosity and supported my work.
I will never forget the awesome precision and beauty of Rodolphe
Gasches lectures. Your genuine love of the question is unmistakable
and has profoundly influenced my scholarly development. I thank
Henry Sussman for encouraging and supporting me from graduate
school right up to the acquisition of the book contract. Your consistent
generosity and presence in my academic life has been mind blowing.
You are a true mentor and role model.
I received a great deal of intellectual, institutional, and emotional
support from my colleagues in the English Department at FIU. I am
deeply grateful to Bruce Harvey, who has been a sagacious reader of
my work. Your insightful comments and keen readerly eye have made
me a better thinker and writer. I thank Carmela Mcintire for bringing
me to FIU and showing me great kindness through my first difficult
years at FIU. Steven Blevins, Jason Pearl, Yvette Piggush, and Andy
Strycharski, your emotional and intellectual friendship and camara-
derie have been crucial to my sanity and general well-being. Asher
Milbauer has been a consistent source of support and encouragement.
At times your absolute confidence in my abilities and worth gave me
enough strength to continue writing. However, I am particularly in-
debted to James Sutton, Department Chair extraordinaire! Not only
have you wholly backed my work but you have repeatedly gone to bat
for me when times got rough. For your tenderness and compassion, I
thank you.
I am indebted to Continuum editors Haaris Navqvi and Srikanth
Srinivasan for your patience and guidance. Feeling your care and
 Acknowledgements vii

respect through the many stages of the publication process never failed
to lift my spirits.
I cannot adequately convey my gratitude to the indomitable and
spirited Heather Russell, friend, comrade, colleague, and partner in
crime. Your rare combination of irreverence and grace, power and
poise, and infinitely generous spirit has been both inspiration and sus-
tenance through these tumultuous years. I will never forget the many
times that you said to me Of course you can! with a wonderful wave
of the hand!
Ellen Thompson, colleague, friend, sister New-England transplant,
confidante, and endless source of support and friendship. Your words
of encouragement and care during the mutually trying years of tenure,
divorce, death, and kid stress border on the epic. I will never be able to
thank you enough for all the love that you have given me.
I have been deeply moved and energized by a magical friendship
with Danny Luis whose intensity and integrity have often held me
up throughout this process. I thank you for exposing me to faith in
lifelong friendship and all that it entails. I will never forget your total
openness to me.
To fellow self-deprecator Sylvan Lee whose ability to make me laugh
until I cry is unparalleled, thank you. The countless meals and child-
care you so generously provided largely contributed to the completion
of this project. Your friendship has meant the world to me and I simply
cannot imagine life without you.
I thank Tom Phillips for sharing a world with me for nearly thirty
years. The love and acceptance that you have extended to me has made
me a stronger and happier person. I feel truly lucky to have you in my
life again. Who else would send me the wise words If you dont sin
Jesus died for nothing?
I am immensely grateful to Berthold Schoene for first legitimizing
this project and giving me a much needed confidence boost. The sense
of intellectual kinship that I have felt with you has been pivotal to the
completion of The Ethics of Community.
I feel especially grateful for the friendship, guidance, and support
of Gustavo Perez Firmat. Your intellectual acuity, sensitivity, and ir-
reverence have touched me more than you know. You are indeed
unforgettable.
I am forever indebted to the undergraduate and graduate students in
English and Philosophy at Florida International University whose in-
tellectual spirit and energy have kept me motivated and fresh through
these many semesters. Matt Bucemi, Sarah Rodriguez. Soraya Bascoy,
Rodrigo Torres, Claudia Carcach, Michael Martin, Nicole Billitz,
Mariane Stanev, Diamys Garcia, Chris Miranda, and Walter Jouvin are
viii Acknowledgements

just a few of the many students who have enhanced my development

as a teacher and scholar.
I thank Monica Vera and Parker Phillips for your friendship, strength,
and much needed research and proofreading assistance! Without your
labor and solidarity, I would not have been able to complete The Ethics
of Community. Know that you each exude a particular kind of gentle
warrior energy that I admire very much.
I am tremendously indebted to Caf Demetrios for allowing me to
make an office of your beautiful caf these last several years. Your hos-
pitality and support never failed to give me a lift when most needed.
The free coffee refills presented to me by Demetrio, Leo, Kati, Maritza,
Dora, and Franscisco were an essential component of the writing
process.
I owe a special thanks to my FIU colleague Isaiah Thomas who has
revived my faith in possibilities for sociopolitical change. Your revo-
lutionary spirit, intellectual curiosity, and financial generosity have
given me soul-sustaining glimmers of hope through the last stretch of
this project.
To Mikele Arriema, Virginia Arriema, and Willie Bu I owe countless
hours of childcare. I will never forget the many deadlines met as a re-
sult of your unflinching willingness to take on my family as your own.
Wrapped up in your generosity I believe that I have experienced some
sense of non-communing community.
I am unspeakably grateful to my sisters Halina Luszczynska, Aida
Gigi Luszczynska, and Nathalia Uribe for standing with me through
these difficult years of illnesses, hospitals, and loss. I simply would
not have made it through this time without you. Our unquestioned
commitment to one another bind us unshakably and the peace granted
therein has been my rock.
I cannot come close to sufficiently acknowledging all that my daugh-
ters Amaya and Kadijah have given to me. Without their inspiration
this book surely would not have been written. Amaya, your tender yet
fierce mirada never fails to remind me of the intense complexity of
existence and love. You are beyond precious and so much more than
I can tell you. Kadijah, from the first time you held my face to yours I
felt the strength of your generosity and care. You are a beautiful and
inspiring force to be reckoned with. My love for you both literally takes
my breath away.
I began this project with my mother and father alive. Both died be-
fore its completion. I am forever indebted to them for all of the (most-
ly unpopular) wisdom that they shared with me: a love of thinking
otherwise, radical irreverence and dissent, vodka shots in the name
of Dionysus, and long Sunday breakfasts listening to everything from
Bob Dylan to Jacques Brel to Susana Baca. In all of these arenas their
 Acknowledgements ix

keen respect and appreciation for meaningless meaning remained

constant. My overlapping intellectual, personal, and cultural hybridity
was nourished rather than thwarted by them and my life has unfolded
accordingly. At its best moments this book is a tribute to the excep-
tional people that they were.
For my daughters, Amaya and Kadijah,
with boundless love.

For my parents, Robert Luszczynski and

Laura Riesco, who showed me how.
Introduction

This book is about creating a necessary conversation. The Ethics of

Community brings together two conventionally independent schools
of critical inquiry Continental Philosophy and Cultural/Literary
Studiesand makes them speak directly to and with each other.
Though admittedly, there is perhaps a greater degree of conversation
in cultural/literary studies with continental philosophy than there is
in its reverse, my aim here is to demonstrate how the inherently ethical
component of community and deconstruction so elaborately analyzed
by contemporary French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques
Derrida can be provocatively traced and underscored in the context
of cultural considerations central to African American and US Latino
Literature.1 As exemplars within these fields, Toni Morrison in Beloved
and Ana Menendez in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd serve as case
studies through which I model what such a conversation might, in fact,
look like. More specifically, Morrisons foregrounding of the distinct
cultural sensibilities of its black and white characters and Menendez
preoccupation with language and exile, themselves activate a decon-
structive ethics and thus provide fertile contexts to explore the role of
culture in Nancian community and imperative ethicity and Derridean
bearing witness. Thus in this study, distinct cultural understand-
ings and contexts provide a particularly interesting way of thinking
through the specificities of particular strains of Nancys and Derridas
thought.
Given that The Ethics of Community highlights deconstruction, ethics,
and culture, it would appear germane to a cultural studies analysis.
Cultural studies, as a field, indeed largely conceives of itself as heav-
ily indebted to or even defined by the ethical thrust of deconstruc-
tion, which it puts to work in its stringent analysis of culture. In other
words, almost by definition an ethically driven deconstruction of cul-
ture and cultural phenomenon is the very project of cultural studies.
The strident and ubiquitous demand for openness to alterity and
radical responsibility to the other frequently articulated in much
cultural studies scholarship (and literary criticism) on some level links
it to central themes in deconstruction and ethics. Furthermore, given
that cultural studies assumes the inevitable textuality of culture, its
approach is necessarily deconstructive.2
2 The Ethics of Community

However, for various reasons the examination that follows exceeds

the confines of a cultural studies analysis. Although like a cultural
studies project, The Ethics of Community is interested in the ethical
component of deconstruction and the manner in which it is saliently
activated in particular cultural contexts, my discussion of themes per-
tinent to culture, linguistic specificity, bilingualism, temporality, and
exile, is not in terms of power and politics per se (as it might be in
a Foucauldian model), but rather is in the context of the ethical com-
ponent of community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, all
specific moments pertinent to the constitutive events of deconstruc-
tion. In other words, rather than a customary link between cultural
studies and deconstruction in which culture is approached decon-
structively in its relationship to networks of power, I am linking ethi-
cal moments (bearing witness, imperative ethicity, community) of both
areas. I locate the relation between cultural considerations and decon-
struction in a potentiality for and activation of an ethical event.
Furthermore, given that obliterating the high/low culture opposi-
tion is central to its overall project, cultural studies analysis generally
casts an extremely sharp (and deconstructive) critical eye on actual
(albeit discursively constituted) cultural phenomenon such as Media
Spectacle and the 2008 Presidential Election or NASCAR and the
Southernization of America rather than on literature or philoso-
phy.3 Such traditional objects of study and consideration are in some
sense precisely that from which cultural studies seeks a departure.
Thus despite the overlap of concerns with culture, deconstruction, and
ethics, the literary component of The Ethics of Community marks a dis-
tinct break with cultural studies as it is most commonly practiced.
Analyzing cultural elements within literature from a deconstruc-
tive perspective appears to fall more squarely within the more dif-
fuse category of literary criticism (although certainly there can be
and sometimes is an overlap between cultural studies and literature).
Literary criticism is obviously more open insofar as it can examine any
literary text from any number of theoretical vantage points. The defi n-
ing ethico-political and deconstructive thrust of the cultural studies
project is not a necessary component of literary criticism and we could
even assert that such an approach is relatively atypical within the field.
While a critical examination of any literature could certainly contain a
broadly conceived deconstructive thrust alongside an ethico-political
engagement, it is not a defining element of a critical enterprise as it
is within cultural studies. In this manner, while my objects of study
(philosophy and literature as they are most broadly conceived) place
The Ethics of Community within the general field of literary criticism, its
deconstructive approach to (and foregrounding of) culture, place its
analysis and central epistemological concerns within cultural studies.
 Introduction 3

Turning more pointedly to the body of critical work that examines

US American and particularly African American and US Latino
Literature does not significantly narrow down the possible approaches.
Deconstructive sensibilities and ethical or political dimensions may
or may not be present (although the past decade or so has witnessed
a proliferation of work indebted to Derridean thought).4 The literary
criticism devoted specifically to US Latino Literature frequently ges-
tures toward general Derridean motifs (sliding signification, absence
of origins, and openness to alterity); however, the deconstructive ele-
ments here are so loosely evoked that the analysis is barely informed
by the philosophical work. The constitutively ethical component
of deconstruction is rarely interrogated with any kind of depth or
nuance in the context of this particular branch of literary criticism.
Given the profound degree to which my literary analysis is grounded
within the intricacy of Nancian and Derridean thought, The Ethics of
Community thereby marks a significant departure from the literary
criticism generally devoted to this body of work. Such an emphasis
on particular Nancian and Deriddean themes would then in some
manner place this investigation as well, within a continental philo-
sophical realm.
Within the continental philosophical community (from whence the
work of Nancy and Derrida emerges), there are a growing number of
scholars who consider deconstruction and ethics together; however, pre-
cious few examine either culture or US American literature (not to men-
tion African American or US Latino Literature) in a direct and sustained
manner. Simon Critchleys work most notably seeks to articulate the rela-
tionship between deconstruction and ethics, and certainly scholars such
as John Caputo and David Wood proceed along a similar critical path.5
However, this interest in deconstruction and ethics has not sought to
change the traditional objects of study of philosophical thought. Firmly
ensconced within a mostly philosophical terrain (with an occasional
splattering of literature), scholarly work on deconstruction and ethics
almost never examines cultural phenomenon as such (as cultural stud-
ies does), or cultural concerns and issues evoked within ethnic US
American literature (as literary criticism might). Although Critchley
and J. Hillis Miller have plainly noted their interest in and openness to
these lines of inquiry they are indeed notable exceptions.6 Historically
continental philosophy has been (and generally continues to be) a tra-
dition of inquiry that examines a particular theoretical issue or query
ever deeper and more closely (consider Heideggers what is Being?
and the many famous Derridean What does it mean? questions:
What does it mean to learn? What does it mean to bear witness?
What does it mean to love?) and situates the analysis within the his-
torical and philosophical tradition out of which it emerges. Undeniably
4 The Ethics of Community

the issues of community and culture are engaged but are traced from the
Greeks, to Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, and Agamben
(to name only a few) in all of their most minute intricacy, and not con-
sidered in relation to, for example, gang communities of East L.A. as a
cultural studies project might do. Concrete cultural phenomenon (dis-
cursively constituted or otherwise) are generally outside of philosophys
central project. Further, although philosophy has had its interest in liter-
ature (and certainly Heidegger took great strides in problematizing the
boundary between these areas) such convergences do not have a history
of looking significantly at US American literature and most particularly
at African American or US Latino Literature.
Examining cultural issues (exile, bilingualism, linguistic specific-
ity, etc) from a deconstructive lens (and its attendant ethical compo-
nents) within a general horizon of what is disciplinarily understood
as philosophy and literature, The Ethics of Community blurs the
boundaries between cultural studies, literary criticism, philosophy,
and African American and US Latino Literature. Given its juxtaposi-
tion of philosophical explications and explorations alongside literary
engagements on culture, all concerned with deconstruction and eth-
ics, this project amalgamates all of the above areas as a thorough-
going activation of interdisciplinarity.7 The analysis that follows
illustrates that in- depth and nuanced appreciations of Nancy and
Derrida regarding deconstruction and ethics can and indeed per-
haps even ought to be considered alongside African American and
US Latino Literature and the approaches to cultural and linguistic
specificity to be found therein. Part cultural studies (in its focus
on deconstruction as ethics and its very interest in a discourse on
culture), part theory (in its untangling of the intricacies of philo-
sophical explorations), and part literary criticism (in its belief that
literature has significant offerings parallel to those of deconstruction
as ethics), this project is an attempt to transgress boundaries, itself
almost a battle cry of cultural studies discourse. Indeed blurring the
lines between discourses is an integral part of not only cultural stud-
ies but a certain strain locatable within continental philosophy at
least since Heidegger. The Ethics of Community is an attempt to acti-
vate the transgression.

On Intervention
Literary criticism has a long tradition of considering the interventionist
possibilities of literature. From Leaviss claim that literarature facilitates
a withstanding of industrial capitalisms alienating effects, to the formal-
ists notion that it defamiliarizes or estranges the world, to Gadamers
understanding achieved through literary engagement, literature has
long been conceived in terms of its potential to transform and intervene
 Introduction 5

in our lives. Furthermore, Bakhtinian dialogics and Foucauldian analy-

sis of power have been readily appropriated (within cultural studies,
literary criticism, and theory) as containing liberatory and opposi-
tional thrusts or potential. In contrast, deconstruction in the realms of
literary criticism, theory, and continental philosophy, is often accused
of being incapable of ethico-political intervention, a position to which I
shall return. However, an experience of the event of deconstruction, itself
an intervention as interruption, locatable in an engagement with liter-
ature and philosophy and the ethico-political possibilities that might
emerge therein, has not been significantly considered.
Contemporary literary criticism devoted to African American and US
Latino Literature proceeds from various theoretical grounds. Athough
psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and queer interpretive endeavors are on
the rise, black and US Latino literary criticism still frequently grounds
itself in understandings of mestizaje, borderlands, and notions of oth-
erness (all in some manner related to Derridean deconstruction) very
much contextualized by considerations of structures of power, oppres-
sion, and exclusion. As such, there is almost inevitably an implicit or
explicit desire for political intervention vis--vis the offered analysis.8
However, in spite of the tremendous overlap between the occupancy of
multiple linguistic and cultural spaces and deconstructive ethics, the
latter is generally not engaged in significant depth. African American
and US Latino literary criticism does not consider an experience of
deconstruction as a possible vehicle for contributing to what might
loosely be called an ethics of being. Although the literary criticism
clearly welcomes deconstructions epistemological impetus when it
comes to subverting hierarchical and hegemonizing imperatives, it
forecloses deconstructions equally potent power to proffer an ethical
relation. Thus, although radical in illustrating how constitutively mul-
tiple being or identity is (and refracted through the contexts of, say,
gender, sexuality, race, or class), it generally ignores how such an expe-
rience of constitutive nonidentity is necessarily thoroughly interwoven
with deconstruction and thereby always-already ethically embroiled.
In short, African American and US Latino literary criticism is willing
to go a piece of the way with deconstruction, but resists treading and
trekking through the dense terrain attending a deconstructive journey.
Deconstruction, however, is in fact an active, experiential agent itself
and as a consequence is inherently simultaneously transgressive and
transcendent.9
While US ethnic American literary criticism is broadly focused on
multiplicity, borderlands, and the power structures that contextual-
ize them (and is thus often marked by an ethico-political critique as
intervention), cultural studies and continental philosophy have their
own unique relation concerning the roles of deconstruction, ethics,
6 The Ethics of Community

and intervention. The issue of intervention that so characterizes the

cultural studies project and with which the thought of Nancy and
Derrida has a complex engagement, may be accurately identified as
the sticking point between them and is worth examining in some
depth. While cultural studies understands itself as radical, opposi-
tional, liberatory, democratizing, and interventionist by definition,
the thought of Nancy, Derrida, and the continental philosophical com-
munity in general is not so programmatically oriented and indeed
much of their work pointedly resists application. Insofar as Nancian
and Derridean (non-propositional) propositions concern ontological
events that are always-already occurring (repeatedly and singularly),
application or institution is simply an unfitting approach (as the
title The Inoperative Community plainly reveals). Derridean deconstruc-
tion and bearing witness as well as Nancian community and impera-
tive ethicity (all intimately related) are necessarily already at play in
any textual context. Neither being nor world can avoid implication
by and within them and are rather thereby situated. Given that the
ontological events that Derrida and Nancy unravel are radically prior,
they escape our conceptual grasp thus refusing any attempt to work
them. Deconstruction, imperative ethicity, bearing witness, and com-
munity are events that we can attempt to trace, but by defi nition they
cannot be applied or even appropriated. However, despite this non-
instructive insistence on the part of Nancy and Derrida, deconstruc-
tion is perceived as justice and therefore there is an undeniable and
urgent quality of their work as it pertains to ethics and politics. So
while both philosophy and cultural studies share an understanding of
deconstruction as justice, there is a considerable distinction in terms
of the steps that should coexist alongside or follow this initial under-
standing. In other words, having/being deconstructed, now what?
The relationship between cultural studies and what we might loosely
call contemporary French philosophy is thus bound to be compli-
cated if not at some moments contentious.
Although relying on deconstructive elements for the propulsion of its
project, cultural studies breaks with deconstruction in a philosophical
context in its prioritizing of decisive and meaningful political action or
directly thematized desire to make a difference in the world.10 Stuart
Hall notes deconstructions alleged inability to sustain a politics main-
taining that deconstructing culture, politics, and power is insufficient.
In this vein, Hall plainly states that if we are concerned to maintain a
politics it cannot be defined exclusively in terms of an infinitely sliding
signifier11 (Hall 1996, 258).
However, according to Paul Bowman, deconstructions own logic
forbids the possibility of the kind of politics or intervention that char-
acterizes the cultural studies project.
 Introduction 7

Cultural Studies desires definite, precise, certain, fully present

and knowable, unmediated interventional power and agency in
the present of the institutional terrain of culture and society. This
desire is impossible and metaphysical because the institu-
tional terrain of culture and society is never fully present, but
constitutively mediated, in deferral, relay, and referral (differ-
ance), prone to the slippage of signification and dissemination.
(Bowman 2004, 4)12

If cultural studies is to understand itself as deconstruction and per-

ceive culture as textual, decisive programmatic action becomes, strictly
speaking, impossible. It is not that cultural studies proceeds unaware
of the paradox of its position concerning deconstruction and interven-
tion but rather that unlike deconstruction in philosophy, cultural stud-
ies chooses to disregard the contradiction and operate on two fronts at
one and the same time (Hall 1992, 282).13 Such is the impasse between
deconstruction as it is situated within cultural studies and decon-
struction within continental philosophy. While these two crudely cir-
cumscribed areas share various intersecting moments, particularly as
concerns a foregrounding of an ethical thrust of deconstruction and
the discursive nature of culture, the issue of intervention is certainly a
primary and important location of difference.
In spite of Stuart Halls simultaneous indebtedness to and desire to
go beyond deconstruction, there is a sense in a particular strain of
emerging cultural criticism that a call to transcend deconstruction is
deeply problematic. Indeed Bowman and Stefan Herbrechter locate a
politics of intervention squarely within the realm of a particular kind
of critique. For Bowman, cultural studies must be an interruptive
deconstructive cultural studies interrogating both its own relation to
culture and power as well as new objects of study such as technosci-
ence, managerialism, bureaucracy, efficiency, effectivity, performance,
performativity, productivity, and production (Bowman 2004, 15).14
Herbrechters profound alliance with a deconstructive project mani-
fests in a desire to understand cultural studies as deconstruction, which
would allow it (deconstruction) to do cultural studies the biggest favor
possible, namely to sharpen the resistance to itself (Herbrechter
2004, 8).15 For Hillis Miller cultural studies must have a more engaged
relationship to philosophy at large. Submitting that cultural studies
has historically assumed loaded concepts such as community and
the body for granted, he notes that Nancys difficult and vast inter-
rogations of both of these concepts could benefit cultural studies dis-
course tremendously (Hillis Miller 2008, 4).16 Implicitly, Hillis Miller
focuses on a more nuanced critique rather than a program or initiative
for the development of a politics of intervention. Similarly, in Bowmans
8 The Ethics of Community

Interrogating Cultural Studies, Simon Critchley (who understands a deep

overlap between the kind of philosophy I do and cultural studies)
responds to Bowmans query on the divergent roles of intervention
in cultural studies and philosophy, by revealing that critique is an
ethico-politically driven intervention, rendering it as activist as the
most active cultural studies (Bowman 2003, 6263). In other words,
interpreting a culture in terms of its objects (such as the Coen broth-
ers films or popular music in his case) is itself linked to a notion of
liberation (61).17 Certainly there are countless examples such as these
that indicate a belief in the oppositional and democratizing power of
critique.18 While a certain sect of cultural studies practitioners may
scoff at critique as intervention it is no less manifest in the field today.

Interruptive Intervention
Alongside Bowman and Herbrechter I reject both a facile notion of clear
and plain articulation and presentation as well as a solely analytic or
playful performance of the deconstruction of culture, and propose a
foregrounding of interruption as a vehicle to potentially altered engage-
ments with the material world. However, unlike Bowman, the location
for the interruption that I propose is within the philosophical and lit-
erary realms. The Ethics of Community contributes to an interventionist
discourse in foregrounding an ethical event of being that can potentially
lead to liberatory experiences, approaches, and understandings. One
could certainly interject that an intricate engagement with Nancian or
Derridean philosophemes is not useful as an interventionist tool, and
if intervention is conceived as directly programmatic or instructive
then such a claim is plainly justified. However, The Ethics of Community
proposes an understanding of intervention as a transformative expe-
rience of interruptive ethics that can itself illicit distinct and arguably
liberatory or democratizing approaches to be activated.19 While such an
intervention in the world cannot be directly instructive, it nonetheless
has the potential to be deeply active. For example, in Morrisons Beloved,
nonrepresentational linguistic events disrupt and alter several charac-
ters totalizing perceptions of themselves and their world leading to new
possibilities of community or being-with others. Similarly, in Menendez
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, a recognition of the impossibility of
locatable origin or home prompts an ontological disruption that itself
reveals a non-recuperable world for a protagonist and her engagements
with it are correspondingly altered. A reader who follows or traces such
an encounter with the nonbeing of being can be confronted with (and
interrupted by) the unraveling of borders between character, reader, and
text leaving a space or gap where essential being was thought to exist.
The result can be a profound experience of groundlessness and ontologi-
cal noncoincidence that shakes us to the core.
 Introduction 9

Rather than summarize Nancy and Derrida or even, less gener-

ously, reference their complex thought without explanation, The Ethics
of Community slowly and carefully outlines community, imperative
ethicity, and bearing witness, and invites the reader into a moment in
which an experience of their ideas becomes possible.20 In other words,
in the context of deconstruction and ethics, close textual engagements
permit the content of the thought to come to life. To do justice to the
intricacies of the event of community, the necessary and constitutive
slippage of signification and being, the complexity of their nonsequen-
tial movements, and the degree to which their rendering escapes us
and simultaneously makes us (and the paradox therein), we must be
patient, meticulous, and even precise and clear regarding that which
refuses precision and clarity. The watered down summary that pro-
vides a sense of this thought does not permit the intense activation or
happening of the unheimlich (eerie or loca for Menendez) experience
that it is (or we are). In both philosophy and literature we must grapple
within the language and/as ideas of the texts, in order to experience
or be in (despite the seeming contradiction of this articulation) the
space of differance in language and meaning. An attempt to get ever
closer to the slippage, to occupy the space of differance is worthwhile
and valuable in that it exposes us (in an active and experiential sense)
to the constitutive events of being about which we are preoccupied. In
other words, the object of study can be accessed both conceptually and
ontologically as an overlapping of thinking and being (which is the
subject of the study) if we think closely and meticulously rather than
broadly and generally. At the very least, this is one avenue of access
to the exposure. Ultimately, The Ethics of Community seeks not only
to explain Nancian and Derridean community, imperative ethicity,
and bearing witness but additionally to instigate an interruption that
their work both thematizes and performs. For readers already familiar
with the notoriously difficult thinking of Nancy and Derrida such
an exercise is unnecessary; however, for those more disciplinarily
entrenched within English and literary criticism of US American lit-
erature, a detailed and meticulous explication can supply an entry
into the interruptions and intervention that they offer. Derridas and
Nancys thought resists summary and therefore must be unraveled
and explained from the deepest intricacies of the inside in order to
open the possibility of an experiential interruption, which is largely
what is at stake in this project. Close readings can potentially reveal
those spaces and gaps of language that perform the imperative ethic-
ity or deconstructive ethics in question. The stakes are of the highest
order: if we can experience the constitutive interruption of which they
speak, which is ethical at its heart, we might be capable of engaging
being, language, and the world in a manner that is consistent with it.
10 The Ethics of Community

Given that The Ethics of Community seeks to introduce particular

Nancian and Derridean elements to culturally focused literary critics
unfamiliar with the specificities of their work, detailed explication is
crucial. As such, the two chapters devoted solely to Derrida and Nancy
are strictly philosophical, indeed very traditionally attempting to expli-
cate some of their central ideas. (For students and scholars more disci-
plinarily entrenched within English a nuanced comprehension of either
Derrida or Nancy cannot be presupposed.) Without an in-depth under-
standing, it is easy to misread and incorrectly appropriate their thought,
and in such instances the radical concepts invoked are often not genu-
inely engaged and indeed their traditional and status quo counterparts
merely reified. Perhaps most notably, a quick summary of Nancian com-
munity can lead to erroneous conclusions concerning its applicability.
The unworkability of Nancian community is germane to his analysis
and must be rigorously thought through to be avoided. I offer a detailed
and clear presentation of Nancys thought as a way of introducing his
work to those who are not familiar with it so that these misunderstand-
ings and reductive and facile applications might be avoided.
Additionally, teasing out the specifics of Nancian and Derridean
thinking can open up numerous critical trajectories that a general
overview does not permit. Although I choose to bring to the fore a
few possible dialogues between their work and the themes of language
specificity, exile, and identity, there are undoubtedly countless others.
It is my hope that clearly explicating select elements of Nancy and
Derrida provides an introduction that will prompt literary critics to
engage it in all of its complexity and conceivably recontextualize it in
exciting and innovative ways. Indeed these possibilities of noncustom-
ary juxtapositions interest me most. Thus The Ethics of Community seeks
to offer clear presentations of select Nancian and Derridean ideas and
juxtapose them with noncustomary texts in an effort to illustrate that
these textual crossings can yield important and fruitful insights.
Outlining elements of Nancys and Derridas work in an introduc-
tory manner is an attempt to transgress an exclusionary language and
understanding and extend the work outward. If Bowman is correct
in noting that specialist languages clearly separate and can therein
only intervene within the realm of their own enclave, then such an
introductory presentation of Nancy and Derrida is an attempt to break
out of or transgress the boundaries of a strictly philosophical discourse
(Bowman 2004, 12). Although I use specific elements of their thinking
on community, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, in the context
of literary analysis, other details could similarly be of interest to and/
or useful for other scholars.
Last, while Derridas vast oeuvre has influenced cultural studies and
some literary criticism, the same cannot be said concerning the work
 Introduction 11

of Jean-Luc Nancy. In this context, The Ethics of Community itself inter-

venes by placing Nancy on center stage and in so doing introducing
his work to a new audience.21 Alongside J. Hillis Miller, I submit that
Nancian thought concerning community and imperative ethicity has
tremendously useful implications for cultural studies and culturally
focused literary critics alike (Hillis Miller 2008, 6). In these contexts, in
the disciplines in which direct mediations upon immigration, exile, cul-
tural identity, processes of othering are often examined, the work of
Jean-Luc Nancy has not been foregrounded. His extensive meditations
upon community can be very provocatively engaged alongside consid-
erations of culture both within cultural studies and literary criticism.
Reading Nancy and Derrida alongside texts that thematize cul-
tural difference, exile, and bilingualism is grounded in a belief that
whole new lines of culturally engaged critical inquiry can be thereby
introduced. Extending their thought in new and unique contexts is
not at all contradictory to Nancian or Derridean understandings as
they have both plainly indicated. Derridas interest in the singularity
of languages and Nancys in the relationship between culture and
philosophy reveal that these considerations are consistent with their
projects.22 Indeed linguistic differences and cultural and geographi-
cal crossings are topics in some way particularly apropos to their
interests. It appears obvious that the ruptures consistent with cul-
tural intersections and geographical displacements would be prime
locations for discussions of constitutive interruptions and their
attendant ethical character that so preoccupy both thinkers. If we are
interested in considering the ways in which their thinking might be
pertinent in material situations (as discursively constituted), looking
to scenes of cultural multiplicity seems a particularly appropriate
place to begin.

Imperative Ethicity, Bearing Witness, Community

The Ethics of Community illustrates that continental philosophical
thought (or literary theory) and African American and US Latino
Literature can all be shown to theorize the relationships among a desta-
bilized subject, language, and ethics. As critics like bell hooks and Lisa
Sanchez-Gonzales aptly note, theory, African American literature, and
US Latino Literature are all frequently preoccupied with interrogating
the notion of a unified and stable subject, self, or identity.23 Although
a few critics do well to point this out, they do not take the analysis
further and examine the ways in which the primary texts indicate that
language is inevitably implicated in this destabilization. For contempo-
rary continental thought and much African American and US Latino
Literature, being exists immersed within language and language itself
functions (or achieves signification) on the basis of a gap or space (since
12 The Ethics of Community

as Derrida has illustrated vis--vis Saussure, it is the negative, or that

which something is not which allows it to mean). Given its existence
within and as this space, being assumes the qualities of language and
is imbued with a space or an element of absence as well as a slippery
and non-definitive quality. As such, in proper deconstructive fashion,
being cannot be a full presence or unified whole.
Once a consideration of language is brought into play, ethics can
emerge as an important theme. According to all of the works treated
in The Ethics of Community, philosophical and literary alike, it is within
this space of being that does not re-present or signify (the space that
deconstruction traces and underscores) that there lies an ethical
imperative. Since it is outside of representation or signification, it is
considered nondiscursive or atheoretical. However, it is (and is not)
nonetheless and the being that resides in this space is toward, respon-
sible, and accountable to the other in some manner. Language which is
poetic or which does not seek to re-present is most capable of accessing
this non-theoretical, ethical space of being. I take a culturally oriented
literary analysis of a nonunified subject composed of this gap or space,
not one but two steps further in engaging the interconnected issues of
language and ethics and addressing these difficult yet pressing inqui-
ries in new and unique contexts.
One of the central themes is the interruption of being facilitated by
the occupation of multiple narrative/cultural spaces (or locations of
difference) and nonrepresentational or poetic languageultimately
ethical and antimetaphysical spaces. The gap of language and being
that denies full presence takes on particular importance in the con-
text of linguistic and/or cultural contexts that are not as founded in
Western metaphysics and representational language, which is most
pointedly the case in Morrisons oeuvre.24 There are obviously many
possible examples of such events but we examine two particular con-
texts in which such a situation is manifested. The texts of Toni Morrison
and Ana Menendez, both implicitly and explicitly, contain moments
in which being occupies a distinct and arguably extra-discursive or
linguistically nonrepresentational space. How do we discuss cul-
tural sensibility without falling into a kind of cultural essentialism?
Is there an imperative to discuss culture and language? How might
a non-absolute ethical imperative manifest in the historical material
world? What are the implications of its existence? What does it mean
pragmatically for being-in-common or community? What is the rela-
tionship between ethics and community, witnessing, ecstasis, lan-
guage, and being? These are just a few of the many questions that the
following exploration addresses.
I elucidate these complex events in a threefold manner. First, I
engage in a reading of Nancys imperative ethicity alongside Derridas
 Introduction 13

conceptualizations of bearing witness as they are outlined in The

Free Voice of Man (Retreating the Political) and Poetics and Politics
of Witnessing (Sovereignties) respectively, in order to show the pro-
found overlap between these two thinkers as they jointly maintain the
inextricable relationship between language and ethics. Second, I illus-
trate how community conceived in a radically new way as an event of
beings destabilization in Nancys The Inoperative Community is a natu-
ral extension forward from this thinking and provides an important
segue into a discourse of material communities. Last, I explore possible
relationships between the philosophical thinking already established
and literary manifestations of ethics, being, and community through
readings of Toni Morrisons Beloved and Ana Menendez In Cuba I Was
a German Shepherd.
In the interest of clarity, I have divided the aforementioned topics
into two equally integral parts, the one philosophical and the other
literary. Chapters 1 and 2 are thus explications and commentaries on
Nancian community and Derridean bearing witness while Chapters 3
and 4 comprise close readings of Morrisons Beloved and Menendezs
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. This structure is intended to culti-
vate philosophically oriented literary engagements that are nuanced,
sensitive, and precise rather than vague, reductive, and general. The
philosophical terminology invoked in Chapters 3 and 4 are rigorously
discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, providing the reader with multilay-
ered and rich understandings of the ideas involved. As such, when
approaching the literary texts of Chapters 3 and 4, we are more attuned
to the potential crossings and creations that occur in a philosophical
and literary encounter.
An in-depth discussion of ethics must interrogate the nature of ethics
itself. Chapter 1 traces Nancys discussion of the inevitable presence of
an imperative (a we must) that drives all philosophical discourses.
From where do these imperatives emerge? Through careful analysis
of Nancys conceptualization of the ethical imperative in his seminal
essay The Free Voice of Man, I explain how philosophical imperatives
emerge from their own discourses. If philosophical discourses create
the imperatives that ostensibly drive their thought (which is to say, if
the imperative emerges from within rather than outside of the discourse
as it is traditionally thought to do) then the imperative is not justifiable,
independent of its own discourse. The extravagant proposition is that
the imperative that drives philosophical discourse is situated in that
very philosophical discourse. Thus, Nancy suggests the eruption of an
extra-philosophical or extra-discursive imperative, one that directly the-
matizes its ungroundable and unjustifiable nature. Turning away from
conventional ethics and its implicit grounding in the absolute, Nancy
names the non-absolute imperative imperative ethicity. Finally, then,
14 The Ethics of Community

Chapter 1 examines the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancys The Free

Voice of Man responds to both Derridas early piece The Ends of Man
and his later essays, which directly thematize issues of ethics, being,
and language (themes opened up but not directly thematized in earlier
Derridean works). As such, Chapter 1 places in dialogue Derrida and
Nancy, beginning with Nancys The Free Voice of Man and ending
with an examination of how Nancy can be provocatively read alongside
Derridas later work on ethics in Sovereignties in Question.
In Chapter 2 I steer the discussion in a slightly different yet clearly
related direction by introducing Jean Luc-Nancys The Inoperative
Community into the already established discussion. Thinking community
in Nancian terms, as ecstatic being that exists to, toward, and accountable
toward the other, is a natural extension of elements of Derridean thought
on being, language, and accountability. Furthermore, in Chapter 2 I ana-
lyze the historical occurrence of the concentration camp in the context of
Nancian community, allowing us to approach more concrete concerns
such as culture and exile. Chapter 2 provides a clear and decisive link
between the philosophical discussion that comprises Chapters 1 and 2 of
the book and the literary interpretations of Chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 3 illustrates how Toni Morrisons Beloved describes real-life
situations that may indicate elements of the opposite of the concentra-
tion camp and exemplify potentially ethical ways of being. The Ethics
of Community proposes that close readings of Beloved extend the con-
versation begun with Nancy and Derrida on ethics, community, being,
and language by underscoring textual events in which (Nancian) com-
munity flourishes, responsibility is at play, and thus being/ethics finds
more breathing room. In Beloved, these situations consistently entail
an element of nonrepresentational language, lending themselves to a
consideration of ethics as it has been outlined above. Most particularly,
orality and song occupy a privileged space in Beloved and close read-
ings of these communal moments reveal what a Nancian community
might actually look like, or at the very least, how we might imagine it.
In Chapter 4, I explore ways in which particular exile situations foster
considerations of the relationship between temporality, narrative, and
experiential disruption. Through close readings of various passages of
the first and final stories of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, I examine
the ways in which a longing for a romanticized and idealized home
(one that specifically signifies as absolute origin and ground) can fun-
damentally inform perception and experience. In this recognition tem-
porality and narrative are foregrounded to such a radical extent that
the protagonists experiences real ontological disruptions. We witness
complex moments of narrative and ontological slippage both thema-
tized and unthematized within the text. Despite the profound dis-
comfort and dis-ease of the protagonists, they ultimately pass through
 Introduction 15

profound experiences of bearing witness that convey the inevitability

of narrative rendering in time which itself demands the recognition of
the impossibility of the much sought after beginning and identity.

Although Menendezs 2001 In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd has

received significant critical acclaim, it has been largely ignored in the
academic world of literary criticism.25 As of 2010 it has been in circula-
tion for nearly ten years and only a handful of academic articles address
it.26 This dearth of critical attention may be due in part to what Rafael
Dalleo and Elena Machado Saez have identified as the difficult politi-
cal line that many contemporary Cuban American writers have been
forced to negotiate.27 The current generation of Cuban American writ-
ers is often neither ber-Left nor Right; rather the writers walk a some-
what ambiguous line between the two vociferous factions.28 Possibly
literary critics (with generally Left-leaning politics) find it easiest to
simply avoid addressing the political ambiguity. Additionally, a certain
faction of critics within the bourgeoning field of US Latino Literature
do not believe that Cuban American literature fits within a broader US
Latino designation due to the unique relationship that said group has
to class and consumption. If US Latino Literature is defined as literature
with a progressive political agenda, then as Eliano Rivero plainly states
in Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict,
Cuban American literature can never be included in this group. As
such, many scholars of US Latino Literature may choose not to treat
texts falling within the Cuban American category. Dalleo and Machado
nicely articulate a need to get beyond such reductive identifications.
The lack of scholarly attention is particularly lamentable given the
tremendous philosophical richness of the text and the cornucopia
of interpretations to which it is amenable. Thoughtfully considering
the complexities of exile as it relates to language, culture, desire, and
time, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is a beautiful albeit melancholy
work. While it is obvious that most of the stories in the collection focus
upon exile or immigration, what is perhaps less apparent is that they
all address experiences of loss and mourning and more specifically a
desire to recover that which is imagined to be lost: ontological presence
and the certainty it provides. It is not just Cuba, a loved one, or another
time that is missed, but rather the full presence thought to have been
encapsulated therein. As such, in the context of exile, missing, mourn-
ing, and desiring, Cuba is most precisely a missing, mourning, and
desire for full presence and the corresponding transparency and intel-
ligibility it implies. The figuration of loss as loss of presence lends itself
to deconstructive interpretations. In this way, Menendezs text is an
important contribution to the growing body of work within US Latino
Literature, exile studies, and deconstructive ethics.
16 The Ethics of Community

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd depicts a desire for fully present

meaning in various ways including a longing for national and cultural
origin, extra-temporality, and a fully knowable and transmittable self
and other. Regardless of its figuration, transparency, intelligibility,
and certainty are all coveted for the total and immediate presence that
they necessarily imply. While much of the critical work on US Latino
Literature addresses (or at the very least intimates the existence of) a
desire for metaphysical presence, it stops short of analyzing it in sig-
nificant depth, generally ignoring the component of presence as it per-
tains to notions of truth.29
Paradoxically though, the situations of exile and immigration
(almost definitive aspects of US Latino Literature) are those which so
poignantly bring to the fore the impossibility and correspondingly
intensified desire for presence, continuity, certainty, and the com-
pletely knowable world that they would reflect. Were it not for the
violent interruption of geography, temporality, language, and culture,
the desire for continuity, to mend that which is perceived as broken,
would likely not assume the intense and passionate form that it does
in much exile literature, that of the US Latino variety included. The
continual negotiation of distinct geographies, cultures, and languages,
underscores or even calls forth beings discontinuity or rupture. As we
witness in our examination of Menendezs text, such negotiations can
occur on a number of levels but we submit that via an almost forced
contemplation of discontinuity and loss, exiles and immigrants can be
compelled to examine a lack of full intelligibility inherent to language
and being in a manner that the occupants of an imagined cohesive
and consistent culture, language, and geography are not. More simply
stated, immigrants and exiles are positioned in such a way that consid-
erations of being in time, place, language, and culture are more press-
ing and thus simply more likely to occur.
While numerous critics have explored the relationship between exile,
writing, language, and being in some manner or another, none has rig-
orously done so with regard to deconstructive ethics. Although Doris
Sommers provocative and entertaining Bilingual Aesthetics engages
a conversation concerning bilingualism and deconstruction, it does
not do so in significant depth. In more general terms, Sommer figures
bilingualism in a manner not unlike our understanding of exile and
immigration, situations obviously frequently interrelated. Sommer
points to but does not examine a manner in which the traversing of
languages and borders is itself a moment or event related to decon-
struction and an ethics of difference. Creative, open, and democratic,
the experience of bilingualism forces a confrontation with otherness,
one that Wilhelm von Humboldt noted is crucial since . . . in the study
of foreign tongues students best learn the humility that comes from
 Introduction 17

never forgetting . . . to negotiate the otherness of the world (Sommer

2004, xiv). Sommer suggests that humility is a good antidote for the
colonizing and conquering impulses that accompany essentializing
thinking.
According to Sommer, not only is teaching bilinguals about decon-
struction redundant but also importantly, bilingualism and/or decon-
struction lend themselves to more democratic and creative ways of
being in the world (the two being related in their recognition of and
openness to difference). She argues that monosystems and cultures
stifle both democracy and creativity and cause a lack of interroga-
tion of and wonder about the world. If instead we learned to toler-
ate the normally melancholic overload of language and identity, we
would train ourselves toward a humane acknowledgement of a world
haunted by damaging efforts to cleanse and to conquer (xv). Sommers
claim implies potential benefits of acknowledging the impossibility of
pure signification and identity, impossibilities evoked in bilingualism.
Rather than pointing toward a need for cohesiveness and unity (as
much US Latino Literary criticism still does), we should rather recog-
nize that clamoring for coherence is integrally related to projects such
as ethnic cleansing and colonization in general. If we could accept
or even embrace the normally melancholic overload of language and
identity we could both acknowledge the dangers of the opposite (what
Nancy would call a will to essence) and foster a more democratic way
of being in the world which is itself integrally related to creativity.
For Sommer, languages are fluid, active, and impossible to identify
as such. Words are not proper and do not stay put. They wander into
adjacent language fields, get lost in translation, pick up tics from for-
eign interference, and so cant quite mean what they say (xix). But is it
really just linguistic wanderings, translation issues, and foreign inter-
ference that prompt the meandering and inconclusivity of language?
Certainly translations and border crossings contribute to the ways in
which words do or do not work, however, they tell only a piece of the
story. Even the most elemental lessons of deconstruction illustrate that
signification itself is necessarily already problematized given the infi-
nite deferral and difference of meaning (differance). In other words,
not only do literal borders and translations infuse signification with
possibility and movement but additionally, signification itself relies
on a simultaneous presentation and withdrawal (the trace or differ-
ence that we have already discussed) that forbids full meaning and
stagnancy.
Although presented entirely tangentially, Sommer makes a signifi-
cant observation regarding temporal and ontological ramifications
of multilingualism, exile, and immigration. The melancholia that
results from existing in more than one time and being of more than
18 The Ethics of Community

one temperament is not specific to bilinguals (and here I would add

exiles or immigrants) but is rather simply a state of being proper to
all of us, which is to say, to being itself. The double-take makes a
little melancholia normal for those of us all of uswho live inside
or alongside more than one temporality and more than one tempera-
ment (Sommer 2004, 9; italics mine). The reading of Menendezs text
that follows explores this exilic aspect of being in much the same way.
Like Doris Sommer, Gustavo Perez-Firmat is interested in the effects
of multilingualism. Although starting with similar questions concern-
ing the traversing of multiple linguistic and geographical spaces, the
trajectory of Perez-Firmats argument adds nuance to that of Sommer. In
Land or Language, the final essay of his seminal The Cuban Condition,
Perez-Firmat closely examines Carpentiers Los Pasos Perdidos and con-
cludes that while language is constitutive of being (and dominates
the subject), it is nonetheless, in another sense, immovable. Unlike
Sommers claim that language wont stay put Perez-Firmat asserts
that it can only stay put insofar as the experience of the speaker solely
exists as such in a particular circumscribed territory.

A language is immovable; it is anchored in a bounded space and

cannot be displaced or transplanted. Outside of Spanish-America,
Spanish-American experience needs to be spoken in other words.
The novel thus establishes an equation between language and
place. Language is place and place is language. One cannot lose
ones place and keep its language; one cannot keep a language
without staying in place. (Perex-Firmat 1989, 142)

It is not language or signification in general that Perez-Firmat addresses

but a particular language and corresponding experience. While signi-
fication in general constitutes us and thus is implicitly location-less
(hence the Barthesian nods in his piece), a singular language can only
be in its designated territory. Being here exists according to a particu-
lar language and all of the attendant cultural, geographic, historic, and
etymological echoes that exist within a discrete territory. As such, you
cannot leave the place and keep the language.
Alongside Perez-Firmat my approach suggests that language exists
for each of us (uniquely) in a particular space, and simultaneously is
always in some degree of flux in both the general and singular senses.
The ways in which signification at its most elemental is based upon
difference has by now been well-rehearsed in a post-structural con-
text, however, it is also the case that specific languages and the unique
worlds that they speak (the aforementioned echoes) endlessly move
and morph both within and without their ostensibly discrete territo-
ries, with the distinction between the two most often impossible to
 Introduction 19

identify. Rather than a same language within a particular location

and the corresponding necessity of an other outside of it, we propose
the irrepressible irruption of difference constitutive of language and
being in any context. Further, and more importantly for my project, an
ecstatic element of language and being is particularly salient in border
crossing situations such as those of multilingualism, exile, and immi-
gration. Nancian imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness
and all of their differential echoes come into play intensely given the
palimpsest of languages and cultures that these events imply. It is in
this context that we confront the possibility and indeed necessity of
something other that emerges in scenes of cultural crossings.
Similar to the work of Perez-Firmat, Michael Ugartes Luis Cernuda
and the Politics of Exile ambitiously proposes a poetics of exile in
which the exilic experience (regardless of specific culture or context)
intensifies the tenuousness of the relationship between language and
reality and is necessarily characterized by desire and a correspond-
ing absence. The exilic voice thereby eerily speaks both the experience
of exile and the nature of language which themselves overlap (in that
they are similarly constituted by absence). Ugartes work is extremely
effective in forcing a confrontation with the interrelatedness of exile,
desire, language, and presence. Our task is to precisely unravel the
relationships between these overlapping events and ideas.
Through readings of Cernudas poetry, Ugarte demonstrates how
exile necessarily implies loss and thus absence, the experience of which
prompts desire. In this respect exilic desire works like any other, which
is to say based on absence, movement, and ultimately writing (what we
come to understand as Nancian imperative ethicity):

Immediate surroundings have meaning only in terms of a lost

geography, a place that is absent. To be displaced is to be obsessed
with memory. It is to perceive the world always in terms of rela-
tions: nostalgia, the fictional recreation of better times in relation
to a negative reading of the present. Exile is a constant process
of evaluation of the new home in relation to the one left behind
and vice versa. Adaptation to the new locus is the unfolding of a
creative process . . .
Exile intensifies the tenuousness of the relationship between
language and reality, for the life of exile is, in many ways, the life
of fiction. Nothing is apprehended without the grid of memory
and comparison; naming and re-naming are constant activities.
All the signifieds within the land of exile keep slipping away as
they are subjected to a process of mediation between the new
land and the old. Exile calls for the assimilation of a new way
20 The Ethics of Community

of being, a new language which is itself nebulous and seems

always to turn on itself. Again what remains is the ambivalence
of the wandering word without the security of a home to nour-
ish it with a single meaning. In this scheme, exile may be consid-
ered as yet another manifestation of Nietzsches prison house
of language. (Ugarte 327)

Ugarte intimates that the trace-like existence of the exile (living within
a world of constantly sliding significations) overlaps with that of lan-
guage (here we can add that if being is necessarily in language then
being too is necessarily of the trace, writing, and ultimately, exile). The
trajectory of Ugartes analysis moves from literal exile to absence to
desire to language. He repeatedly asserts that the exilic voice is one
which works very much like language and literature at their most
elemental. In other words, what constitutes language and literature is
what constitutes exile: the ongoing interplay and eruption of absence,
desire, and language.
The following chapters illustrate that being and community, writ-
ing, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness refuse our attempts to
separate them. When trying to get a handle on the precise mechanisms
involved in imperative ethicity and the manner in which being is writ-
ing, why not look to situations that bear out the logic of the trace, so to
speak? What better way to probe the intricacies of being in and as writ-
ing than to consider a situation that accentuates the tenuousness of
the relationship between language and reality? Ugarte notes Derridas
assertion that to write is to be an exile. In other words, writing (as sig-
nification) and exile are saturated by the absence and desire that both
constitute and propel them. Given the manner in which being is itself
constituted by language and writing (and we discuss this dynamic in
detail in Chapters 1 and 2), we might just as well proclaim that to be is
to be an exile.
Indeed Ugartes reading of Cernudas Como el Viento from Un
rio, un amor stresses the parallels between the structure and language
of the poem and the defining factors of exile. Not only are both built
upon an absence (significance achieved via figuration as well as a sug-
gested yet unnamed thematic in the poem, and the absence of home
in exile) but both are characterized by restlessness and movement indi-
cated by the centrality of wind in the poem and the obvious displace-
ment that is exile. Ugarte suggests that there is an illusory unity to
Cernudas poetry that is a linguistic marker of exilic desire (332).
Ugarte is plainly interested in an aspect of exilic desire that is distinct
from desire proper. In other words, there is something unique to the
exilic voice that speaks in Cernudas poetry and that can then be linked
 Introduction 21

to the nature of language itself. Literal exile speaks like language at its
most basic (the sliding signification already referenced). In contrast,
our project pursues a thinking of literal exile as a point of entry into the
workings of the metaphorical exile that constitutes being and language
(and all of the intricacies therein). Arguably, exile literature can help
us in our attempt to hold onto and grapple with these fundamental
ontological issues that escape our grasp. Through the figure of exile we
are poised to more closely examine being itself and gain insights that
would otherwise be inaccessible. So while Ugarte treats literal exile
and its fundamental relationship to the workings of literature and lan-
guage, we pursue a thinking about exile as being and the relationship
to language. We try to think how in exile, being, and language it is the
imperative of finitude that creates the spacing that makes desire and
writing, and forbids identity, their opposite.
Lene Johannessens The Lonely Figure: Memory of Exile in Ana
Menendezs In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd does a fine job of
extending a conversation concerning exile into considerations of figu-
ration. Johannessen rightly stresses the significance of re-mapping in
exilic efforts at orientation. Inevitably, she argues, the displaced will
call upon figuring processes in order to comprehend their new world
in a meaningful manner. However, the degree to which all being relies
upon a signifying process is not lost on Johannessen:

We should recognize that writing about and in exile is writing

of and about being in extremis because the literature of migra-
tion and exile necessarily intensifies the sensitivity to the tempo-
ral and spatial complexities and contradictions embodied in all
attempts at representation. Writing of exile magnifies and dra-
matizes the distance between what was and what is in narrative
exercises that tend to turn on the retrieval of home, in order to
recreate and restore familiarity, if only its memory. (55)

There is a crucial tension between the importance of representation in

exilic experience on the one hand and on being in general on the other.
Johannessen asserts very clearly that to talk about exile is to talk about
being in extremis thus linking the two realms. However, she then
proceeds to discuss events of exile, memory, and figuration as though
they are specific to an exilic situation. In this sense, her presentation
proceeds along two different levels simultaneously.
Johannessen discusses figuration, namely analogy and metaphor,
as the master tropes of migration and the way in which understand-
ing as familiarization occurs rather than as the sole manner in which
being can be (which is what the assertion concerning exile as being in
extremis suggests) (Johannessen 55). In order to apprehend and order
22 The Ethics of Community

a new and foreign world, a subject necessarily engages a process of

figuration, understanding the new world in terms of the old. As tales of
relocation from old to new and from known to unknown, migrations
stories invariably entail a certain degree of metaphorization in the
most general meaning of the word, namely as figuration. Faced with
strange surroundings, the ability to map and figurate is essential to the
process of orientation and inhabitation (Johannessen 55). This is not a
critique of making the other into the same la a Levinasian approach,
but rather a recognition that the only way to comprehend and corre-
spondingly navigate a world is to understand it in the terms available
to us. Johannessen cites Michael Seidels observation that imaginative
powers begin at the boundaries of accumulated experience, which is
another way of getting at this issue of mapping and figuration; imagi-
nation occurs in terms of the experiences of the subject (Seidel 2).
Although analogy and metaphor (figuration in general) are central
to the orienting process of the migrant or exile, are they not fundamen-
tal to being itself (as Johannessen herself suggested)? Isnt the unavoid-
ability of figuration and the manner in which it is contextualized by
the boundaries of accumulated experience another way of accessing
the centrality of writing and language and corresponding necessity of
bearing witness? Certainly border crossings demand re-mappings and
orientations that draw upon or emerge from a figuring process, but
this is the situation of being itself, as the works of Nancy and Derrida
indicate. Writing and language, which happen on the boundaries of
accumulated experience, are the terms with and within which we
map and figure, whether we be literally exiled or not. As Chapters 1
and 2 of this book illustrate, a rigorous examination of signification,
being, community, and ethics reveals their overlapping and the degree
to which they are constituted by differance, spacing, and the other to
whom there is extension. To talk about figuration as a necessary com-
ponent of exile whilst ignoring the specifics of figuration itself is to
miss several large pieces of the picture. First of all, the fact that figu-
ration is not only central to but constitutive of being is insufficiently
recognized. While Johannessen does well to observe that exile is an
extreme situation of being, it would certainly be productive to keep
this insight in view and follow the thought to its conclusion. Second,
we must unravel the complex events of figuration or writing in order
to get a more precise grasp of the specifics of exile, as both material fact
and ontological metaphor. We must consider exile not only as being in
extremis but additionally as a materialized or literal situation of these
constitutive and pre-discursive events of being. We come to see exile as
a material event of finitude, community, and the ethical imperative,
a basic yet contextually dependent human issue that becomes histori-
cally manifest in various ways.
 Introduction 23

Inviting a wide range of critical approaches, from early 1990s histori-

cist (and often essentializing) readings to more contemporary femi-
nist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial interpretations, Toni Morrisons
1987 Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved has received tremendous critical
(and popular) attention. The most acclaimed novel within the Nobel
prizewinners oeuvre, Beloved is a central focus of 311 monographs
and roughly 667 articles.30 However, in spite of the centrality of lan-
guage, community, and ethics to Beloved, there has been little invoca-
tion of Derridean ethics and no mention of Nancian community within
the critical work.31 Rather than presenting a laundry list of Beloveds
scholarly treatment (scarcely related to this book), I simply and briefly
place The Ethics of Community in relation to the studies with which it
does share pivotal interests. In distinct ways, both Satya Mohantys
1993 The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the
Postcolonial Condition and Molly Abel Traviss recent Beyond
Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrisons Beloved
and J. M. Coetzees Disgrace address themes pertinent to The Ethics as
Community.
Mohanty does a fine job of outlining the complex and troubled rela-
tionship between theory and praxis in his heavily cited 1993 Cultural
Critique piece on Beloved. Mohantys analysis reflects the contentious
relation between the postmodernists on the one hand and essen-
tializing thinkers on the other. In a by now familiar indictment
against post-structural positions, Mohanty takes issue with what he
perceives as the postmodernist rejection of the category of experi-
ence (since it is an unreliable source of knowledge). Given this alleged
rejection, postmodernism can neither provide an objective truth nor
account for the historical material world. Mohantys is a call to reclaim
moral universals, a task that he suggests can be accomplished by
the co-substantiation of the (cultural or historical) particular and the
(moral) universal (Mohanty 1993).
Mohanty reads Beloved as containing moral universals based upon
an objective ethics and knowledge that are visible through the trans-
formation of its characters, most notably Sethe and Paul D. (pt. 25).
While this study shares Mohantys interest in exploring the complex
relationship between the theoretical and material and a potential ethi-
cal imperative, it differs significantly in its approach. A deconstructive
ethics is most precisely a turning away from or refusal of a groundable
and objective truth. The sacred (a complicated notion to which we
return throughout the book) component of being and ethics emerges
from undecideabiity rather than empirical certainties. Mohanty in some
way anticipates this response and claims it insufficiently pragmatic but
we in turn argue that the unworkability of community and ethics is
exactly the place from which it derives its power and, importantly, can
24 The Ethics of Community

make a substantial difference in our material lives. Vis--vis the same

text (Beloved), we illustrate that an eruption of finitude and impera-
tive ethicity can and does invoke and provoke theoretical and material
transformations. Rather than either reified as objective or neglected
as unreliable, experience is the site of the ethical event of community
and thus a profoundly relevant topic. The location for the continual
interface between the material and the theoretical, experience needs to
be redefined in a manner distinct from Mohantys final conclusion of
an attainable empirical one. We trace this rethinking in our treatment
of Beloved vis--vis the thought of both the postcolonialist Paul Gilroy
and continental philosopher David Wood.
Molly Abel Traviss recent Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing
and Ethics in Toni Morrisons Beloved and J. M. Coetzees Disgrace
comes far closer to the theoretical underpinnings and articulations of
this project. Travis shares our deconstructive understanding of ethics
and reads Beloved accordingly. Her conclusions concerning the radical
alterity of narrative and the ethical possibilities echo our own; simi-
larly, her stress upon the fragmentary and unsublateable character of
Beloved the text and character is compelling and instructive. Rather
than attempt to build a cohesive and easily applicable ethics, Abel
illustrates how Beloved consistently denies such definitive appropria-
tion and pragmatic rendering. The combination of narrative distancing
and empathy combines to create compelling characters and situations
whose ethical situatedness cannot be readily apprehended. Travis sub-
mits that ethical thrusts are locatable in an element of undecideability
rather than in any objective moral insistence.
Our task is to augment, and even fill in, Traviss analysis insofar
as she shares our theoretical ground concerning the nature of ethics
as an openness to alterity and yet fails to bring any kind of nuance or
explanation to the picture. To assert that It is only through openness
to alterity that there can be an ethical relation is all fine and well but
what exactly does this mean (Travis 2010, 232)? The complex history
of considerations of alterity and ethics is not even mentioned much
less explained. From Heidegger to Levinas, to Derrida, and Nancy (to
name only a few), there is certainly a long history of engagement to
this issue. It is precisely here that continental philosophy and literature
must have an enhanced and far more vital relationship.
In spite of a similar ethical consideration, an integral part of our
analysis of community and Beloved posits a point antithetical to Traviss
own. While we emphasize movement between beings, Travis under-
scores an ethical thrust of a side by sideness of stories: The full ethi-
cal force of Beloveds design derives from this side-by-side relationship
between stories that do not coalesce or resolve themselves into a har-
mony (237). While we certainly agree that harmony or resolution
 Introduction 25

is not a part of an ethical movement in deconstructive ethics, it is pre-

cisely this side-by-sideness that we will call into question. As a result
of the impossibility of relation between a side-by-side structure, it cannot
account for the fundamental and ecstatic movement that, according to
deconstructive ethics, constitutes being in and as community.

To be interrupted by finitude or exposed by community is to be jolted

out of a habitual and correspondingly (in some manner) comfortable or
familiar space. Additionally, interruption is a stopping point, a break, a
mark of dis-continuity, and often can be irritating, frustrating, or sim-
ply discombobulating as a result. In this spirit of healthy discomfort,
the interruptions that hopefully follow are not necessarily altogether
pleasant. When we experience ourselves as fragmented, as incapable
of catching up to the word/idea that leads us (and makes us) it is eerie,
unheimlich (Heidegger and his followers), inaugurating (Beloved),
and loca (In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd). However, in spite of
the dis-ease that it elicits, passing through such an experience (that
we can never have in the sense of self-possession), necessarily leaves
us not-the-same in all of the senses of this phrase (both not one with
ourselves and distinct from before). Among other things, interruption
precludes identity, authenticity, self-possession, communing commu-
nity, origin, and home. In turn, it simultaneously gives and is spac-
ing, exposure, sharing, non-communing community, language, the
other, responsibility, and justice. These are the central motifs of all of
the chapters that follow, philosophical and literary alike. It is my hope
that closely examining them exposes us to the exposure with which
they are all in some way concerned, which is to say, I hope for beings
interruption.
1 Nancy and Derrida: On Ethics
and the Same (Infinitely Different)
Constitutive Events of Being

We begin by exploring the relationship between ethics, writing,

finitude, and spacing as they are presented in Nancys essay The
Free Voice of Man (Retreating the Political), which is in some manner
a response to Derridas The Ends of Man (Margins) The relation-
ship between these events of being cannot be easily untangled. By
nature, each moment is radically implicated by the others such that
there exists neither foundation nor chronological ordering. Rather,
we are in a realm in which being can best be understood as a series
of singular ruptures or interruptions that precisely and radically
turn away from any sense of grounding or order. As such, Nancys
thoughts are necessarily difficult to fully grasp. Indeed, in what fol-
lows our discussion of being will be contextualized by the notion
that there is a discursively inaccessible imperative to all philosophi-
cal discourses that ultimately implicates being in and as writing,
finitude, and spacing. As such, not being able to fully conceptually
grasp these ideas is precisely the point (as they are not accessible to
logical or philosophical examination). Thus our project is to expose
the manner in which being is fundamentally intertwined with the
exhaustion of the philosophical endeavor.
The second portion of this chapter explores the ways that Nancys
approaches can be augmented and amplified by Derridean discus-
sions of ethics. Through a consideration of Derridas essays Poetics
and Politics of Witnessing and Rams (Sovereignties in Question) and
the notions of bearing witness, testimony, poetic language, and carry-
ing discussed there, we interpret possible points of intersection and
distinction between the two thinkers. The most central similarities
involve the notion of a radically prior being-with that is constitutive
of being as well as a consideration of the limit of discursive thought.
Additionally, while Nancys thought is more intricate concerning the
specificities of these issues, Derridas is more willing to discuss the
nature of the experiences of being-with and the impasse inherent to
the philosophical.
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 27

Our approach is twofold insofar as we scrutinize the ethical impera-

tive both conceptually and as an experience of being. (In spite of the
oppositional framework presented here, interrogating the concept/
experience dichotomy is an important final step in this exposition.)
Conceptually, we must do our best to unravel and articulate the
intricate complexities of the imperative as it is related to constitutive
events of being, despite the understanding that we will not be able to
fully reach our object of thought (as it is inaccessible to philosophi-
cal inquiry). Examined as an experience through which being passes
(again and again and each time singularly), the events of the imperative,
finitude, writing, and spacing that constitute being will be considered
as in some way concretely relevant. The final portion of the chapter
exposes potential problems with, as well as possibilities of, discussing
these issues in the context of the material or historical world.
According to Jean-Luc Nancy in The Free Voice of Man, within
any philosophical endeavor there lies an imperative that drives the
thought or exploration at hand. Whether implicitly or explicitly pre-
sented, a we must lurks or announces itself within the discourse,
immediately, always-already placing us within an ethical realm. The
question From where does the imperative come? assumes a particu-
lar power contextualized by the radical lack of a final signified within a
post-structural framework. This question concerning the origin of the
imperative opens up numerous pathways of consideration. First, Nancy
asserts that the philosophical discourse itself invents and presupposes
the imperative that fuels it. In other words, the origin of the imperative
of any philosophical discourse is that philosophical discourse (it must
create its own justification): Because philosophical discourse also, if
not primarily, always consists precisely in determining its obligation
by itself, in producing the knowledge of its end, and thus the theory
of its duty (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 36). Second, if the we
must of any and all philosophical discourse originates in the discourse
itself, it is not theoretically or discursively justifiable: this il faut, this
It is necessary, is unjustifiable, it anticipates everything that it would
be necessary to know (34). If the discourse creates its own justifica-
tion or imperative then the imperative cannot logically precede and
be outside of the discourse, as an imperative is generally, traditionally
considered to be. Thus by implication we must rethink our conception
of the imperative and philosophical discourse. Third, Nancy observes
that the imperative, any initial il faut, is radically unavoidable as
it shows or inserts itself in any and all philosophical discourses.
Given this irrepressible showing, we cannot avoid the question of the
imperative while simultaneously we cannot (philosophically) justify it.
These three observations concerning the imperative of philosophical
discourse are sufficiently complex as to merit significant consideration.
28 The Ethics of Community

In what follows, we attempt to unravel and elucidate some of the com-

plexities to be found therein.
Before considering the ways that a philosophical discourse invents
its own imperative, it is useful to make several clarifying distinctions
between an imperative as it is traditionally conceived and the impera-
tive as Nancy would like to think of it (although ultimately we will
see that the latter inevitably exists even within a discourse that denies
it or that works from a traditional point of departure concerning an
imperative and its relationship to an ensuing discourse). One of the
central difficulties in firmly grasping this piece is that Nancy invokes
(without directly thematizing) three different kinds of imperative that
ultimately can be traced back to one. The first is the imperative within a
traditional philosophical discourse that specifically maintains the exis-
tence of an extra-linguistic, absolute foundation from which meaning,
knowledge, and morality emerge. The second type of imperative exists
within a philosophical discourse that fails to or scarcely interrogates its
own implicit imperative and proceeds as though it is a given. Here, the
imperative can be traced back to some sort of immanent foundation or
final signified like that referenced above. The only distinction between
the first and second imperative then is the discourse within which it is
placed; the first discourse readily acknowledges the absolute founda-
tion from which the imperative is thought to emerge and the second
does not. The imperative itself, however, is considered to come from
a place that is extra-linguistic and thus in some sense is understood
as unimpeachable. (Examples might be as follows: Human Progress,
Nature, Science, etc. Certainly we can readily see such notions func-
tioning in many facets of human life today.) The third type of impera-
tive exists within a discourse such as that of Nancy or Derrida where
there is an acknowledgement that the imperative within discourse
cannot be discursively or philosophically proven and rather exists in
another realm entirely. Here, the imperative is conceived as showing
itself rather than proving itself: . . . philosophical discourse shows
itself having to deconstruct itself (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997,
37). While all three of these kinds of discourse have different relation-
ships to the imperative within their own projects, according to Nancy
and Derrida, all three necessarily contain within them the same imper-
ative which is the one that inserts itself in a showing in every philo-
sophical discourse. As we will see, such an imperative is precisely and
radically other than the absolute foundation upon which traditional
philosophical discourse grounds itself. Similarly, Nancys exposition
in The Free Voice of Man distinguishes between the philosophical,
or what he also alludes to as a realm of proof, and the nondiscursive
or nontheoretical (which is the home of the imperative as we need to
think of it).
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 29

In what sense, or how and why, precisely, do all philosophical dis-

courses determine their obligation by themselves? This is so simply
because in a post-structural framework there is no final signified, no
imminent or absolute source or fount of meaning outside of a linguistic
realm from which an imperative might emerge. Thus, if the impera-
tive cannot be attributed to or located within an extra-textual space (in
other words, if there is no meaning-making source outside of the text
or language) it must necessarily emerge from within the text. In the
event of a radical lack of grounding of any kind of a priori foundation
from which an imperative, obligation, or duty might come, we are left
acknowledging that there can be no imperative as it is traditionally
conceived and that any imperative that does exist must necessarily:
(1) emerge from the text or language itself; (2) be radically unlike a
traditionally conceived imperative; (3) be philosophically unprovable
(which is to say, exist in a realm or emerge from a place that is other
than philosophical discourse or the realm of the provable) or inacces-
sible to philosophical discourse.
Why is the imperative as Nancy wants to conceive it entirely inac-
cessible to the realm of proof, which is to say, to philosophical thought?
Nancy answers this question briefly, elliptically, but precisely: this il
faut, this It is necessary, is unjustifiable, it anticipates everything that
it would be necessary to know (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 34).
In other words, it would be necessary to know in advance (antici-
pates) what it would be necessary to know (the imperative) in order for
the it is necessary (the imperative) to function, or to get its driving
force. It is perhaps useful to think of this first in traditional terms in
order to understand the manner in which the logic of the imperative is
itself inherently faulty, which is to say (since we are in a philosophical
realm), illogical. Traditionally conceived, philosophical discourses can
be said to be composed of the following sequentially ordered elements:
(1) an imperative that sets the discourse in motion or lays its ground-
work; (2) a corresponding approach; (3) a corresponding discourse;
(4) a corresponding knowledge. In order for such a system to function,
both the imperative and writing must be conceived as entirely distinct
from each other and from being. To sustain the logic of philosophi-
cal discourse so conceived, the imperative must exist independently of
writing and being and instead must emerge from an unquestionable,
imminently meaningful ground that determines its nature. Consistent
with the meaning of the imperative, the approach, discourse, and
resulting knowledge all emerge after the imperative and in the order of
the above list. However, Nancy points out that this is a logical impos-
sibility because the imperative cannot come from an unimpeachable
ground that would necessarily exist outside of a discourse and rather
is always-already implicated in a discourse itself. It cannot know and
30 The Ethics of Community

direct without already being bound up in a whole system of knowl-

edge and writing and all that that entails. It cannot exist as before and
outside because by logic an imperative would anticipate and would
already know and in some sense exist within the knowledge that it is
supposed to engender. As such, we cannot prove the existence of an
imperative but rather the imperative shows or inserts itself within phil-
osophical discourse. This other imperative demands the deconstruction
of philosophical discourse and it does so in the event of a showing. This
is an entirely different way of thinking about philosophical discourse
and the imperative that inevitably lies therein.
Given the unjustifiable nature of the imperative as it is traditionally
conceived within philosophical discourse, and this new understanding
of an imperative to deconstruct discourse that manifests as a show-
ing rather than in the realm of the provable (or the philosophical),
we are left with an inexorable paradox: the philosophical endeavor is
understood to contain within it the imperative that demands for its
own deconstruction thus implying in some sense that philosophy itself
demands its own end (or, we are at the end of philosophy as we have
traditionally conceived it).1 There is a command to prove the unprov-
able nature of philosophical discourse, which is another way of saying
that there is a demand within a philosophical discourse to deconstruct
itself (illustrating where the philosophical, logical endeavor meets its
impasse). However, this demand itself is discursively unjustifiable (we
must prove the impossibility of proving); the imperative to deconstruct
itself cannot itself be philosophically justified because the imperative
does not exist within the realm of proof. How are we to respond in
the wake of such a paradox? Nancy suggests, following Derrida in his
critique of Levinas, that rather than exalting this phenomenon to a
transphilosophical mystery, we need to examine and discuss it as pre-
cisely and rigorously as possible (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 41).
Additionally, in Poetics and Politics of Witnessing, Derrida describes
a possible response to this unheimlich experience of being within that
which is inaccessible to logical or provable thought. Such an experience
is marked by the inability to have the knowledge of that which
cannot be proven. Here, the imperative is not accessible to discursive
thought and it is precisely that inaccessibility that is experienced or felt
in some way. For Derrida, the response is one involving a compulsion
to repeat:

What we are calling here the force, the energy, the virtue, and
above all in its language, is what makes us have to cite it, again
and again with an irresistible compulsion . . . What we have
here is a compulsion to cite and recite, to repeat what we under-
stand without completely understanding it, feeling at work in
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 31

the economy of the ellipsis a power more powerful than that of

meaning and perhaps even than that of truth, of the mask which
would manifest itself as mask. The reciting compulsion, the by
heart desire, stems from this limit to intelligibility or transpar-
ency of meaning. (Derrida 2005, 87)2

In addition to being radically inaccessible to philosophical thought,

the nondiscursive imperative is always activated thus prompting us to
interrogate it. But how do we interrogate or even access this we must?
Must we interrogate the we must? In the philosophically provable
realm we cannot because we cannot provide the imperative for inter-
rogating the imperative. Indeed, we can no longer provide the impera-
tive for any discourse but the experience is most aporetic here when the
discourse precisely concerns an interrogation of the nature of discourse
and, more precisely, the imperative that drives it. However, according
to Nancy, this nonphilosophical imperative does not need to be justified
philosophically. Such a claim is in some sense intuitive as the nondis-
cursive imperative exists as precisely other than the philosophical and
thus in its nature would resist such an appropriation. As Nancy thema-
tizes directly, duty in this nondiscursive sense is that which . . . it is not
necessary to legitimize in discourse . . . a duty which, while still remain-
ing a duty, would decidedly turn aside from the philosophical duty that
philosophy has always deduced or wanted to deduce from theoretical
reasons . . . (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 37). In other words, not
only is there not an imperative to philosophically justify the nonphilo-
sophical imperative, but the nonphilosophical imperative is precisely a
turning away from philosophy as it is traditionally conceived in terms
of theoretical reasoning within the realm of the provable.3
Exactly what happens in the event of the nondiscursively acces-
sible imperative that imposes itself? What constitutes such an occur-
rence and how does it relate to being? In order to effectively respond
to these questions, we must examine the inextricable link between the
imperative (or duty or obligation) and finitude, which Nancy locates in
and discusses from the point of departure of Heideggers Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics. It is this inextricable link that the next few pages
attempt to explain:

A being that is fundamentally interested in a duty knows itself in a

not-yet-having fulfilled, so that what indeed it should do becomes
questionable for it. This not-yet of a fulfilling, which is itself still
undetermined, gives us a clue that a being whose innermost inter-
est is with a duty is fundamentally finite. (Heidegger 1990, 147)

It is useful to call attention to the complex notion of finitude itself

within this framework. Vast in its implications, finitude is that which
32 The Ethics of Community

simultaneously radically denies the possibility of completion (in

the sense of a teleological orientation) and appropriation (rendering
impossible the imposition of an absolute meaning). For a being who
is fundamentally finite, the completion of a goal and a satisfaction in
firm ground are impossibilities. Following Heidegger, Nancy asserts
that a being who is concerned with duty is a being who is fundamen-
tally finite. As that which is necessarily in a position of incompletion
(a not-yet-having-fulfilled) the being concerned with duty can nei-
ther finish the job nor even, properly speaking, identify it. Arguably,
as a still undetermined . . . not-yet of a fulfilling duty already places
us in a nondiscursive realm, which, strictly speaking, can be neither
identified nor defi ned.4 If a being concerned with duty is a being who
knows itself as fundamentally fi nite, then we might assert that fi ni-
tude emerges or perhaps even shows itself in the event of duty, obli-
gation, or ethics. Indeed Nancy indicates that we must understand
finitude as ethical, as the opening of ethics. We can clearly see fini-
tude as ethical (or in the realm of duty) insofar as it renders beings
completion both in the sense of a goal or end (telos) and in the sense of
its own radical fragmentation (death), impossible. (In other words, it
is because of finitude that being cannot complete itself.) As the depro-
priation of the end, finitude is ethical. But similarly, the ethical or that
which exists in the realm of a duty or obligation is fi nite as the quote
from Heideggers Kantbuch revealed: . . . a being whose innermost
interest is with a duty is fundamentally finite (Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy 1997, 40). Indeed at this point it is nearly impossible to discern
any distinction between the ethical and fi nitude; both are constituted
by a depropriation of the end and exist as events rather than founda-
tions. It may be most useful to think of finitude as ethical insofar as
finitude necessarily entails a component of duty or there is some sense
in which it demands to be thought, which is another way of saying it
commands us to think of it in the way of an obligation. But simultane-
ously, finitude is the opening of ethics (which is distinct from being
ethical) insofar as fi nitude is the necessary context or space in which
ethics can open or occur; ethics must be as finitude, a formulation
itself indicating that just as finitude is ethical, the ethical is finite. As
such, finitude and the ethical indicate distinct elements of a singular
event of being.
As previously noted, if fi nitude depropriates the end and duty is
itself finite (or pertaining to or entangled with finitude) then duty is
also that which denies the possibility of an end. Finitude is the depro-
priation of the end . . . Hence duty might thus be said to indicate the
openingand the question of the proper ethos of the non-proper
(Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 40). As such, duty indicates the
opening of the ethos of that which is a finite being or is non-proper.
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 33

Engaged in the experience of duty, exposed to, in, and as fi nitude,

being cannot understand itself as a proper-being and in contrast, is
spaced.5 In this context, the opening indicated by duty (of a being
who is not a proper being) is an unheimlich ethos. The ethos here
is unheimlich insofar as the goal toward which this ethos is oriented
is ultimately characterized by a denial of the end of the (or any) goal,
or, in some sense, the opening up onto the impossibility of arrival. Or
as James Gilbert-Walsh so precisely frames it in his insightful essay
Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension of Nancys Thought:
This ethos is unheimlich inasmuch as its relation to its proper end
is the very depropriation of the end (Gilbert-Walsh 2000, 47). As a
result, a being experiencing itself in duty experiences itself as a finite
being and as such is implicated in this unheimlich ethos involving a
non-possession of its own end.
But what of the role of writing in this unheimlich ethos characterized
by an opening into finitude? In some sense, this is the central question
that Nancy poses to Derrida in The Free Voice of Man. Hence he
writes: The thought of writing has not written the ethics of this duty
(of the question as to its propriety and its impropriety). It has let us
know nothing beyond the response that we have just read. But could
it be said, for all that, to have maintained responsibility intact? This
is what we must know . . . (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 41). Is
there a way of thinking through Derridean writing or differance that
will allow us a recourse to duty? Although this thought had not been
significantly thematized by Derrida at the time of The Free Voice of
Man, Nancy opens the possibility that a Derridean notion of writ-
ing had nonetheless maintained responsibility intact, which is to say,
allowed or perhaps even encouraged a space for its activation.6 Given
the association that has already been established between finitude
and duty, we may say that insofar as difference, which is nothing, is
therefore finitude, which in its turn is nothing, writing is immedi-
ately implicated with the question of duty or obligation and as such the
ethical realm (46). This is the case because duty belongs essentially to
finitude (or duty occurs in and as finitude even while finitude occurs
in and as a duty), and finitude is itself writing (46). If duty is an essen-
tial part of finitude and finitude is writing, then writing (as finitude)
is always-already implicated with duty. In other words, as the space or
location of noncoincidence, of the radical denial of any kind of identity,
writing (as difference) places being within a realm of infinite deferral
and non-presence, or finitude. Here, the duty in which writing is impli-
cated is both brought forth by difference or writing, and is that which
differs or defers itself. The interconnection and overlapping of duty,
finitude, and writing is thus established. In a formulation that entirely
denies a logic of sequence or conditions of possibility, Nancy proposes
34 The Ethics of Community

a thinking in which writing is always-already implicated with a sense

of duty, and indeed writing, duty, and finitude cannot be disentangled
but rather indicate distinct aspects of the same (infinitely different)
event of being.
Thus, we can assert that Nancys proposal, and answer to the ques-
tion concerning the articulation of an ethos within a Derridean con-
ception of writing, is that insofar as writing or infi nite difference is
finitude, and finitude is itself of duty, writing does indeed always-
already invoke an obligation or duty. In the spirit of the non-realizable
duty already indicated, duty differs or defers itself, which in some
sense is simply a more intricate sense of the Heideggerian notion of
the not-yet fulfilling of a duty which is itself uncertain. As we would
expect, in the context of writing or difference, duty is noncoinciden-
tal, appropriatable or sublatable. More radically and precisely framed,
duty cannot exist in any other way than in the way of writing, which
is to say, in the way of difference and deferral. As such, we must look
at duty not just in the context of writing, but as fundamentally related
to writing insofar as both are infused with or have their determining
thrust in a Heideggerian sense of finitude. In fact, we could reasonably
propose that the differing and deferring of duty is indeed the same as
the differing or deferring of writing.
But not only are writing and duty so fundamentally entangled,
Nancy suggests that difference brings forth duty by itself (Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 46). Here, difference seems to be the privi-
leged anti-structure. It is from difference that duty emerges. Any
consideration of writing must therefore necessarily involve (whether
made explicit or not) a sense of duty. However, writing and duty are
both finitude. As the infi nite deferral of presence, writing is finite and
as that which only knows itself in a not-yet having fulfilled, duty is
also finitude. In this case, writing and duty highlight a distinct but
overlapable aspect of fi nitude. Thus, in an enigmatic formulation,
difference or writing evokes duty, while duty is necessarily imbued
with difference or writing. Any attempt to locate the first moment
or event from which all others proceed is doomed to fail. Being is
always-already implicated in fi nitude, writing, and duty. These three
moments all involve a simultaneous lack of a proper end and self-
coincidence, and as such, imply deferral. Establishing any kind of cau-
sality or foundation is impossible and indeed there is some sense in
which this thought eludes capture. As is often the case with Nancys
work, this discussion of duty, writing, and fi nitude largely involves
highlighting different aspects of a single (yet irrevocably multiple)
event ontological of being.
But what is the nature of this difference that evokes duty or obliga-
tion? . . . difference obliges, that difference (if it has anything) has
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 35

the structure and nature of an obligation, prescription, and injunction,

even if these terms can no longer be understood in accordance with its
ethico-metaphysical concept. Difference obliges differently (Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 46). It is evident here that more than simply
evoking duty, difference is itself structured by duty or obligation:
difference (if it has anything) has the structure and nature of an obli-
gation (46). Thus the very structure or composition of writing is itself
duty or obligation; writing is composed of obligation or as Nancy indi-
cates, the nature of writing is obligation, prescription, and injunction
(46). In some sense then writing and obligation are barely discernable
here. In classical terms, the defining factor of writing is obligation, pre-
scription, and injunction. Thus, difference or writing is by nature obli-
gation, but what is obligation, by nature? Of what is it composed and
how does it function?
The addition of the terms prescription and injunction provide
some insight regarding the determining factors of this (nondiscur-
sive) obligation that occurs in and as writing. Additionally, we already
know that this obligation that emerges from, in, and as writing is in
some way unique given that it obliges differently and cannot be
understood in accordance with its ethico-metaphysical concept (46).
If we are to understand this obligation inherent to writing as one syn-
onymous with prescription and injunction, there is some sort of a com-
mand at work; the obligation herein obliges. Indeed it is at this point in
The Free Voice of Man that Nancy shifts from the terms obligation
to imperative. But we must not forget that the obligation or impera-
tive under scrutiny takes place or happens in and as writing (or differ-
ence), and, further, is inseparable from finitude.
In the last analysis, the imperative within writing that is finitude does
nothing except to command and defer sense or, at least, inscribes its
differance (48). In other words, the imperative commands that sense
be infinitely deferred and never identical with itself. This is intuitively
accessible since we understand that the imperative takes place in and as
writing, which itself indicates that there can be no identity or presence
of meaning or being. However, the provocative insight that we attain
with this observation is that it is precisely the imperative within or of
writing that renders coincidence impossible. Most assuredly, writing is
differance, but here we extend that thought to conceptualize the event
of the imperative as that which evokes the spacing of differance that
renders identity impossible. There is again the sense here that we are
simply getting an even more precise and detailed look at these constitu-
tive events of being.7
Arguably, spacing is privileged in Nancys analysis of obligation,
writing, and finitude and grants us further insights. Indeed we might
even say that obligation, writing, and finitude all enact a spacing while
36 The Ethics of Community

simultaneously they are structured themselves by spacing. For

example, not only does obligation evoke the spacing in and as writing,
but further it is the imperative that renders indiscernible the indices
of the addresser and the addressee (48). There is some sense in which
the inscription of difference in and of the imperative enacts a spacing
in such a way that the I and the you are as rigorously associated
as they are disassociated (49). Here, it is not even a question of rein-
troducing an Other into the originary sphere; it is a matter of an alter-
ity or an otherness of the ego in its egoity and even before any alter
ego . . . on the register of sense, as on that of the subject, the imperative
is only or only makes spacing. The imperative spaces (49). There is
something in the imperative that happens in and as writing that spaces
being such that there is a being and an other of being in being. Here we
find an analysis and description of the noncoincidental ego. In writing,
in the event of the imperative, both constituted by and constituting
finitude, being is spaced in and from itself. The crucial element that
we must bear in mind is the fact that it is specifically the imperative,
entangled with finitude, existing in and as writing, that spaces being
in such a way. Being is constitutively spaced by the imperative that
exists in and as writing, and in and as finitude. Thus, being is always-
already constitutively implicated by, with, and in the imperative that
spaces. Nancys term for this imperative that spaces that is constitutive
of being is imperative ethicity. Thus, the inextricable link between fini-
tude, the imperative, writing, and hence the spacing of and as being is
identified. These four events cannot be separated and, indeed, in the
final analysis, can all be said to indicate distinct aspects of a ruptur-
ous single event of being, which is itself a spacing between, in, and
that is being. For Nancy, the imperative is an implicit and constitutive
ontological element of being and it acts in and as being as a spacing.
The imperative happens in and from writing and writing is consti-
tuted by finitude and spaces being. The spacing enacted in writing and
as an imperative constitutes being as spaced, as a being and an other
than being, a radical alterity within and as being.8
Thus we may conclude that in every discourse, indeed in every
inscription or writing, there is an imperative, an obligation toward
which we have already been called. A groundless ground, imperative
ethicity, if it is anything, is a demand to be as an interruption, as an
event that cuts through and denies any and all attempts at totalization,
sublation, and identity.9
What is the relationship between Nancys thought on the imperative,
finitude, and writing and Derridas notions of bearing witness, testi-
mony, and carrying as they are outlined in Poetics and Politics of
Witnessing and Rams from Sovereignties in Question? Most saliently,
a Derridean notion of bearing witness and testimony is inextricably
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 37

linked to poetic language: All responsible witnessing engages a poetic

experience of language (Derrida 2005, 66). Derrida (playfully) seeks to
prove this hypothesis within Poetics and Politics of Witnessing
where he makes the case that any and all bearing witness necessarily
involves the paradoxical and aporetic experience of the presentation of
a secret as a secret. I propose that such a conceptualization is consistent
with Nancys analysis of writing and, further, that the central points of
this analysis can be said to play themselves out most saliently in the
context of poetic language. As that which calls attention to its non-
referential nature, and thus in some way thematizes the space between
the signifier and the signified, poetic language can be considered that
which is more akin to a non-totalizing linguistic event. As such, poetic
language is a space where differance can more freely find its playing
room. Inhabiting the space and spacing of writing (particularly poetic
language), being can experience its finitude in a manner distinct from
that of a language which seeks strict representation.10
Derridas proposition regarding witnessing is that it must engage a
poetic experience of language insofar as it is incapable of expressing
or directly indicating that to which it is bearing witness. The radical
irrecuperability (and hence inevitably secret nature) of any experience
of being to which one might bear witness results from the lack of full
presence of being and the world. If I were fully present to myself, and
capable of achieving or reaching fully present meanings of the world
in which it would be immediately intelligible and re-presentable, then
I would have a guaranteed testimony that could become a demon-
stratable theoretical truth (Derrida 2005, 68). According to Derrida,
this is precisely the antithesis of testimony as testimony, which is com-
prehensible precisely as that which cannot be proven or is a secret that
must manifest itself as a secret.

The secret always remains the very experience of bearing wit-

ness, the privilege of the witness for whom no one can be substi-
tuted, because he is, in essence, the only one to know what he has
seen, lived, felt; he must thus be believed, taken at his word, at
the very moment when he is making public a secret that nonethe-
less remains secret. A secret as secret. (88)

Indeed the truth of the secret, the singular experience of the being
who bears witness, cannot be fully appropriated even by the wit-
ness and thus can surely not be re-presented as a provable truth
in testimony. And it is precisely the imperative that spaces in and
as writing and that manifests as fi nitude that radically denies the
possibility of complete appropriation and transmittal. As such, we
are left with a bearing witness and a testimony that is invariably
38 The Ethics of Community

poetic insofar as it denies the representation of a fully present mean-

ing to a fully present being. As Derrida says, the poem engages in
a signing and de-signing of itself in a single gesture sealing and
unsealing itself. . . sealing while (by, through) unsealing itself,
as a poetic text (67). This kind of anti-structure should by now be
familiar to us. Poetic language signifies or means by and in a simul-
taneous movement of signifying and un-signifying, which is to
say that it achieves meaning via the process or event of denying the
full meaning of that which it signifies. Both Nancys and Derridas
analysis here, one of originary ethicity and the other of bearing wit-
ness and testimony, respectively, evoke the same trace like structure
of being. In each case or event, being has the structure of the trace as
an imperative, which is to say that it must efface itself.11 The impera-
tive invoked here is one of necessity. Being cannot not efface itself or
be being other than in the structure of the trace, indicating that it is
both being and other than being (a fi nite being), and thus composed
of imperative ethicity.
Similarly, or in the same gesture or event, the act of bearing wit-
ness underscores the finitude of being insofar as it is precisely beings
nonidentity (or finitude) that necessitates or demands that testimony
can only be the presentation of a secret as secret, which is to say can
only take place (responsibly) as poetic language (which itself under-
stands the impossibility of full presence which is to say the imperative
of finitude).

The poem bears witness. We dont know about what and for
what, about whom and for whom, in bearing witness for bearing
witness, it bears witness. But it bears witness. As a result, what
it says of the witness it also says of itself as witness or as bear-
ing witness. As poetic bearing witness. Can we not, then, here
transfer to bearing witness, to this poetic bearing witness, as to
that which in all bearing witness must always appear as poetic?
(Derrida 2005, 87)

In other words, when one bears witness (and in some sense one is
always bearing witness to or before the other), one is inevitably engaged
in a constant signing and de-signing of meaning (or implicated in the
logic of the trace), which is to say, within writing, and when responsi-
bly enacted, poetic language.
The next conceptual juxtaposition we engage involves a Nancian
notion of finitude and sharing and a Derridean conception of carry-
ing as it is outlined in Rams from Sovereignties in Question. Nancy
posits sharing in The Inoperative Community as being as spaced by
being via its encounter with the other of an other being. Here, my other
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 39

of being touches or encounters your other of being and being is thus

shared or divided and is constitutively spaced and implicated with a
radically irrecuperable alterity. Nancian sharing is extremely difficult
to think insofar as he places the being of being as happening as an
event simultaneous to sharing (which necessarily implicates an other
being) or what we will see Derrida here calls carrying. In contrast,
Derridean carrying involves more of a chronological ordering inso-
far as before I am I carry (Derrida 2005, 162). However, despite this
distinction between sharing and carrying the two notions bear much
in common as we witness in the following passage:

To carry no longer has the meaning of to comprise, to include,

to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself for to bear
oneself toward the infinite improbability of the other, toward the
encounter with its absolute transcendence in the very inside of
me, that is to say, in me outside of me. And I only am, I can only
be, I must only be starting from this strange, dislocated bearing
of the infinitely other in me . . . Before I am I carry. Before being
me, I carry the other. I carry you and must do so, I owe it to you.
I remain before, owing, in debt and owing to you before you. I
must keep myself in your reach but I must also be your grasp.
(Derrida 2005, 162)

As already indicated, the defining elements of this Derridean notion

of carrying themselves involve a Nancian notion of finitude as the
imperative that spaces. Carrying radically denies the possibility of sub-
lating or assimilating the other from the point of departure or frame of
a cohesive or unified ego or self. In such a case, the alterity of the other is
entirely denied as the other simply becomes incorporated into the self.
In contrast, Derridean constitutive carrying involves being as toward
the undeniable and radical otherness of the other. Carrying situates
being as bearing oneself toward the impossibility of comprehending
the other and rather touching or encountering alterity as absolute
transcendence or as entirely beyond being. Being as moving toward
is a being that is spaced by the imperative and is itself determined by
finitude (the being of duty according to Nancy and indeed the very
definition of being as it is conceptualized in The Inoperative Community).
As such, being is not one or not an identity and thus comprises being
and beings own other of being. Like in Nancys sharing, Derridean
carrying involves my other of being encountering your other of being
and both of these beings are necessarily finite, which is to say spaced
by the imperative. Most provocatively, this event is not secondary to an
already established foundation of being, but rather exists as the very
condition of possibility of being. Being is constituted by carrying or
40 The Ethics of Community

sharing. And I only am, I can only be, I must only be starting from this
strange, dislocated bearing of the infinitely other in me (Derrida 2005,
162). In other words, being only is insofar as it begins from an origin-
less place of dis-location that radically denies any and all senses of
foundation or ground. Further, this constitutive movement of my other
of being bearing toward your other of being always-already implicates
the other in my being at its most fundamental. As such, before I am
I carry the other. In some sense, literally, I cannot be without you.
Before I can have a being or be as a being, I am already bound up with
or more precisely toward you. Thus it is evident that in order to be
at all, I must be as accessible to you or as Derrida frames it, I must
keep myself within your reach; we must, in some way, be together.
Moreover, I am and must be your grasp or that reach without arrival
of being toward being. The imperative of finitude that spaces could not
be more evident here. Derridas repetition of the must indicates the
obligation or duty that is inextricable from finitude, which according to
Nancy itself spaces. The being-toward of the above passage involves an
imperative (I must) that prohibits being as an identity and further des-
ignates beings fundamental spacing that involves a movement toward
without arrival.

Now What?
Conceptualizing Nancy and Derridas philosophical discourses on
the constitutive events of being and their relevance for thoughts on
ethics or relations to an other might leave us with some sense that
there is something yet to be done. Such abstract and difficult (and at
times poetic) theoretical elaborations upon being and responsibility
no doubt further our understanding of meanings of being. But how
do these discourses affect our actual lives in the world of concrete
existence? Nancy himself poses this question directly at the close of
Retreating the Political (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997). In the final
chapter of the text, aptly entitled What Is to Be Done? Nancy seeks
in some way to address the issues of agency, action, and concrete exis-
tence. After Nancy and Derridas intricate and rigorous insights on the
nature of the ethical, how are we to act? It is extremely clear that the
understandings of ethics with which Nancy and Derrida provide us,
radically deny any kind of simplistic application. As Nancy repeatedly
warns in The Inoperative Community, to make a work or project of
this thought is tantamount to a totalizing gesture that reduces it to that
which is precisely nonethical. So, what are we to do? How and where
might we locate agency and action within this thought?12
Not surprisingly, upon closer interrogation we find that these
particular questions concerning agency, action, and the phenom-
enal world presuppose the existence of certain approaches that are
 On Ethics and the Same Constitutive Events of Being 41

perhaps antithetical to the ethical as we have outlined it in this chap-

ter. Arguably, What now? and What is to be done? imply, at the
very least, two dichotomies that we must examine. First, do they not
reinscribe a traditional dichotomy between theory and practice, phi-
losophy and action, or thinking and doing? Nancy gestures toward
this problematic in What Is to Be Done? when he questions the very
nature of our knowledge of thought and action: Perhaps we no longer
even know what it is to think nor, consequently, what it is to think
doing, nor what doing is absolutely (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
1997, 157). In other words, rigorously thought, what does it mean to
do or to act?13 Certainly, opposing thinking and acting as nonprob-
lematically as the question what is to be done? presupposes is, at the
very least, reductive. Even traditionally conceived, thinking involves
a component of doing just as doing involves a component of
thinking. As Nancy rightly notes, the question: What is to be done?
presumes that we begin with a theory and proceed forward with a
corresponding practice that would enable us to reach the goal indi-
cated by the theory. As such, the question itself is problematic insofar
as it is both teleologically oriented and rests upon an untenable and
somewhat foundational opposition. Teleological thinking is precisely
unethical (as well as logically inconsistent with the nature of being)
in a Nancian and Derridean approach as it involves a closure of pos-
sibility and even an end-point to the event of being (the attainment of
the goal). Furthermore, such closure of possibility implicitly draws
upon the belief in an immanently meaningful or foundational logic.
Any such foundation from and toward which we conceptually pro-
ceed involves the antithesis of the ethical as Nancy and Derrida have
described it. Both thinkers highlight the non-ground of the constitu-
tive imperative of being that spaces and implicates being in its finitude.
Thus the question What is to be done participates or is complicit with
several modes of thought that are inconsistent with the ethical as we
have come to understand it.
The question What now? is perhaps even more problematic inso-
far as it amplifies the presumption of a simplistic and divided notion of
theory and practice or thinking and doing. Here, we proclaim implicitly
that we have completed our philosophical endeavor and thus are now
ready for action. Furthermore, both questions imply that the doing
that follows the theory will take place in the phenomenal or more
commonly framed real world. Thus another dichotomy is obviously
playing itself out: the philosophical and the concrete. Within questions
such as What is to be done? and Now what? so frequently posed
to and by philosophers lies the presupposition that the theory that
precedes the practice is abstract and the action concrete. Although
intuitively sound (and thus perhaps demanding interrogation), such
42 The Ethics of Community

presuppositions deny the complex and too scarcely thought interplay

between how (and the terms within which) we think and how we act,
which upon even slightly closer inspection are in some way inter-
twined. Undeniably, much of the time, the language within which we
perceive and all of its corresponding structures determines our real
world and the actions that follow. As such, actions are always-already
infused with or implicated by language or that which is generally con-
ceived of as abstract.
Such a problematization of the traditionally conceived relationship
between philosophy and action does not seek to negate the existence
and analysis of something like an actual material or historical world
and the manner that we engage or act within it. We must propose
entirely the opposite. In the context of a Nancian originary ethicity
and a Derridean bearing witness and carrying, a reconsideration of
the relationship between theory and practice demands a careful and
patient examination of our actions in the real world; it is only through
such a reconsideration that we might be able to make evident the man-
ner in which our actions participate with and within the linguistic
and theoretical context of being. Certainly there are times in which
firmly inscribed conceptualizations of being and the world, unexam-
ined foundations and grounds from which we think and move, largely
determine our actions. In light of notions of originary ethicity, we must
examine our actions in the material world to expose those moments
in which we rely upon or participate within a foundational or meta-
physical thinking that has been revealed to be precisely anti-ethical.
Further, if we do engage in this examination of our being in the mate-
rial world, we might witness moments in which action is implicated
with and within thinking or language as imperative, finitude, writ-
ing, and spacing. Such a possibility presumes that not all of our actions
or events of being in the phenomenal world are founded in metaphysi-
cal presuppositions. Surely there are moments of rupture where the
noncoincidence of being happens plainly as a singular event. At those
moments, we might be able to recognize them in all of their glory.14
2 Nancys Community

Jean-Luc Nancys difficult and exhaustive exposition of community as

presented in The Inoperative Community provides us with tremendous
opportunities to consider community in radically innovative ways. As
Nancy rightly notes, there is an imperative to expose the erroneous
and limiting conceptualization of being and community insofar as it
can and does lead to what might be called impoverished relations
within the material world, most dramatically exposed in his analysis
of the logic of the concentration camp.1 Although within The Inoperative
Community Nancy does not make direct links between his philosophi-
cal observations and the material realm, it, nonetheless, becomes clear
that there is indeed such a connection. In addition to elucidating the
ideas within The Inoperative Community, it is our task to inquire into
and extrapolate upon the precise nature of the relationship to be found
between the philosophical and the historical.2
Any attempt to systematically present the ideas that comprise The
Inoperative Community is necessarily difficult. Although what fol-
lows is indeed such an attempt, it is marked by an understanding that
these ideas resist systematization and in some instances, conceptual-
ization itself. Because the events, moments, or ruptures that constitute
being (and community) happen from a place of groundlessness, there
is no base or substance from which one can proceed in a chronologi-
cal fashion. Everything that constitutes being occurs as in a flash.
Specific and distinct characteristics and contexts of such a flash do
exist; however, the terms that describe it tend to overlap and the (non-
processional) processes indicated are fundamentally dependent on the
others for their meaning. So while I attempt to explain the concept of
the singular being, or the being for whom community is ultimately a
question, I must necessarily delve into the problematics of, for example,
finitude and ecstasy. It, therefore, becomes impossible to define each
term distinctly and separately, discuss their chronological relation-
ship, and thereby unravel their connection. All of the ideas happen
simultaneously and in a sense each describes a different piece of the
same moment.
The structure of The Inoperative Community is contiguous with
the ideas Nancy conveys, which pertain to understanding outside of a
context of foundation and chronological ordering. In other words, the
44 The Ethics of Community

essay unfolds without a point of origin and a corresponding devel-

opment or progression, as do the concepts he explores. Rather Nancy
moves fluidly from one terminological exposition to another and
unravels the complexity of community accordingly. For the sake of
clarity and accessibility, the presentation that follows departs from his
structure insofar as there is an institution of a kind of progression. The
manner in which the concepts that he presents defy such an ordering
becomes elucidated as we gain an ever-increasing understanding of
their meaning.
The beginning of the chapter provides a context from which to
understand the fundamental issues and stakes involved in a thinking
of community. When possible, I have separated the key terms of The
Inoperative Community but only insofar as they permit such separa-
tion. Certainly, particularly toward the end of the essay, the terms come
to utterly resist clear distinction. At these points, I define them provi-
sionally and subsequently allow them to reveal themselves in Nancian
fashion. My hope is that throughout the chapter the central issues of
community, its imperative, and the stakes involved will be exposed.3

The Individual and the Absolute

Nancy suggests that by definition the individual is the indivisible
atom, a necessarily totally detached figure of immanence that is the
ultimate for-itself. It is a figure of absolute certainty representing an
absolute origin (The Inoperative Community 1991, 3). The individual
being, so conceived, not only reflects an impoverished perspective but
is ultimately a logical impossibility insofar as the individual is inca-
pable of being in any way toward an other. We know that being must be
toward an other, or as Nancy plainly states, one cannot make a world
of simple atoms. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one
toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other (3). As
an absolute for-itself or in-itself, how would this being, this individual,
be capable of being-with in any way?4 What would characterize the
being-with, the connection, or the attachment of the individual? How
can an immanence be unto an immanence? Lacking any capacity to be
or lean toward the other, the individual can rather only be unto itself.
Strictly speaking, relation in this context is impossible; it would be a
connection devoid of relation, a side-by-sideness with no attachment.
Highlighting such an observation is crucial for it is here, in the context
of the individual, that we have been and remain (1112).5 Furthermore,
it is a central issue insofar as it would seem that if pressed, we all
know, have some kind of an understanding (however unformulated
it may be), that being exists in relation in a complex, important, even
fundamental way; there is a sense that the detached being-side-by-side
of the individual is simply inadequate to the connections of (or that are)
 Nancys Community 45

being. Nonetheless, the general context of our time, the context of the
individual, places us within this contradiction of understanding being
as both individual and connected. Even the most traditional, human-
istic sense of community no doubt intends to convey a more profound
connection than that which we have seen is possible for the individual.
The community of humanism has as its condition of possibility (the
individual) that which makes all connections or relations impossible.
The question of being as it relates to the question of being-with must be
engaged indicating that we must move beyond the individual as our
point of departure.
Nancy continues his critique of the concept of the individual by
discussing how an essence or immanence is imagined to be achieved
(from where does the essence emerge?). As with the essay as a whole,
this issue is generally contextualized by a meditation on the betrayal
of communism. In communism, the essence or immanence of the indi-
vidual allegedly completes itself in and as community through ones
labor. In other words, the labor performed is itself conceived as the
production of both the essence of the individual and the essence of
community. Through his labor man produces his own essence
as the production of the essence of the community. Accordingly, one
would here achieve, fulfill, and most precisely produce ones essence
in the form of ones labor.
Similarly, humanism is the understanding of the individual as con-
taining the essence of humanness. The individual is not integrally
connected to the community as it is with communism; however, the
conceptualization of the individual as essential functions the same way
in both modes of thought. Humanism simply envisions the human as
the primary immanence and does not extrapolate this notion onto a
community.
Being conceived as an individual or subject, as it is in both com-
munism and humanism, has very specific ramifications for a concep-
tion of community. If the individual is perceived as the achievement of
immanence, then the community of individuals is, without question,
the community of immanence, characterized by a lack of a leaning-
toward the other. Furthermore, if community is formulated as the pro-
duction of human essence, then the will to essence necessarily informs
all ties of the individual. Essence is set to work in and through all
manner of relations (3). Accordingly, we must understand and remem-
ber that the ties or relations between individuals within this context
are characterized by a lack of being-with and rather institute and
expose the will to essence. Everything is understood in terms of the
accomplishment of this essence, which becomes the work of all rela-
tions. Nancy indicates that we have called this totalitarianism but we
might call it immanentism, which is the impoverished perspective
46 The Ethics of Community

that is the general horizon of our time (3). The individual is thus the
point of departure for our world, dooming us to think only within the
terms of immanentism.
What specifically is lost in a thinking of being as a will to essence,
that is, a thinking of being in which being is individual? Throughout
the preface and the body of the essay Nancy stresses the imperative of
thinking community in its true sense. However, we must first inquire
into the nature of being and death for a being characterized by imma-
nence or essence. How can an essence or immanence, an absolute for-
itself, be, or be-with, or die? The individual is incapable of being-with,
given that an essence cannot lean outside of itself to be with an other.
This is so by definition, as the immanence is and can only be an abso-
lute for-itself. The individual cannot die insofar as it is characterized
by an immanence that necessarily implies the infinite. Death is impos-
sible for an immanence or individual and, accordingly, ceases to have
meaning. Last, one could argue that an immanence is not capable of
being in the first place. As that which cannot move or act, the being
of an individual is contrary to being (or at the very least, called into
question). We might propose that the individual is both already dead
(incapable of being) and infinite (incapable of dying as it is imma-
nent). As such, both being and death become radically problematic.
Consequently, there is no meaning of being for the individual, which
again is characterized by a lack of movement, action, and connection.6
All of the characteristics that constitute being are impossibilities for
the individual.
We cannot properly close a discussion on the conceptualization of
being as individual without at least addressing the question of the ori-
gin of such thought. Nancy engages this issue briefly in observing that
some have seen in the concept of the individual Europes triumphant
dominance insofar as the European idea of the individual illustrated
to the world the way to emancipation from tyranny, as well as the
standard against which all communal endeavors or projects should be
gauged (3). Given Nancys painstaking and thorough critique of the
individual, this text reflects his vehement disagreement with such an
understanding. However, the allusion to the thinking of the individual
as a European concept brings us to question the status of the world
(the other world, the non-European world) to which such an idea
was illustrated. Is the entire world subject to such thinking? Nancy
proposes that the individual is the ontological ground upon which we
walk and we are accordingly lost (1112). To what we does he
refer? It does seem that Nancy is implying that the we for whom this
thinking is a point of departure is the we of the world.7 However, he
indicates clearly that this manner of thought is specifically European
in origin and was then shown to the rest of the world (3). We are
 Nancys Community 47

compelled to inquire concerning the reception of this illustration. Did

(and does) all of the world perceive it? Is it possible that being was
(is) conceptualized differently in those places in which the illustration
of the individual was (is) perhaps not perceived and received (at least
as fully)? These questions become important later in this chapter and
we return to them when we examine Nancys brief reference to the
contexts within which community is slight and inaccessible (35).
If community is not the community of the individual then what is
it? We might imagine that he would begin this investigation with a
description of the being of which community would be made (or more
accurately, as we see later, the being that is constituted by community).
But rather than proceed in such a linear fashion, Nancy discusses com-
munity from a different angle. He slides it into the discussion in the
context of an analysis regarding the manner in which a metaphysics of
the subject is incapable of considering the question of community. In
a rather painstaking exposition, Nancy challenges any metaphysics of
the absolute and illustrates that it is community in its true sense that
cuts through and denies any metaphysics of the absolute. We trace this
discussion in the following pages as the implications regarding the
role of community in the dismantling of metaphysics are provocative
and relevant to a rigorous understanding of Nancys thought.
We have already seen that community cannot be conceived from the
point of departure of the individual, as the individual is a figure of
the absolute and therefore utterly without relation. Nancy begins his
discussion of community and metaphysics by reminding us that any
of the forms that a metaphysics of the subject might assume prohibit
a thinking of community. All of the following are examples of such a
metaphysics: the Idea, History, the Individual, the State, Science, the
Work of Art, and so on (4). Again, these have been constructed upon
the ultimate foundation, which is the metaphysics of the subject or the
absolute. Nancy challenges this foundation and we fi nd that commu-
nity itself prohibits metaphysical thinking.
It bears repeating that an absolute for-itself is perfectly detached,
distinct, and closed: being without relation and that according to
Nancy such a being cannot logically exist (4). Or more precisely, the
very logic of the absolute points to the impossibility of the absolute.
Nancy begins this deconstruction with the following observation: A
simple and redoubtable logic will always imply that within its very sep-
aration, the absolutely separate encloses more than what is simply sepa-
rated (4). This idea can be best unraveled by using a specific example
of the absolute. For our purposes, it is most logical to use the Individual
as our example of the absolutely separate (4). It is absolutely separate
because it is an immanence or rather the immanence par excellence,
and nothing else has this same quality. The Individual, the absolutely
48 The Ethics of Community

separate necessarily encloses more than what is simply separated due

to the fact that it is the ultimate immanence (4). Because it is an ulti-
mate immanence and thus an almost magical entity, what is separated
within it is more than just the thing itself (if it were just the individual
that were absolutely separate it would be merely an individual and not
an Individual). Within the absolutely separate must be enclosed more
than what is separated as it must receive its ultimately immanent qual-
ity from somewhere other than itself. Here we find the logical quag-
mire. That which is absolutely separate must have a separate entity that
is itself enclosed in order to make the separation absolute. Or as Nancy
puts it, the closure must not only close around a territory (while still
remaining exposed, at its outer edge, to another territory, with which it
thereby still communicates), but also, in order to complete the absolute-
ness of the separation, around the enclosure itself (4). The enclosure
must enclose both a territory and the enclosure itself. The separateness,
in order to be absolute, must have an enclosure not just around the
Individual but also around that which encloses the Individual. It must
be doubly enclosed. To be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be
so; I must also be alone being alone- and this of course is contradictory
(4). The very definition of the absolute indicates the impossibility of the
absolute. The contradiction that arises within the logic of the absolute is
that there is a relationship within alone between two entities and if that
is the case then there can be no alone. Thus by definition, the kind
of self-enclosure and aloneness implied by the absolute indicates a
relationality that violates the logic of the absolute itself. In summary,
the essence of the absolute is to be absolutely nonrelational, that is,
absolutely alone. In order to be absolutely alone there must be an alone
being alone which implies more than one, which implies not alone at all.
Regarding this relation that necessarily constitutes that which wants
to be absolute, Nancy says: This relation tears and forces open, from
within and from without at the same time, and from an outside that is
nothing other than the rejection of an impossible interiority, the with-
out relation from which the absolute would constitute itself . . . (4). The
relation itself denies the possibility of the absolute by tearing and forc-
ing open that which would like to be absolutely closed; relationality is
implicit in the logic of the absolute and is always denying such closure.
It exists inside the absolute (thus rendering it non-absolute) insofar as
the logic of the absolute itself suggests relation which thus prohibits the
absolute. The outside of the absolute can be understood simply as the
denial of the absolute interiority of the absolute without-relation from
which the absolute understands itself as constituted. Thus, both inside
and outside the absolute there is relation that tears and forces open by
itself, indicating that the total interiority that the absolute would like to
claim is an absolute impossibility.
 Nancys Community 49

It becomes clear in the next section that the tearing open enacted
by relation is a description of community. In other words, commu-
nity is the tearing and the forcing open of the absolute of metaphys-
ics. Excluded by the logic of the absolute-subject of metaphysics (Self,
Will, Life, Spirit, and so on), community comes perforce to cut into this
subject by virtue of this same logic (4). Thus community cuts into the
metaphysical subject, again, by virtue of the very logic of the absolute.
There is a sense in which community itself brings out of the absolute
that part of the absolute that causes it to contradict itself (like a light
that shines on the logical flaw of any metaphysics of the absolute). It is
not simply that community sets the absolute in relation but rather that
it undoes that which is supposed to be absolute: The logic of the abso-
lute sets it in relation: but this, obviously, cannot make for a relation
between two or several absolutes, no more that it can make an abso-
lute of the relation. The logic of the absolute undoes the absoluteness
of the absolute (4). The relation, or community, is the undoing of the
absolute, if it is at all. As an undoing, a taking apart, a cutting into, an
opening up, an action rather than a thing, community is not exactly an
is. By definition, community undoes immanence as it is that within
the very logic of immanence that cuts into and undoes its logic. Since
community is within immanence, there can be no immanence.
As that which explodes the myth of the absolute, community has not
yet been considered. The questions and concerns that have guided our
thinking on community have assumed the individual as the frame of
reference. Only now, says Nancy, do we find ourselves asking the ques-
tions of community for the first time.

Death and Community

Community is constituted by the immanence that is perceived as lost
from it. Furthermore, were immanence to be achieved (for example,
through an understanding of death as an achievement of immanence),
community would certainly not be the result. Rather, Nancy argues,
the only possible implication of such an achievement is death. If we
consider what it is in death that engenders immanence (all meaning-
making and hence recuperative gestures), the impossibility of commu-
nication or community becomes evident. The realm of the individual
immanence (and death) implies nothing more than the continuous
identity of atoms (12). The only possibilities for being herein are a
meaningless side-by-sideness of individual atoms. As we will see, in
this formulation, death loses its senseless meaning.
Another way of conceiving of an occurrence of immanence as an
occurrence of death is by considering the absolute lack of movement
that is necessarily proper to an immanence. Any will to essentialize
being indicates something of death insofar as, strictly speaking, an
50 The Ethics of Community

essence is not capable of being. As that which is a an absolute or total

for-itself, how could an immanence move, be-with, engage, interact,
change, or be in any way that indicates the quality of being? It simply
cannot. By definition, such an entity would rather be characterized by
death. Thus, it can be said on this level as well that any will to imma-
nence is a will to death.
For Nancy, the logic of a will to immanence is the logic of imbuing
death with meaning or making a work out of it. In contrast, for the
finite or mortal being (the being that is not an individual) death is that
from which meaning cannot be derived. If immanence is the goal, then
death functions as a work by moving being closer to an achievement
of purity, unity, and ultimately immanence. In contrast, Nancy often
stresses that true community is that which cannot make sense of
death, as death is irrecoverable and unsublateable. But it certainly bears
mentioning that Nancy also indicates that what is at stake here is death
losing the senseless meaning that it ought to have and obstinately
does have (14). Thus, a senseless meaning is formulated as proper to
death whereas a meaning with the goal of immanence is not.
Nancy uses the example of Nazism to illustrate a material situa-
tion in which being is conceived from the point of departure of the
individual with immanence as the ultimate goal. In this context of a
will to immanence death is instituted as a work; community here is
only slight and inaccessible (35). In contrast, for the fi nite or mor-
tal being there is the unworkability of death and community. For the
former, death has lost its senseless meaning and for the latter, death
is senselessly meaningful. If we do not think of the question of com-
munity (which is the question of the being for whom death is irrecu-
perable, or senselessly meaningful), death loses the senseless meaning
that it ought to have (14). In other words, if we fail to think of death as
that of which we can make no sense, we will lose our death, that death
which is most properly our own or the death that Nancy calls the
singular death. Thus it is evident that although Nancy repeatedly
indicates deaths irrecoverable and unsublateable character he does
not proclaim it meaningless; in fact he asserts that it has senseless
meaning, which is a meaning beyond meaning (14). This senseless
meaning is crucial as it is that around which community emerges or
upon which it is dependent. In other words, the senseless meaning of
death has meaning insofar as it is an understanding of its own sense-
lessness, its irrecoverability and resistance to institution that form the
backdrop for the existence of being and community. Being and com-
munity occur simultaneously as there is no mediation between the
two; thus, being is community. Being is outside of being or being can-
not recuperate, sublate, or make sense of its ownmost possibility, that
is, its singular death.
 Nancys Community 51

Nancy first indicates the real ramifications of these issues in this con-
text of a will to immanence and its relation to death. While in other essays
he will cite other examples, the primary example used in this essay is
that of Nazi Germany.8 Any political, economic or social program that
assumes as its goal the will to a community of essence or immanence has
as its work the work of death. Thus in Nazi Germany the desire for a pure
Aryan being was nothing other than a desire for death. What this meant
for the victims, or those who were deemed neither Aryan nor pure, is
obvious. However, Nancy proposes that the work of death extended to
the victimizer, those for whom the community was to be achieved as
this immanence. That is why political or collective enterprises domi-
nated by a will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of
death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that
of the suicide of the community that is governed by it (12). Thus, we find
that it was not only the other who was exterminated but additionally
those within the Aryan community who were not deemed sufficiently
pure. Furthermore, Nancy asserts that on a certain metaphorical level,
Germany as a whole was self-exterminated. Interestingly, he maintains
that it would be reasonable to make such an assessment given certain
aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation (12). Here we find the death
of both victim and the community that intends or wills immanence.
Any institution or regime like Nazism, governed by a desire to
achieve purity and banish the impure other, is working according to a
desire for immanence that is primarily ruled by a logic of death. In the
end, despite the fact that death must be conceived in both literal and
metaphorical terms, this empirical example powerfully demonstrates
that a work toward immanence is the same as a work of death.9
Literal death conceived as immanence carries with it a poverty of
understanding insofar as death loses its senseless meaning. Further-
more, immanence itself seems to be of the nature of death and thus
calls to mind that which is more of death than of being. Logically, any
political enterprise desiring or working toward or for immanence itself
reflects the work of death. A desire for immanence is equivalent to a
desire for death.
However, the example of Nazism brings to light another level upon
which the will to death is occurring, and this is the actual world of
concrete beings. Literal death can be the result of a will to essence as
witnessed in the death of the other deemed insufficiently pure. Thus
on both abstract and empirical levels the will to immanence is equal to
a will to death. A large part of the imperative or driving force within
this Nancian project is to illustrate the connection between that which
is abstract, or philosophical, and that which is empirical, or real. An
unexamined will to immanence has led to disastrous and horrific con-
sequences within the real or actual world.
52 The Ethics of Community

In another gesture toward the material, Nancy extends this discus-

sion to the citizens and militants . . . workers and servants who have
bought into the dream of achieving immanence in and through an ulti-
mate community that, although yet to come, will come and thereby
provide the immanence so desired (13). But by now, he argues, there
is a realization that the yet to come is not coming, which results
in dissatisfaction and resignation. Nancy warns us against this real-
ization (or consciousness) and likens it to the consciousness of the
lost (immanent) community; in the same manner as community so
envisioned could never have been lost as it never existed, the imma-
nence dreamed of being achieved through a community to come, was
never to come or never to take place. The nostalgia and dreaming are
essentially two sides of the same coin. The former is a mournful look-
ing back at an immanent community and the latter is a hopeful look-
ing forward to that which is yet to come. Both of them are fictitious. It
would be impossible for immanence to come for the community that
would come offering immanence would be nothing more than death.
In other words, a perception of an immanent community yet to come
indicates death existing as a means to something else and death pre-
cisely denies such application or function being totally resistant to
any kind of recuperation. Furthermore, as the community that would
bring immanence, this community would again be the community
of death, which is simply impossible because such a death (or death
so conceived) cannot or could not come about or form a future (13).
What can come about and form a future says Nancy, is the singular,
irrecuperable death. Communion or immanence is not what comes of
death; properly speaking nothing can come of death.
Nancy maintains that although millions of deaths are justifiable,
they are not sublateable. Regardless of the context or how justifiable
the death may be, it still absolutely resists recuperation; we simply can-
not make a work out of death. According to Nancy, the modern age has
only understood justifiable death as salvation or the dialectical subla-
tion of history (13). In both death as salvation and death as the recu-
peration of history, some sort of immanence is imagined to be attained.
Given that this is the only way that death is being perceived, it has
lost its sense of infinite negativity or its singular irrecuperability. Thus
death is being deprived of that which is most proper to it and thereby
most proper to us, or to being itself. In this contemporary context we
are therefore deprived of our own death, the death that Nancy calls
our singular death, which is beings ownmost possibility.10 Singular
death is the death that each particular being (alone) has to die. Unlike
death as the achievement of immanence, which cannot come about, the
singular death can come about and form a future. This is a crucial ele-
ment of Nancys project as it is around this death that community can
 Nancys Community 53

be conceived. While it is clear that Nancy is challenging the conception

of community as a will to immanence, as that which makes a work of
death, we must clarify and elaborate upon Nancys true community.
In Nancys vision of community, community reveals itself through
death and death reveals itself through community. Interestingly, com-
munity or being-with, results from the fact of the mortality or fini-
tude of being. Simply stated, community or being-with comes about
in the context of the mortal being. Thus only the mortal, finite, and
we will soon see, singular being, can be in community. For the indi-
vidual, the subject, the being incapable of inclination, community is
impossible.
The community, or the event of being-with, is that through which
my finitude or mortality is presented or exposed to me and as such,
death is revealed through community. Death is quite straightforward
here: the death of being simply indicates my mortality, the fact that
it is impossible that I might be either immanent or infinite. This, in
turn, has vast implications insofar as if I am not immanent or infinite I
must conceive of my death in such a way that prohibits me from under-
standing myself as an individual or a subject. Rather I must perceive
of my being as ecstatically thrown into the possibility of my singular
death.11 The death that is not the death of the individual but the death
of the singular being, reveals to being its lack of immanence, which
itself indicates being as outside of itself, or ecstatic. (It is useful here
to think of immanence as the ultimate for-itself and the opposite of
immanence as being as out-from-itself.) Death reveals to being that it
is not immanent, is ecstatic, and in its ecstasis (or in its being outside
of being) is toward an other being. In this toward an other, being is,
constitutively, a being-with. Insofar as this is the case, death reveals
community, or being-with, to being.
On another level, community as the event of being-with is nothing
other than the exposure of finitude that can occur only through an
other. Here, I am revealed to myself to be mortal and thus incapable of
immanence insofar as I have an other of my own being. In my lack of
immanence, in my mortality or finitude, the fact that I have an other
of being is exposed to me. In this sense as well, finitude indicates, or
more precisely reveals, through the other, a lack of immanence.
However, although community reveals to being its lack of imma-
nence and thus its singularity, this formulation is misleading insofar
as it seems to designate a sequence of events or chronological ordering
when, in fact, community is that which has always already happened.
We do not begin with being, proceed to an event of being-with in which
death is revealed to being, and then arrive at the singular being. Rather
the event constitutes being itself and therefore there is never a time in
which the event has not already occurred and is not taking place.
54 The Ethics of Community

Importantly, such a community, which is necessarily the community

of finite beings who are capable of death and thus lack the possibility
of immanence, is not a community in which any kind of substantial
or transcendent bond between subjects would occur. Community nei-
ther works to achieve anything that can be considered a product nor
comprises anything higher or more transcendent than the beings
within it or, more precisely, the beings for whom being is finite. (We
see here as we do throughout the text that our language itself resists
this thought.) Nancys assertion that the community of finite beings
is calibrated on the death of its members indicates that the commu-
nity is itself of the order of mortal beings rather than of the order of
transcendence.
Thus community is dependent upon and is in the way of the finite
character of being. Being as finite necessarily indicates being in com-
munity. There is no temporal priority with regard to being and com-
munity but rather they exist simultaneously. If being is finite, then
being is automatically in community or is in the way of community.
The relation that the finite being has to death, which is characterized
by non-immanence, places the finite being immediately into or as
community. We cannot understand this event in terms of an order, pro-
cess, or development, which makes it exceedingly difficult to conceptu-
alize. There is no ground from which anything emerges, upon which
we might attempt to impose an order. There is absolutely no mediation
between being and community. Here we recognize that community or
being as finite constitutes being itself. Properly speaking, being cannot
be if is not finite and thus not in community. The distinction between
community and the finite being is nonexistent. The two terms name
the same event, which is being as finite and mortal. (Finitude as mor-
tality and finitude as ecstasy name two sides of the same coin of non-
immanence.)

Ecstasy and Singularity

Thus far, we have determined that the individual cannot be our point
of departure and that it is community itself (or relation) that cuts
through any metaphysics of the subject. Furthermore, the connection
between being, community, and death has been illustrated. But what
of being that is not characterized by immanence; in other words, what
about true being or the being characterized by community? Nancy first
approaches an analysis of this being through Bataille.12 This discus-
sion clarifies that ecstasis, as the opposite of the absolute, characterizes
the being in question. Ecstasy is the name for the rupture that cuts
through the possibility of absolute being. (However, as we saw above,
community is the name for that rupture. These terms are largely inter-
changeable and simply indicate different ways of accessing the same
 Nancys Community 55

idea.) If absolute being is impossible (due to the rupture or ecstasis),

then being itself is defined as relational (or as community). According
to Nancy, if we are to understand ecstasy in a rigorous sense, we find
that it is not about effusion or illumination, but rather about the outside
of being of being, that is, of being set in relation to itself (6). Ecstasy is
the absolute impossibility of the absolute, the name for the impossibil-
ity of absolute immanence, insofar as it implies being as outside of itself
or being as relational, which is, therefore, neither absolute nor imma-
nent. Any thinking founded upon the individual is itself based upon a
notion of immanence and, thereby, necessarily denies the possibility of
ecstasy. Being cannot be thought without ecstasis (being considered as
relational rather than as the absoluteness of the totality of beings).
In the following quote we can certainly see the beginnings of a con-
ceptualization of being that is an alternative to immanence and the
individual. Ecstasy answersif it is properly speaking an answer
to the impossibility of the absoluteness of the absolute, or to the abso-
lute impossibility of complete immanence (6). In other words, rather
than the absoluteness of the absolute or complete immanence, there is
something called ecstasy. Notions of the individual (being as abso-
lute) and of a pure collective whole (community as absolute) are again
revealed to be impossible given ecstasis. All modes of thought that
assume as their frame of reference either the individual or the com-
munity as immanence (humanism and communism respectively) are
linked by their denial of ecstasy, of being as outside of itself, of the fun-
damentally relational (and interruptive) aspect of being.
The question of community is integrally linked with the movement
or event of ecstasy. The events of ecstasy and community indicate that
neither being nor community can be considered within the realm of
the absolute. Ultimately, we cannot think of either being or community
without thinking of ecstasis. Much of what is unraveled in this chap-
ter pertains to a fundamental manner in which being is conceived as
outside of itself or as ecstatic. There are, of course, many particularities
within the formulations that Nancy develops; however, the thinking of
ecstasy is a useful umbrella concept for beginning an understanding
of the constitutive events that Nancy is trying to describe.13
The fact that ecstasis is constitutive of being rather than a result of it
indicates that in ecstasy being is outside of itself, or relational, in such
a way that there is nothing that comes before it. The very principle of
being is relation. Being is not first an individual or an immanent whole
that then comes to be fragmented and set in relation, but rather being
as being, in order to be being, is set in relation. In order to conceive
of community, we must understand ecstasy in the sense of being as
always-already outside of itself, as set in relation to itself to such a radi-
cal degree that it never existed in any other way. Ecstasy so conceived
56 The Ethics of Community

is fundamental to being, preceding everything, that is, every concept

or understanding of being as an immanence in the form of an individ-
ual or subject. If ecstasy denies the possibility of immanence in being,
then community is likewise prohibited from such a production. Both
being and community are here affected, and as the chapter progresses,
we continue to witness their inextricable connection.
Nancy proposes the being for whom being is ecstatic, or the singular
being, as an alternative to the individual. He first broaches the ques-
tion of singularity briefly in an aside early in the essay. Singularity, or
being as non-absolute or non-immanent, does not occur in the context
of atoms (as does the individual) but rather in the way of the clinamen,
which is a leaning toward that which is unidentifiable insofar as it is
not a thing but rather a relation. It names an event or a movement and
accordingly cannot be identified as such.
Given these descriptions of ecstasy and singularity, we can see the
manner in which the singular, non-absolute being, is the being to whom
ecstasy happens. Singularity is linked to ecstasy: one could not prop-
erly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has
no subjectbut one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the
singular being (7). The terms ecstasy, singularity, and community are
so closely related that one could argue that they are indistinguishable.
To say that ecstasy happens to the singular being basically indicates that
the singular being is the ecstatic being. The singular being happens
or is as being outside of being (insofar as it is). Therefore, singularity
and ecstasy name the same event of being. Furthermore, strengthening
the earlier observation that community and singularity (and thus ecsta-
sis) are themselves indistinguishable, in the above quote, Nancy places
the term community in parentheses immediately following ecstasy to
indicate that the two terms are largely synonymous. Community can also
be understood as ecstasy or as the spacing of being outside of itself and
thus points to the constitutive and relational aspect of being. Singularity
and community are distinct only insofar as they allude to specific intri-
cacies of the event of being. Singularity, for example, gestures toward
the uniqueness of the singularity whereas in community the notions of
sharing and compearing (or co-appearing) are fundamental. However,
ecstasy can be considered a general name for both terms. Ecstasy defines
the outside of being of being and singularity is the being to whom ecstasy
has always-already happened. Strictly speaking, ecstasy is the defining
event of the singular being and accordingly ecstasy is singularity. Last,
community is the spacing of being itself or the manner in which it is
always-already set in relation, which occurs constitutively in the event
of ecstasy. The relationship between these three key terms as they have
been set forth thus far is a strange one. They are distinct in some way
but, simultaneously, are largely synonymous.
 Nancys Community 57

The above is only a brief introduction to singularity, and Nancy

returns to and elaborates upon it significantly later in the essay. As
we progress, we learn more regarding the specificities of singularity.
For now, we must bear in mind that there can be no interiority to the
singularity as it names the being constituted by relationality. All of the
singular being, or all the singular being, is as set in relation. At this
point, we must address a new component of Nancys analysis, which
is that this relation that is constitutive of being occurs between being
itself (being as outside of being) as well as between being and other
beings (between singularities). In fact, we see that singularity is radi-
cally dependent upon other singularities for its being.

Singularity, Finitude, and Communication

In order to examine the fundamental relationality of singularity,
we must consider the importance and connection of finitude to sin-
gularity. We have already witnessed the incredibly close connection
between ecstasy and singularity, and we find a similar dynamic occur-
ring between singularity and finitude.
Nancy notes that the singular being is the finite being (27). In an
earlier section, we discussed a manner in which finitude concerns the
absolute impossibility of the absoluteness (immanence) of being. We
saw how this occurred in a twofold manner. First, finitude (which,
importantly, we only experience through the other and the presenta-
tion of our mortality) indicates mortality, and second, it indicates ecsta-
sis. (And we saw how mortality and ecstasis are themselves related.)
However, finitude, its intricacies, and particular relationship to singu-
larity, merits further exploration.
One of the central difficulties in conceptualizing singularity is
that it does not emerge from a ground and, very possibly, does not
come from or proceed from anything (27). Singularity as such is not
quite born. In contrast to an emergence from a particular ground,
or having a distinct birth, the singularity is the point of reference
against which birth or the concept of birth is neither a production
nor a self-positioning (27). In the context of singularity, birth can-
not be made into a work, a production, or a place from which the
self can be understood. Rather it is something like a continual hap-
pening of being in which fi nitude is continually born. Nancy names
such a birth the infi nite birth of fi nitude. Birth and fi nitude are so
conceived insofar as fi nitude (the presentation to my being by the
other of the impossibility of immanence and thus the presentation of
my mortality and my experience of ecstasy) occurs over and over, or
is continually born for the singular being. In other words and more
simply, fi nitude is continually born in the ecstasis that happens to
the singular being.
58 The Ethics of Community

Nancy has already illustrated that one of the primary factors of com-
munity in a non-immanent sense is that there is no common, essential
substance in which beings would partake or share and which would
exist in a totality superior to them. In other words, there must be no
communion of beings (there must be a substance or a definitive thing
for communion, and this is precisely what Nancy wants to deny). But
what is there in place of such a communion? What happens among
singularities? What are the interactions of the inoperative community?
Here Nancy proposes communication. Finitude, or that which appears
to the singular being, cannot commune for it is not a ground, thing, or
substance. But it can and does appear, present and expose itself, and
thus it exists as communication (28). Communication is an appear-
ing and exposition. Finitude exists in communication, that is, in expos-
ing and appearing (importantly, Nancy calls this phenomenon more
originary than any other. Here again these events are described as
constituting being rather than occurring after there is a being that is
already constituted). Such an exposition and appearance necessar-
ily occurs to a being. Finitude is not exposed unless there is another
being to whom the exposure can occur. There must be more than one
being; there must be an among beings in order for communication
(appearing and exposing) to take place. Nancy calls this co-appearing
or compearing and states that finitude can only compear. By definition,
finitude appears or communication occurs among singularities in the
form of a together (28).
This formulation has vast implications that Nancy draws out at the
end of the essay. The fundamental nature of being among is appar-
ent. Ultimately, this radical connection to or necessity of the other con-
stitutes being itself. For Nancy, singularity, by definition, cannot exist
alone as being is dependent for its being on other being(s), granting
a priority to being-with. Being-with almost seems to precede being.
Generally, this constitutive event does resist such chronological place-
ment; however, given that being-with is a kind of condition of possibility
for being, it is tempting to think of being-with as assuming some kind
of precedence. However, oddly, it would be more accurate to observe
that the two events (being and being-with) occur simultaneously.

Sovereignty, Sharing, and Community

Not surprisingly, inextricably linked to ecstasy, fi nitude, and singular-
ity are the concepts of sovereignty and sharing. We begin with sover-
eignty, an idea that Nancy develops from Bataille. The following quote
alludes to the manner in which sovereignty is connected to ecstasy
and finitude (and communication): . . . sovereignty is the sovereign
exposure to an excess (to a transcendence) that does not present itself
and does not let itself be appropriated (or simulated) that does not even
 Nancys Community 59

give itselfbut rather to which being is abandoned (18). Thus being is

exposed to an excess of transcendence. (This is perhaps reminiscent of
the exposure of finitude that occurs in ecstasis.) The very exposition of
the excess to which being is exposed is itself sovereignty (recall earlier
discussion on how the appearing and exposing of finitude is commu-
nication). In this exposure that is sovereignty, being is abandoned to
an excess or transcendence. Therefore, sovereignty exposes being to an
excess in such a way that being is abandoned to it. Further, the excess to
which being is exposed and abandoned (which is sovereignty) is not a
substance. It is not a thing that could present itself or let itself be appro-
priated. In fact, Nancy indicates that this excess, properly speaking, is
not, in a manner similar to the way that Heideggerian Being is not. In
the end, like Bataille before him, Nancy concludes that the exposure
and abandonment to the excess that is sovereignty is nothing.
The exposure and abandoning to an excess of sovereignty is impor-
tant insofar as it designates a certain spacing of being that is crucial
to an understanding of singularity and thus community. In the noth-
ing to which being is exposed and abandoned, that is, in sovereignty,
being is as being outside of itself. In sovereignty being is in an exte-
riority that is impossible to recapture, or perhaps we should say that
it is of this exteriority, that is, of an outside that it cannot relate to
itself, but with which it entertains an essential and incommensurable
relation. This relation prescribes the place of the singular being (18).
(Such spacing of being outside of itself is reminiscent of the ecstasy
that occurs with the exposure of fi nitude.) In sovereignty, which is
nothing, in which being is exposed and abandoned to an excess, being
comes to be in an outside of itself that is groundless, formless, and
without substance. In other words, being is itself of this very exterior-
ity. The way of being in sovereignty is being that is of this exteriority.
The outside radically refuses or denies both capture and assimilation.
However, being does have an essential and incommensurable rela-
tion to its exteriority (18), which is that being in relation is the way
that being is; being itself is so spaced. In other words, it is essential to
being that being has a being and an outside of being, which consti-
tutes its very singularity. Or the place of the singular being is pre-
scribed by this relation (18). In sovereignty, being is placed or spaced
outside of itself (through its exposure and abandonment to an excess)
and thus put in relation with itself. Sovereignty and ecstasy are linked
insofar as both name an event of being as exteriority. We must bear in
mind that in both of these events being is as a relation to itself result-
ing in a spacing of being that is fundamental to the way in which
Nancy is conceiving of community.
In a sense, a discussion of sharing brings us one step closer to a more
solid understanding of Nancys conception of community. He provides
60 The Ethics of Community

a brief definition of the term in which it is evident, once again, that the
ideas he introduces are extremely tightly interwoven:

Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in

presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside
myself. Which does not mean my existence reinvested in or by
community, as if community were another subject that would
sublate me, in a dialectical or communal mode. Community does
not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing
other than this exposition. (26)

Sharing indicates both sharing as we generally think of it (a giving

out or allocating among participants) as well as a dividing. When we
attempt to think of the revealing or exposing of finitude (communica-
tion) by community (or by an other singularity) that leads to an ecsta-
sis, or an understanding of being outside of being, we must understand
this process as sharing. Sharing is community presenting to me my
birth and death, my finitude, and thus my being as outside of itself.
The term is fitting insofar as it describes a situation in which being
is divided (shared) into being and outside of being. Furthermore, the
dividing necessarily occurs among singularities, and, in this sense, it
is an experience (albeit a constitutive and preconscious one) that we
share or an experience that occurs as a sharing.
Nancy hastens to observe that when my existence outside of myself
is revealed to me it is not then appropriated, reinvested, or sublated
by community that is a subject capable of this activity. Community is
not a subject and thereby resists operation. The finitude that com-
munity exposes cannot be sublated by a community or by anything
else. Furthermore, community itself is nothing other than the exposi-
tion of finitude. Therefore, we have at last arrived at a definition of
Nancian community. Community itself, in sum, is nothing other than
this exposition (26). Community is the exposition of finitude.

A Closer Look
Having acquired a sense of the different components that contribute
to the events of community, we can examine them in more depth. A
further look at communication, or the exposure of finitude with an
emphasis on the co-appearing of the exposure, leads us to a discussion
of the specifics of the spacing of the singular being. Nancy begins this
discussion by observing that communication exists fundamentally in
a certain dislocation:

Communication exists before all else in this sharing and in this

compearance of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the
 Nancys Community 61

interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-

in-common- precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a
common being. The finite being exists first of all according to
a division of sites, according to an extension-partes extra partes-
such that each singularity is extended. (29)

Communication, or the exposure of finitude to and of my being, exists

in the dividing of being (sharing) and in the fact that this exposure
and dividing can only take place together (compearance). Another way
of understanding the exposure, dividing, and compearing is as a dis-
location and an interruption that is constitutive of being-in-common
but only insofar as being-in-common is not a common being. It is no
surprise that the finite being is not reducible to a common being as we
have been discussing from the beginning how none of what Nancy is
attempting to describe is sublateable or reducible to an immanence or
substance. However, the fact that this event is a dislocation and that
the finite being or the singular being exists as a division of sites . . .
such that each singularity is extended points to an aspect of spacing
that we must develop (29).
Singularity exists as being as outside of itself, relational in its very
nature. In a similar manner, this relation is an extension toward that
which is in contrast to a self-enclosure. But what precisely happens in
this spacing of being to itself and how is that spacing related to other
singularities? In other words, where and how does the outside of being
that is an other (outside of being) fit in to this picture? Nancy writes the
following on singular being:

It is what it is, singular being, singularity of being, only through

its extension, through the areality that above all extroverts it in
its very being . . . and that makes it exist only by exposing it to an
outside. This outside is in turn nothing other than the exposition
of another areality, of another singularitythe same other. This
exposure, or this exposing-sharing, gives rise, from the outset,
to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in
language . . . Finitude compears, that is to say, it is exposed: such
is the essence of community. (29)

Singular being emerges only through the outside of being that radi-
cally extroverts it and causes it to exist as an exposure to an outside. We
have repeatedly discussed the outside of being of being, but we have
not yet probed the outside of the outside of being itself in any kind of
depth.
This outside is revealed to be the exposition of another areality, of
another singularity the same other (29). Presently, it is evident that
62 The Ethics of Community

each singularity is composed of being and a being outside of itself,

which is necessarily extended toward an other singularity. In other
words, if the outside of being is the other of self, then we may assert
that my other of self is extended toward an outside in which I come
upon another other of self. These others are the same insofar as they
are both the other of a self or they both indicate the outside of being
of being. Nancy names this event exposing-sharing. My other of self
(or finitude) is exposed to another other of self. In this exposure, both
you and I are simultaneously spaced, divided, or shared (we return to
this idea in a moment with a close reading of you shares me).
This exposing-sharing constitutes a mutual interruption or inter-
pellation of singularities that precedes any linguistic connection or
relationship. The relationship between singularities described as an
exposing-sharing is preconscious and constitutive of being rather than
an experience that we have of being. We must keep this point in mind
as we engage the issue of the places in which community is slight and
inaccessible that is addressed at the end of the essay.
The following quote indicates that exposition and compearance are
fundamentally conceptually connected and crucial to the existence of
community: Finitude compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the
essence of community (29). Recall that compearance is another name
for co-appearing, which implies that the process of exposition that is
a compearing necessarily occurs among singularities. The finite being
or the singularity can only compear as singularity is radically depen-
dent on the other. The exposition of finitude or of the singular being
cannot occur without an other singularity, or an other exposition.
Thus the exposition of finitude necessarily implies that it compears.
Compearance comes very close to naming the same thing as exposi-
tion. Finitude or the singular being is exposed and this exposure must
necessarily occur among singularities, which is another way of say-
ing that it must compear. Compearance itself highlights the fact that
when finitude or singularity is exposed it is exposed together (28).
These seemingly synonymous terms underscore a different aspect of
the same process. Paradoxically, Nancy is able to provide a clearer pic-
ture of community by describing its constitutive moments with many
different terms, which themselves focus on its varying aspects.
Any thought of communication, or finitude as exposing itself, must not
have as its frame of reference a social bond (29). The notion of the social
bond implies both the subjectivity of being (or being as subjectobject)
and an illusory intersubjectivity of the subjectobject (29). Here, being is
envisioned as immanent and thus there can be no interconnection or lean-
ing toward between such beings. Accordingly, the social bond names a
situation that, strictly speaking, cannot exist. What exists in its place is an
impoverished perspective regarding the other and community.
 Nancys Community 63

Furthermore, communication or compearance occurs at a much more

fundamental level than the social bond, that is, it is a prelinguistic or
preconscious event that constitutes being. Nancy highlights the impor-
tance of understanding that it does not transpire at the level of or in the
place of a ground, of a from-which. It does not set itself up from a
foundation or among beings that are already established subjects. (No
doubt we have seen how it denies or even resists the concept of being as
a subjectivity.) The implications are immense insofar as relation itself
constitutes being rendering the singular being totally dependent upon
the other. Nancy thus asserts that humans are fundamentally social in
a much more vital and radical sense than is generally thought.
Although compearance comes from no ground or place, Nancy indi-
cates in what it consists, which provides a bit more insight into the
event: It consists in the appearance of the between as such: you and I
(between us)a formula in which the and does not imply juxtaposi-
tion, but exposition. What is exposed in compearance is the follow-
ing, and we must learn to read it in all its possible combinations: you
(are/and/is) (entirely other than) I. Or again, more simply, you shares
me (29). The beginning of this quote alludes to the togetherness or the
among that is necessary for compearance. When there is a between
you and I or even more fundamentally when there is a you and I at all,
compearance is happening in the between and in the and. What
occurs in the between and the and in which compearance is, is not
a side-by-sideness of you and I (a juxtaposition), but rather an expo-
sition. Opposing juxtaposition and exposition is particularly effective
here. In juxtaposition we are almost forced to see the lack of connection
indicated, whereas exposition specifically gives the sense of an open-
ing to an outside, thus implying a kind of relation.
The latter portion of this quote raises the issue of the nature of what
is exposed in the exposition. What is exposed in compearance is the
following . . . you shares me (29). We already know that the other
of being (or the extension of being that is not enclosed in a form) is
exposed. Furthermore, we are aware that the outside to which the
other of being is exposed is simply another areality or another spacing
of another other than being. The above quote illuminates the picture
further by pointing to the you shares me aspect of compearance.
The importance of the you as other to compearance or the exposure
of finitude has already been established; however, this citation also
highlights that when the exposure occurs among singularities, you (as
other) exposes my finitude. Insofar as this is the case, I am shared or
divided by you. It is useful to think of sharing in terms of the spacing
that it enacts upon being. In other words, when I am exposed to the fin-
itude of being, my being is spaced or set in relation. (However, we must
bear in mind that I am always-already exposed; I do not first exist as a
64 The Ethics of Community

subject and then become exposed and thus shared.) I am only shared,
divided, or spaced when I come upon you. I am dependent on you for
my ecstasy, for my finitude, and my finitude is most properly my own,
so I therefore need you in order to have (although properly speak-
ing it is not a having) that which is most properly mine (my other of
being, my finitude, my death).
You as entirely other than I bring me to my entirely other than I.
Insofar as I have an entirely other than I, I myself am divided, spaced,
or shared, but I can only be as such given that my other of being is
exposed to your other of being. Compearance or co-appearing neces-
sarily indicates that there is not just one exposition occurring. Finitude
is exposed from me to you and from you to me, if you will. My other
of being as toward your other of being automatically implies that we
are co-exposed. You shares me or causes me to be outside of myself
in that the finitude that I am exposing necessarily occurs to you; I can-
not be exposed without you. The to you is as fundamental to this
equation as the exposure. I need you to expose my finitude and when
finitude is exposed, I have an other of being, or am exposed, divided,
or shared. In this sense, in the to you of the exposition, you shares
me. The simultaneity of the exposition of finitude (which immediately
implies a sharing or an ecstasy) and the to you of the exposition are
crucial. There is no temporal priority given either to one or the other;
they occur completely simultaneously. The moment in which my fini-
tude is exposed to you and the moment that I am ecstatic or shared is
the same.

Community as Slight or Abundant?

Insofar as community (or the compearing of finitude or communica-
tion) is simply how being is or that which constitutes being, it seems
that it would be impossible to lose it. According to all that Nancy
reveals regarding his conception of community, it is prelinguistic,
preconscious, and a constitutive aspect of being, utterly resisting any
kind of appropriation. Until this point in the text, The Inoperative
Community is consistent with this understanding. However, toward
the end of the essay there seems to be a barely perceptible shift. This
shift to which I refer certainly does not indicate that we could make a
work out of community, but it does gesture toward the possibility that
contexts exist that are more or less conducive to the being of commu-
nity. This is a strange notion, given that we have come to understand
community as a constitutive aspect of being; we can neither enact it
nor, properly speaking, even grasp it. It is with us before everything,
having an absolute priority and immediacy and, therefore, could not
be something that a material context could make more or less visible
 Nancys Community 65

or more or less abundant. Nonetheless, Nancy indicates that this is

precisely the case. The following pages will attempt to think of com-
munity as a constitutive aspect of being and community as depen-
dent on its context for the way in which it is (for example, slight and
inaccessible).
Nancy leads up to the suggestion that community might be more
or less accessible or more or less abundant depending on its historical
material, with an observation that we cannot lose community:

Community is given to us with being and as being, well in

advance of all our projects, desires, and undertakings. At bot-
tom, it is impossible for us to lose community. A society may be
as little communitarian as possible; it could not happen that in
the social desert there would not be, however slight, even inac-
cessible, some community. We cannot not compear. Only the
fascist masses tend to annihilate community in the delirium
of an incarnated communion. Symmetrically, the concentration
campand the extermination camp, the camp of exterminating
concentrationis in essence the will to destroy community. (35)

Even in the social desert, community would be present in some

sense, however slight, even inaccessible it may be (35). How could
this constitutive aspect of being be slight and inaccessible? How do we
reconcile this with the assertion that we cannot not compear that we
have been digesting for the entire essay? If we cannot not compear and
community is indeed a constitutive aspect of being that is prelinguistic,
then how could it be slight and inaccessible? Being is community and
thus would seem to be resistant to such discussion of degrees. The less
than subtle insinuation is that there is less community in the concen-
tration camp and that there are, therefore, times and places in which
community is more difficult to locate or slight and inaccessible. Thus,
there must be some way in which this prelinguistic, constitutive aspect
of being is integrally related to the empirical or actual conditions of
existence. Apparently, a will to immanence, such as that reflected in
the camp, prompts community, or compearance, to somehow happen
to a lesser degree. Here, perhaps immanence draws community in, that
is, limits the exposure of finitude, rendering it slight and inaccessible.
Ostensibly, this too would occur on the same prelinguistic level thus
maintaining communitys inoperative and resistant quality. It is per-
haps useful to think of community as still existing in this context (we
cannot not compeer), however, existing in such a way that it is held
at bay or not permitted the space in which to flourish. The problem
here arises from the suggestion that the material context could alter the
66 The Ethics of Community

quality (it is here described as slight and inaccessible) of that which

is preconscious. It would seem that although community is a constitu-
tive aspect of being, it, nonetheless, can be more or less evident, which
is an odd formulation.
There are tremendous implications to thinking of community as
slight and inaccessible. For example, the opposite would necessarily
also be true. Certain contexts could, thus, render community abun-
dant and accessible. Although as a prelinguistic process it remains that
which cannot be instituted, it seems to be a possibility that contexts
could be imagined or created that would allow community, in the
Nancian sense, to flourish. These contexts would necessarily be of an
order (or non-order) that is the opposite of the concentration camp, that
is, of the will to immanence and, rather, be in a way that is more con-
ducive to absolute alterity. Community remains that out of which one
cannot make a work (and here lies an aspect of its resistant character);
however, Nancy has opened the door to the possibility that there are
contexts within which community may be more or less accessible. We
still cannot grasp, hold onto, make a work of, or institute community
in any way, but we can reconsider immanence and imagine contexts
in which this reconsideration would be prevalent. Accordingly, possi-
bly, community could flourish. Although Nancy does not expand upon
this idea in any way, here he does introduce it briefly in the preface
in which he asks: . . . how can the community without essence (the
community that is neither people nor nation, neither destiny
nor generic community) be presented as such? That is, what might a
politics be that does not stem from the will to realize an essence? . . . I
shall not venture into the possible forms of such a politics. This would
be beyond my competence (xxi). There is, therefore, more than one
allusion to the relationship of this thought of community to a more
historical material level.
Nancys suggestion that there are specific sites or places where com-
munity exists in varying degrees prompts numerous questions. What
might those places where community could be abundant actually look
like? We know that they are not characterized by a will to immanence
and, furthermore, they must be marked by a structure that is open to
absolute alterity, that is, to the absolute impossibility of immanence.
But what form might such a structure assume? What exactly is the
opposite of the concentration camp?
In attempting to answer these questions, we are compelled to return
to Nancys discussion of the most fundamental stumbling block to any
thinking of true community: the concept of the individual. Nancys
entire analysis of community begins with the assertion that it was
a European invention, which some believed had shown the world a
means of escape from tyranny and the norm by which to measure all
 Nancys Community 67

our collective or communitarian undertakings (3). If we couple this

notion with an understanding that there are places or sites in which
community is more or less accessible, does it not seem appropriate to
ask if some of these places might be those which have been least effected
by a pervasive, overwhelming, and guiding notion of the individual? If
our frame of reference for understanding being and community is the
individual, then a will to immanence is contextualizing our thought.
However, if the frame of reference in terms of being is otherwise or
is at least less absolutely guided by this thoughtthen would it not
be easier to imagine the existence of a context more conducive to an
abundant community? (Is the we of which he speaks in reference to
our beings as lost most particularly a Western we? Similarly, is the
world that bears witness to the conflagration of community most pre-
cisely a Western world?) While it is neither my intention nor within my
capabilities to delve into an anthropological examination of cultures
less influenced or guided by a European notion of the individual, given
that Nancy cites it as the primary barrier to a thinking of community
and that he opens the door to the possibility of places of more or less
community, it is reasonable to observe that cultures less influenced by
this European thought would provide some interesting insights into
places or events in which community might flourish more easily.

The Resistance of Community

The discussion concerning contexts of community and specifically the
concentration camp continues: But even in the camp itself, undoubt-
edly, community never entirely ceases to resist this will. Community
is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence.
Consequently, community is transcendence: but transcendence which
no longer has any sacred meaning, signifying precisely a resistance
to immanence (35). Even in this most extreme situation where there
is a deliberate attempt to annihilate community, it, nonetheless, never
stops resisting a will to immanence (for as we know immanence or
identity is precisely the opposite of community). Community does not
resist because it is threatened but rather it resists by its very nature.
If immanence were not the goal, community would nevertheless con-
tinue to resist it since community does not try to resist or institute itself
as a resistance. Its very being is a resistance to immanence. By defini-
tion, community resists appropriation of any kind and thus any appro-
priation with the goal of achieving immanence.
Furthermore, community is itself transcendence but transcendence
conceived without the connotation of the sacred. (For Nancy, the term
sacred is still imbued with a notion of communion that is itself
based on a desire for immanence.) The transcendence that community
68 The Ethics of Community

indicates is based on its resistant character. For Nancy, there is some-

thing transcendent in the manner in which community resists all the
forms and all the violences of subjectivity (35). No doubt the violences
of subjectivity refers to atrocities that result from a will to immanence
such as that of the concentration camp. Communitys inherent resis-
tance to such a will is transcendence itself.
Linked to its resistant character (revealed to be transcendence) is the
notion that community exists as an imperative which assumes the form
of a task and a struggle. Throughout the entire text, Nancy expresses
the urgency to think this thought. Community is given to us or we
are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and
communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced. But it is a task,
which is differentan infinite task at the heart of finitude (35). If com-
munity is a gift to be renewed or communicated, there follows the
implication that it may not be renewed or communicated. It will none-
theless remain (we cannot not compear). However, in these instances
we might imagine it as slight and inaccessible. In contrast to a work
or production, community is a task and a struggle that exists infinitely
at the heart of finitude. In its nature community resists and struggles
against a will to immanence and there is an imperative linked therein.
The struggle and resistance against immanence exists given that
beings being demands to be exposed. Accordingly, community cuts
across or breaks through the logic of the concentration camp and all
other examples of a will to immanence.
The implications of Nancys exposition of community are far-
reaching. Our conceptions, henceforth, must not be marred by the
inherently reductive and limiting framework of the individual. From
this new and (paradoxically) groundless point of departure, we can
attempt to imagine events of community, moments of resisting imma-
nence, within the literary and material worlds. Nancys rigorous analy-
sis prompts us to assume this task. Quite possibly, community herein
conceived suggests that one avenue of exploration (among many) may
be contexts less saturated with the overarching concept of the individ-
ual. Accordingly, African American and US Latino Literature provides
a fertile location for such exploration. Approaching these texts from
a radically new conception of community where being is a complex
event rather than ground can provide provocative, new, and interrup-
tive insights.
3 Morrisons Beloved, Nancian
Community, and Derridean Witnessing

Thus far we have closely examined the necessity of overcoming a

humanistic perspective of being. Vis--vis both Nancy and Derrida,
we have analyzed the ways in which a metaphysical humanism is a
profound conceptual obstacle to any theory or praxis of ethics. Nancys
The Inoperative Community reveals that the notion of being as an
Individual radically separate from other beings not only makes being-
with impossible but is itself a logical impossibility. Tracing the his-
tory of the Individual and observing the resulting societal structures,
permits a full view of the corresponding relational poverty. How can
an entirely self-enclosed being move toward the other in any way?
Ultimately we found that according to Nancy being is an event simul-
taneous to being-with. I am, and can only be, with the other giving an
ontological priority to Heideggerian Mitsein (being-with). The Free
Voice of Man adds texture to the discussion by exploring the role of
language in being. All discourse, indeed all thought, is always-already
implicated with imperative ethicity, an extra-discursive obligation that
ultimately involves being in and as the trace. Imperative ethicity is thus
the way of being. Derridas Poetics and Politics of Witnessing con-
siders the inevitability of bearing witness and its poetic nature. Since
being in the world involves a profound entangling of being, language,
and world, experiencing and thus witnessing is never transparent and
representative (of a pre-given and objective world) but rather always
singular and necessarily involving the poetic (rather than that which
re-presents). As such, Derrida claims that all responsible witnessing
must involve a poetic experience of language. When I bear witness to
you, a vow or an oath is always implied: you have to believe me. The
to you of any communication or relation must simultaneously be a
promise. All relation is based upon this extra-discursive event that
happens within language as a pledge. Further, Derrida echoes Nancys
prioritizing of esctatic exposure in Rams wherein he claims that
before I am I carry the other. Rather than a simultaneous or coexis-
tent being and being-with, Derrida maintains that I am and can only be
after having been in a way of responsibility to the other.
70 The Ethics of Community

The relationship between deconstructive ethics and the world of con-

crete experience and agency has continually manifested in our inquiry
as we have grappled with how to understand the real-life implications
of our analysis. What are we to actually do with our understanding? In
Chapter 1 we addressed these questions and found that their frame
generally presupposed a metaphysical opposition between theory and
praxis. However, consistent with Nancys rupturing of community and
extra-discursive imperative, and Derridas poetic experience of wit-
nessing and the corresponding extra-discursive oath, we located the
possibility for glory in the actual world. Despite the constant threat
of totalizing and reducing our intellectual insights by putting them
to work, it is our task and responsibility to imagine ways of being
in the world that are consistent with our intellectual endeavors. An
examination of Toni Morrisons Beloved provides us with just such an
opportunity.
Concerned as it is with ethical responsibility and obligation, wit-
nessing, language, and the extra-discursive realm, Beloved engages
the central issues of our explorations. The context for its philosophical
underpinnings and articulations is located squarely within a specific
and extreme historical situation. Locating the discussion within the
confines of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its immediate aftermath
recontextualizes our concerns. The thinking and events of being that
we have discussed assume a particular urgency when framed by a dire
quest for survival in the realm of an unjust, oppressive, and violent
sociopolitical and economic structure such as slavery. Here we witness
how deconstructive ethics and its attendant views of language and
being assume an actual and irrepressible power. In the close readings
of Beloved that follow, we consider what deconstructive ethics looks
like in action, imagining contexts in which the space of being opens
and community in the Nancian sense can flourish. At stake are singu-
lar moments of being within nonrepresentational language that allow
and even promote a space of a flourishing being-with, community, or
carrying of the other on both a conceptual and material level (insofar as
they permit separation); these textual moments transcend conceptual-
ization for both character and reader.
Given that the contexts for Beloved are black communities in the slave
and post-slave United States, it is not only the structure of slavery that
informs our discussion but additionally, and even more crucially, black
cultural sensibilities. Culture has thus far been wholly absent from our
discussion.1 Its consideration demands the adoption of an entirely new
lens, one that our previous examination of Nancian community clearly
supports. Recall that Nancy painstakingly explores the far-reaching
power and ramifications of thinking in terms of the Individual, which
he identifies as a product of Europe and even interpreted by some as an
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 71

indicator of Europes triumphant dominance, illustrating to the world

a path to freedom from tyranny and standard for communal endeav-
ors. Extending that thought, we can consider with Beloved the degree to
which cultures that are less infused by an overarching perspective of
the Individual and its corresponding structures and sensibilities might
conceive and exist in and according to alternative understandings.
Perceiving cultures as hybrid entities, continually and always in
flux and fluid, is a central component of our interrogation. In the same
manner that being continually moves and resists identity, culture con-
sistently transforms. Rather than being fixed and absolute, cultures
necessarily move and change. Given the general consensus of the
humanities concerning the debunking of the reductive essentializing
of metaphysical (and by extension Enlightenment and Romantic) doc-
trines (concerning truth and progress particularly), we may see that
considering texts within the bounds of the West but nonetheless
contextualized very plainly by hybridity, mestizaje, or creolization
might be fertile grounds for investigating that which is less deter-
mined by essential notions of the Individual that are so contrary to
possibilities of being-with, ethics, and the trace (or deconstructive eth-
ics). These texts provide a context for understanding and philosophiz-
ing that is distinct from but certainly related to the canonical West
(which is of course not only the canonical west as infused as it is with
the allegedly Other) and has its own singular way of understanding
language, culture, being, time, artistic expression, and so on.
One prime example of such a consideration of culture is Paul Gilroys
groundbreaking and influential The Black Atlantic, which provides a
compelling examination of black expressive culture and its power and
potential regarding innovative and liberatory experiences (such as the
nonhierarchical and lateral relations in call and response). Gilroy care-
fully examines the manner in which cultures refuse independence and
isolation. By nature and definition, culture involves interface, relation,
and movement. Thus rather than an absolute category, culture indi-
cates ways of being that are fluidly unique, in constant process and
relation to other cultures, as well as shifting geographical, histori-
cal, political, social, and economic contexts. While Nancy understands
the Individual as simultaneously the primary frame for thinking of
being or existence in the West and the central obstacle to any think-
ing of being-with or community, Gilroy similarly tackles the legacy of
Enlightenment thinking and its belief in Truth, Progress, and the cor-
responding scientific racism as a difficulty in transcending essential-
izing thought and its attendant racism. For our purposes it is perhaps
most useful to understand the central tenants of Enlightenment and
Romantic thought as an extension of the kind of metaphysical think-
ing of the Individual that Nancy so rigorously attacks. While in many
72 The Ethics of Community

respects extremely different, Nancys and Gilroys analyses share a

preoccupation with the degree to which this discourse has infused
our Western understandings and prohibited a thinking of being-with
or the ineffable respectively.2 Nancys tone is urgent concerning the
necessity of understanding being as radically social; he explains this
urgency to some degree in terms of the horrific consequences of meta-
physical thinking and a particular historical event with which such
thought is consistent: the Nazi concentration camp. Blending elements
of Nancy and Gilroys critiques of the Individual and the Enlightenment
respectively permits us to propose a compelling analysis of an ethi-
cal, deconstructive, and experiencing subjectivity. Nancys position
is powerfully augmented by Gilroys emphasis on the subject of lived
experience (in culture) while Gilroys benefits from the more nuanced
understanding of the relationship between language and ethics.
Alongside Gilroy, we maintain that examining black cultural pro-
duction in all of its powers and possibilities necessitates a refram-
ing from traditional objects of study; performance, music, as well as
the phatic elements of language have been disregarded for too long.
Extending (and at places departing from) Gilroys discourse, we con-
sider how moments of black cultural production provide contexts for
a flourishing of ethical or deconstructive being, and, possibly, corre-
sponding material structures. In our analysis, these events are consis-
tently marked by a nonrepresentational experience of being which can
and sometimes does lead to actual ethical practices. Here we probe
the relationship between theory and praxis or concept and experience.
Finally, interrogating the complexly interrelated roles of language
and culture alongside ethics and being and the concept/experience
dichotomy allows us to consider the possibilities of agency for a decon-
structed subject.
A productive way to approach or combine components of Nancys
and Gilroys analyses and amplify them with a consideration of
agency is to introduce David Woods compelling Ethics and Politics
after Deconstruction and The Experience of the Ethical (Dooley and
Kearney 1999). Wood is interested in reintroducing experience into
a continental philosophical discourse of deconstructive subjectivity.
He notes that while Derrida had always acknowledged the rupture
within the notion of presence and experience (thus necessarily under-
mining the possibility of either), only his later works evoked experi-
ence without placing it under erasure.3 The later works thus clearly
denote some shift in perspective as they plainly and freely reference
an experience of the aporia as well as experiences of the limits of
language and discursive thought, which we witnessed and examined
in Chapter 1. In a move similar to that suggested at the close of the
previous chapters, which gestures toward a thinking of concept and
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 73

action (and that further echoes Gilroys treatment of culture), Wood

suggests the following:

If we apply the principle of what we proposed earlierthat we

must will the conditions of what we value-then we must ask
under what conditions such negotiable identity could best flour-
ish. It may be said that our contemporary rich diversity of stories,
language, cultural symbols, etc. is no substitute for tradition, that
one cannot just buy and sell roots, tribal bonds, etcetera. But one
serious response here would be that a culture of dynamic iden-
tity modification is a culture, a tradition itself. (Ethics and Politics
after Deconstruction 2005, 23)

Wood thus accommodates a thinking of a deconstructive subjectivity

or negotiable identity alongside experience, culture, and agency
such that not only can we consider the subject as nonessential but the
agency of said subject becomes a legitimate possibility. The primary
task remaining is to identify as precisely as possible the relationship
between a deconstructive, ethical subject (or subject of the trace), and
language, experience, agency, and culture.
In what follows, we consider being as both essence and trace (and
the distinct contexts that constitute them), the relationship between
theory and praxis, and the relationship between experience and agency.
Approaching Beloved in this manner (and perhaps listening to its offer-
ings) grants us valuable new perspectives. If we can imagine contexts
and more specifically structures within which there is little space for a
flourishing of community, that is, if community is subject to degrees of
existence, then we ought to be able to talk about places within which
community (ethics) might more or less saliently exist. If it exists more
saliently, if there is an opposite of the concentration camp, then is not
the corresponding lived experience a decidedly different one? If all of
our structures of existence are based upon a will to essence as Nancy
proposes (and we stand to lose the meaningless-meaning of being),
then the structures as well as the concepts according to and with which
the structures are made and determined cannot be separated from our
lived experience in the material world. The concepts and lived
experiences are irrevocably intermingled.
As we engage Beloved, we must bear in mind that the black commu-
nity that we are examining is no more an idealized community than
any other. Its not infrequent collapses into meanness, envy, and ran-
corousness refuse a romanticizing and reductive view of its complexity.4
Our primary focus concerning a black community is its emphasis on
nonrepresentational language, the power of song, and hospitality that
indicate a valuing of non-absolute and non-groundable sensibilities,
74 The Ethics of Community

which can certainly be interpreted as evincing something of an ethical

character as we have come to understand it. These sensibilities are con-
trasted to the logic and corresponding being of the proponents of slav-
ery. Existing within language is one thing but the distinction between
existing within nonrepresentational language (and the corresponding
groundlessness) versus representational language (and its compatibil-
ity with the desire to name, define, and possess) is entirely another,
and this distinction is made clearly within the text.

Loosely based upon the historical incident in which a runaway slave

woman in South Carolina named Margaret Garner killed her baby girl
as slave catchers approached, Beloved addresses many of our central
preoccupations. While the bulk of the narrative unfolds in Cincinnati,
Ohio, in 1873, the text is replete with temporal shifts that abruptly place
the reader throughout the slave South pre-emancipation proclamation.
In the narrative present, our protagonist Sethe struggles to beat back
the past whilst living in a house haunted by the ghost of her murdered
baby with her one remaining child, her daughter Denver (Beloved 1987,
73). The suffering that she endured at the hands of the plantation over-
seer (paradoxically named Schoolteacher) and his nephews, the loss
of her husband and children, and her horrific murder of her baby that
the overarching crime of slavery instigated contribute to a life of unliv-
able memories that she struggles to keep at bay.
Consistent with Nancys and Derridas assessment of the Shoah, the
institution of slavery is presented very precisely as a will to essence.
Strengthened and cemented by structures of commodification, objec-
tification, and exchange, a condition of possibility of slavery is the
logic of the Enlightenments scientific racism and its attendant render-
ing of humans as fundamentally partly animal. Sethe perceives this
logic clearly and prefers death to the dirtying that results from it.
Importantly, it is the character named Schoolteacher (the institution-
ally chosen proprietor and transmitter of knowledge) who explicitly
provides Sethe with an understanding and experience of this concept.
At Sweet Home, the plantation in which she resided with her husband
and children prior to her escape, she overhears him providing a lesson
to one of his nephews: No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put
her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And
dont forget to line them up (193). Sethe is jolted by the overheard lesson
and turns to Miss Garner (the mistress of the plantation) for a definition
of a critical term: characteristics. What do characteristics mean?
(195). After several orders directed at Sethe, Miss Garner eventually suc-
cumbs to Sethes insistence and responds, A characteristic is a feature.
A thing thats natural to a thing (195). At this point, Sethe understands
that Schoolteacher conceives of the slaves as intrinsically animal.
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 75

Transcending this label is impossible given its essentialistic foun-

dation: black people are, in part, inherently animal. Armed with this
totalizing master discourse, Schoolteacher subsequently observes and
takes notes on the pupils (his nephews) sexual assault of Sethe, an
enactment of the interrogation into her human and animal charac-
teristics: . . . two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast
the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and
writing it up (70). As partly animal, Sethes body is literally milked
by one of the nephews; however, as partly human, she also provides a
disabled body (the other holding me down) upon which a sexual act
can be performed. In an effort to further his studies into the nature
of the slaves beings and observe his theories in action, he takes notes
surrounding the events of the assault. Schoolteachers experiment
demonstrates Beloveds refusal of a theory/practice opposition, forcing
the reader to witness scientific racism in and as action.
Schoolteachers inability to see the slaves outside of a commodify-
ing perspective is further revealed when he makes the trip to Ohio
to reclaim the runaway Sethe and her children. Unbeknownst to
Schoolteacher and his posse, Sethe witnesses their approach and races
to the shed to kill her children and herself. Upon encountering Sethe
in the shed, Schoolteacher laments the loss of the labor he claimed as
his own:

Right off it was clear, to Schoolteacher especially, that there was

nothing there to claim. The three (now four because shed had
the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were
alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and
raise properly to do the work desperately needed, were not. Two
were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down
the dress of the main onethe woman schoolteacher bragged
about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed
his collars the way he liked, besides having at least ten breed-
ing years left. But now shed gone wild, due to the mishandling
of the nephew whod overbeat her and made her cut and run.
Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think-
just think-what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the
point of education. (149)

Schoolteachers approach to Sethe reveals nothing other than the

impossibility of a genuine approach to the other. He conceives of her
as an animal (a horse) and a source of labor, in other words, solely
in terms of use value, a commodity that must be owned both for his
benefit and her own: . . . people who needed every care and guidance
in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred (151).
76 The Ethics of Community

Other than as labor outlined in very specific terms, Schoolteacher is

incapable of perceiving Sethe at all.
The failure of the vast majority of the white characters to conceive
the humanity of the slaves is obvious; however, more veiled is that this
perceptive lack extends into their ability to see being at all. The world
of the white characters in Beloved is thoroughly infused with human-
istic notions and their being is correspondingly impoverished. With
the exception of Amy Denver, who is herself marginalized by a white
patriarchal power structure, the text offers no examples of white people
engaging to or toward the other as we will witness is a possibility in the
black community. Rather, the white characters, from Schoolteacher, the
nephews, Mr. and Mrs. Garner and the Bodwins, only understand in
terms of commodification and exchange.5 Such an impoverished view
leads to the essentialization, reduction, and violence unto the other and
themselves as Stamp Paid reveals in the following passage:

White people believed that whatever the manners, under every

dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging
screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their
sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The
more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them
how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the
more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something
Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more
tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasnt the jungle blacks
brought from that other (livable) place. It was the jungle white
folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, and through
and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had
made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them.
Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so
scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming
baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were
their own. (199)

The assessment of the spreading of the perceived lethal and unnavi-

gable waters of every black skin to the white folks themselves is
consistent with Nancys proposal that those who engage in essential-
izing violence are both perpetrator and victim of their own crime. The
event of the totalization of being (the other) is not only the attempted
annihilation of being and being-with (or a will to death), but the anni-
hilation of the agent. In other words, essentializing the other is implic-
itly an essentialization of self (or the will to death of the other is a will
to death of self). If we recall that for Nancy and Derrida being is
radically social in an a priori fashion and is itself a being-with and its
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 77

attendant obligation, then it follows that making a work or project of

the other is tantamount to refusing the being-with that is being itself.
Similar to the impossibility of community in Enlightenment formu-
lations is the impossibility of bearing witness. The view of being as a
totalizable essence renders a strict separation between being, world,
and language. If being is an objectively knowable for-itself that is
implicitly only unto-itself, then it is knowable through and with a lan-
guage that is radically separate from being and the world. An objective
being and world are knowable with a language that directly reflects
and re-presents it. Such is the condition of possibility of Romantic
and Enlightenment doctrines and so goes the world of slavery and
Schoolteacher (and the concentration camp). Bearing witness as we
have come to perceive it thus stands in direct contrast to these classi-
cal formulations, necessitating a poetic language which itself eschews
representationality and its correspondingly reductive defi nitions.
Derrida notes the totalizing quality of representational language and
Beloved echoes this thought, further underscoring the relationship
between representational language and power: Definitions belong to
the definer and not the defined (190).
In addition to demonstrating the unspeakable horrors of slavery and
the essentializing logic upon which it is based, Beloved reveals moments
or events in which community as a non-communing relation becomes
manifest. These situations provide clues as to what a flourishing rather
than slight and inaccessible community might actually look like. The
first of these moments that we investigate concerns Sethe, her daughter
Denver, and their extreme isolation from the community.
Effectively cast out of the black community in Lorain, Ohio (through
a painful and ongoing process of mutual rejection), Sethe eventu-
ally comes to assert, the world is in this room (1823). The provoca-
tive component of the mutual disdain between the community and
Sethe is that it results not from her rough actions in the shed or her
murder of her baby, but the pride and assertion of independence that
followed (152, 232, 249, 256). As Stamp Paid, a central character, later
pronounces: Pride, well, that bothers em a bit. They can get messy
when they think somebodys too proud (232). Sethes independent and
proud demeanor, consistently evincing that she could go it alone, is
entirely untenable for the community. Given that Sethes total and radi-
cal isolation from the community is a central element of the narrative
(she literally has not a single friend or even acquaintance with whom
she interacts and Denver suffers mightily as a result), it is crucial to
examine it rigorously. Dichotomies such as those between individual
and community, radical self-reliance and interdependence, inside and
outside, from which Sethe works, are oddly those in which the com-
munity participates, transcends within the community that eschews
78 The Ethics of Community

Sethe, and ultimately transcends entirely. In what follows, we trace

several textual moments that illustrate the manner in which the realms
of concept and experience become one.
Near the close of the text Denver is finally forced to leave the porch
of her house, a momentous event given that she has not left the con-
fines and perceived safety of the home realm in several years. The ghost
of the baby has not only manifested in corporeal form but Sethe has
become entirely overcome with devotion and an impossible desire to
convince Beloved of the necessity of the murder. At this point in the
text, Sethe has removed herself from all outside contact, including her
employment (and source of income and food) and her life is entirely
lived according to Beloved and her demands. Beloved has become
increasingly large and angry while Sethe has diminished physically to
such a dangerous degree that Denver fears for her mothers life. Denver
perceives clearly the gravity of the situation and realizes that she must
ask somebody for help in order to save her mother (243). However, her
alienation is so complete that Denver perceives leaving the porch as a
departure from all ground and orientation: . . . since neither Beloved
nor Sethe seemed to care what the next day might bring (Sethe happy
when Beloved was; Beloved lapping devotion like cream), Denver knew
it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the
world, leave the two behind and ask somebody for help (243). Denver
and Sethes frame of communal exile is clearly visible. For Denver, leav-
ing the house meant leaving the world and facing possible annihila-
tion as one might perceive actually stepping off the edge of the world.6
After a brief conversation with her grandmothers ghost, Denver
finds the necessary courage and leaves the porch to find that the way
came back (245). She manages to locate the last house she had ever vis-
ited, that of Miss Lady Jones, the black schoolteacher of the community
and the one from whom Denver had learned her letters. The encounter
between Miss Lady Jones and Denver that follows contains within it
an event that transforms Denvers life. Rather than words of wisdom
or a message of hope and encouragement, it is the simple utterance of
the word baby, said softly and with such kindness that inaugurated
her life in the world as a woman (248). It is the to you of the utter-
ance rather than any message that Miss Lady Jones was trying to relay
that is so transformative for Denver. The power of the word baby said
softly and with such kindness is obviously not a matter of strict sig-
nification but of another element of a linguistic experience. Language
is not functioning representationally in this instance and the intensity
of Denvers experience is drawn rather from a profound sense of being
with an other whose utterance has not articulated or represented a
message, but expressed kindness, care, and an experience of being-
with an other that Denver has so severely lacked.
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 79

It is no coincidence that Denvers inauguration into womanhood did

not end with Miss Lady Joness kindness. Rather:

The trail she [Denver] followed to get to that sweet, thorny, place
was made up of paper scraps containing the handwritten names
of others. Lady Jones gave her some rice, four eggs, and some tea.
Denver told her that she couldnt be away from home for long
because of her mothers condition. Could she do chores in the
morning? Lady Jones told her that no one, not herself, not anyone
she knew, could pay anybody anything for work they did them-
selves. But if you all need to eat until your mother is well, all
you have to do is say so. She mentioned her churchs committee
invented so nobody had to go hungry. That agitated her guest
who said, No, no, as though asking for help from strangers was
worse than hunger. Lady Jones said goodbye to her and asked
her to come back anytime.
Two days later Denver stood on the porch and noticed something
lying on the tree stump at the edge of the yard. She went to look
and found a sack of white beans. Another time a plate of cold
rabbit meat. One morning a basket of eggs sat there. As she lifted
it, a slip of paper fluttered down. She picked it up and looked at
it. M. Lucille Williams was written in big crooked letters. On
the back was a blob of flour-water paste. So Denver paid a second
visit to the world outside the porch, although all she said when
she returned the basket was Thank You.
Every now and then, all through the spring, names appeared
near or in gifts of food. Obviously for the return of the pan or
plate or basket; but also to let the girl know, if she cared to, who
the donor was, because some of the parcels were wrapped in
paper, and though there was nothing to return, the name was
nevertheless there . . . (2489)

Denvers agitation at the perceived charity that she and her mother
would receive confirms the values of self-reliance and pride that Sethe
has passed on to Denver. Sethe and Denvers lonely existence is predi-
cated upon a view of being as radically individual or unto itself. Here
it is clear that the conceptual understanding of being (radically self-
reliant) has grave and concrete ramifications in the material world.
The above passage contains numerous provocative pronouncements
concerning Denvers experience of community in both a traditional
and a Nancian sense. The implications of the trail that Denver fol-
lowed to reach that sweet and thorny place of adulthood are vast.
Containing within it the absent presence of an other, predicated upon
the notion that a body has traversed an area and left a path, a trail is a
80 The Ethics of Community

literal manifestation of the structure of the trace. Denver follows this

path of others who have in some way gone before her but do not mani-
fest as presences. The fact that Denver follows this trail of absent pres-
ence in order to reach womanhood is telling. Changing in such a way
that she is able to reach a different and necessary experience of being
necessitates her dependence on rather than independence from others,
both in the Nancian sense and literally. The trail is a metaphor for her
movement to adulthood but, simultaneously, her movement from her
home to the homes of others literalizes the metaphor. Further, Denver
follows a metaphorical path of absent presence (the trail) upon which
she is dependent to reach maturity, but is literally dependent upon the
food left for her by members of the community. The metaphor of the
trace or trail functions as an abstraction as well as a literal phenom-
enon simultaneously rendering the two realms inseparable.
Adding another layer of complexity to Denvers experience is the fact
that the trail is made up of the handwritten names of others, which
are also literal manifestations of a trace. The trail that she follows is
thus a trail of a trail or a trace of a trace. The text proposes that evolu-
tionary or transformative events of being can occur in the context of
phatic and nonrepresentational occurrences of language and being in
the context of the trace. Crucially, these momentous events occur both
metaphorically (or poetically) and literally. The path or trail is an actual
traversing of land as well as a trace of beings (the handwritten names
of others).
These experiences are ethical in both a conceptual and literal sense
on a level beyond a close consideration of the nature of the trail and its
transformative impact. The material content of this experience is a lit-
eral putting bread in the mouth of the other evincing actual, tangible,
and conceivably life-changing generosity. Denvers neighbors, whom
she literally does not know, are sacrificing some of their own food (and
Miss Lady Jones has made it clear that no one has much extra) to help
Denver and her mother (for whom they clearly do not have positive
feelings). On every level community is flourishing.
The space of being is first opened when Denver experiences the
to-ness of Miss Lady Joness utterance. Denver experiences the non-
representational event as a manifestation of kindness, which we
might assert (particularly given the events that follow) as a hearing
of the oath or pledge (the to-you) inherent to (non- communing) com-
munication. The moment marks the beginning of a profound change
in Denvers life. The path that she then follows can be considered a
trace of a trace, the absent presence of being, or the spacing that is
ethics. Rather than a merely conceptual non-groundable ground, this
space experienced as an event is literally manifest as a central ethical
image: the feeding of the other.
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 81

According to Nancy and Derrida, deconstruction is ethical insofar as

differance is the opening up of the space of to-ness, allowing me to be
to you. Being is the trace and when it is experienced as such, it is neces-
sarily nondiscursive. An experience of the traces trace leads Denver to
one such moment. According to Derrida, all representation, whether
spoken or written, occurs via the structure of the trace; according to
Nancy, all imperatives, including the most fundamental of all, impera-
tive ethicity, find their ultimate breathing room in the space of being/
language. Denvers powerful experience with Miss Lady Jones under-
scores an opening of the space of being that contains a play of several
traces at once (and itself further calls forth the interplay of the theory/
practice binary). It is the handwritten names of others, the actual lin-
guistic trace (that which exceeds conceptualization) that is contex-
tualized (and actually also indicate or refer to in a representational
manner) by a literal or empirical moment of that which the Derridean
trace is supposed to theoretically allow: to-ness or hospitality as an
event of being that transcends the concept/experience dichotomy. The
text speaks a literal manifestation of an a priori responsibility to the
other presented as putting bread in the mouth of the other. The lit-
eral traces, both the area traversed to other homes and the handwrit-
ten names of others, call forth differance (or the trace), noncoincidence,
and non-presence, as well as and simultaneously, an material to-ness that
conceptual difference ostensibly makes possible. According to Nancy
and Derrida, difference or the trace creates the spacing that is impera-
tive ethicity. These appear to be highly abstract formulations; however,
here, they literally manifest in an actual ethical relation that is coinci-
dental with literal trails or traces.
Throughout this book there has been a continual attempt to indi-
cate the complexity of an abstract/concrete relation and particularly
its relation to the concomitant notions of ethical theory and praxis. We
are first philosophically grounding the proposition that these dichoto-
mies are in fact constructions and the terms of the binaries cannot,
strictly speaking, be entirely disentangled. Our task is to locate those
moments where conceptual and material oppositions are transcended
and the results are extra-discursive and ethical experiences that neces-
sarily involve an interruption of being as an identity. This experience
evades capture in the world of concepts as well as in the world of what
we commonly think of as experience. Denvers journey to woman-
hood vis--vis Miss Lady Joness spoken words and the handwritten
notes of others defies the concept/experience dichotomy, and mani-
fests as a trail through (or passage within) imperative ethicity and the
extra-discursive or an experience of the trace. For Denver, the event
is marked by a literal manifestation of traces as well as literal manifes-
tations of ethical movements defined as a flourishing and unfettered
82 The Ethics of Community

to-ness that has a profound impact. The first moment occurs with the
nonrepresentational utterance of Miss Lady Jones and the subsequent
events occur as the neighbors literally leave traces as they put bread in
the mouth of the other. This example illustrates that what is at stake in
this instance is all that the extra-discursive moment entails.
But is this necessarily an extra-discursive moment? We can certainly
affirm that it is transformative for Denver insofar as she experiences
an inauguration that leads to womanhood. We are prompted to
call it extra-discursive as the changes that occur do not emerge from
representation, meaning, or concept but rather from something other
that happens in the event of language. The significatory power of oh
baby is not found in the content but rather in the manner in which it
is extended (said softly and with such kindness). That the continua-
tion of this trace or trail is a result of a (continued) extension of others
is not insignificant (The trail she followed to get to that sweet, thorny,
place was made up of paper scraps containing the handwritten names
of others). Given that Denvers experience is contextualized by a mul-
tifaceted trace, denies conceptual access, and foregrounds Nancys
radical sociality, we can interpret it as an extra-discursive moment of
being-with or community.
Being is the trace and yet there are locatable contexts that encour-
age the speaking of the trace that lead to its flourishing. The rather
simple idea is that differance is always-already there as it is the way of
being, however, it can flourish or wither depending on material con-
text. In the case of Beloved, there are repeated situations in which this
component of being can be somehow tapped and then flourish (as well
as the opposite in both the white and black communities). The result is
repeatedly one of transformation.
Through the character of Stamp Paid this actual generosity is in
some way thematized as the following quote indicates:

After a disagreeable breakfast he went to see Ella and John to

find out what they knew. Perhaps there he could fi nd out if, after
all these years of clarity, he had misnamed himself and there was
yet another debt he owed. Born Joshua, he renamed himself when
he handed over his wife to his masters son. Handed her over in
the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because
his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where
and to whom could she return when the boy was through? With
that gift, he decided that he didnt owe anybody anything.
Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off. He thought
it would make him rambunctious, renegadea drunkard even,
the debtlessness, and in a way it did. But there was nothing to
do with it. Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all.
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 83

Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike
others. It didnt seem much of a way to live and it brought him
no satisfaction. So he extended this debtlessness to other people
by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery.
Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for;
gave them their own bill of sale, so to speak. You paid it now life
owes you. And the receipt, as it were, was a welcome door that
he never had to knock on, like John and Ellas in front of which he
stood and said, Who in there? only once and she was pulling
on the hinge. (1845)

Stamp foregrounds larger textual themes that are otherwise only

implied, expressing a hybrid sensibility in which his own conclusions
are distinct from and yet literally rendered in terms of the masters dis-
course of exchange and receipt. The master narrative informs Stamp
Paids thought, while, simultaneously, his own sensibilities determine
the contents of his engagement. Certainly content and structure can-
not be strictly separated as the in terms of which are crucial to a
precise understanding of content. Nonetheless, Stamp Paids reflec-
tions appear to confirm the possibility of a thinking in terms of the
master that paradoxically defies his entire discourse. His stress upon
extension (he literally extended his debtlessness to other people) and
hospitality (a welcome door he never had to knock on) indicate that
his sensibility is virtually antithetical to a slave system of oppression,
objectification, and commodification. Stamp Paids interaction with the
dominant structures of the master, in which he both thinks in their
terms and subverts them, is a poignant example of cultural hybridity.
Of a distinct (insofar as this is possible) cultural context (the African
and African American and its attendant economic, geographic, histori-
cal specificities), Stamp Paids responses to his situations demonstrate a
blended approach, informed by both the master narrative and a simul-
taneous opposition to it. Understanding the fluid nature of such cul-
tural sensibilities is thus crucial to our analysis.
A closer examination of the above passage further reveals the
extent to which Stamp Paid directly highlights an ethical imperative
that often manifests in the concrete world of the black community in
Beloved. Such an imperative does not appear as a result of interroga-
tion, choice, or an externally prescribed doctrine but simply as a way
to live.7 For all but the expelled Sethe and Denver, hospitality in some
form is simply the way of being. Stamp Paids articulation in this pas-
sage is momentous as it is the one instance in the text that a conceptual
understanding that grounds an overarching ethical imperative is pre-
sented. While the other members of the community who frequently
behave according to a fundamental ethical imperative (such as those
84 The Ethics of Community

witnessed in the generosity of Miss Lady Jones and the community

who provides offerings of food to Denver) do not reveal an abstracted
reason for their behavior, Stamp Paid does.
Contextualized by the coexistence of principles of debt, payment,
the gift, and hospitality, Stamps musings clearly demand rigorous
interpretation. Oddly, the notion of the gift might first appear to be
an indication of a commodification of women, however, even slightly
closer inspection reveals that the gift that he extends is not his wife
Vashti to the owners son but rather the paralysis that she demands of
him as a response: Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed
over his wife to his masters son. Handed her over in the sense that
he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded
he stay alive . . . With that gift, he decided that he didnt owe anybody
anything (185, italics mine). Strictly speaking, his gift is thus to do
nothing and correspondingly, stay alive; he gives the gift of his life, a
fact that becomes more significant as we proceed.
Giving his life leads him to conclude that he is debtless or that he
didnt owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act
paid them off (185). Ostensibly, previous to his act of not acting he had
obligations, however unformulated they may have been, but his action-
less action paid them off and as a result he considered himself debt-
less. In response to the absence of an ethical imperative or sense of
obligation, he thought it would make him rambunctious, renegadea
drunkard even, the debtlessness and in a way it did. But there was
nothing to do with it. Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not
at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike
others. It didnt seem much of a way to live and it brought him no sat-
isfaction (185). With no accountability, responsibility, or obligation to
an other, Stamp found himself entirely free to behave according to his
own will and desire. He perceived that the debtless situation may cause
him to act out wildly, subvert lawful behavior, and possibly even
become a drunk. One could argue that his conclusion that in some
sense it did emerges from his subsequent unlawful behavior of fer-
rying runaways across the Mississippi into free Ohio. More interest-
ing still is his ultimate conclusion regarding his lack of obligation to
others: It seemed no way to live and it brought him no satisfaction
(185). After maintaining his life in response to Vashtis demand (his
gift), he found himself without responsibility to others which in turn
prompted the conclusion that living debtlessly was no way to live
and brought him no satisfaction. Stamp Paid is quite specific regard-
ing the utter meaninglessness of living with no accountability and
the lack of satisfaction it brings. From working, to sleeping, to sense,
the absence of stakes is clear. Even senselessness becomes a possibil-
ity in this world devoid of responsibility and yet such a senselessness
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 85

(unlike the one we witness at the close of the text) is literally unsatis-
factory. Stamps response is to look elsewhere for a way to live and a
corresponding satisfaction.
The giving of his life and the subsequent perceived lack of obliga-
tion ultimately revealed to him another kind of obligation, which can
be read as a way to live that is ultimately satisfying (contrary to the
no way to live of rambunctiousness, renegade behavior, and alcohol).
Rather than living a life unto himself in which he could work, sleep,
and make sense according to only his own will or desire, he . . . extended
this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off what-
ever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and ren-
dered them paid for; gave them their own bill of sale so to speak. You
paid it now life owes you (185). Provocative in its implications, this
passage reveals that a response to debtlessness that does bring satis-
faction is an extension of debtlessness to other people by helping them
pay out and off whatever they owed in misery . . . (185). In a nearly
extra-discursive structure, a fulfilling response to the absence of obli-
gation is to extend this absence and help others. In effect, Stamp is
extending to others the sense of the absence of an obligation to extend to
others. Importantly, it is precisely when Stamp is devoid of an obliga-
tion to others that he perceives plainly an obligation to others and it is
this that he then extends. In other words, that which he is extending
and the extension itself are one and the same; further, extension and
helping others is revealed to be continuous with rather than contrary
to life insofar as it is the way to live. Stamp Paids subversive bill of
sale is the extension of the sentiment that they have paid off to life
what they owe in misery.
Oddly, the transaction of extension and satisfactory life has further
echoes of commodification insofar as it is framed by Stamps reception
of a receipt. However, consistent with his transgressive understanding,
the exchange relationship of commodification is entirely subverted by
that which he receives in return for his extension, which is hospitality
in a most elemental form: And the receipt, as it were, was a welcome
door that he never had to knock on . . . (185). The strict barrier of the
(metaphorical and literal) threshold of an other (the door of the home)
evaporates as Stamp assumes an always-already welcome relation with
the others to whom his life is extended. Literalizing a fundamental
ethical image yet again, Stamps manner of engagement with the black
community is marked by a deterioration of borders between inside
and outside such that in some way he is always-already with, extended
to and welcomed by, the other. (The degree to which this is the precise
opposite of Sethes formulations is not to be lost on the reader.)
Importantly, rather than a merely conceptual understanding,
Stamps realizations and their progression emerge directly from and
86 The Ethics of Community

within his experiences in the material world and his attendant theory
and practice cannot be disentangled. It is the situation with Vashti and
his concession of inaction that initiates his sense of debtlessness. He
gives to her the maintenance of his life, which ultimately leads to a
confirmation of an ethical imperative beyond imperative that he finds
satisfying and consistent with life itself. A way to live is simultane-
ously a conceptual and active formulation. Living for Stamp is itself
extending extension, a movement highly similar to Nancys exposing
exposure.
Stamp Paids name change further complicates his narrative.
Perhaps there he could find out if, after all these years of clarity, he
had misnamed himself and there was yet another debt he owed. Born
Joshua, he had renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his
masters son (185). This brief passage is replete with cultural intersec-
tions that trace a complex movement from a traditional Christian name
(originally, at some point, a name that emerges from the master) to a
culturally African American one, and can be interpreted as echoing
the biblical Joshuas name change from Hoshea to Joshua.8 Contrary
to a simplistic expectation of consistency between the signification of
each name and the sensibility and structure that informs them, the
names Joshua and Stamp Paid function precisely as interruptions to
their contextualizing structures.
Successor to Moses, spy, and leader of the Isrealites into the prom-
ised land, the Biblical Joshua appears to have significant similarities
to Beloveds Joshua renamed Stamp Paid. A self-identified spy and he
who ferries runaways across the Ohio River and into freedom, Stamp
can reasonably be likened to his namesake. Additionally, the Biblical
Joshua himself also underwent a change of names from Hoshea mean-
ing salvation to Joshua, the Lord saves. How are we to interpret
Stamps rejection of his given name and subsequent interrogation of
its accuracy?
Recall that Stamp Paid did not rename himself, rejecting his given
name, until he endured the experience of maintaining his life for
Vashti. At that point he was only vaguely aware of whatever his
obligations were and did not have a clear understanding of any sort
of imperative within which he might live. However, following his
experience with Vashti he made a conscious decision that whatever
obligations he did have, his act of paralysis paid them off. He no lon-
ger owed anyone anything and thus renamed himself Stamp Paid.
One could read this as Stamp Paid eschewing obligations and thus,
appropriately, rejecting the name Joshua with all of its implications
of service as well as the notion that the Lord saves. He had had his
share of misery and was not in any way embracing a sense of feel-
ing saved by the Lord. As such, the change to Stamp Paid directly
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 87

articulates the rejection of the implications of the Biblical Joshua

(he was not saved and he had no obligation toward the other) and
an acknowledgement that life owed him since his stamp in mis-
ery from life had been paid. Had Stamp Paids assessment of his life
stopped there we would have a fairly neat analysis, consistent with
the implications of the Biblical Joshua. However, his conclusion that a
life solely in accordance to his recognition of imperative-lessness was
no way to live instigated a response of extension. In the absence
of a nebulous and unformulated imperative that one could argue is
contextualized by the slave name Joshua and its attendant status-
quo implications, Stamp Paids response (the one contextualized by
exchange and receipt) is to engage in another kind of obligation,
one of extension toward the other (which itself defies exchange and
receipt). The implications of each name are inverted in terms of the
actions to which they correspond.
If we push this reading slightly further, we might conclude that
Stamp Paid rejects the externally imposed obligation of a Biblical pre-
scriptive imperative and only therein is able to reach a more a priori ver-
sion of ethical obligation or obligation as we have come to understand
it. Arguably, Stamp Paid rejects the name Joshua, the saving Lord that
it implies, and therein is able to reach his more radical position of
extension.
Staging a dialogue between Stamp Paids narrative and the philo-
sophical expositions of Nancy and Derrida reveals numerous points
of intersection. Our reading of Nancys central position in The
Inoperative Community indicates that a traditional humanism or
immanentism must be overcome in order for the speaking of being
to be heard. Furthermore, the closing of The Free Voice of Man
underscores that thinking and doing cannot be so easily opposed. The
entanglement between Stamp Paids conceptual understandings and
his actions in the material world reveal a full sense of Nancys points to
a radical degree. Stamp does what he gives, that is, he provides exten-
sion to the other as he extends to them. The object of generosity and the
generosity are one and the same.
Echoing Nancy, Stamp Paid can be interpreted as eschewing the
prescriptive dogma of a final signified (the Lord) and approach-
ing a more radical understanding of Biblical thought.9 Stamp enacts a
Nancian community and thus illustrates what a deconstructive ethics
might actually look like in action. Being ecstatic (or as Nancian com-
munity), always-already engaged in a movement toward the other, he
extends himself to others as a way to live, a way that is consis-
tent with living or being (alive). Stamp Paids narrative and activities
throughout the text reveal to us how an inoperative community may
manifest in the actual world.
88 The Ethics of Community

The a priori character of Derridean carrying is similarly evident in a

close reading of Stamp Paids assertion that living in the absence of a
prescribed obligation leads to an obligation of a radically prior nature.
The complete absence of any imperative (or debtlessness) gives way to
a no way to live that in turn leads to an obligation beyond obligation.
As path, the way to live that Stamp identifies is in extending toward
the other, culminating in the evaporation of the metaphorical threshold
between self and other (the implicit welcome indicating the needlessness
of knocking). Strictly speaking, the path or way to live (to be alive) for
Stamp Paid is thus to extend. Living becomes extending, which translates
into actions in the material world. That which is extended is precisely
the condition of possibility for radical obligation insofar as Stamp gives
debtlessness which in turn can lead to the extension in which he engages.
If to live is extending then there is a formulation in which being is
extension to the other. Here, at the very least, as I live I carry the other.
An involved reworking of being as an identity is evident in Beloved
near the close of the text as thirty townswomen gather outside of
Sethes house to confront the ghost of the murdered baby. The descrip-
tion of the event underscores both a movement forward that is non-
recuperable as well as the meaningless-meaning of the movement
(similar to the unfolding of Nancys analysis, these are interrelated and
only slightly distinct aspects of the same event or movement). The con-
text for the event in question is the desire of the townswomen to rescue
Sethe from being haunted by the materialized ghost (256). The women
have no distinct plan in mind as they make their way to Sethes home
for a confrontation with the other worldly entity. Without a formulated
strategy, there is no intention of creating a precise result other than the
vague and undefined rescue. Upon arriving, they begin to sing, creat-
ing a powerful sound that literally causes Sethe to tremble:

For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its
heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched
for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke
the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it,
and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound
deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over
Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (261)

The sound created by the singing does not emerge from a single voice
but rather from building voice upon voice until they found it. The
voices are configured as dependent upon one another for the creation
of this immensely powerful sound indicating a literal manifestation of
a notion of beings radical interdependence. Furthermore, the singing
itself is significant insofar as it is a singing toward. The women are
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 89

not singing for themselves or as a performance rather they are singing

to or toward Sethe and Beloved. The extension outward of the sound
does not return to them in any way. They receive neither response nor
even verification of the sounds reception.10
Even more critical than the singing toward is the meaningless-
meaning evinced therein. The sound that the women create that broke
the back of words breaks signifying meaning insofar as the back of
a word can be read as that upon which referential meaning is depen-
dent. The sound does not indicate an articulation of a message or idea.
Although the sound breaks signifying meaning, it is, nonetheless (or
consequently more), meaningful, as it can knock the pods off chest-
nut trees and causes Sethe to tremble like the baptized in its wash.
Thus, what comes forward from the women, moving toward Sethe
and Beloved, is a sound borne of many intermingling, interdepen-
dent voices that is meaninglessly meaningful and completely resists
recuperation. Given its lack of signifying meaning, the sound cannot
be received in the sense of recuperation or totalization. If the sound
betrays a meaning that is simultaneously nonreferential and meaning-
ful, then it cannot be apprehended by an already established self or
subject. Rather, like the non-recuperable senseless meaning itself, the
being that is affected by it must correspondingly be nontotalized and
totalizing, and, thus, be a nonsubject or nonunified being. Arguably,
the meaningless sound is the speaking of being or community.
Nancys analysis suggests that community or being ecstatic is prior
to all of our conscious projects or understandings, which is why we are
more radically social than we generally imagine. In Beloved the singing
women seem to have a conception of this always-already interdepen-
dence. In a reworking of line 1 of the Book of John, the text states that
the women stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning.
In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound
sounded like (259). If we understand beginning not as origin but as
that which is prior to conscious understanding or undertakings, then
we might suggest that the sound that broke the back of words (a
meaningless-meaning dependent for its being on being together and
movement toward) came before all else. The beginning does not con-
cern the origin of time but rather the beginning of being in the sense of
a radical priority of the event of community, being-with, or an a priori
ethical obligation.
The cleansing that the sound provides for Sethe is not insignifi-
cant insofar as throughout the text she repeatedly indicates the
severity of the dirtying she experienced in the context of slavery,
which is itself presented as a mechanism logically premised upon
the power of defi nition (of making a literal and figurative work out
of being, the precise opposite of Miss Lady Joness speaking of being
90 The Ethics of Community

and Stamps understanding of extension) (251). The radical cleans-

ing that is likened to a baptism can be interpreted as community
interrupting the logic of the defi ner, here posited as the slave owner
Schoolteacher who constructs (black) being as essentially animal
(193). Indeed, Sethe identifies Schoolteachers project of defi ning the
slaves as having both animal and human characteristics as that
which she absolutely cannot allow her children to endure, and this
is the reason she provides to Beloved in an attempt to explain her
murderous impulses (251).
The context that provides the flourish of community is, thus, the
thirty townswomen who have come to rescue Sethe from being bedev-
iled by the ghost of the baby she murdered (255). The flourish refers to
the unbridled and accessible nature of the being ecstatic of the singing
women; arguably, the singing itself indicates an event of Nancian com-
munity. Here, there is nothing to hold it back, to restrict the intensity
of its movement toward. Rather than seeking to construct being as a
work or project, they speak the meaningless-meaning of being insofar
as they signify no-thing but rather create together a power that is a
kind of transcendence, which is the speaking of being itself. Possibly,
here we can locate the opposite of the concentration camp and more
clearly see the link between concrete experiences of existence and the
abstract or conceptual realm.
But we cannot close the analysis without noting the paradoxical
nature of the identification of ecstasis. We began with an attempt to
locate a context that permits a vision of ethical obligation in action.
However, the identification of the context necessitates the identification
of the event itself (community or being ecstatic), which is problematic
insofar as it is by definition unidentifiable. As radically prior, pre-
conscious, and prelinguistic, an a priori ethical obligation is simply the
way of being. Identifying this always-already way is problematic since
in identifying and naming we invariably run the risk of totalizing,
making community into a work or project, or attempting to operate
the inoperable.
However, Nancy opens the door to such a pursuit by evoking the
relationship between context and the character of community. If it can
be slight and inaccessible, then it can flourish as well. Despite the dif-
ficulty and almost paradoxical nature of the task, attempting to locate
moments when community flourishes, when being as ecstatic ruptures
or interrupts essentializing projects, is vital. It allows a glimpse into
the possibilities and the power of being, which subverts an often dom-
inating and always totalizing will to essentialize and thus, the very
real and disastrous consequences to be found therein. Although com-
munity resists institution, we can, nonetheless attempt to recognize its
moments and encourage the contexts within which it emerges.
Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and Derridean Witnessing 91

In some sense, Beloved itself is a bearing witness to the intricacies,

cruelty, and horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (insufficiently rec-
ognized in a US American cultural context and thus of a particular
urgency). Within this larger project are numerous thematizations of
the nature of the process. Foregrounding the power of non-communing
communication (the singing women), the nonrepresentational linguis-
tic event (Miss Lady Joness Oh baby), and hospitality and an ethi-
cal imperative (Stamp Paids debtlessness and welcome door), various
themes of deconstructive ethics coalesce.11
The significance of bearing witness in and of Beloved lies in its
imprecision, groundlessness, and ultimate impossibility. Although
we cannot know that for which there is a witness (the object of the
witnessing, Beloved and Beloved) in a precise and absolute sense, we
know that it/she is not nothing. By extension, fully naming and hav-
ing an experience cannot occur.12 However, the repeated incantations
at the close of the text that this is not a story to pass on indicate
that we must pass something along by telling the story of that which
refuses enclosure and ground. Reminiscent of a Heideggerean invo-
cation of Being, the final pages of Beloved suggest that we all must
engage in a remembering and telling. Down by the stream in back
of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar.
Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them
out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there
(274). The footprints once again evoke a trace-like structure of and to
Being (or an absent presence) so fundamental to the understanding
that we have thus far achieved. Further, should we forget her like a
bad dream all that is left is wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing
too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss (274). With
only weather remaining, the fundamental elements of being are lost
(the meaningless meaning of being). Beloved is simultaneously a nar-
rative of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that we must remember and tell
(and bear witness) and a narrative of narrative, that is, a narrative of
being. Beloved the character is a type of incarnation of this aspect of
being (narrative incarnate is this not being?) insofar as despite her
attempt to have Paul D. call me my name, that is, name her finally
and fully, as an immediately transparent being her efforts inevitably
fail.13 Just as Paul D. and the other characters cannot name her (we
have only her inscription on a tombstone again invoking the trace),
she is, strictly speaking, inaccessible. However, the imperative to tell
her story is nonetheless irrevocable and urgent as it involves partici-
pating in being in a dual sense doing the only thing that we can do
(telling the story) and thus opening being and invoking a direct and
almost immediate embodiment of a responsibility or obligation to the
other.14 The reader bears witness to her story alongside the text insofar
92 The Ethics of Community

as we understand that witnessing is (and is in) the telling or the a priori

obligation of archi-ethics. However, lest we feel too comfortable, fulfill-
ing the archi-obligation of being is in some sense an oxymoron. The
archi-obligation referenced necessarily refuses or denies fulfillment
(not unlike Derridean mourning) with Beloveds name an appro-
priate signifier of these events given that it is impossible to be-loved
once and for all.15 Rather than giving rise to completion, the telling
necessarily erodes closure. An ongoing movement of the approxima-
tion of any rendering, Derridean bearing witness necessarily involves
expropriation and poetic language such that the telling refuses to lead
to a definitive told. In the case of Beloved (both text and character), the
incompletion of the event urgently implores us. Like being loved, we
cannot tell her story once and for all. Bringing to the fore the clamor
for a kiss (reminiscent of Nietzschean laughter, Derridean dancing,
and Bataillean eroticism) necessitates the discomfort (and concomitant
possibility of cleansing) experienced in interruption. Eschewing a
tidy and comforting recuperation, Beloved implores us to experience
the interruption it performs.
4 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude

What is inhabiting a language where one knows both

that there is no home and that one cannot appropriate a
language?
Jacques Derrida,
Language Is Never Owned (Sovereignties)
Ah, the ghost of the transient
moves through the open, innocent
heart, like a summer cloud
Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

Contextualized as we are by a Western metaphysical culture and its

attendant exaltation of truth and its transparency, the denial of logocen-
tric virtues is uncomfortable.1 An abrupt immersion in a culture that is
not ones own (resulting from the necessary displacement that defines
immigration or exile) cultivates a continual interruption between being
and the world. Surrounded by rupture both philosophically (since this
is the nature of being) and historically (as an exile or immigrant), the
characters within Menendezs In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd are
often materially reminded of the impossibility of possession, ground,
and transparency and frequently become consumed with repairing the
alleged break. The overwhelming sense of rupture in turn reinforces
the experience of that which is believed to be lost and thus even more
fervently sought: unity, totality, or metaphysical presence. The charac-
ters pursue complete intelligibility in distinct ways but it is invariably
frustrated by language and time, two of the more prominent themes of
the text. Unlike the characters of Beloved who often embrace alternative
and non-teleological linguistic spaces, the protagonists of In Cuba I Was
a German Shepherd have a definite goal of achieving or possessing fully
present meaning in time and language. As such, when they are unable
to attain the meaning that they pursue, they are mournful rather than
liberated.
Although many US Latina texts share a preoccupation with the vari-
ous ruptures that characterize an exile or immigrant experience, In
Cuba I Was a German Shepherd most pointedly thematizes the roles of
94 The Ethics of Community

language and temporality in exile.2 When the place, culture, language,

and temporality of what is considered home is interrupted, there often
follows some level of interrogation of the roles of language or narration
as well as time, memory, and the possibilities of recuperation in our
lives. In Menendez text this interrogation and awareness often leads to
explorations of these issues beyond the realm of exile or immigration
and into our lives or being in the world in more fundamental terms.
As we discussed in Chapters 13, the kind of understanding of
being, time, and language evoked in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
is grounded upon a subversion of an Enlightenment or Western logo-
centric foundation. Rather than radically separate, being, time, and
language overlap to such a profound degree that they are indistin-
guishable as such. Where metaphysical perspectives rest upon an
absolute meaning that springs forth from an unimpeachable ground,
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd repeatedly evokes the unavoidable
overlap of being, time, and language.
What follows is a bearing witness to exile and immigration that
simultaneously addresses bearing witness itself. In other words, we
seek to bear witness to both exile and bearing witness or to perform
the content of the exploration (which we have understood is in some
way inevitable). Chapter 4 then echoes back to the Introduction in
that it too is concerned with a way of reading that is mindful of an
extra-discursive experience that is imperative ethicity. The argument/
event that is simultaneously outlined/performed is that an experi-
ence of exile or immigration and the particulars (almost necessarily)
to be found therein (geographical, temporal, linguistic, and cultural
rupture) can and often do lead to direct engagements with Nancian
community, ethics, and finitude. As such, Chapter 4 does not so much
stress a fluidly unique aspect or aspects of Cuban American culture
as it does the cultural intersections and interruptions that occur in sit-
uations of exile and/or immigration. In this chapter, we examine vari-
ous moments and scenes in which bearing witness, imperative ethicity,
and community are brought to the fore.
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is framed by the title story of an
elderly Miami Cuban exile named Maximo, and Her Mothers House,
the story of Lisette, an adult daughter of exiles. Despite the fact that
they are separated by a generation, both Maximo and Lisette long for
a possession of origin, here figured as Cuba and Cuban-ness. In what
follows we see that both characters confront finitude and impera-
tive ethicity, and in some way experience altered engagements with
the material world. Curiously, while Lisette and Maximo repeatedly
confront temporal and linguistic instabilities borne of the impossibil-
ity of fully present meaning, the narrator still appears to understand
the world in terms of metaphysical values of knowledge attainable as
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 95

and through presence, clarity, and light. A certain tension between

immanentism, the individual, and a transparent and fully intelligible
world, on the one hand, and finitude, community, writing, and an
ethical imperative, on the other, reveals the complex relationships that
Maximo, Lisette, and the narrator have with various metaphysical and
non-metaphysical sensibilities.
This chapter examines these two stories that pointedly treat exile
and its possible ramifications. We begin with the title story as it
concerns Maximos direct experiences of exile and preoccupation
with time, nostalgia, presence, appropriation, and bearing witness.
There are multiple examples of a will to identity, truth, and presence
throughout In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, but Maximos relation-
ship to them is among the most complex in the text. Both desiring and
resisting a complete and unambiguous appropriation of meaning in
time, Maximo is consistently troubled, melancholic, and disoriented.
He appears to understand the potential dangers of nostalgia and the
fixed and reductive (alleged) truth it seeks to re-present, but nonethe-
less, laments and suffers the impossibility of holding on to meaning
and being in time. Ultimately, we see that Maximos disquietude in
the face of nostalgia escalates to a point that he simply can take no
more and explodes against it. In an event that is fittingly characterized
as improper, Maximo finally experiences a disappropriation of time,
being, and culture and his actual life and conceptual musings change
accordingly. While this ecstatic event of community (and the necessary
eruption of finitude it implies) is not framed as in any way joyous or
celebratory, we see that it is nonetheless productively uncomfortable
and what we have come to understand as ethical.
Following our examination of Maximo, we take a close look at the
final story of the collection, Her Mothers House, and its protago-
nist Lisette, the child of Cuban exiles. Lisette negotiates her moth-
ers nostalgia for her childhood home as well as her own feelings of
groundlessness in a world where her history and home are perceived
as elsewhere. Central issues of the story concern a coexistence of cul-
tural, discursive, and ontological interruption. We see how Lisettes
journeys reveals that community and bearing witness are particu-
larly pertinent to not only exiles but their children as well. For Lisette,
finding her origin rather than remembering it (as was the case with
Maximo) is the primary issue. Rather than feeling ruptured from a
cultural, national, and personal home, she feels a blank page where
the beginning of her story should have been (Menendez 2001, 210).
Her quest through most of Her Mothers House is thus to find and
possess that home. As an adult, Lisette visits Cuba and the mythical
home of her mothers stories in an attempt to fill in her gap-filled
past. However, her experiences in Cuba and encounter with the
96 The Ethics of Community

house prompt recognition of the impossibility of fulfilling her desire.

Ultimately, in Cuba and upon her return to Miami, Lisette experiences
and understands herself as inevitably fi nite, a singular being who can
and must bear witness rather than capture or possess her past and
her life.

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Maximos is a story of a Cuban exile in Miami. One of the first to leave
Cuba on the eve of the first of January 1961, he abandoned his com-
fortable and prestigious career as a university professor in Havana to
become first a cab driver and eventually the owner of a small restau-
rant, where he and his wife Rosa served black beans and rice to the
nostalgic (Menendez 2001, 7). He was thirty-six when he left and in
the narrative present he is an elderly man whose wife had died five
years earlier and two daughters are grown and gone. Maximo spends
his days playing dominoes with three friends (one Cuban and two
Dominican) at Domino Park, a historic landmark and tourist attraction
in Miami. The story chronicles Maximos melancholic musings of time,
loss, and the impossibility of recovery. Although an enthusiastic joke
teller at the park, he is often privately disoriented, overcome by vertigo
and at times hallucinating (7, 9). While he perceives the dangers of and
is unsettled by the nostalgia that has pervaded the exile community
in Miami, he simultaneously desires the temporal and significatory
recovery and appropriation that nostalgia promises. Maximo then can
be said to resist both nostalgia (and its appropriative movement) and
finitude, community, and their ecstasic disappropriation.
From the opening to the closing pages of In Cuba I Was a German
Shepherd, various manifestations of nostalgia are depicted as dan-
gerous and unethical in their foreclosure of ontological movement
and extension. Its appropriative sensibilities (revealed in a desire to
reach and possess its object of thought) attempt to deny the irrepress-
ible showing of the imperative or rupturous nature of fi nitude. Even
more insidiously, rather than cultivating connection or community
as it purports to do, the text reveals that nostalgia actually objectifies
and murders.3
By the close of the story something important happens and Maximo
explodes against a commodified nostalgia, transforming how he inhab-
its his world. In what follows we trace the essentializing impulses of
nostalgia, Maximos complex rejection of and desire for the full pres-
ence that it promises, and last, the pivotal moment of Maximos life that
changes everything. Ultimately at stake is the conceptual and material
difference that Maximos shifted relationship to community, impera-
tive ethicity, finitude, and bearing witness makes. Additionally, we
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 97

examine how the eruption of finitude and community simultaneously

and necessarily involves a subversion or interruption of their opposite,
the will to immanence. We see that Maximos rupturous event is one in
which communitys resistance to immanence is potently clear.

Malignant Nostalgia and the

Oppression of Purity
As the narrator recalls Maximo and Rosas early years in Miami as
first sandwich vendors and then small restauranters, we learn of the
dynamics of a particular Miami exile community on the famous (if not
infamous) Calle Ocho.4 The narration reveals a great deal not only about
the preoccupations of the community but, even more profoundly, the
terms in which they articulate and understand their nostalgia, which
evinces crucial epistemologies concerning time and being:

They worked together for years like that, and when the Cubans
began disappearing from the bus line, Maximo and Rosa moved
their lunch packets indoors and opened their little restaurant
right on Eighth Street. There, a generation of former professors
served black beans and rice to the nostalgic. When Raul showed
up in Miami one summer looking for work, Maximo (not Rosa?)
added one more waiters spot for his old acquaintance from
L. Street. Each night, after the customers had gone, Maximo
and Rosa and Raul and Havanas old lawyers and bankers and
dreamers would sit around the biggest table and eat and talk and
sometimes, late in the night after several glasses of wine, some-
one would start the stories that began with In Cuba I remember.
They were stories of old lovers, beautiful and round-hipped. Of
skies that stretched on clear and blue to the Cuban hills. Of green
landscapes that clung to the red clay of Guines, roots dug in like
fingernails in a good-bye. In Cuba, the stories always began, life
was good and pure. But something always happened to them in
the end, something withering, malignant. Maximo never under-
stood it. The stories that opened in the sun, always narrowed into
a dark place. And after those nights, his head throbbing, Maximo
would turn and turn in his sleep and awake unable to remember
his dreams. (7, italics mine)

The necessarily good and pure character of this other time and
place is not at all incidental. As classic articulations of a metaphys-
ics of presence, the desire for and nostalgia concerning goodness
and purity (or goodness as purity and purity as goodness) is yet an
other manifestation of the will to essence or immanence that Nancy
discusses throughout his work on community. It is no accident that
98 The Ethics of Community

this is the precise manner that metaphysical truth and presence and
their attendant historical manifestations (subjectivity, masculinity,
whiteness, purity, and heteronormativity) have been mythologized.
Recall that the self-enclosed individual indicates an absolute for itself,
a pure entity utterly devoid of difference and movement. Purity, like
its cousin terms authenticity and even race, indeed indicates ideal-
ity, a fully present and transparent being in a correspondingly read-
able and reliably real world.5 By definition, at its most fundamental,
purity is the ultimate antithesis of difference and must forbid it to
achieve itself as such. That for which nostalgia yearns is generally this
imagined and mythologized state of complete understanding. Indeed
the notion of nostalgia has long been noted as a potentially dangerous
and threatening impulse, the precise opposite of an ethics of differ-
ence. As Nancy so painstakingly outlines, it is not simply the point
of departure of the individual that has bred destruction and terror
throughout our world, but the logic that sustains and propels it: that
of truth as purity and presence.
In other words, the past of another place (I remember in Cuba) is
certainly missed, but more particularly the participants understand
and thematize that what is lost is not just Cuba and the past but the
goodness and purity they allegedly embodied. Indeed a conceptual-
ization of the past as good and pure is a fine working definition of
nostalgia itself and this level of understanding is not lost upon these
exiles. Crucially, the stories that began with In Cuba I remember
always began life was good and pure. In their articulations, nos-
talgia cannot be in any other way than as a desire for the lost object
necessarily perceived as good and pure. The individual was thought
to be the path to this realization of existence. Whether it be a yearning
for that which is imagined to be lost or a looking forward to the com-
munity to come (by way of communism), both structures have denied
community and finitude and thus the difference and imperative ethic-
ity that constitutes being.
Rather than foster community as it often purports to do, nostalgia
cultivates precisely the opposite: death. This is the point that Nancy
and Derrida as well as Beloved and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
all seem to be driving home. The concept and corresponding mate-
rial manifestations of purity (which cannot be disentangled) are
murderous and must be so perceived. The murderous movement of the
nostalgic stories is notable to Maximo who never understood how
something always happened to them in the end, something wither-
ing, malignant (7).
The distinction between the stories withering and something wither-
ing befalling them must be underscored. The more traditionally struc-
tured the story withered implies that the teller lost her narrative skill
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 99

or energy, whereas something withering happening to a story indicates

that the story is independent from the teller. The fact that something
withering and malignant happened to the stories with no mention made
of the teller indicates that the stories and their tellers lead indepen-
dent lives (and deaths). The stories are subject to withering and wither
as they are subject to malignancy and are ultimately malignant. Both
dying (withering) and certain to die (malignant) these nostalgic stories
fail to deliver that with which they initially tantalize their audience
(and/or teller): some degree of access, proximity, or even possession or
recovery of the goodness and purity of the Cuba they collectively nar-
rate, construct, and remember.

Maximos Resistance
Domino Park, the setting for much of the story and the place at which
Maximo and his friends spend most of their time, is an actual tourist
attraction in Little Havana on Eighth Street in Miami. A particularly
important space for our consideration, the Park as tourist attraction
embodies nostalgia at work and the alleged recovery and appropria-
tion of a lost time it promises. Maximos disdain for the dynamics
between the Domino-playing men and the tourists who watch them
is consistent throughout the story. While he is confused by the malig-
nancy of the nostalgic discourse at the restaurant (he never under-
stood), we see that the commodified nostalgia of the tours of Domino
Park is unmistakably offensive to him.6
As the following lines illustrate, Maximo resists going to the Park
from the beginning, explaining that he will not be the sad spectacle in
someones vacation slide show (9). However, his friend Raul is unde-
tered and coaxes Maximo along:

But Raul was already dressed up in a pale blue guayabera, saying

how it was a beautiful day and smell the air.
Let them take pictures, Raul said. What the hell. Make us
immortal.
Immortal, Maximo said like a sneer. And then to himself, The
gods punishment. (9)

Maximo understands the static spectacle of Cuban-ness as punish-

ment vis--vis immortality. The reduction of Cuban men to objects for
viewing entertainment is a material manifestation of a will to essence
or immanence, which is not only perceived negatively by Maximo but,
perhaps more importantly, is perceived negatively in terms of the lack
of finitude and, ironically, community it indicates.7 Reduced to a spec-
tacle in a slide or live show, these Latinos (and arguably Cuban cul-
ture at large) become exoticized object/other to the gaze of the viewing
100 The Ethics of Community

subject (the pink US Americans).8 Domino Park as spectacle meta-

physically reifies a subject/object opposition rather than dissolving
it as Nancys community would necessarily do. The story of Maximo
and Domino Park underscores that objectification occurs as a result
of a particular logic and manifests in specific material situations; it
is unjust and appropriating precisely due to its foreclosure of being.
A kind of ontological murder, the spectacle attempts to fix and hold
being itself, that which necessarily and by definition refuses to be held
down. Ecstasis, compearance, and community all indicate that being,
at its most fundamental, is not fundamental. Maximos harsh rejection
(it is the gods punishment) of the immortality (fixity) that the spectacle
implies can be read as a direct indictment of its attempts to deny com-
munity and finitude. Recall that finitude is the spacing of being that
is both rupturous and constitutive, containing two central meanings:
we are all going to die (or are radically finite) and we can never be
one, unified, essential, or absolute. The show of the Domino players
is here framed as that which grants immortality, and although Raul
cannot see the problem, Maximo is keenly aware of the punishing
nature of the designation.
A conceptual cousin of the concentration camp, the Park as tour-
spectacle functions according to the implicit framework of the individ-
ual that Nancy so meticulously critiques. The flip side of exterminating
concentration, the romanticized spectacle of nostalgia appropriates
and reduces Cuban (which indicates something) to Cuban-ness (which
is saturated with meaning and thus vacant), an absolute designation
permitting neither ontological nor temporal difference.9 The nostal-
gic speech of the tour guide is precisely not a telling or bearing wit-
ness (which is underscored throughout the text, from the telling of
jokes to the desire within Hurricane Stories, to Lisettes stories) but
a proclamation and alleged re-presentation of Cuban-ness, retaining
an even more lethal character than the nostalgia disseminated at the
restaurant. Maximo rightly recognizes the difference. You see, Raul,
Maximo said. You see how were a spectacle? He felt like an animal
and wanted to growl and cast about behind the metal fence . . . A god-
damn spectacle. A collection of old bones, Maximo said (24).
Maximos sense that he is being likened to an animal almost neces-
sarily calls to mind the structure of a zoo where animals are viewed
for mass consumption. Objects for the enjoyment of the paying public,
the zoo animals and Domino-playing-older-Cuban-men are frozen in
time and discourse. The will to immanence is visible in the attempt
to deny constitutive elements of being: its movement, extension, fini-
tude, imperative ethicity, and ability to bear witness. Nancys analy-
sis of the ontological inevitability of finitude and ecstasis on the one
hand and the impossibility of immanence on the other highlights the
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 101

movement-between of the former and the stasis of the latter. Both zoo
animals and these Cuban (and non-Cuban!) men clearly move and thus
cannot help but deny the objectifying logic that attempts to fix them in
time, place, and language. Indeed the fact that Maximo feels like an
animal and wanted to growl and cast about behind the metal fence is
significant in that it indicates that Maximo in some way understands
the problem with fixity and wants to respond to it by moving fiercely.
A historical material manifestation of nostalgia and its implicitly
essentializing logic, the spectacle forecloses being and its possibilities
in a murderous and appropriative movement. Furthering the malig-
nancy metaphor of the nostalgic stories at the restaurant, the collec-
tion of old bones reduces the complexity and ecstatic movement of
being to a static and mass grave, necessarily invoking violent and mul-
tiple deaths. The correlation between the camp of exterminating con-
centration and the sad spectacle of old bones is not difficult to make.
Just as the camp takes a logic of purity to a deadly extreme, the Park
spectacle does the same (same) in reverse. Rather than exterminating
impurity, the tour bus and guide murders vis--vis romanticizing nos-
talgia, a fact obviously not lost upon Maximo given the terms in which
he frames his protest.
According to the theoretical explorations of Chapters 1 and 2, com-
munity, ecstasis, finitude, and writing are intricately entwined, inev-
itably thrusting forth an ethical imperative. In spite of the spectacle
to which the Park is reduced by the touristic gaze, also discernable
are moments of ecstatic eruption or disappropriation. In some way
the simultaneity of nostalgias desire to capture and fix, and beings
resistance to this reduction, confirms Nancys claim that community is
irrepressible (being cannot not compear). Nancy thus provides a theo-
retical exposition while Maximo in Domino Park shows us what such
a material manifestation of community and ethics might actually look
like. More specifically, not only does Maximo erupt against the tour
guide in a public and vociferous fashion but he is clearly transformed.
The scene and its aftermath thus call to mind the central themes of our
analysis: community, ethics, finitude, and bearing witness:

An open trolley pulled up and parked on the curb. A young man

with blond hair, perhaps in his thirties, stood up in the front, hold-
ing a microphone. He wore a guayabera. Maximo looked away.
This here is Domino Park, came the amplified voice in English,
then Spanish. No one under fifty-five allowed, folks. But we can
sure watch them play.
Maximo hears shutters click, then convinced himself he couldnt
have heard, not from where he was.
102 The Ethics of Community

Most of these men are Cuban and theyre keeping alive the
tradition of their homeland, the amplified voice continued,
echoing against the back wall of the park. You see, in Cuba, it
was very common to retire to a game of dominos after a good
meal. It was a way to bond and build community. Folks, you here
are seeing a slice of the past. A simpler time of good friendships
and unhurried days.
Maybe it was the sun. The men later noted that he seemed odd.
The tics. Rubbing his bones.
First Maximo muttered to himself. He shuffled automatically.
When the feedback on the microphone pierced through Domino
Park, he could no longer sit where he was, accept things as they
were. It was a moment that had long been missing from his life.
He stood and made a fist at the trolley.
Mierda! he shouted. Mierda! Thats the biggest bullshit Ive
ever heard.
He made a lunge at the fence. Carlos jumped up and restrained
him. Raul led him back to his seat.
The man of the amplified voice cleared his throat. The people
on the trolley looked at him and back at Maximo; perhaps they
thought this was part of the show.
Well. The man chuckled. There you have it folks.
Lucinda ran over, but the other men waved her off. She began to
protest about rules and propriety. The park had a reputation to
uphold. (256)

Battling the nostalgic and objectifying rhetoric, Maximo explodes

against the tour guides speech. In a moment that had long been miss-
ing from his life, he literally curses the touristic logic and embodi-
ments that attempt to capture him on so many levels. The logic
and movement of nostalgia, on both sides of the fence (that allegedly
divides subject from object, viewer from viewed, and US American
from Cuban) are appropriative, totalizing, and murderous. From the
stories invoking the good and pure life in Cuba told by the exiles to
the you here are seeing a slice of the past of the US American tour
bus, Cuba is accessed as an unmoving object to be re-presented along-
side the Cuban as its ontological corollary.
When nostalgia is the guiding conceptual apparatus, there are pic-
tures, the oxymoronic still lifes, slideshows, and rhetoric that Maximo
perceived as withering, malignant, and mierda (shit). In contrast, the being
of community and bearing witness that Nancy and Derrida discuss can-
not stop moving. It is perhaps no accident that Maximos response to the
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 103

rendering static of objectification is to no longer sit still. Further his

moment is one that had long been missing from his life, indicat-
ing its necessity or imperative quality. There is much about Maximos
out-burst that evokes ecstasis. He literally erupts or ex-plodes off of
the bench, shouting, waving his fist in the air, and finally lunging for
the crowd. It is not difficult to characterize this event as one of extension,
intense movement, and again, the antithesis of the stillness, fixity, and
death that characterizes the nostalgia he has encountered.
Nostalgia is likened to death and murder and is dangerous and
damaging in terms of its appropriative movements and objectifying
project (and this project is inherent to nostalgia rather than an inciden-
tal byproduct). It is not simply that the narration reveals how Maximo
understands nostalgia as destructive, but rather, and more signifi-
cantly, the text perceives nostalgia as potentially dangerous in particu-
lar terms. It is not merely negative but far more intensely, nostalgia is
literally framed as a malignancy to finitude. The withering stories of
the restaurant and the photos procured by the tour punish by invoking
immortality or denying the finitude that is community/singularity.
Maximos moment literally challenges the appropriative movement
of the spectacle in both form (eruption/rupture/expropriation) and
content (your nostalgia/spectacle is shit). Fittingly, the Park overseer
Lucinda objects to Maximos outburst citing the rules and propri-
ety that he transgresses. The detailed exposition of the importance
of appropriation and disappropriation in Chapter 1 have clearly indi-
cated the metaphysical understandings at stake in articulations of the
proper. The overlap between the philosophical underpinnings and
their historical material corollaries is not at all difficult to see. The logic
is appropriating and essentializing and as Nancy indicates, the corre-
sponding structure of the tour bus and the interactions it initiates are
as well. More precisely, the logic of Cuban nostalgia for sale is deathly:
Cuba and Cubans are reduced to a static immanence necessarily inca-
pable of any manner of movement.
But how does his eruption and resistance to immanence transform
Maximo? How does it make a difference in his life and the lives of
those around him? After the narration of Maximos outburst at the
Park, only two scenes remain. The first is just several lines long and it
tells of Maximos inability to sit at his pine table or even cook dinner
during the evening following his scene at the park. All he can do is
sleep. The scene that follows, and the final one of the story, takes place
the next day at the Park and reveals the profound effects of Maximos
disruptive moment of the day before. In this final section of the story,
Maximo is able to finish the joke (which he now calls a story) that he
had previously attempted to tell his friends at the Park.
104 The Ethics of Community

Let me finish the story of Juanito the little dog.

No one said anything.
Is that okay? Im okay. I just remembered it. Can I finish it?
The men nodded, but still did not speak.
He is just off the boat from Cuba. He is walking down Brickell
Avenue. And he is trying to steady himself, see, because he still
has his sea legs and all the buildings are so tall they are making
him dizzy. He doesnt know what to expect. Hes maybe a little
afraid. And hes thinking about a pretty little dog he knew once
and hes wondering where she is now and he wishes he were
back home . . .
Hes not a depressive kind of dog, though. Dont get me wrong.
Hes very feisty. And when he sees an elegant white poodle strid-
ing toward him, he forgets all his worries and exclaims, O Madre
de Dios, si cocinas como caminas . . .
The men let out a small laugh. Maximo continued.
Si cocinas como caminas . . . , Juanito says, but the white poodle
interrupts and says, I beg your pardon? This is Americakindly
speak English. So Juanito pauses for a moment to consider and
says in his broken English, Mamita, you are one hot doggie, yes?
I would like to take you to movies and fancy dinners.
. . . So Juanito says, I would like to marry you, my love, and
have gorgeous puppies with you and live in a castle. Well, all
this time the white poodle has her snout in the air. She looks at
Juanito and says, Do you have any idea who youre talking to? I
am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but
a short, insignificant mutt. Juanito is stunned for a moment, but
he rallies for the final shot. Hes a proud dog, you see, and hes
afraid of his pain. Pardon me, your highness, Juanito the mangy
dog says. Here in America, I may be a short insignificant mutt,
but in Cuba I was a German Shepherd. (278)

The joke contains a structure and follows a movement that signifi-

cantly parallels that of the tour bus at Domino Park. Insofar as both
the nostalgia and photographs of the tour attempt to capture the past
(the better days of nostalgia) and re-present it as a kind of artifact, and
the white dog claims superiority based on her breeding and class
and correspondingly maligns Juanito for his hybridity (he is an insig-
nificant mutt) both situations attempt to appropriate Cuba and Cuban-
ness in an absolute fashion. Cuban is either fixed in time and space
as a slice of the past or necessarily impure as an insignificant mutt.
Essentializing logic clearly has concrete ramifications pertaining to
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 105

our ways of structuring our relations to one another both systemati-

cally (commodified culture/tourism) and interpersonally (evinced in
the dialogue between the white poodle and Juanito). The very idea
of a business venture based upon the commodification of nostalgia
would not be possible were a metaphysical logic of appropriation not
there to found and propel it. Similarly, Juanito implicitly values the
white poodle given that he approaches and pursues her romanti-
cally; further, their ensuing interaction (reifying her desirability as a
refined breed of considerable class and his lack of significance given
his hybridity) indicates that a guiding narrative of the value of purity
or good breeding grounds and fuels their interactions.
Furthermore, the content of the joke highlights the contextual/his-
torical role of signification or meaning. In the context of the United
States, Juanito the dog is perceived as an insignificant mutt (the
hybrid literally failing to signify or engender significance) but in Cuba,
Juanito reassures the white poodle (and seemingly himself), he is a
German Shepherd, a breed that not only signifies but does so in terms
of masculinity, strength, dignity, and bravery.
Given that the story directly thematizes a metaphysical discourse of
purity and its material incarnations of both racism and classism, Juanitos
tale also brings to the fore the overlap between the philosophical and
the historical. Here, a pure/impure theoretical opposition itself implic-
itly grounded upon a metaphysics of presence provides the base and
propulsion for the privileging of nostalgia in the case of the tour bus and
purity in Juanitos narrative. Structures of consumption as well as direct
interpersonal understandings are framed according to these logics.
Additionally, as a white purebred of considerable class, the poo-
dle in Juanitos story feels sufficiently superior to deny him a most basic
component of sovereignty: the ability to bear witness or speak. The
poodle directly inquires of Juanito if he knows to whom he is speak-
ing, implying that if he did, he would not dare attempt to communi-
cate. Invoking ontological privileges (she is pure), the poodle materially
manifests as white and high class (and interestingly, female). Juanito,
the impure (mutt), low class, insignificant, other, literally should not
have a voice according to the poodle of considerable class. Invoking
the same logic as that of nostalgia, the logic of purity totalizes being,
rendering it static in both time and space. This is precisely the impov-
erished world of the individual, a world in which Maximo is denied a
basic and fundamental space to bear witness.
If we understand Maximos ability to tell the joke/story of Juanito
the dog as contextualized by his outburst against the tour bus from the
previous day, then we may assert that a confrontation with an ethical
imperative cultivates more of the same. While the first incident with the
tourists reveals Maximos inability to sit still with the appropriative
106 The Ethics of Community

and totalizing force of nostalgia, its commodification, and thus its

material manifestation, the second outburst occurs directly follow-
ing Maximos telling of the joke/story of Juanito and involves an erup-
tion of sadness. Indeed we can plainly see that Maximo in some way
gets the relationship between purity (or essentializing logics) and
temporality, whether consciously or otherwise. The story of the violent
objectification and denigration to which Juanito is subject by the white
poodle makes Maximo first cry, and immediately following, contem-
plate temporality and the impossibility of appropriation therein:

Maximo turned so the men would not see his tears. The after-
noon traffic crawled eastward. One horn blasted, then another.
He remembered holding his daughters days after their birth,
thinking how fragile and vulnerable lay his bond to the future.
For weeks, he carried them on pillows, like jeweled China. Then
the blank spaces in his life lay before him. Now he stood with
the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And
what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting
Rosas face, the precise shade of her eyes. (29)

The tears can be read as a provocative movement bearing certain simi-

larities to the ecstatic eruption of anger at the Park. As an extension out-
ward, the tears are an unanticipated expression that also transgresses
or subverts propriety, particularly, culturally, for a Cuban man. Indeed
a most common US American expression of tears is that one bursts
into tears. Maximos unexpected crying and this sense of bursting
forth both indicate an eruption of sorts that can be likened to finitude
(insofar as it cuts through the expected and the known). In some sense,
the hiding of these tears underscores their impropriety and can thus be
said to reinforce their subversive character.
Although Maximo ponders the nature of temporality throughout the
story he does not directly confront the issue of time and finitude as rav-
aging until this moment in the text.10 It is crucial that Juanitos designa-
tion as a mutt is followed by profound considerations of temporality.
Hybridity and temporality are not generally conceived as interrelated
but Maximos narration reveals precisely this correlation. Nostalgia
and its appropriative movement attempts to stop time while Maximos
engagement with time as that against which you fight losing (what had
he salvaged?) invokes the disappropriation (or temporal aspect of fini-
tude) inherent to being in time. Arguably, Maximo is able to consider
temporality directly only in the context of his eruption against nostal-
gia and his ability to finish telling the joke/story of Juanito. The final
page reveals a head-on interrogation of being in time in terms of his
assessment of his own life and what he feels he has lost.
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 107

Maximo is transformed given his ability to finish the joke/story at

all. Recall that his previous attempt to tell it was unsuccessful and
rather it is only after he has the moment that had long been missing
from his life that he is able to complete the tale. He had told other
jokes throughout the story but the single joke that does not work, that
he refers to as a story, that surprises him and makes him confront
temporality and cry before his friends, and then, we will see, engage
in a final command, is arguably another moment in which imperative
ethicity erupts before him, undeniable and irrepressible.
The particular terms in which Maximo perceives his being in time
are telling. He recalls considering temporality as a young versus an
older man, and from both vantage points there is some degree of
absence rather than a possessed presence:

Then the blank spaces of his life lay before him. Now he stood
with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past.
And what had he salvaged through the years? Already he was for-
getting Rosas face, the precise shade of her eyes. (29, italics mine)

His youthful relation to time indicated blank spaces ahead while old
age brought a gulf at his back. Notably, both situations pointedly fail
to capture time as a spectacle and photograph attempt to do. The plural
blank spaces indicates a number of unknowns to come while the sin-
gular gulf implies a lone yet massive absence. Spatially structuring
temporality, they both call forth emptiness, non-presence, or absence
(in both time and space).
The metaphor of salvaging through time is also extremely telling
and gives us an even more intricate sense of Maximos experiences.
And what had he salvaged through the years? Maximos simple but
potent query resonates. Salvage connotes a recuperative keeping,
holding on, rescuing, and preservation from an unforeseeable mis-
fortune, wreckage, or disaster. For Maximo, time is the disaster from
which we attempt to rescue something of our lives. In spite of time
and the unforeseen circumstances of his life, what had he managed to
keep or recuperate? So well trained are we to conceive of value in terms
of appropriation that it may be difficult to even notice that Maximos
question implicitly values appropriation or keeping. The metaphysical
frame of holding on (itself a manifestation of the priority of presence)
will not be a ground that gives way easily.
Further indication that appropriation is here framed in and in spite
of time, and even more precisely that time itself is conceived in terms
of presence, is the fact that he gages what he has salvaged according
to what he can and cannot remember. Presumably, if he could have
remembered the precise shade of Rosas eyes, he would have had that
108 The Ethics of Community

as his own, or that at least would have been salvaged. Salvaging as

appropriation is to come as close to presence as possible, that is, to
remember. For Maximo, as a fading memory, Rosa is becoming lost
to him. In other words, given that he was not salvaging this memory
of the precise shade of Rosas eyes through the years, he was losing
them and by implication, her. To have is then to remember, and to lose
is to forget. (Interestingly, while presence appears to be what Maximo
desires here, it is simultaneously that to which he objects in both the
restaurant and tour bus manifestations of nostalgia.)
In addition to the precise shade of Rosas eyes, that which Maximo
and the other Miami Cuban exiles attempt to rescue from loss at sea
(another definition of salvage) is another time and place, the past of
Cuba that is radically irrecuperable and yet tantalizes as an object of
ideality (hence nostalgia). The only avenue for recovery or possession
contra time is memory, that which is necessarily imbued with deferral
(and thus an element of absence) since it must be situated in language
and time. Thus memory precisely and paradoxically precludes the pos-
sibility of appropriation that Maximo and the other exiles so desper-
ately seek.
The final lines of the story repeat and reinforce the distinction
between the fixity of the spectacle on the one hand and the imperative,
bearing witness, and resistance on the other. Following Maximos tears
and melancholic musings of time and loss, just a few moments pass
(in which his two Dominican friends Carlos and Antonio are notice-
ably uncomfortable) before he can hear the tourists behind him and the
fence that divides them:

When the wind eased Maximo tilted his head to listen. He heard
something stir behind him, someone leaning heavily on the
fence. He could almost feel the breath. His heart quickened.
Tell them go away, Maximo said. Tell them, no pictures. (29)

The simultaneous evocation of a literal clinamen (leaning heavily on

the fence) and the almost felt breath of the tourist versus the pic-
tures that s/he presumably wants to take (literally or otherwise) is tell-
ing. This final scene is arguably a showing (that must insert itself) of
the irrepressible nature of community, regardless of the context. The
leaning and breath of the tourist indicate a movement of and between
one being and an other in which the between is stressed more than
s/he who leans and breathes. In other words, the heavy leaning of the
tourist on the fence that Maximo hears and the breath of the leaner that
he can almost feel underscores the importance of the movement over
and above its agent.
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 109

Equally significant is the fact that Maximos response to the leaning

and breathing departs from the three previous choices he had made in
the face of the tourists. Up to these final lines he had sat still, erupted,
or cried. After hearing and almost hearing the leaning and breath-
ing, he makes a very different choice in issuing an imperative to bear
witness to finitude: Tell them go away, Maximo said. Tell them, no
pictures. In a powerful and strange literalization of being as commu-
nity and the implied deferral and lack of presence, Maximo tells them
(his friends) to tell them (the tourists) not to take pictures (which deny
difference and finitude in a will to essence evinced in the spectacle).
Maximos imperative (tell them) is a direct challenge to presence and
purity and the logic and structures of the absolute. In effect, Maximo
bears witness in and as an ethical event insofar as he tells them (his
friends, in both a command and a bearing witness to his experience)
to bear witness on his behalf. In this way Maximo resists the logic
of immanence and the materialization of that logic that the tourists
picture-taking and objectification initiates. Maximo does not just say
no, he commands no and further he commands that his friends com-
mand resistance as well. Not only does he demand no to the objectify-
ing pictures but he tells his friends to tell the tourists to go away. The
final command that he gives to his friends involves both bearing wit-
ness and the inescapability of difference as a way of away. Maximo
has done his going and the way (both as literal path and manner)
that he traveled was most definitely an away way, both historically
as an exile and ontologically as a finite being.
It is important to think of Maximos fi nal telling as an imperative
that is particularly situated or contextualized rather than existing as
a piece of a chronological order. It is not that he is capable of issu-
ing an imperative to bear witness directly as a result of understand-
ing himself as a fi nite being (who therefore knows himself in duty).
Rather we posit that the contexts of cultural difference, immigration,
and exile are material contexts in which community in the Nancian
sense is more likely to flourish. Certainly it is always happening but
here it is a song that is played a bit louder. Unlike the concentration
camp (or camp of exterminating concentration), the will to essence of
the tour bus nostalgia leaves more space for dissent, a space Maximo
readily occupies.
Maximos vexed relationship to nostalgia is evident throughout
the story but does not emerge as directly subversive until the closing
pages, when he is fi nally unable to sit still any longer in the face
of objectification. His ecstatic moment at the Park is an event of
community that cuts through and tears open the will to essence that
the tour guide attempts to institute. Not only is it indicative of resis-
tance as the ecstatic component of singularity/community indicates
110 The Ethics of Community

but further it can be said to have initiated sovereignty, the exposi-

tion of fi nitude to Maximo vis--vis the rhetoric of the tour guide.
Paradoxically Maximo is shared by the disembodied voice of the
other that seeks to objectify him or reduce him to a static spectacle.
Here, the tour bus nostalgia is a material embodiment of a will to
immanence and Maximos eruption of fi nitude and community must
manifest as dissent.

Lisettes Longing
Her Mothers House, the last story in the collection, tells the story
of Lisette, an only child of Cuban exiles living in Miami. Set in both
Miami and Cuba, the narrative is replete with both temporal and spa-
tial shifts, often making it difficult to construct a cohesive and orderly
sequence of events. However, a basic chronological restructuring
reveals that from the earliest years of her childhood, Lisettes life is
framed by her mothers intense longing for her own childhood home
lost in the Cuban revolution. As a recently divorced young woman
(paradoxically frustrated by her ex-husbands belief that the past is
something you can play again like an old song), Lisette is driven by
a desire to visit the house of her mothers stories. When a reporting
assignment presents her with an opportunity to travel to Cuba, she
jumps at the chance. Undeterred by her mothers protests, Lisette thus
makes the journey to her mothers house, seeking fulfillment and ori-
entation for her life, which she experiences as uncomfortably uncertain
due to its lack of a beginning that every story needs. The trip to Cuba
is thus meant to fill in a perceived absence of cultural, national, and
personal origin. However, upon encountering the house for which her
mother was half mad with longing and which was always in the air,
behind every reproach, Lisette discovers that her mother (Mabella)
had deceived everyone and that the house described as majestic was
in fact comparable to a shack, particularly when contrasted with the
relative opulence of the house in which they all lived in Coral Gables, a
generally affluent section of Miami (206).
The destabilization of her separation from her husband Erminio
forms the backdrop for Lisettes desire to travel to Cuba, that is, to find
solid ground upon which to stand and confidently understand her
identity (which she perceived, at the beginning of the story, as identifi-
able). In her own words, . . . every story needed a beginning and her
past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken
it (210). Thus we can ascertain that prior to her trip to Cuba, Lisette
had been thinking metaphysically and actively sought her origin and
the sense of groundedness it would ostensibly provide. The obstacle
she perceived was her lack of the beginning of her story, the truth to
darken the page that was her life. If she could only visit the house and
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 111

thereby finally encounter the origin of which she had been deprived
(and which was indeed a foundational absence in her life) she could
finally begin her life.
The text is replete with figurations that valorize and glorify clarity,
intelligibility, and truth, and indeed Lisettes desire for such possession
is visible throughout the narrative.11 Mostly, Lisette yearns for a world
in which bearing witness and the centrality of narrative it implies is
unnecessary. Having had enough of storytelling given her mothers
endless accounts of her childhood home (That house. Always in the air
behind every reproach), Lisette seeks a directly accessible and entirely
retrievable world (206). Although she herself scarcely comprehends
this desire she is crystal clear concerning the heart of the matter: She
wasnt going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to
herself. How every story needed a beginning (210, italics mine).

Storytelling
Upon encountering the actual house, everything changes and Lisette
confronts the fact that her mother had lied.12 Given that the endless
stories of her mothers house had been such a central aspect of her
life, the realization of her mothers deception is immensely disruptive.
Upon encountering the lie of the house, she not only understands but
additionally experiences that her origin, both in terms of her mothers
house and her very being, is a story. In other words, she experiences
the impossibility of catching up to herself in language, that is, she
experiences difference, finitude, and imperative ethicity. Interestingly,
in an eerie performative move, the original master or grand house
that was to provide the origin for Lisette was the vehicle for the master
or grand narrative of the concept of origin itself.
Lisette thus finds precisely the opposite of the origin, ground, and
corresponding certainty she had been seeking and can now only pine
for the narratives within which she previously operated (her desire
shifting from the possession of first-hand knowledge of the house and
Cuba to the desire for the initial desire; or from desire of object to desire
of desire of object): If only Lisette could get up now and return to the
hotel in Havana . . . back to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple
stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness (221). Recognizing
that their sadness (and who is included in this their?) is no longer
factual and the rafters stories have lost their simple quality, Lisette
cannot return to her once guiding paradigm. Indeed her experience in
Cuba and encounter with the house makes her less grounded, cultur-
ally, nationally, and ontologically, than ever. As we shall explore in the
following pages, Lisette rather finds that she is far more disoriented and
groundless than she had been when she embarked upon her journey to
Cuba seeking the beginning that every story needs (210).
112 The Ethics of Community

Since she wishes to but presumably cannot return to the simple

stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness, she recognizes
the role of bearing witness in the journey of recovery. How will she
tell this story? The house, the idea of her mothers house there in the
shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she described
it to herself much later (218). Although the subject of the sentence
begins as the house itself, it is quickly qualified as an idea, thought,
retelling, and description, with access to it hampered by these as well
as by shadow and time (retelling and later). Thus, several sig-
nificatory and temporal disjunctions are here highlighted, revealing
the importance of imperative ethicity and bearing witness to Lisettes
life. Writing, finitude, and spacing are crucial elements of the nonco-
incidence insisted upon in this line. Entirely denying unity, ground,
and origin, this seemingly innocuous line dashes any and all hopes of
retrieval and recovery. In what follows, we see that Lisette had failed
to anticipate the complete overlap of being, language, and time that she
would experience in Cuba, and the ensuing difficulties of fully pos-
sessing and subsequently recounting said experience.
The linguistic and temporal chasm that is the context of any nar-
ration is highlighted in the interruption between the house and the
idea of the house and the flickering presence and absence that is the
nature of any retelling or signification. Bearing witness is inevita-
bly composed of this interruption as is imperative ethicity. For Lisette,
the thought or idea of her mothers house is ostensibly present as a
thought in the moment of retelling but retelling is always-already
occurring and thus a notoriously slippery affair. (Here, recall Derridas
claim that there is some sense in which we are always bearing wit-
ness, and Nancys that imperative ethicity is constitutive of being.)
First, as she is retelling, it is already not a present thought as lan-
guage eschews the present. Second, with each reading or retelling
it produces its trace-like indication or signification. To which this
retelling does she refer? Is she discussing the process in which the
narrator/Lisette is engaged in the writing (with each retelling) or the
process by which it is present to each reader/producer of the text?
In either situation, but particularly in the case of the latter, there is a
rupture between the notions of the present thought and this retell-
ing revealing that both refuse the presence that they ostensibly offer.
The present thought could be that of Lisette or the thought of the
immeasurable readers who read the text. (As such, it is not the present
thought in the singular as it pretends to be but rather is necessarily the
present thoughts.) This retelling is even more problematic as it could
refer to more than one possible this, which then denies the meaning
of this. It is impossible to locate the this of the retelling. Further,
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 113

rendered in the gerund, the retelling itself refuses the closure that
the this suggests (and simultaneously denies).
The last clause of the sentence reinforces this antinomy with which
the text at large is concerned and which so frustrates Lisette: . . . is a
present thought in this retelling, the way she described it to herself
much later (218). To hold open the paradoxes of a present thought in
this retelling alongside the way she described it to herself much later
is strictly speaking impossible. Assuming that the present thought in
this retelling is the present thinking of the narrator/Lisette as she
is telling it to the reader (which refuses temporal designation), how do
we contend with the disconnect of the way she described it to herself
much later? In other words, what she has written and what we are
reading, which was (in some manner) present to her at the time of the
writing or retelling and is now present to us as we read (again
and again and again), is only the way that she herself understood it
retrospectively, thus not present at all. The narrator accentuates the
fact that we are not receiving the present of this present thought but
a re-presentation (with the temporal lag it necessarily implies). The
not so subtle insinuation is that the present thought is not a present
thought. And although it is present to the reader as they are read-
ing, and was present to author/narrator/Lisette at the time of the writ-
ing as a thought (with its own temporal and linguistic ruptures), it is
necessarily (doubly) removed temporally and linguistically from the
present. In other words, the text tells the reader that we will not arrive
at a present thought, indeed that there is no such thing as a present
thought. The absence of even the possibility of presence in telling, in
bearing witness, is the emergence of finitude and imperative ethicity.
The narrator reveals and traces Lisettes experiences of these events
and prompts the reader to conceivably experience it through and as
this tracing.
As replete as it is with significatory and temporal disjunctures, the
line in question refuses more than it offers, highlighting the problem-
atic nature of presence and meaning not only for exiles and immigrants
but for being in general. Arguably, it is the ardent desire for intelligibil-
ity, presence, and home of exiles and their children that provides the
impetus for such meditations. This yearning powerfully inscribes the
impossibility of presence vis--vis the denial of national and cultural
recuperation and possession. Despite herself, Lisette cannot help but
recognize the complex, slippery, and rupturous nature of bearing wit-
ness and imperative ethicity. (All she can do is engage the retelling of
the idea of her mothers house rather than possess, retrieve, and pres-
ent the house as it really is. However, much as she longs to return to
the simple stories of the rafters, the plain truths of their sadness, she
114 The Ethics of Community

realizes the impossibility of her desire for this and any other manner
of possession.

Interruption
The revelation of the dis-continuity between her mothers stories and
the actual house directly result in experiences of dis-continuous being.
In what follows we examine the various disorientations that Lisette
thus endures:

Lisette saw the way Lisidro bent his head toward this house, this
little dream. His lips moved, wordless. Alicia took her hand. And
then Lisette was sitting at a wood table inside a small kitchen. A
kerosene stove, a bucket of oil, a yellowed basin filled with water,
a refrigerator covered in silver tape, black at the edges. Lisidro
kept moving his lips at Lisette. She blinked. Was that her laughter?
Inside it was dark; the contrast with the outdoors made her eyes
hurt. She tried to look at Alicia, her polished coconut face. (219)

The little dream of a house overtakes Lisette as her encounter with

those around her is imbued with a surreal character. Lisidro appears to
speak as his lips moved however he is wordless. The dissimilarity
between the actual house and that of her mothers stories of it results
in several instructive ruptures. First, there is that between subject and
expression in vocal signification: his lips moved but Lisette experienced
him as without words. Additionally, there is the disjuncture between
Lisette and an other being: he appears to be speaking to her but she
cannot hear him. Following the experience of wordlessness, there is a
temporal discontinuity: Alicia took her hand. And then Lisette was sit-
ting at a wood table inside a small kitchen. Lisette proceeds from being
outside of the house looking at it as an object to being seated at a table
inside of it. The dream like progression from one place and moment to
another without any linkage between them is conspicuous. The tem-
poral and spatial shifts indicate a profoundly disconcerting and frag-
mented experience wherein time and place do not move fluidly but
exist in abrupt repositionings with no continuity between them. The
next line reveals that the disconnect between self and other continues
for some time: Lisidro kept moving his lips at Lisette. She blinked.
Rather than any kind of experience of communication or connection,
Lisette only sees a person moving their lips at her. Failing to under-
stand him and not even experiencing him as speaking Lisette rather
only perceives him physiologically, observing his lips moving. The
narrative appears to indicate that she does not understand the implica-
tions of moving lips as connected to producing speech.
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 115

The closing lines of the paragraph reveal the most intense disjunc-
ture: Was that her laughter? Inside it was dark; the contrast with the
outdoors made her eyes hurt. She tried to look at Alicia, her polished
coconut face (219). The certainty of the identification of ones own
being, of a continuity between self and expression (never mind the con-
tinuity between idea and rendering), is lost. When she hears laugh-
ter, she cannot be sure if it is she or another who laughs. The question
does not concern the precariousness of signification but rather of literal
expression (laughter), which she cannot trace back to its origin. The
experience reveals a startling incoherence of being and simultaneously
an uncertainty regarding the division between self and other.
Notably, laughter is the vehicle that disrupts the self/other opposition.
As a nonrepresentational and ecstatic event (or an erupting disruption
to representation) that cannot be pinned down to an origin, laughter
can be aligned with finitude and imperative ethicity. An extension of
no-thing and functioning outside of an order of signification, laughter
has the potential to expose us to the way in which we are not one and
are rather constituted by finitude.13 In other words, it is potentially an
event of imperative ethicity. Laughter then denies self-enclosure, the
individual (as Nancy outlines the concept), and identity. Appropriately
then it is laughter that momentarily erases a border between self and
other, radically denying the identity that Lisette had sought.
Lisette also experiences a precariousness of cultural and national
identity, evident in her anxiety about her Cuban-ness (she had been
vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban and exaggerated
the contours of the words so there would be no doubt that she was
one of them) and a new ambiguity regarding what Cuba means (she
longed to return to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple
stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness, 213, 221). In addi-
tion to the failure of her mothers house to serve as a point of truth and
origin, Lisette experiences Cuba itself as disconnected from her moth-
ers stories. Inconsistent with her mothers narration and the plain
facts of their sadness, the Cuba Lisette experience is complicated and
not easily totalized. She directly confronts a different story of Cuba
when Matun relates his understanding of the government from which
Lisettes family fled:

You know. The government has been very helpful to us. Yes,
very generous with us. They gave us this land when your grand-
parents left. Every Sunday, me and the wife drive the scooter to
Havana and sell guavas and mangoes. We are not poor; we are
doing very well, he said. Thanks to our government and the
grace of God. (224)
116 The Ethics of Community

Matuns presentation stands in sharp relief to the Cuba narrated to

Lisette by her mother. Lisette reveals early in the story that she believed
that she first understood her mother when she literally crawled into
Lisettes room, weeping at the softness of the toilet paper and the pov-
erty of the children in Cuba who had to use whatever they could in its
place (206). In contrast, Lisette finds herself faced with Matun indicat-
ing that the government has been good to them. This does not coin-
cide with the plain facts of their sadness and obviously places some
nuance into Lisettes previously held convictions.
Lisettes intensified ontological instability emerges from the
clash between, on the one hand, the story of her mothers house
as a foundational absent presence, and on the other, the revelation
of her mothers house as a lie that explodes her beliefs in founda-
tion, presence, and truth. Oddly she had been on more solid terrain
before her trip. Although she had only heard stories of the house
rather than experiencing it fi rsthand, she at least had a founding
idea (along with the idea of foundation) upon which to ground her
self-understanding. When fi nally reaching the origin she sought,
she fi nds someone elses imaginings, a different story thus jolt-
ing her into an even more precarious space than she had previously
occupied. As the fi nal story of the collection, it is not unreasonable
to read Her Mothers House as addressing the many themes of
the text as a whole. The temporal, spatial, and linguistic slippages
that so frustrate the various characters of the text reach a climax
not through the arrival at an ultimate resolution, a long-awaited
return to the imagined original Cuba, but rather in irresolution and
the impossibility of self- coincidence or identity. Being in time, space,
and language simply will not permit it.
Facing her mothers actual house, Lisette experiences the command-
ing and deferring of sense that Nancy defines as imperative ethicity.
Further, Lisettes attempts to access the house that has so contextual-
ized her life and that she sought as a definitive ground and origin,
exposed her to the imperative within/of writing that renders impossi-
ble the coincidence she had so fervently sought. The imperative evokes
the spacing of difference that belies identity. Thus for Lisette, the fi ni-
tude that she experiences (that which continually resists her desire for
presence or self-coincidence) is an imperative emerging within writing
and irrepressibly showing itself when she attempts to bear witness to
her experiences of her mothers house. The finitude that is an impera-
tive for Lisette, which happens in and as writing, is also a spacing that
renders identity (precisely that which she has been after in all of its
senses oneness, presence, and cultural/national designation) impos-
sible. These events of being are not derivative but constitutive and the
historical experience of exile forces Lisette to confront them.
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 117

Lisettes confrontation with finitude is unsettling as her life had

been organized around a single, unifying, and unified notion of ide-
ality and the fully present and transparent world it speaks. In other
words, Lisette was guided by a profound desire for that which she had
been taught was desirable: Meaning, Cuban-ness, Home, and so on.
However, her journey of recovery to Cuba forces her to confront the
impossibility of ideality. She rather finds herself in and as writing, fini-
tude, and imperative ethicity. Who knows what form the experience
of interruption would have assumed had she not been overwhelmed
with a quest for authenticity, ethnicitys version of truth. By the end of
the story she is able to embrace the locura that is her life, not vis--vis
logotherapy but locotherapy, an idea to which we shall return.

The Discursively Constituted Real: Reading a World

Lisettes experience of being interrupted is both material (the spatial
and sensory disruptions) and metaphorical (she experiences a differ-
ent story) much like the path that Denver traverses to reach woman-
hood and Nancy and Derridas invocation of Nazism. For Lisette, as for
the readers tracing her movements, this is an experience in which the
division between narrative and real is impossible to discern. Lisette
does not solely understand that her mother lied but rather experiences
the inevitability of the narrative that she is. Lisettes situation illustrates
that explorations of national and cultural identity can and do prompt
larger inquiries and experiences of imperative ethicity and bearing
witness and their attendant implications of writing and finitude.
The contradiction between her mothers stories and the house before
Lisette is somewhat tenuous as the house is not figured solely as a lie
but additionally as someone elses story from someone elses imag-
inings. In this manner it is identified as a matter of narrative even
while it is contextualized by recountable and absolute facts that the
realm of lies inhabits. Further, given that Lisette walked into the
room, half hearing Matun, not seeing the small rug, the flowered cur-
tain strung across one corner, perception itself is problematized thus
prompting the reader to confront the irrecuperability of the real (which
again, would frame the lie) (223). However, the persistent notion that
her mother simply lied suggests that there is a truth against which
the lie is assessed, which in some way reinforces rather than destabi-
lizes a truth.
Evidence of the foregrounding of Reality and its Truth is manifest
directly following Lisettes disoriented moments with Matun and
Alicia. After her hearing and traditional spatio-temporal sense return
and she is capable of speaking with Matun, she considers her situa-
tion in a manner that emphasizes the degree to which a firm paradigm
involving truth guides her understanding:
118 The Ethics of Community

He stood and walked back to a small room. Alicia and Lisidro

stayed behind at the table. Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the
truth that sat with its arms crossed in front of her. And what of
it! She wanted to shout. So she lied for years. So she lied! If only
Lisette could get up now and return to the hotel in Havana, the
men dancing on the Malecon, back to the Cuba she could talk
about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their
sadness. (2201)

Reinforcing the traditional binary of truth and falsity, Lisette seeks a

truth upon which she feels stabilized. The truth that sits before her is
not in any way yielding and is rather presented in precisely the oppo-
site sense: Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the truth that sat with
its arms crossed in front of her. She literally does not want to see this
plainly presented truth (further it is perhaps worth noting that the
truth is presented as a being that is closed in upon itself). A figure of
obstinance, this crossed arm truth leaves little room for questioning
and indeed her determination is simply that her mother lied thereby
rendering her past false rather than firm. The object of her desire is an
absolute ground from which she can move without question and with
certainty. The issue that she is contending with here is not the inescap-
ability of narrative but the falsity of her origin.
However, in another sense that highlights the complex relation
between the discursive and real, the narration turns around presence
and absence like a mobius strip. Prior to her visit to Cuba her founda-
tion existed, it was simply absent in her life; the encounter with the
house, her attempt to make present this foundational absence, results
in the explosion of the absent (narrative) foundation that she sought to
experience. Cuba reveals to her the absence of her foundational absence
and rather places her within someone elses imaginings, a different
story. The tension is palpable. Her mother lied, denying her the truth
of her origin, but the truth of the origin is figured as a story or imagin-
ing rather than empirically verifiable fact.
We can read the tension between the ground of intelligibility (her
mother lied) and groundlessness of its problematization (she encoun-
tered the house of someone elses imaginings, a different story and
failed to even see parts of the room) as a simultaneous acknowledge-
ment of the inescapability of the actual, concrete world and the dis-
tinction between the inevitability of narrative and pure fabrication,
especially when performed for self-serving purposes. In other words,
while there is a brute material world in which we all exist, there is
a concomitant interpretive mechanism that in another sense consti-
tutes that world. These two manners of considering the world and our
place within it are distinct permitting us to differentiate between and
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 119

acknowledge the potential coexistence of willful deception (occurring

in the context of the real world) and the nuances of perception and
understanding (occurring in the narratively constituted world).
Laclau and Mouffe name this tension between reality and narration
the discursively constituted real, which stresses the dual importance
and simultaneity of the presentation (real) and withdrawal (discur-
sive) inherent to signification (a useful perspective in our consider-
ations of the pertinence of fi nitude, imperative ethicity, and bearing
witness to our understandings of Her Mothers House).14 Thinking
in terms of the discursively constituted real has the decided advantage
of recognizing the importance of and overlap between the material
and narrated worlds. Within Laclau and Mouffes formulation both
are stressed and neither can be thought without the other. Further, if
we think of the real as discursively constituted alongside exile, fini-
tude, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness, we get a slightly dif-
ferent slant. (We may need to be reminded that differance also means
different from a base that does signify.) Undeniably, a component of
that to which we bear witness, that from which we are inevitably sepa-
rated, is a real world. Laclau and Mouffes discursively constituted
real and Lisettes experience of and bearing witness to her mothers
house similarly underscore reality (she lied) and productive narra-
tion (the house is a different story), both of which necessarily imply
finitude and bearing witness.
The indeterminacy of narrative and the presentation and with-
drawal of signification upon which it rests is most pronounced in the
comparisons of perspectives (and degrees of life-satisfaction) of
Matun, Alicia, and Lisidro on the one hand, and Mabella on the other.
Mabellas profound expressions of sadness and empathy for the impov-
erished citizens of Cuba and the dire conditions and presumed tragic
nature of their lives (Cuban children rely on inventive and less than
desirable sources for toilet paper) appear to be contradicted given the
facts of Matuns and Alicias lives. Certainly they live very modestly by
Mabellas Coral Gables standards (in the small shack upon which her
fabrications are based), but they appear neither hungry nor unhappy.15
The fact that they are doing very well belies Mabellas descriptions of
tragedy and blight. In contrast, Mabella lives in an extremely comfort-
able and arguably luxurious Coral Gables home and yet appears nearly
perpetually dissatisfied, consumed as she is with the loss of her life in
Cuba and empathy for her cursed Cuban brethren. Lisette is thus left
digesting the coexistence of a lack of access to material wealth (dis-
cussed in dramatic terms by her mother) and satisfaction or happiness
(impossibilities given her mothers descriptions of Cuban life): Matun
reveals that life is good in the shack while her mother is veritably
plagued by an obsession with the loss of an imaginary luxurious home
120 The Ethics of Community

(while simultaneously living in an actual one).16 One might say that not
only is the house one of someone elses imaginings, a different story
but the Cuba that she encounters with Matun, Alicia, and Lisidro is
similarly a different Cuba. What does this disparity reveal? Certainly
it is interesting and significant that the real is discursively constituted
but it carries an immediate urgency insofar as the stories that we
tell affect the ways in which we live our lives, how we understand,
approach, and experience our being in and as a part of the world. In
other words, imperative ethicity (and bearing witness) is a difference
that makes a difference.17
As we already observed, while the concrete world is foregrounded
in the lie, the narratives or imaginings that emerge within and from
it are stressed simultaneously. The fact that Lisette reveals that she
wishes she could go back to the Cuba that she could talk about later,
the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness indi-
cates something in addition to an emphasis upon a material horizon
of being (221). At stake in this quote is a Cuba that Lisette recognizes
she will be unable to talk about later and one to which she wishes
that she could return. Notions of access (talk about) and retrieval (later)
are implicitly evoked yet again. The brief quote reveals that simple
stories and plain facts can be retrieved and articulated while the
Cuba that she encounters on her visit belies such access. Presumably
this Cuba that she experiences is not simple or factual.
That to which Lisette would like to return is a fully present world
accessible by a fully present subject. Arguably, the easily spoken and
retrieved simple stories and plain facts work neatly and clearly
within a logocentric perspective concerning the relationship between
being, the world, and language. In this view, as we have seen, a fully
present being accesses an already meaningful world which is then
nonproblematically accessed and retrieved. Lisette has experienced an
ontological rupture that forbids a self-understanding as fully present.
Additionally, the multiple disruptions between her mothers narratives
and those of Matun cause a further interruption of a present, unshak-
able, and fully exterior reality. Lisette appears cognizant of the central
role of narrative within her understandings when she indicates that
the house she perceives is the house of someone elses imaginings, a
different story (219). The easy correlation between a fully present sub-
ject experiencing an already (and thus unalterably) meaningful world,
and its attendant clarity (which Lisette repeatedly reveals she desires),
become impossible. A single and foundational real that she can access
and continually recount is recognized as another fiction upon which
she has based her life and understanding. The inability to talk about
this Cuba later reveals the profound extent to which Lisette appears
to perceive a particular divide, rupture, or interruption between
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 121

experience and signification. Although the impossibility of absolute

groundability is recognized, the desire for it remains: She wishes she
could return to the Cuba she could talk about later . . . Arguably at play
here is a conceptual battle between metaphysical conceptions of fully
present meanings and more contemporary foregroundings of the pro-
ductivity of narrative and necessity of bearing witness. At this point in
the story, Lisette has been exposed to finitude yet is still pining a loss
of transparency.
Are we certain that Lisette could not talk about it later? Should
she attempt to articulate later her destabilizing experience of Cuba
and her house, what might it look like? How could she talk about that
which appeared to continually evade conceptual capture? How can she
discuss her experience and understanding without relying on meta-
physical principles of what is real? What happens to experience, under-
standing, and a corresponding articulation or communication when
the ground is revealed to be a construction rather than an absolute?18
We are left with bearing witness. Indeed, the narrative rendering that
we are reading is precisely such an attempt. She can only thematize
the fact that she cannot talk about the Cuba that she is encounter-
ing (and indeed she has already revealed that we are reading a past
present thought of her recollection); or the narrative that we are read-
ing is an attempt to talk about it later, which actually thematizes its
own impossibility. In this sense the text bears witness in a Derridean
sense rather than offering an account of the truth, simple stories, and
plain facts. The textual recognition that being cannot disengage from
the historical world, narrative, or temporality signifies that what is pos-
sible is bearing witness or a rendering of a singular experience (which
itself contains no resemblance to an absolute truth and precisely turns
away from factuality). The narrative shifts in temporality reveal that the
account of the house is one that is recreated much later from memory.
As such, the now of the imagination (a present thought) necessar-
ily comes later than the experience. While experiencing, she recognizes
the impossibility of a subsequent retrieval and yet the narrative that
we are reading emerges precisely from such a later (it is a subsequent
retrieval). These two assertions must be held open simultaneously.
Lisette both cannot talk about this Cuba (as she could the other of dog-
matic assertions in which being, the world, language, and time existed
fundamentally separately), and the narrative account that we read is
one in which Lisette talks about this Cuba. An experience of a tempo-
ral and significatory noncoincidence that forbids full presence and its
corresponding clarity (that Lisette so desires) is here plainly felt.19
Lisettes multiple experiences of dis-location force a confrontation
with finitude, imperative ethicity, and bearing witness and the precise
ways in which they overlap. Exile can be read as a kind of literalization
122 The Ethics of Community

of these constitutive events of being. An interruption that cuts through

and denies any and all attempts at sublation and identity, exile exposes
being to its constitutive finitude and thus imperative ethicity. Given
finitude and imperative ethicity, being can only bear witness or tell a
story of itself, an apt description of Lisettes experience in Cuba. In this
sense, the situation of exile strikingly articulates the unavoidable and
complicated interplay between the discursive and the real.
In some way Her Mothers House is thus a metatext in its bearing
witness to bearing witness. The narrative thematizes its own impossi-
bility and accordingly bears witness to the problematic nature of bear-
ing witness. Although a we must is not directly present in this story,
the inescapability of bearing witness nonetheless speaks. The impossi-
bility of straight intelligibility and Enlightenment notions of truth and
factuality implicitly evoke a bearing witness of being that is an ethical
imperative. The spacing that emerges in the linguistic or narrative act
provides an extension of being that can be read as a kind of metaethics.
Rather than a fact of isolation, bearing witness is an event of exten-
sion and even expropriation from one to an other. What remains in the
place of a false and foundational understanding of a real world is our
movement to the other that bears witness to our experiences. This is
the point at which our characters seem to stop, providing a first step
in a deconstructive understanding but being unable to move out and
beyond it in a thematized manner.
At stake here is an illustration of the manner in which texts that do
not explicitly thematize ethics are still bound within an ethical impera-
tive. Recall Nancys proposal that at the heart of non-communing com-
munication is an ethical imperative or imperative ethicity. The degree
to which metaethics is at play in any and all linguistic acts becomes
manifest as Nancys inoperative community and compearance are
herein invoked. Recognizing the (absent) presence of a non-thematized
ethical imperative assists us in perceiving where and how it occurs as
an event regardless of its explicit articulation. Not only is it provocative
to examine the various manifestations of a metaethical imperative but
further it is an obligation at the heart of narrative and being (and fi ni-
tude) that demands recognition. The command of finitude that we wit-
ness this unheimlich experience draws its power not only from itself but
correspondingly from the demand that we reject its opposite, a founda-
tion and metaphysical immanentism and its very real and untenable
ramifications evinced here in a dogmatic perception of Cuba.

Authorship and Bearing Witness

Toward the end of the story, as Lisette is cleaning out the house in
Coral Gables in preparation for its sale, she finds a letter sent to her
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 123

sometime in an apparently distant past as she cannot recollect receiv-

ing it. Typewritten (as if the sender wanted to remove the last trace
of himself), it is addressed to L and closes with an A. It is a letter
encouraging L to write the book she had apparently at one time con-
sidered writing about the Cuban experience:

L.:
So happy youve finally decided to write that novel. I think the
Cuban experience is a great idea for a book. You have to promise
me one thing: You have to make fun of them. Theres no other
way to write this. Send me what you have.
Love you. Miss you. Cant wait to see you.
A.
The letter was typed, as if the sender wanted to remove the last
trace of himself. She couldnt remember receiving it. Who was A.
Had she ever thought of writing a novel? . . ..
Had she written the note herself? She sat at her old bed and tried
to reach back into the years. She met herself going the other way.
Promising she would never write, never publish, never be a spe-
cial section in the bookstore. Better to write about berms and
set-asides, last nights vote in a small room of microphones and
lights. (2267)

Another metatextual moment, the above passage invokes multiple

interpretations. Possibly the omniscient narrator has written to the pro-
tagonist, Lisette. Or perhaps it is Ana Menendez (indicating both the
A of author and Ana) who writes the letter referencing a book on
the Cuban experience thus suggesting that it is Lisette who has ulti-
mately written the text that we are reading. In a traditional perspective,
the Author magically and extra-linguistically transports an absolute,
objectifiable, and intelligible meaning to the reader. In the letter from A.
to L., however, something quite distinct occurs. The author of the text
(literally Ana Menendez) encourages a character to write the very nar-
rative that we are reading (thereby challenging a notion that the Author
is in complete control of their text, literalizing the suggestion that char-
acters (and readers) repeatedly coauthor the text). Further, the request
that L. send what she has, suggests that Ana/author does not know
what the character in her text might reveal. The traditional trajectory or
sequentiality of creation is interrupted. The text reveals understandings
and meanings to the author rather than the author standing in full and
objectifying control of their text. In other words, the authors text is not
only the authors text but additionally another text with which they are
124 The Ethics of Community

engaged as a reader. Love you, miss you, cant wait to see you also
implies a relationship that exceeds simple creation.
Given the palimpsest of being, language, and world, accessing the
author and text as independent entities is impossible. In her inability
to ascertain the author of the note as well as our inability to find the
original text referenced therein (does it refer to the one Lisette writes
that is this story, the whole text of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, the
one that we the reader create?), Lisette as author and reader and we
the reader (as author and reader) find ourselves in the throes of fini-
tude and imperative ethicity and within the realm of bearing witness.
While this experience is certainly unsettling it is nonetheless valuable
and important. Here we experience our being as differance, as writing,
and we are correspondingly interrupted; we cannot possibly be the
same (in both senses of the word).
The content of the note further accentuates the ways in which issues
of exile and culture are pertinent to those of authorship and textuality.
At one point Lisette had considered writing a book about the Cuban
experience, which we understand from reading this very story in
which the letter appears is impossible to access and rather opens into the
necessity of bearing witness. One way to write about the Cuban expe-
rience might be to write about the impossibility of writing about the
Cuban experience, which is arguably the very text that we are reading
(the Cuba of her experience cannot be talked about later). Interestingly
the letter also indicates that You have to make fun of them. There is no
other way to write this, a clear imperative. The degree to which Lisette
(and the text at large) makes fun of its characters is debatable but the
interruption of straight re-presentation implicit within making fun is
undeniable as is the observation concerning the impossibility of reflect-
ing a straightforward (not making fun) Cuban experience.
The discovery of the letter from A. is directly followed by the ad
that Lisette writes for the paper in which she describes her childhood
home that they are trying to sell (revealing that Lisette is letting go
of two homes): Beautiful Coral Gables home, five bedrooms, three
baths, vaulted ceilings in the dining room. Balcony with wrought-iron
railings overlooking large pool. Entrance flanked by royal palms. She
paused and added, The house of your dreams (227). Importantly, the
final detail (entrance flanked by royal palms) is used by her mother
to describe the house in Cuba. In a manner similar to the simultaneous
conflation and spacing between Ana Menendez, Lisette, and reader
or author and text/reader, the house referenced in the title Her
Mothers House is ambiguous. The house of her mothers childhood
in Cuba is the one with which Mabella is consumed and describes in
tremendous detail as opulent and luxurious. Lisette reveals that she
began to remember all of it too indicating that it assumed a central
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 125

role in the lives of both mother and daughter (207). However, given that
Lisettes visit reveals the degree to which her mother had fabricated
the elaborate details of the house, we are left wondering if the house of
her mothers preoccupation is the one in Cuba or the one in which she
actually lives in Coral Gables. It appears possible that the later Coral
Gables house became superimposed upon the memory of the house
in Cuba further underscoring the role of narrative in our lives and the
impossibility of disentangling reality and textuality.
Indeed throughout the entire narrative we are presented with small
details of the Coral Gables house that overlap with the presentation of
the house in Cuba. During a dramatic moment in which Lisettes mother
remembers how the soldiers took her house, she tells Lisette that she
walked straight, not turning once to look at the stained-glass windows
. . . not even the white columns that climbed to the second floor. And the
iron railing on the balcony where the rattan furniture was laid out for
company, the clink of glasses. Lisette began to remember all of it too
(20607). Additionally, Lisettes father reveals to Lisette that:

The first years of their marriage, all her mother did was talk about
her lost plantation. Her father told Lisette how she used to lie in
bed giving him imaginary tours of the house. The graceful stair-
way laced with gardenias in the summer, the marble fireplace
her father had installed on a whim after visiting the States, the
long white-shuttered windows that looked out over the gardens,
the mar pacificos, the royal palms. Your grandfather was the only
one who could grow roses in Cuba. People came as far as Oriente
to see them. (214)

Although not thematized as spectacular and presented in small, nearly

tangential references, the house in Coral Gables contains a second
floor balcony to which her father had attached lights that extended to
the roof of the gazebo. The house Lisette describes is one that bears
striking similarities to the one in Cuba for which her mother is half
mad with longing (206).
Just as Lisette is simultaneously a character/text brought forth by Ana
Menendez (who can also be read as a character/text) as well as a charac-
ter/text that speaks independently (and to the author), and in this sense
Lisette and Ana Menendez are profoundly connected and yet separate,
the houses of her mother, the one in Cuba (of the past) and the one in
Coral Gables (of the present), are also oddly intertwined and overlap-
ping. Arguably, Lisettes mother remembers/creates the house in Cuba
according to her present material conditions prompting an intermin-
gling between the two houses that traverses both time and space. Noting
a parallel between Mabellas relationships to the two central houses of
126 The Ethics of Community

her life with the relationship between Lisette and the author of the note
is instructive as it calls forth the degree to which textuality is a central
element of being, which in turn underscores metaethical possibili-
ties. Lisette ultimately realizes the degree to which the original house
she sought is fabricated by her mother and necessarily textual. While
apparently not cognizant of the process, Mabella is figured as similarly
enveloped in textuality. Her preoccupation with her childhood house
and the stories she tells of it become interwoven with the house of her
present. The origin figured as house, author, or even as text (suggested
in the note) are all impossible to locate as independent entities and rather
revealed to be immersed within and a part of the deferral and rupture
that is writing. The experience of origins impossibility is an experience
of finitude that awakens us to the necessity of bearing witness.
The inescapability of the constructedness inherent to recollection and
iteration (and the attendant exposure to finitude and denial of origin)
becomes increasingly visible to Lisette and the narrator who ultimately
thematize the impossibility of talking about it later and recapturing
experience in time and language. Arguably, the exile experience facili-
tates such recognition as exiles and their offspring are removed in time
and space from an imagined and longed for origin.
Beings complete immersion in language and time is certainly not
a new consideration. In the case of Lisette and her mothers house,
however, we have occasion to examine the ways in which Nancys
imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness play themselves
out in a particular situation of immigration or exile. Recall that
according to Nancy there is an radically prior imperative at the heart
of discourse or language (within which being inevitably exists).
Denying ideality and foundation, imperative ethicity is the spacing
within fi nitude that drives any and all narrative. Our existence within
it thus places being fi rmly within an imperative. We can only exist
as spacing and obligation to the other. Even though neither Lisette
nor her mother express any overt obligatory sense, the imperative
can nonetheless be located within the opening of a linguistic space
that is underscored as an interruption of the continuity to which
Lisette and her mother aspire in distinct ways. The Enlightenment
notions of truth, presence, and a locatable origin, although fervently
sought, are revealed to be impossibilities and in their place lies a
recognition of the ruptured (and arguably rapturous) relationship
of being to itself, language, and time. It is within the space created
by this interruption that beings movement becomes possible and
an imperative highlighted. These observations allow us to perceive
new understandings and connections. First, we are permitted a view
of the manner in which exile experience lends itself to deconstruc-
tive sensibilities. Second, we can locate moments wherein an ethical
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 127

imperative is most saliently present despite its lack of direct articula-

tion. Third, we are able to discuss how and why we might attempt
to make these moments more powerful given a belief that they will
lead to actual ethical relations.

On the Way to Her Mothers House

It is not only the house as a figure of origin that remains irrecuperable
in time and narration but the road that leads to it as well. Indeed the
road to her mothers house is even more inconclusive than the house
itself. At least with the house the reader has some orientation regard-
ing truth/falsity (Mabella lied), however, in the case of the road there
is only ambiguity. As the means of access to the imagined and ardently
desired origin (the house), the road is a significant figure (particularly
when we acknowledge that the manner of access contributes to the
constitution of the object of perception). Here we can draw a paral-
lel between the way (road) to her mothers house (origin) and the way
(language) to retrieval and articulation of that house that was once
considered a longed-for manifestation of presence and truth.
The descriptions of the road with which the story begins and ends
are nearly identical, however, they bear little resemblance to that within
the body of the narrative that reveals (via absence) a different experi-
ence of the road to her mothers house. Both the first and final narra-
tions are rendered in the past tense. The first description appears as a
recollection brought forth by a third-person omniscient narrator:

The road to her mothers house crossed a wooden bridge into a

field of sugarcane that bent green and wide to the horizon before it
narrowed into a path flanked on both sides by proud royal palms.
It was late afternoon in summer and the men were coming in from
the fields, hauling their machetes behind them. They stepped aside
with their backs to the palms to let her pass and then stood wait-
ing for the dust to settle, their hats flapping softly in the breeze.
Lisette watched the men in the mirror until they retook the road
and then her eyes were on the green fields ahead of her . . . (205)

In contrast, when Lisette herself is articulating her memory to her fam-

ily near the close of the story, it is presented as a bizarre unquoted
blend of first- and third-person narration. Upon her return from her
trip, surrounded by family at a party at her house, Lisette is asked to
describe her mothers house in Cuba:

Her parents had thrown a party here after shed returned from
Cuba, all of them healthy and young, the orange trees in blossom,
128 The Ethics of Community

her cousins daughters splashing in the pool. She looked up at the

house, the palms framed against the sky.
What was it like? What was the house like? The childrens laugh-
ter like punctuation marks. Only her mother was silent. She sat
across from her, her hands in her lap. Lisette followed her gaze.
The day was bright, shimmering above the water. Lisette spoke
slowly. It was too bad, she began, that the soldier had taken her
camera. There was so much to see. The road to the house that
crossed a wooden bridge into a field of sugarcane. The narrow
path flanked on both sides by royal palms. It was a later after-
noon in summer and the men were coming in from the fields,
their hats flopping softly in the breeze. (228)

In contrast to the above quote, the majority of the body of the text is an
account of Lisettes visit to her mothers house in Cuba in which the
road to her mothers house is not presented as structurally cohesive
(as it is disrupted by Lisettes internal dialogue as well as the simple
fact of her being literally lost) making it difficult to piece together a
solid description. However, that which the narration does present is
inconsistent with the framing narratives (although it does not entirely
deny them either). Given that the descriptions repeated in the opening
and close of the text are absent in the body rather than contradicted, it
appears possible that they might be accurate. Lisette turned onto the
first opening in the field, a bumpy road of loose sand and stone. The
men stepped aside to let her pass. The landscape was green and flat but
for the hills. She came to the end of the road where it disappeared into
a field of sugarcane (21415). There is no wooden bridge mentioned
on the way to her mothers house, the men do not resume the road
while she continues to drive, and the royal palms dissipate quite early
giving way to a dusty and flat landscape. Although these narrations
appear inconsistent, it is difficult to definitively assert the impossibil-
ity of their coexistence. The text continually frustrates our attempts
to achieve narrative cohesiveness and firmly decide what version to
believe or what logical account to construct.
The identical narration repeated at the start and close of the story
could be interpreted as imagined recollections in the opening lines
(she began to remember it all too) and then a knowingly false mem-
ory after the fact in the closing ones (which would render the narra-
tion in the body in which the repeated details are absent true), or is
perhaps simply a repetition of an accurate description of events (that is
simply absent from the body of the text). In the latter case, the narration
with which the text opens (discussing the wooden bridge that opens
into a field of sugar cane) is possibly a portion that belongs chrono-
logically in the central body of the story, which is composed of Lisettes
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 129

experience of her visit to Cuba and her mothers house. In this case, the
identical account presented at the start of the text in third-person nar-
ration (but belonging in the body) and the close of the text in Lisettes
own first-/third- person narration would be an honest rendering of her
experiences on the way to her mothers house. Essentially, it would be
a portion of the narrative placed out of place insofar as it is presented
in the first paragraph of the text and absent in the body where it would
temporally and thematically belong. Read in this way, there is a consis-
tency between the opening and (nearly) closing narratives of the way to
her mothers house, and there is discontinuity solely in the disruption
of the chronology of the narrative. However, at the very least, interpret-
ing the account of the road to her mothers house presented in the first
lines and closing pages as simply accurate is vexed, given that in the
entire narrative of the trip we are presented with no such view. We
cannot be certain of the veracity of the accounts that frame the story as
a whole (and indeed we might be prompted to provisionally conclude
that the story itself precisely denies a sense of wholeness). In the end,
a simple interpretation of narrative displacement feels unsatisfactory;
there appears to be a more complex (and unheimlich) event or disrup-
tion occurring.
One manner of accessing this experience of narrative discontinuity
or inconsistency (that in some way refuses access) is to consider it an
invitation into disruption; thinking about the text this closely is a call
to be interrupted or to experience the finitude about which the story
is concerned both thematically and structurally. The narration of the
road to her mothers house demands that the reader think about lan-
guage (just as the road is the means of access to the house, language
is the means of access to the house), which is itself figured as thinking
about finitude (the roads in the story fail to correspond to each other
just as Cuba and the house fail to correspond to the stories of them).
The result of both discontinuities is a certain interruption or experi-
ence of finitude.
It is equally possible that the opening line of the text involving the
description of the road to her mothers house that crossed a wooden
bridge into a field of sugarcane that bent green and wide to the horizon
before it narrowed into a path flanked on both sides by proud stands
of royal palms exists solely in Lisettes imagination (very probably
that which was provided to her by her mother which she began to
remember too, 20506). In this event, a narrative voice of certainty (a
third-person omniscient narrator) presents the reader with two con-
trasting presentations of the same event, one in the opening and clos-
ing and the other in the body. Provocatively, the narration that is more
embellished (and thus suspect given the reality of the house in Cuba)
is presented twice, once in the opening line of the text and once in the
130 The Ethics of Community

closing pages. The account that differs is presented as absence rather

than a directly contradictory story, leaving the reader uncertain as to
the actual events. The subtle discontinuity in content and the narrative
voice in which it is presented (two in third and one in first/third), com-
bined with the nonlinear presentation result in a performative ground-
lessness that further undermines the possibility of a discernment (for
reader and protagonist) of what actually happened. This interrup-
tion between experience, retrieval, and presentation so exquisitely the-
matized in the story lead directly to meditations upon the possibilities
of bearing witness, an issue not lost upon Lisette. Her recognition that
she cannot return to the Cuba that she could talk about later reveals
that she has come to an understanding of the impossibility of a fully
intelligible world and its nonproblematic rendering. Indeed when faced
with the necessity of recounting her visit to her family, and particularly
her mother, she perpetuates her mothers fabrications, perhaps reveal-
ing an understanding of the impossibilities of having her experiences
accurately imparted to those around her.
We may be tempted to conclude that the account of the road to her
mothers house offered at the close of the text is a fabrication as it is
presented in the context of the continuation of her mothers lies. The
description of the road is thus guilty by association to the description of
the house itself. As such, we remain dis-believing of the entirety of the
first-/third-person narration that closes the text. We might thus deter-
mine that the third-person narration is reliable while the first or first/
third is not (consistent with a traditional approach in which objectivity
is only possible from an impartial and removed narrator). In this case
the third-person narration of the body of the text in which the details
of the final version are absent is the most reliable. An understanding
of the actual/fabricated narrative is therein constructed. However, this
conclusion is denied by the two noncoinciding third-person accounts
(one in the opening lines and one in the body). Should we believe the
narration in the body of the text (which may appear reasonable given
that this is the portion of text that unveils falsities), then we must assert
that the opening lines, also in third-person narration, are (likely) false.
Since almost the entire text is presented in third-person omniscient
narration, in the event of its established falsity, is not the text as a whole
called into question? The more we attempt to arrive at some sort of
clear narrative voice and reliable presentation, the more the text frus-
trates us indicating the groundless character of being in/and narrative
that the text both thematizes and performs.
How else might we read the odd blend of third- and first-person
narration alongside the narrative displacement and descriptive incon-
sistencies of the road to her mothers house? The text itself presents
us with a possible approach: The house, the idea of her mothers house
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 131

there in the shadow, is a present thought in this retelling, the way she
described it to herself much later (218). We have already addressed the
numerous disruptions of this singular meta-observation of the text that
reveals the complexity of temporality and narrative in any retelling
(and by implication, the corresponding unreliability). Contextualized
by the preceding quote (as well as Lisettes observation that she will
not be able to return to the Cuba she could talk about later), the
blending of first- and third-person narrations once again evinces the
impossibility of certainty and foundation within narrative. This is a
story about far more than the truth or falsity of her mothers stories and
rather much more profoundly performs the perpetual movement and
slippage of being, time, and narration. Arrival at a ground or origin,
that which Lisette so desperately sought, is revealed to be radically and
provocatively unattainable.
Might the bizarre juxtaposition of first- and third-person narration
(occurring in a dual and overlapping manner much like the relation-
ship between being and language itself) illustrate a manner in which
all narration occurs in some way in the third person as well as the
first, neither of which are strictly speaking, mine? Refusing to be traced
back to a solid or foundational I of experience, being in time and lan-
guage can only continue to tell a story of itself and the text is inevitably
a performance of these events (which is itself an irrepressibly activated
imperative ethicity and bearing witness). What rendering of an experi-
ence can escape the inevitability of existing as a narrative? Although it
is an I who speaks, it is one who invariably emerges from and within
a linguistic, temporal, and material context that refuses both origin
and arrival and is therein composed of finitude.20 In this sense lan-
guage is simultaneously mine and not mine or as Derrida articulates I
only have one language; it is not mine (Derrida, Language Is Never
Owned, Sovereignties, 104). Lisette thus finds herself (and correspond-
ingly, we the reader find ourselves in the narrative) in a position of
continual slippage and interruption that the narrative underscores in
various ways, revealing a denial of cohesiveness in and of being, time,
language, and world. It is perhaps no accident that the displaced nar-
rative of the visit to Cuba and her mothers house does not concern the
house itself, but the way to it. It is not only the object of recuperation
(the house) that belies capture but additionally the literal (and figura-
tive) road to retrieval (language) is unattainable and the two are, in the
end, the same. In other words, since an experience can only be accessed
and retold linguistically, it is bound (and arguably liberated) by and
within its medium.
We have addressed the bizarre relationship between the first- and
third-person narrations of the line concerning the road to her moth-
ers house as well as the inconsistency between the repeated line and
132 The Ethics of Community

the main body of the narration of the visit. However, we have yet to
unravel the structural issue of the displacement of the narrative spe-
cifically in terms of its opening of the story. The thematic and chrono-
logical displacement of the first paragraph of the story indicates that
cohesiveness is already challenged. The idea of a whole, clear, and
intelligible narrative account is structurally dispelled from the first
lines of the text. Although Lisette reveals that she wants a truth to
darken her past, the narrative has already denounced the possibility
of this arrival in the multiply ambiguous first lines, which themselves
challenge the very notions that would make a definitive truth a possi-
bility in the first place (the strict separation between being, language,
and world forbidden by the strange relationship between the first- and
third-person narrations of this same line as well as by the inconsis-
tency of this line with the central narrative of the visit to her mothers
house). In other words, despite Lisettes explicit desire (or rather, even
in her desires given the nature of desire itself) for origin and foun-
dation, the text has recognized its impossibility from the beginning
(as bearing witness inevitably does). Desire for origin is thus in some
sense an oxymoron.
Language, narrative, or story is both the context out of which being
fundamentally emerges and simultaneously the manner in which being
can be an issue for itself ( la Heideggerian Dasein). Language is both
(groundless) ground and the vehicle through and in which being can
bear witness to an other. Indeed we saw in Chapter 1 how both impera-
tive ethicity and bearing witness occur in language and being as obli-
gation and promise to the other. When Lisette journeyed to Cuba she
sought a firm and uncontestable origin but rather encountered a pleth-
ora of narrative and ontological interruptions that forbade any such
cohesiveness, beginning, or clarity. A close reading of the text reveals
that the lines that divide being from language and time are blurred
throughout the story. Lisette can no more reach a central ground and
origin of her life, experience, and narrative any more than the reader
can of its rendering, which, in the end, amounts to the same thing. The
experience of the reader who attempts to find the center, or place from
which the various convolutions emerge, is frustrated and we find our-
selves circling, repeating, and rewording in a vain attempt to arrive.
Like Lisette, we must continually engage in a coming closer, an on the
way to (road or story of) this unheimlich relationship between experi-
ence and its articulation (or Derridean bearing witness), which is to
say, between experience and language and the extra-discursive event
of their overlapping.
The attempt to articulate the many intersecting ways in which there
is a road to her mothers house brings forth the non-recuperable
events that are Nancian imperative ethicity and bearing witness,
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 133

which is arguably what is at stake in this story. Given that it is the

road to her mothers house that highlights inconsistency (with the
larger narrative), interruption (in its displacement), and groundless-
ness (in the confounding of beings third- and first-person narration),
it is not only the object of recuperation that evades our grasp, but
the vehicle through which we reach for recovery, namely, language
in time. The metanarrative that interrupts the otherwise straightfor-
ward representation of the events of the visit thematize these prob-
lematic elements of recuperation very plainly: The house, the idea of
her mothers house there in the shadow, is a present thought in this
retelling, the way she described it to herself much later (218). Nancian
imperative ethicity and Derridean bearing witness come directly into
play when we pursuit an articulation of the relationships between
the various roads to her mothers house. As a vehicle of access, lan-
guage is the road to her mothers house and ultimately, the vehicle
and the house itself become inseparable and indistinguishable (much
like the event of being). Her language, articulation, and memory of
the house become constitutive elements of the house itself. Another
perhaps more instructive manner of accessing this complex process is
that the way that Lisette can arrive at her mothers house is in lan-
guage and time and given the already outlined inconsistent, disrup-
tive, and groundless character of this way or road that is language,
we know that Lisette will never arrive. The road or the way to the
object of perception and recuperation is all there is and can both
encompass and transcend the dichotomy between vehicle and object.
Interestingly, despite her desire for arrival at a truth or origin, Lisette
simultaneously reveals that there is something preferable and more
satisfying in the journey: The air was still, the thin white clouds
high in the sky, and Lisette thought again how much she preferred
the journey to the destination . . . She felt it now, comfortable in her
stride, accustomed to the silence, not caring anymore where the road
ended (217). As path (which we addressed in Chapter 3), a road is
indicative of movement and motion toward rather than arrival. The
previous passage reflects a manner in which Lisette highlights a vis-
ceral enjoyment in the motion above and beyond the destination.

Another Step Back: The Map

Twice removed from Lisettes mothers house is the map of the road that
leads there. Before Lisettes departure to Cuba her mother begrudgingly
gives her a map to guide her. Lisette finds that the map is instructive in
Havana (although the street names have changed), however, as she jour-
neys to the countryside to locate the house, she becomes lost, the map
apparently ceasing to serve its purpose. Eventually, Lisette is forced to
ask for directions in order to orient herself and ultimately reach her
134 The Ethics of Community

destination. Upon encountering the young man from whom she solicits
information, we find that the map is read in various manners:

A man approached on horseback, growing in relation to the hills

with every step. She pulled to the side of the road and exam-
ined her mothers map. On the lower right hand side, her mother
had painted a large box and labeled it simply, M. Lisette looked
outside at the expanse of palms and orange trees. Her mother
and her cryptics. She was probably afraid that Lisette would be
stopped with an incriminating document . . . The man got closer,
filling up more and more of the sky, until he was upon her and
Lisette sat waving her soft map like a small flag.
The man took off his hat and nodded, as if unsure he would be
understood. It had happened to her in Havana and Lisette had
been vaguely hurt that no one recognized her as Cuban.
Buenas tardes. Lisette said, exaggerating the contours of the
words so the man would no doubt she was one of them.
He smiled. En que la puedo ayudar?
Lisette showed him the map and pointed at the road that was
supposed to lead to her mothers house. She pointed to the block
in the right-hand corner, where the road branched to the right.
She looked up.
Militar, the man said and shrugged as if something struck him
as silly. The notion of a military base in the middle of the campo?
Her mothers precautions?
He took the map and studied it. Then he turned it upside down
and nodded, smiling, to point here she was. If she continued this
way past the small cane refinery and turned right on the first
main road, she would pass the military instillation on her right.
Then if she took the first left, she should get to where she wanted
to go. (21213)

A provocative sign for readership and orientation, a map is literally

that which is defined by its ability to tell us which road to take in order
to arrive at a particular destination. Given our cognizance of the man-
ners in which ontological and narrative arrival are precisely forbid-
den for Lisette (even as she reaches her destination), the maps various
possible significations and denial of ultimate and absolute readability
comes as no surprise.
The subtext of national and cultural identity so consistently pres-
ent throughout In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd and Her Mothers
House (and much literature of exile) inserts itself directly as Lisette
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 135

sat waving her soft map like a small flag (213). As an obvious symbol
of a nation-state that is most frequently invoked in view of an achieved
(generally unexamined) national identity and a corresponding pride
(necessarily unexamined) to which Lisette appeared to aspire or
already possess, a flag is a provocative simile. The map/flag is both
a literal guide to her mothers house and a metaphorical path to her
perceived and desired ground for identity or imagined Cuban-ness.
Indeed directly following the image that conceives of the map as a flag,
we are presented with several lines that illustrate Lisettes desire for
recognition as Cuban and the subsequent hurt in its absence: It had
happened to her in Havana and Lisette had been vaguely hurt that no
one recognized her as Cuban (21213). Further she clearly conceives
of a Cuban-ness in terms of an us (although the narrator does not,
using a them for Cubans) insofar as she accentuates the contours
of the words so the man would have no doubt she was one of them
(213). Lisettes desire to absolutely ground her identity in an imagined,
fully present and immanently meaningful Cuba (and thus making
it possible for her to achieve Cuban-ness) is amply evident in these
lines. The truth of her past that she had been seeking is revealed to be
a national past complete with a fixed and unshakable Cuban identity.
The likening of the map to a flag concretizes (albeit through simile)
the complicity of Enlightenment organizing principles, nationalism,
and its corresponding identity politics. These structures of thought are
restrictive and damaging to Lisette and their constructed nature are
ultimately perceived in Lisettes ontologically disruptive experiences
at her mothers house.
In addition to evoking nationality, the flag appears to Lisette as a
direct representation of her mothers cryptics. Unable to ascertain
the meaning of the M in the box drawn on the map, Lisette assumes
that her mother is being intentionally obtuse in an effort to throw off
potential harassers who might determine that the map is an incrimi-
nating document (212). That which Lisette interprets as cryptic we
later learn is an accurate signifier of Militar, a point of orientation on
the road to her mothers house. Reading and misreading is plainly fore-
grounded in this sequence. Lisette believes that her mother aspires to
being unreadable when in fact it is Lisette who misreads both the map
and her mother given that the M actually does signify in straight
representational fashion. Or does it?
The man from whom Lisette received directions appears to immedi-
ately recognize the M as indicative of Militar as he responds accord-
ingly when Lisette pointed to the block in the right hand corner, where
the road branched to the right. She looked up. Militar, the man said
and shrugged as if something struck him as silly (213). However, in
order to understand or make sense of the map as a whole, he must
136 The Ethics of Community

turn it upside down at which point it becomes readable to him: He took

the map and studied it. Then he turned it upside down and nodded,
smiling, to point where she was (213). If inverted, however, the M
that so neatly signified Militar morphs into a W. The intelligible or
readable map thus fails to signify the orienting M that would guide
Lisette to her mothers house. Subverting totalizing signification, the
noncoincidental intelligibility of the M and the map as a whole fur-
ther thematize the problematics of representation. Ultimately we are left
uncertain regarding the explanation for the inconsistency of the M
with the larger indications of the map. Whether Mabella intentionally
sought to mislead Lisette or simply recollected erroneously is impossible
to discern leaving the reader in a nonconclusive space yet again.21
We are guided back to our overarching concerns of ethics and com-
munity when we conceive of the house as that toward which we have
been and are in this story. In other words, as a meta-story about a
(repeatedly) recollected house and how to arrive at a retelling (the
road to her mothers house), the house is not only that toward which
the narrative continually moves but additionally the object that denies
Lisettes and the readers arrival. It is the house that indicates to us
that experience evades recovery and possession. Lisette is left in the
realm of a Derridean bearing witness where she recognizes the impos-
sibility of a full rendering of her encounter with the house. With that
recognition comes the attendant understanding of the impossibility of
plain facts and simple truths and the ability to talk about it later
to which she wishes to return. Curiously, the house is in some way an
emblem of Heideggers metaphor for language as the house of being
from which Lisette can apparently see no redeeming qualities.
Is there any sense in which Lisettes continuation of her mothers lies
about the house evokes Derridean bearing witness? If read carefully,
we can discern a nearly confrontational tone in Lisettes retelling of her
encounter with the house, which speaks an interesting dynamic:

She looked at her mother. Watched her hands turn in her lap.
Everything was the same Lisette said after a moment. The
stairway, the balconies. Even the marble fireplace. Somehow, it
all made it through the revolution.
She faced her mother. Held her chin her hands. (228)

Looking pointedly at her mother as she tells the story, Lisette and her
mother become curiously joined in the lie. A profound moment of con-
nection is borne from the known disjuncture between narration and
reality conspiratorially linking the two as they alone share the secret.
Simultaneously, she confronts her mother with her lies by not telling
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 137

the truth in a manner that is perhaps more profound than if she were
to out the secret. You know that I know and I know that you know
that I know is an unspoken yet powerful movement between Lisette
and her mother. Additionally, it could be viewed as a challenge to her
mother to tell the truth. Here, a false rendering reinforces the possible
veracity and potential integrity of an experience that is inherent to
bearing witness. If the power of bearing witness lies in the you have
to believe me implicit therein, subverting its central element simply
reinforces the absent presentation that has been knowingly denied. As
such, the continuation of the lie functions to make more intense the
bearing witness of Lisettes experience of the house.

Locotherapy: Spanish and/or English

The narrative present revealed in the final pages indicates the changes
in Lisettes life sometime following her visit to Cuba:

She was an editor at the paper now, had her own office overlook-
ing the bay. She was a little in love with a German psychologist
who loved her back. In the evenings they had long conversations
about the will and happiness. On Sundays they had some people
from his practice for lunch and she put out her good crystal and
the leather-bound Rilke . . .When, alone with him, the people
gone home, she would complain of despair, her sick parents, he
would hold her face and tenderly ask, Why do you not kill your-
self? It was an old joke with them. And Lisette always laughed.
Logotherapy, he called it the first time. And shed understood loco
therapy. There is meaning in this, he insisted. And he waved his
arms meaning everything. Yes, shed say, its all loco. (225)

A pivotal tension of the story, that between groundedness, full pres-

ence, intelligibility, and identity (or logocentrism) and the spaces that
emerge within and from beings noncoincidental entanglement with
experience, narrative, and temporality (imperative ethicity or bearing
witness) are addressed in this simple situation of misunderstanding
(an apropos event for articulating the distinction between the above
and tracing Lisettes conceptual shifts). Her journey to Cuba was an
attempt to finally and fully ground her identity in a single and recu-
perable origin, which itself relied on logocentric principles. However,
the various ontological interruptions coexistent with her recognition
of the twin foils of narrative and temporality to coincidental being
sparked a perceptual shift that ultimately thematized itself, speak-
ing the impossibility of full presence of being or/in world. Arguably,
Lisettes conceptual and perceptual shifts and error (the misunder-
standing) emerge from her experience in Cuba (with and as narration
138 The Ethics of Community

or writing or imperative ethicity), which in some manner surpassed

the realm of reason and truth. An understanding that her own expe-
riences as well as her ability to recount them escaped her grasp (she
could not have them) revealed the limits and failure of reason, which
she viscerally felt as ontological disruption. While at one time logos
appeared to be the central principle implicitly orienting her concep-
tions, her trip to Cuba instigated a reorientation, which in the above
passage is identified as a belief in the significance of loco. Rather
than an orderly and deliberate reason governing the universe la a
Greco-European philosophical tradition, Lisette understands that the
meaning in all this is not exactly a meaning at all and rather stands
in direct contrast to it: it is crazy. Denied the truth and origin that she
sought on her trip to Cuba and her mothers house, and cognizant of
the impossibility of transparency in narration, Lisette concludes that
the only meaning is loco or a meaning that fails to mean (Nancian
meaningless meaning). Provocatively, it is in a misunderstanding of
the ultimately loaded Greek term for a powerful (and playful) Spanish
one that she arrives at this directly thematized insight. Lisette literally
does not hear or misunderstood the metaphysical term par excellence
and instead perceives in Spanish, thereby lead with/in and by Spanish
to a subversion of logos and all of its implications.
A close examination of the odd juxtaposition of Spanish and English
that contextualizes Lisettes experience in Cuba reveals a provocative
movement. Aside from the few words presented directly in Spanish,
all of the exchanges appear to be translated. Why are dialogues that
almost certainly occurred in Spanish translated to English? Do the
translations result from the narrative existing as a present thought
in this retelling, which for Lisette occurs in English? And last, how
might we read the directly translated lines (the lines awkwardly pre-
sented in English since they are direct translations)?22
The words rendered in Spanish almost solely signify either some
element of hospitality as in hello and thank you or that which
indicates a connection to others such as La hija de Mabi (Mabis
daughter) and igualita (identical) indicating the relation and resem-
blance between Lisette and her mother Mabella. Given that this pre-
sentation is a retelling, it might be reasonable to assert that the terms
in which she remembers/thinks in Spanish are precisely these terms
of hospitality and family connection (since Spanish is the language
of her parents and heritage). She is the daughter of Mabi (in Spanish),
she looks just like her mom (in Spanish), and her grandparents died
in Venezuela (in Spanish). These are the terms in which these simple
relations with the other are recollected and thus presented. The hospi-
table and connecting words rendered in Spanish simply indicate that
for her Spanish is the language of these events, which are in some way
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 139

outside of the logos that her German boyfriend believes can heal her
and give her back the meaning that she has lost. However, Lisettes
mis-hearing in Spanish reveals that for her this notion is not reason-
able but rather crazy.
In contrast, when referencing that she is tired from her trip, would
not like a tour of the house, and has a lot of work to do, there is an odd
translation into English that is clearly a direct translation from Spanish.
Tengo mucho trabajo is literally and awkwardly translated into I
have much work. Additionally, and even more interestingly, Estoy
demasiado cansada por el viaje is again directly and thus strangely
translated to I am enough tired from the trip. In English, this phrase
barely works as a sentence. Here, she is plainly thinking both in English
and Spanish, arriving at a strange juxtaposition between the two that is
neither Spanglish nor an accurate English translation, perhaps indicat-
ing an eerie space between languages and cultures.
Given these observations it becomes apparent that Her Mothers
House is a text that is at least partly in English in/and Spanish. It
is not simply translated or dubbed as the original is in Spanish in/
and English thereby problematizing the concept of locatable origin.
As we have seen, the text is preoccupied by a simultaneous desire for
and refusal of a static temporal and linguistic origin that is repeatedly
revealed to be a slippery and unfixable narrative. The original is thus
not original. The implicit and explicit juxtaposition of Spanish and
English is a structural thematization of the lack of origin in language.
Not only is there no origin to the story or stories (that of Lisette and
Her Mothers House) and not only is language by nature multiple,
diffuse, and productive, but literally the juxtaposition and at times
superimposition of Spanish and English underscores this complex pro-
cess. The third-person omniscient narrator vacillates between translat-
ing, failing to translate, and translating badly leaving the reader with a
trace of a gesture toward what would have ostensibly been the origi-
nal, which is itself (not) presented (as it is conspicuously absent); fur-
ther, the reader is rather presented with a translation that is not quite a
translation as it is the original of the text. The original is thus neither
present nor absent and both.
Our analysis in this chapter has complicated notions of language
and home. While we can certainly appreciate Perez-Firmats asser-
tion that If the voyage of cultural recovery has to be undertaken in
English, the loss is irreparable we must also recognize the inherent
complications of cultural recovery evinced in the many layers of
Lisettes journey to Cuba upon which she embarked with precisely
this goal (Perez-Firmat 1989, 139). Recovery, home, and language them-
selves signify indeterminately as we witnessed in the preceding explo-
ration. Lisettes quest to unearth her Cuban-ness failed not because she
140 The Ethics of Community

had been geographically removed from her parents place of birth and
engaged the retelling in Spanish and English, but more pointedly as a
result of the undeniable and powerful refusal of full presence or mean-
ing (that which is sought in the recovery) of Cuban-ness, which itself
indicates no-thing (which is distinct from a claim that it is nothing).23
The refusal of origin, full presence, and identity are almost necessar-
ily brought to the fore in the context of the 1.5 generation of which
Lisette is a member. With two foreign parents, growing up in Miami,
her identity and culture are neither American nor Cuban. Complicating
a strict notion of culture and identity as pure or authentic, Lisettes
experience is not uncommon in its multiplicity. She is (as we all are)
both and neither. The language of a blended Spanish and English is
her language and thus the very notion of a home language is already
directly problematized.
While Ana Menendez Her Mothers House appears to function
as though the central revelatory movements proceed from a belief and
desire for a truth to a recognition of its impossibility, it additionally
performs a Nancian non-meaningful meaning of the act of telling a
story, bearing witness, or narration itself (imperative ethicity). In other
words, the text plays out but is not self-reflexive concerning the nonsig-
nificatory significance of the telling. In this sense, it activates while not
thematizing the sacred stripped of the sacred that is a central compo-
nent of bearing witness, Nancian community, and imperative ethicity.
It is not truth that lies beneath but inevitably escapes our grasp but
rather narrative or rendering (or bearing witness), and it is this final
step that is thematically absent from the text. Her Mothers House
stresses Lisettes craving for self-presence and certainty and simultane-
ously reveals the extent to which this truth that it craves is a construct
(which we have been discussing throughout the chapter), but impor-
tantly it additionally performs that what is present as a non-presence
(in being, time, and language and their interlacing) is the meaningless
meaning in narrative imperative ethicity. The text knows this but does
not know that it knows. Thus while it highlights its desire for presence,
on another level it speaks the extra-discursive power of the telling.
Her Mothers House is a story that thematizes its protagonists
desire for origin as something that she could barely explain to herself
(210). However Lisette and the text seem to move in opposite directions
regarding their relation to the desire for origin and recognition of its
impossibility. While Lisette can barely explain to herself her desper-
ate search for origin and truth, the text barely explains to itself that
there is something other in desire, in ontological and narrative slip-
page, noncoincidence, and a pointed rejection of foundational think-
ing. It offers these alternatives but fails to recognize them as it does so
explicitly with their opposite. The reverse order of Lisette and the texts
 Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude 141

relationship to a desire for truth and origin lies in the fact that Lisette
barely understands her desire for truth and origin and the text barely
understands desire, that is, its desire for the opposite.

Conclusion
Perhaps one of the the many things that Ana Menendez In Cuba I Was
a German Shepherd illustrates is that the eruption of finitude or the ethi-
cal event of community is not necessarily joyous or even comfortable. It
may not cleanse or feel good as it did at times in Beloved. Indeed by
definition an eruption is in some manner unsettling so we should per-
haps not expect to be happily transformed. But it transforms nonethe-
less. Both Maximo and Lisette are changed by the close of their stories
and approach their world differently in the context of an activation of
community, finitude, and bearing witness. If we consider these dif-
ferences as evoking more open and less appropriative relationships to
themselves, others, and the world, and in some way getting their
inseparable nature, then that is enough.
But we cannot help but wonder if the melancholia so potent through-
out both stories (and the text as a whole) stems also from an unexam-
ined belief that we are ultimately supposed to truly know ourselves
and our world vis--vis some magical experience of certainty, clear
understanding, and an experience of ontological appropriation (one
that we have seen speaks a logic of death). Although such full presence
and ideality can only annihilate, it often seductively appears to us as
arrival and safety, as it did for Maximo and Lisette (in a figure of Cuba
as lost home). Possibly, the sorrow emerges in some part from these
metaphysical vestiges that prioritize presence and truth and the value
it allegedly speaks.
What happens though, if we shift grounds and understand truth
and home differently? Or better yet, what if we embrace or lean into
groundlessness and the finitude and community that constitutes us?
According to Nancy, if we cannot even undertake this task, not only do
we lose our ownmost death, but we do not even manage to constitute
a world.24
Conclusion

Must we ask the question of community? As we have seen, Nancy

and Derrida submit that we cannot avoid the rupture that is being
itself. Our analysis of imperative ethicity, fi nitude, writing, commu-
nity, bearing witness, and carrying the other underscore the inevi-
tability of these events. Further, the disruptive quality that they all
share necessarily contains ethical implications. In a nutshell, as being
we are toward the other, irrevocably obligated and accountable to in
a fundamental yet unidentifiable manner. Escaping our discursive
conceptualization, deconstructive ethics speaks something other of
which we are a part and yet cannot name. Thus whether or not we are
accountable is no longer the issue; rather we must consider the degree
to which this accountability is visible and manifest in the material
world.
Cognizant though we are of the problematic elements of a dichoto-
mous thinking of theory and praxis, concept and experience, and the
abstract and concrete realms, we can nonetheless retain the propul-
sion of our inquiry by cautiously invoking them. In other words, we
can be vigilant against a reductive and simplistic oppositional frame-
work (that denies the complexity of and radical interdependence and
indeterminacy of the above binaries) while simultaneously consider-
ing the degree to which deconstructive ethics does or does not play
itself out in the material world. Curiously, we began with Nancy and
Derrida whose treatment of the concentration camp and Shoah in gen-
eral (the concrete realm) inform their discussions in crucial and sig-
nificant ways. Indeed Derridas reading of Celans bearing witness to
bearing witness in Rams invokes a consideration of an experience
of the concentration camp and the im/possibility (and simultaneous
inevitability) of a corresponding telling.1 Any attempt at rendering an
experience (or bearing witness) confronts us with the impossibility of
being coincidental to the narrative (and experience) within which we
exist (which we witnessed poignantly in Chapter 4). Even within this
brief discussion, the overlapping of the binaries (abstract/concrete) is
already visible.
In an effort to explore the pertinence of deconstructive ethics to our
actual lives we turned to Morrisons Beloved and Menendez In Cuba I
Was a German Shepherd. We look to these particular texts in an effort to
 Conclusion 143

illustrate a tremendous and provocative relation between deconstruc-

tive ethics and predominant cultural issues of African American and
US Latino Literature. While the typically engaged literary works of
Holderlin, Rilke, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Emerson, Beckett,
Keats, Coleridge, or Genet certainly provide exciting interpretive
opportunities and are exceptionally writerly texts, others that have
not occupied a power position in the field are as well. With a few
notable exceptions the dominant voices in contemporary, continentally
driven theoretical discourse still mainly explore literary textuality
with and within the thinking of European white male authors.2 While
it may strike us as odd to invoke such loaded and clearly linguistically/
culturally inscribed terminology (as though male and female,
European, and white actually and definitively signify), we must
consider the important ways in which they continue to speak and,
more crucially, exert power. In other words, regardless of the sophisti-
cation of our understandings of these terms (and perhaps because they
are not generally perceived in such a manner) they are continually and
significantly pertinent to our world. In order to interpret the ways in
which they participate in violence, we must address them while remain-
ing vigilant against reinscription. In this context a consideration of the
general lack of attention in the continental philosophical realm allotted
to African American and US Latino Literature is significant; we must at
least entertain the possibility that unexamined mechanisms of power
are still imperceivably at work.3
Beyond a desire to address an absence of attention that may result
from a stubborn and veiled power structure, within our analysis we
have illustrated that overlapping narratives are capable of piercing
through totalizing ones, revealing the inevitable (and interrupted)
inscription that is being. Such recontextualizations are thus particu-
larly adept at cultivating a deconstructively ethical scene. While we
are aware that these narrative overlappings are always-already occur-
ring and we emerge as subjects within them, actively recontextu-
alizing our understandings/narratives is a manner in which we can
actually promote a context of interruption which necessarily forbids
a reductive and violent promulgation of a single, cohesive, and often
oppressive one. Resituating ourselves by deciding to juxtapose nar-
rative forms can shock us out of the habit of sitting comfortably and
complacently within a dominant and unrecognized master narrative.
Additionally, we can actively foster recontextualizations that bring to
the fore ontological gaps and therein we can exert certain degree of
agency.
Given our explorations of both Beloved and In Cuba I Was a German
Shepherd we may submit that US American texts (and any texts con-
textualized by immigration or displacement) are often primed for
144 The Ethics of Community

this subversion of a dominant narrative as they are frequently already

framed by a cognizance of ontological and narrative rupture.4 The
house is a particularly appropriate metaphor from which to situate
a discussion concerning the benefit of cultural recontextualizations.
Morrison and Menendez both address the importance of considering
the notion of a house in significant and distinct ways. Stamp Paids
breakdown of the implicit barriers of a house (at once consistent with
a notion of deconstructive ethics in its evocation of an always-already
welcome door and simultaneously engaging in a reinscription of the
walls it inevitably invokes) resituates our thinking of housing by
underscoring an ethical metaphor of hospitality oddly couched within
a narrative of exchange. Furthermore, Lisettes profound experience of
ontological rupture and ultimate liberation from a confined notion of
house and home as unimpeachable origin, permits a re-encounter with
dominant cultural significations of placement (particularly within a
context of immigration and exile). Attempting to locate her absolute
origin and identity (itself contextualized by an essentializing and
metaphysical notion of Cuban-ness), she instead encountered pro-
found ontological and narrative disruption in an experience of being
as narrative. Such reconceptualizations continually provide us with
possibilities of reinscription that can ultimately prompt meaning-
lessly meaningful interruptions as we have come to understand them.
Although we cannot make a work or project out of community or fini-
tude (since such activation is tantamount to identification and totaliza-
tion, which negates the event of community), we can encourage those
scenes in which being is interrupted and community can possibly
flourish. Here, the agency of a being who cares to create a context for a
deconstructive subjectivity becomes possible.
Since discourse is necessarily difference or differance, both the
material and ontological realms are fundamentally constituted by dif-
ference, that is, fundamentally cannot exist as fundamentals. One way
we can think about ontology, history, and discourse is to think that
there is an extra-discursive imperative that is always-already at play in
all of these realms. Far from claiming purity, unity, or authenticity, this
extra-discursive imperative is the spacing of finitude that forbids any
and all notions of identity. If we can hear, feel, or understand the ethi-
cal imperative, then we can experience our place in and responsibility
for the world differently. According to Nancy and Derrida, as well as
Morrison and Menendez, the imperative erupts, cuts through, insists
on showing itself. If it is so perceived then things change, we are dif-
ferent. As such, our engagements with ourselves, others, and the world
cannot help but change as well.
Notes

Introduction
1. I have elected to use the word community rather than singular-plu-
rality in spite of the fact that the latter is Nancys preferred term in his
second and third monographs on being-with, Being Singular Plural and
The Creation of the World or Globalization. Although singular-plurality is
more precise in its departure from any connotation of communion,
community has the decided advantage of accessibility. Furthermore,
as the first of his three texts on the constitutive and radical sociality of
being, The Inoperative Community lays the theoretical groundwork for the
following texts. The two terms are, however, interchangeable.
2. See pages 2834 in Stuart Halls Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical
Legacies. Additionally, Laclau and Mouffes proposition that the real
world is simultaneously real and discursively constituted has been
central to the evolution of cultural studies discourse.
3. See Douglas Kellners Media Spectacle and the 2008 Presidential
Election and Michael D. Gardinia and Joshua I. Newmans NASCAR
and the Southernization of America.
4. Christopher Petersons Kindred Specters and Sam Durrants Postcolonial
Narrative and the Work of Mourning provocatively treat Beloved alongside a
Derridean (and Freudian in the case of the latter) perspective of mourn-
ing. However, neither text examines Derridean bearing witness or
Nancian community. Hillis Millers Boundaries in Beloved is informed
by Derridean thought. In a broader sense, Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez
Boricua Literature is infused with post-structural sensibilities at large.
5. Critchley, Caputo, Wood, and Lawlor indicate distinct manners of think-
ing ethics and deconstruction. Critchleys work is straightforwardly
ethico-politically driven; Caputos explorations are theologically con-
textualized; Wood and Lawlor explore intersections between phenom-
enology, contemporary French philosophy, and considerations of ethics.
See Critchleys The Ethics of Deconstruction and Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity;
Caputos Against Ethics and edited volume Questioning God; Woods Ethics
and Politics after Deconstruction; and Lawlors An essay on Animality and
Human Nature in Derrida to name a few.
146 Notes

6. Simon Critchley plainly indicates his alignment with a cultural studies

project in an interview with Paul Bowman published in Interrogating
Cultural Studies. See also J. Hillis Millers Crossroads of Philosophy
and Cultural Studies. Hillis Miller contends that cultural studies
has often, more or less deliberately, forgotten all about Western phi-
losophy and can always say Plato or Aristotle; Descartes, Kant,
or Hegel; Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Heidegger; Austin or Merleau-
Ponty are not relevant to what I am trying to do. In any case, I am too
busy mastering fi lm noir, or popular music, or fashion magazines, or
whatever, to have time for philosophy (34). In spite of his explicit
desire to see a more energized relationship between cultural studies
and philosophy, Hillis Millers derisive attitude concerning the cul-
tural studies orientation toward pop culture is appears undeniable.
Both Critchley and Hillis Miller indicate a need for cultural studies
to engage philosophy with more verve and commitment, yet fail to
note the often explicit intersections that do exist. In fairness, both
Critchley and Hillis Miller reveal with equal emphasis the degree to
which philosophy could benefit from an engagement with cultural
studies.
7. Strictly speaking, the areas themselves resist the kind of circumscrip-
tion that the above sketch invokes.
8. From Anzalduas vociferous call to arms in her seminal text Borderlands
to Santangelo-Camineros desire to break a few windows of the (rac-
ist) masters house in Puerto Rican Negro, to Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez cri-
tique of the lack of an ethical imperative within Esmeralda Santiagos
When I Was Puerto Rican in her own Boricua Literature, the persistence of
this articulation is undeniable.
9. For an incisive analysis of the possibilities for transgression of the
Symbolic Order (and the signifying order that necessarily accompa-
nies it) in the context of Queer Theory see Lee Edelmans No Future.
Edelmans text persuasively proposes a liberating potential of non-tele-
ological and queer modes of existence.
10. See page 284 of Stuart Halls Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical
Legacies.
11. See page 278 of Stuart Halls New Ethnicities.
12. See page 4 of Paul Bowmans very insightful The Task of the
Transgressor wherein he provides a cogent presentation of the con-
temporary cultural studies terrain. In this passage he quotes from
Derridas Dissemination (1981).
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid., 15. Bowman cites Gary Halls formulation of the relationship
between cultural studies and culture/power relations in a cultural
studies that is effective: by definition . . . a politically committed ques-
tioning of culture/power relations which at the same time theoretically
interrogates its own relations to politics and to power (Hall 2002, 10).
 Notes 147

15. See Stefan Herbrechters Et Cetera Cultural Studies and

Deconstruction.
16. Hillis Miller also notes that philosophy could have much to gain in
reading cultural studies scholarship given its propensity to couch its
enunciations as universals valid anywhere in the world at any time.
They tend to forget history and cultural differences even when they are
making pronouncements about history and culture (4).
17. When Bowman responds that cultural studies tries to be more than
critique or meditation for cultural studies its all about intervention,
he plainly presupposes that critique cannot be an intervention (and
further confirms that intervention is the defining component of a cul-
tural studies enterprise). The dissatisfaction that Bowmans utterance
indicates (either his own or that of a cultural studies community) is
with the very definition of intervention (critique) that Critchley sug-
gests and he responds accordingly: It sounds to me like your model
of cultural studies would be a subset of philosophy youve spoken of
philosophy as a meditation on culture, philosophy as critique. . . . But
I think that perhaps the difference between cultural studies and the
kind of philosophy that you engage in is that cultural studies tries to
be more than critique or mediation for cultural studies its all about
intervention (61).
18. Laclau and Mouffes Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a central cultural
studies text that is both profoundly influenced by deconstruction and
functions according to a foregrounding of analytical power.
19. The word transformative has troubling connotations that we must
clarify before proceeding. Literally changing shape suggests a static
form (or subject) that is then altered to become a new or distinct (and
cohesive) shape or form. I would like the word to connote something
altogether different, namely an active process (transforming) happen-
ing to an active being (who is in some measure always-already thus
engaged). The shift in registers occurs when an active being experi-
ences themselves as such. Having some awareness of an experience of
being-as-transforming is itself a transformative experience.
20. The experience is not a totalizing one of a fully present subject. We
discuss this issue in some length in Chapter 3.
21. For a noteworthy exception to this lack of engagement concerning
Nancys thought on community and literary/cultural studies, see
Berthold Schoenes compelling The Cosmopolitan Novel. Schoene per-
suasively argues the necessity of conceiving of the novel as a kind of
world-forming or cosmopolitan enterprise as opposed to confined
within national borders. According to Schoene, Nancys foregrounding
of the between rather than the opposition of self and other can be
traced in the cosmopolitan novel, which reveal(s) the anachronism of
these kinds of hegemonic distinctions between self and other (27).
22. Among others see Derridas Monolingualism of the Other (1998),
Language Is Never Owned (Sovereignties), and The Other Heading
148 Notes

(1992). The understanding that languages are untranslatable is a

central aspect of his work and can be found throughout his oeuvre.
See Nancys introduction to Who Comes After the Subject, Being Singular
Plural (particularly Eulogy for the Melee) and The Creation of the
World or Globalization . . . .
23. See bell hookss Postmodern Blackness and Sanchez-Gonzalez
Boricua Literature respectively.
24. The degree to which Beloved is contextualized by an African cosmology
is underscored in African diaspora theory.
25. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd was selected as a New York Times
Notable Book of the Year in 2001, has been translated into eight lan-
guages, and the title story won the Pushcart Prize.
26. As of the time of this writing there are only four scholarly articles
addressing the text. They are: Jennifer Ballantine Pereras Only in
Miami is Cuba So Far Away, Lene Johannessens The Lonely Figure:
Memory of Exile in Ana Menendezs In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd,
Maya Socolovskys Cuba Interrupted: The Loss of Center and Story in
Ana Menendezs Collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, and Dalia
Kandiyotis Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina Garcia and Ana
Menendez.
27. See Machado Saez and Dalleos The Latino Canon and the Emergence of
Post-Sixties Literature, pages 1603.
28. The works of Cristina Garcia, Achy Abejas, and Ana Menendez most
obviously fall into this category.
29. Although a broadly post-structural sensibility is frequently pres-
ent in US Latino/a literary criticism, there are certainly moments in
which more traditional or metaphysical paradigms are at work. For
example, while Maya Socolovskys Cuba Interrupted ostensibly
challenges foundational understandings (such as that of an orient-
ing center), it ultimately does precisely the opposite. Implicitly and
explicitly, Socolovskys entire argument assumes and asserts the pos-
sibility of recovering or engaging in a narrative that could create
stories and transform the present moment into one firmly based on a
history of identity and palpable origins (238). Ostensibly, the stories
in Menendez collection illustrate the failure of language, narrative,
storytelling, or art to accomplish what it ought to. The story, however,
demonstrates the effects of language gone wrong. Rather than pro-
ducing escape or entertainment, the act of narrating jokes produces
something more fearful: in the short term, tears, as laughter is made
to mingle with sorrow, and in the long term, a loss of memory and
origin (239). Socolovskys intervention necessarily assumes the fol-
lowing: art is teleological; language and storytelling are rigidly dis-
tinguishable from being; sorrow is undesireable; memory and origin
can be attained or possessed. Narrative fails to fulfill a desire for ori-
gin not because such an origin is itself a narrative (as I argue the text
illustrates) but rather because the narratives or stories do not function
 Notes 149

effectively; they have gone wrong. The complexity of desire and its
relationship to language and being is entirely unexamined and indeed
not even considered. Socolovsky asserts that language fails to sustain
Cuba as an ideal and instead disintegrates it not to show the impos-
sibility of the ideal but to indicate that the disintegration is a product
of ineffective language, storytelling, or art.
30. MLA International Bibliography, 2011.
31. For scholarship interested in ethical relations in a deconstructive con-
text see Travis, Beyond Empathy; Christopher Petersons 2007 mono-
graph Kindred Specters; and Sam Durrants Postcolonial Narrative and the
Work of Mourning.

Chapter 1: Nancy and Derrida: On Ethics and

the Same (Infinitely Different) Constitutive
Events of Being
1. Or, as Nancy indicates in The Free Voice of Man: . . . the possibility is
open from the moment that one can also show and this is what, since
Heidegger, shows itself, which is to say, deconstructs itself that, in
reality, philosophy cannot philosophically prove its own necessity any
longer (37).
2. Although we are incapable of completely understanding that which
surpasses discursive thought, Derrida directly thematizes the power
and force of this limit to intelligibility (87). By the close of this chap-
ter, we will be able to more precisely connect the imperative or ethical
as Nancy and Derrida imagine it, to the impossibility of transparency
in meaning that Derrida references (or difference).
3. An interesting sidenote here is that both the traditional foundational
imperative and the nonphilosophical imperative are philosophically
unjustifiable for the same reason but in different ways. Both impera-
tives are unjustifiable because one cannot get behind the back of
either type as there is no original founding ground upon which an
imperative can be justified and rather only a circle of imperative and
discourse in which being is inevitably and always-already implicated
(as we see later). Ultimately, this circle implies a certain slippage and
gap between and within being and between and within meaning that
makes a provable justification impossible. The second half of this chap-
ter attempts to elucidate this process as in many ways this is what is
at stake in The Free Voice of Man. Thus, the lack of a fi nal signified
or grounding absolute logic from which an imperative comes, is the
reason both of these imperatives are unjustifiable. The first traditional
kind wants to believe that such a foundation exists; the second kind of
imperative is unjustifiable not because it believes in a foundation but
rather because it is radically other than a foundational logic or system.
It entirely denies the possibility of such a ground and is inaccessible to
the logic of proof.
150 Notes

4. As is evident in Nancys oeuvre in general, it can be said that fini-

tude is that which will always and has always cut through the logic
of the absolute or what he calls immanentism in The Inoperative
Community.
5. Sharing is another term very close to spacing in this context. In
The Inoperative Community Nancy explains in great depth the manner
in which being is shared by, in, and as being. This sharing indicates the
significance of the between or among beings that occurs in and as
spacing.
6. Nancy addresses this absence of thematization on pages 34 and 42 of The
Ends of Man in Retreating the Political. Here Nancy imagines a possible
Derridean response to the question once posed to Heidegger: When will
you write an ethics? The hypothetical Derridean response Nancy offers
is as follows: Write an ethics? But what does it mean to write the law? Is it a
matter of copying out its pure and transcendent utterance, or is it rather in
writing that the law might be said to trace itself? Could writing legislate?
If so, how? This is precisely what we do not know. And this knowledge, as
such, is also absent from Derridas texts. And yet, despite everything, we
should have some idea about it (34). Furthermore, on reading Derridas
discussion of theory in Violence and Metaphysics, Nancy notes that
despite Derridas assertion that I have regard for recognizing that which
cannot be regarded as a thing, as a faade, as a theorem. I have regard for
the face itself (Violence and Metaphysics, 122), he nonetheless will
not have seen this regard, or in any case, will not have made it visible or
discoursed upon it (Retreating the Political, 42). In many ways, at stake in
The Ends of Man is an exposition of the relationship between ethics,
writing, and finitude that Derrida intimated (perhaps even referenced)
but did not significantly thematize (indeed Nancy claims that Derrida
lost sight of it) (42). Certainly many of Derridas later texts, such as
The Gift of Death, On Hospitality, Sovereignties in Question, and Counterfeit
Money, do indeed thematize the issue of ethics and its relationship to fini-
tude and writing.
7. In The Inoperative Community, this event of the imperative is discussed
intricately in terms of being and community and the constitutive rup-
ture of immanence that is being-with.
8. In other texts such as The Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural,
Nancy will focus significant attention upon the between beings aspect
of this event. In these contexts, we would need to include the between
beings aspect of the spacing enacted by finitude. Here, the radical soci-
ality of being (or the radical dependence of being upon the other) is
directly noted and indicated by formulations such as You shares me
(Nancy 1991, 29).
9. In The Inoperative Community, imperative ethicity is called commu-
nity and while the two terms indicate the same event, they thematize
different elements of it. The Inoperative Community underscores commu-
nity as the being ecstatic of being, which is itself most saliently being
 Notes 151

as shared (and all of the complex implications concerning fi nitude,

spacing, and the other) while imperative ethicity is far more concerned
with the integral nature of writing or difference to this process.
10. The distinction between the two lies in the degree to which they
are each thematizing the impossibility of straight representation.
There is some sense in which poetic language knows itself as non-
representational, as participating in the noncoincidence of mean-
ing inherent to language. For a concise discussion of this issue, see
Terry Eagletons Literary Theory: An Introduction. Particularly useful
is his explication of Barthess understanding of signs as healthy or
unhealthy.
11. We should not conclude, however, that such self-effacement is the essence
of being given that the property of the trace in general . . . is a property
which is not one, it does not constitute an essence (Nancy, 50).
12. In some way these are the questions of both James Gilbert-Walsh
and Simon Critchley in Broken Imperatives: The Ethical Dimension
of Nancys Thought and The Ethics of Deconstruction, respectively.
While certainly quite distinct in various ways, both Gilbert-Walsh and
Critchley are similarly interested in a move to the concrete or histori-
cal world.
13. This entire problematic concerning thinking and doing calls to mind
Heideggers conceptualization of thinking as acting.
14. I draw the term glory from Derridas reading of Celans Aschenglorie
in Poetics and Politics of Witnessing. In a provocative and poetic
reading that oddly resonates with Nancys closing words in What Is to
Be Done? Derrida notes that This glory of ashes, this glory of ash, this
glory which is that of ashes but is also of ash, in ashes and glory, at the
very least, the light or shining brightness of fire here sheds light on a
poem that I shall not even attempt to interpret with you. Light is also
knowing, truth, meaning. Now this light is no more than ashes here, it
becomes ash, it falls into ashes, as a fire goes out. But (and the mobile
and unstable articulation of this but will be important for us) ashes
are also of glory, they can still be renowned and renamed, sung, blessed,
loved, if the glory of the renowned and renamed is not reducible either to fire or
to the light of knowing. The brightness of glory is not only the light of knowing,
and not necessarily the clarity of knowledge (italics mine, Derrida, 69). If
we understand the light of knowing and the clarity of knowledge
as certainties and glory as akin to a certain strength then the fol-
lowing line that closes What Is to Be Done (which is also the close of
the text Retreating the Political) is a powerful rejoinder to Derridas idea
of glory: it is ineluctable to invent a world, instead of being subjected
to one, or dreaming of another. Invention is always without model and
without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxi-
ety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gathers the
strength that no certainty can match (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
1997, 158).
152 Notes

Chapter 2: Nancys Community

1. Nancy extends his consideration of a radically prior being-with in both
Being Singular Plural and The Creation of the World or Globalization.
2. One way of approaching Nancys three studies of community or sin-
gular-plurality is to consider The inoperative Community as supplying a
foundation for the two latter works that extend out and into the mate-
rial world. Indeed Being Singular Plural considers identity and culture
(in identity politics and the ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo) while The
Creation of the World directly emphasizes concrete equality and actual
justice (53). For a thorough and precise discussion of the tension
between the theoretical and material in Nancys oeuvre on community,
see Ian Jamess The Fragmentary Demand, 1523.
3. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy clearly articulates the urgency and stakes
of his project: This book does not disguise its ambition of redoing the
whole of first philosophy by giving the Singular Plural of Being as its
foundation . . . this is not my ambition but the ambition of the thing
itself, of our history. . . at the very least I hope to make this necessity
felt (xv).
4. This is a reference to Heideggers notion of Mitsein as presented in Being
and Time. One could argue that The Inoperative Community is itself an
attempt to further this concept. The notion of being-with or Mitsein,
is a kind of starting point for Nancys analysis of being.
5. To what we is Nancy referring? I briefly discuss the problematic of
the we formulation later in the chapter. In the chapters that follow,
this line of inquiry is significantly examined.
6. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy precisely asserts that we ourselves are
the meaning.
7. In fact, on page 1 Nancy directly cites the modern world as endur-
ing the gravest and most painful testimony . . . of the conflagration
of community. In other words, rather than being subject to any kind
of cultural specificity, the issues of which he speaks regarding com-
munity are pertinent to the world as a whole. According to Nancy,
community has thus not yet been thought of by the world.
8. See Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy. A particularly compel-
ling discussion on the disastrous consequences of a will to immanence
occurs in the essay Eulogy for the Melee, which is a commentary on
the events in Sarajevo.
9. This example is not without its difficulties. Surely these spiritual deaths
are more distinct from than similar to the actual deaths that occurred
in the concentration camps.
10. This is a reference to Heideggers conception of Dasein and death.
11. The reference to being as ecstatically thrown, once again, is a Heideggerian
notion. Nancy proceeds from fundamentally Heideggerian conceptions,
such as Mitsein, Dasein, and ecstasis. His project, then, is to attempt to
consider them further.
 Notes 153

12. Throughout the essay, Nancy repeatedly returns to a dialogue with

Batailles conceptualizations of being, community, and ecstasy, most
notably discussed in Inner Experience.
13. By way of Bataille, Nancy discusses the manner in which ecstasy occurs
in the realm of an intense rupture of being at the point or place where
immanence would have been. As silence, ecstasy answers the impos-
sibility of immanence. Or again, ecstasy answers to the rupturing of
being itself, denying the possibility of immanence and rendering being
necessarily relational. Throughout the essay, being and community are
characterized by a rupturing or cutting through with community cut-
ting through the immanence that would have been. In this sense, com-
munity can be understood as ecstasis.

Chapter 3: Morrisons Beloved, Nancian Community, and

Derridean Witnessing
1. A more comprehensive analysis not permitted here would necessar-
ily engage the various Derridean and Nancian texts that examine the
signification of culture. Derridas The Other Heading and Nancys
Eulogy for the Melee are two such texts.
2. See Gilroy 1993, 73. In addition to the ineffable, Gilroy is concerned
with the relationship between the sacred and the profane, possibilities
for survival and agency, and an embodied racialized subject.
3. See Wood The Experience of the Ethical 112.
4. See Beloved pages 157 and 232.
5. With the exception of Amy Denver, the white characters within the text
evince a commodifying understanding of the black characters. Even the
abolitionists (including Mr. Bodwin who gives a house to Baby Suggs)
consider Sethes tragedy as an object to exchange for the furtherance of
their cause. Mr. Garner, who appears preferable to Schoolteacher as over-
seer of Sweet Home, obviously directly benefits from the slave system and
additionally utilizes his perspective that his slaves are men in order to
bolster his own sense of manhood. Last, we examine the precise manner
in which Schoolteacher articulates his commodifying approach later in
the chapter. For an involved discussion of exchange relationships within
the text see Rafael Perez-Torress Knitting and Knotting the Narrative
Thread in Peterson, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches.
6. On pages 2434 the profundity of Denvers isolation and fear is fully
rendered: In the brightest of the carnival dresses and wearing a
strangers shoes, she stood on the porch of 124 ready to be swallowed
up in the world beyond the edge of the porch . . . Out there where there
were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went
near them it would happen again . . .
7. By all appearances members of the black community in Beloved gen-
erally behave according to an implicit obligation to the other. The text
is replete with generous gestures that appear outside of economies of
exchange and rather are more akin to gifts (expecting nothing in return
154 Notes

and characterized by extension and care). See pages 913, 232, 2489,
and 2569 particularly. However, the prevalence of generosity does not
negate the staggering failure of the townspeople to warn Sethe that the
four horsemen were entering town. Stamp Paid reveals his belief that
it was something like meanness-that let them stand aside or not pay
attention, or tell themselves somebody else was probably bearing the
news (157).
8. For an insightful discussion of name changing in the African diaspora
see Gilroys The Black Atlantic, 203.
9. Stamp Paids close relationship with Baby Suggs (she was the moun-
tain to his sky, 170) and his encouragement of her nonprescriptive ser-
mons (she did not tell them to sin no more, 88) is indicative of this
rejection. Further, the maintenance of his Biblical engagement, despite
his eschewing of the name Joshua, is clear in the text as he aspires to be
a highminded soldier of Christ (170).
10. In addition to the presentation of the power of song, the community with-
holds it should they deem someone unworthy of its supportive effects.
Following Sethes murder of her baby and her subsequent arrest, the
crowd of onlookers deem her too proud and thus undeserving of the
comfort that song can provide. Provocatively, it is not her murder of her
baby that is beyond forgiveness and a corresponding extension of sup-
port but rather a response of invincibility and radical independence. In
this instance Sethes head is literally held too high to deserve comfort:
Outside a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. Holding
the living child, Sethe walked past them in their silence and hers. She
climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky.
A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high?
Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would
have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the
house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have been quickly
wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it
was, they waited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And
then no words. Humming. No words at all (152).
11. The theme of telling is likewise textually manifest strengthening a
reading that considers ethics and deconstruction. Throughout the text
there are repeated calls to tell a story. When Nan passes on to Sethe
the story of her name she emphasizes the telling through repetition:
Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe (62). Amy Denver is
similarly concerned insofar as the worries that Sethes daughter will
not know that it was she who brought her into the world: You gonna
tell her? Who brought her into these here world? . . . You better tell her,
you hear? (85). Further, the various first person accounts of Beloveds
arrival directly thematize the interpretive rather than reflective com-
ponent of the telling (20017). Last, as Christopher Peterson astutely
notes, Sethe cannot directly access the recalled experience of murder-
ing her baby daughter and only once attempts to do so with Paul D.
 Notes 155

She circles around it with an acute understanding that she can neither
arrive at nor articulate her precise motivations. An interruption of
cohesive narrative is fully evident, see Peterson 1997, 80.
12. The fact that Beloveds proper name is never revealed underscores the
impossibility of fully reaching being/Beloved and telling her story rep-
resentationally or in absolute fashion. Such is the impossibility of bear-
ing witness and in some sense what is ultimately at stake in the text.
13. See pages 11617. Additionally, Beloveds very being as a ghost is a
literalization of an absent presence.
14. The closing pages of Ellisons Invisible Man poignantly speaks the inevi-
tability of textuality and an imperative to tell as the following quote
indicates: So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? . . . Why
should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated
and set aside yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems
to be no escape. Here Ive set out to throw my anger into the worlds face,
but now that Ive tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing
a role returns, and Im drawn upward again. So that even before I finish
Ive failed . . . (579).
15. See Woods The Step Back, 12.

Chapter 4: Ethics as the Eruption of Finitude

1. For an in-depth exploration of the productive discomfort of occupying
multiple cultural and linguistic spaces (and the corresponding inter-
ruptions) see Doris Sommerss Bilingual Aesthetics.
2. See the works of Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Achy Abejas, Ana
Castillo, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Cristina Garcia, particularly.
3. Recall that Nancy understands the will to immanence as a will to
death, which has been historically manifest in structures such as the
Nazi concentration camp.
4. Known as populated by Miami Cubans, Calle Ocho has a long history
of anti-Castro activism. Recently it has become even more nationally
recognizable to hip hop and pop music audiences as the well-known
Miami rapper Pit Bull references it frequently in his top selling, often
overtly misogynistic, musical oeuvre.
5. For an eloquent and compelling exploration of cultural hybridity versus
rhetorics of purity or authenticity, see Nancys Eulogy for the Melee
in Being Singular Plural, 149.
6. However, simultaneously, the Park is a space of resistance in numer-
ous ways. Not only is it the domain of jokes, humor, and the obviously
ludic, but it is also the place where Maximo erupts against the objectify-
ing and murderous pulsion of nostalgia and all the logic it carries.
7. The fact that all the men are assumed to be Cuban is a reduction itself.
Indeed the reader knows that at least two of Maximos friends at the
Park, Antonio and Carlos, are Dominican.
156 Notes

8. For a fascinating look at the history of the often commodifying relation-

ship between the United States and Cuba see Gustavo Perez-Firmats
The Havana Habit.
9. See the introduction to Nancys Being Singular Plural for a full discus-
sion of meaning-saturation and its corresponding meaninglessness
as it relates to cultural identities and the proliferation of destruction,
hatred, and the denial of existence, xiii.
10. On pages 910 we learn that the year following Rosas death, Maximo
had begun to see her throughout his house at twenty-five and thirty.
These apparent hallucinations are juxtaposed with sounds and memo-
ries that bring him back to his other life in Cuba prompting an inter-
rogation of the nature of time and existence. This reading is reinforced
by Maximos consideration of time as a string you could gather up in
your hand all at once, 15.
11. For example, on page 208 she reveals her proclivity for clarity in terms
of weather and cleanliness: It was one of those clear December nights
that Lisette still loved about Miami, everything clean. On page 212 it
emerges as an equation between morning and generous interpretation
and the end of the day and a lack of understanding that eventually
lead to despair: In the mornings when everything was fresh and new,
she had thought that they had something here that her parents gen-
eration had lost in exile. The feeling evaporated by the end of the day,
replaced by a watery feeling that she would never understand herself,
much less this country that seemed intent on killing itself slowly. And
before she fell asleep each night despair took her again, 212.
12. In case there is any concern that the house Lisette is confronting is some-
how not the same house of which her mother spoke, Matun presents
her with a photo of her mother sitting in that very kitchen. Matun
returned with a small wooden picture frame. He handed it to Lisette.
A little girl in pigtails sitting in that very kitchen, all the furniture the
same, a bucket of guava in front of her. Tu mama, Matun said, Youre
grandparents loved this house. In Cuba I Was a German Shephard, 221.
13. In a more general sense, Johannessen makes a similar claim regarding
laughter and transcendence in her reading of the title story In Cuba I Was
a German Shepherd (2005). The jokes Maximo tells evade the mono-
logic world where last words and ultimate truths reign, 65. Instead, the
inherent purpose of laughter and irony is to transcend, 65.
14. See Laclau and Mouffes Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics, 11112.
15. While Matuns use of the word left (regarding Lisettes grandpar-
ents flight from Cuba) may be a euphemism for evicted or forcibly
removed by military threats, there is at least a question concerning the
conditions of Mabellas familys flight from Cuba given the revelation of
her lies regarding the house.
16. This is not to dismiss the poverty prevalent in Cuba but rather to high-
light the contradictions between Mabellas narratives and Lisettes
 Notes 157

particular experiences of Cuba. For a vivid description of the extreme

poverty in parts of Havana, see Achy Abejass Ruins.
17. In Broken Imperative, James Gilbert-Walsh similarly suggests that
the finitude of the imperative voice perhaps makes all the difference
in the world, 18.
18. Many stories in the collection address precisely this issue. In Hurricane
Stories the telling of stories (and coexistent desire to tell them) is
foregrounded as the only way to come close to an other. However
this recognition is melancholic at best as the desire for complete unity
between beings remains although within an understanding that it can
never be satiated: I want to wake up with sand in my hair, all my mem-
ories spilling over him like a tide that returns again and again, 48. In
The Perfect Fruit the protagonist Matilde responds hopelessly to a
realization of the impossibility of ever really knowing her husband
and finally proclaims that we live alone in our own core, 73.
19. The distinction between the written narrative of this story and speech
(the retelling) can be provocatively engaged here alongside Derridas
meditation on the spoken and written word in That Dangerous
Supplement in Of Grammatology. It is particularly pertinent to Lisette
as presence is an element of being and experience that she so pro-
foundly desires.
20. See Barthess (1967) classic essay The Death of the Author where he
describes the text as a multidimensional space in which are married
and contested several writings, none of which is original; the text is a
fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture, 53.
Approaching the I in these terms narrows in on the articulations and
stakes of I within Her Mothers House in the scenes of translation
particularly.
21. A playful interpretation might consider the M written by Lisettes
mother as indicative of a Me contextualized by the United States and
unreadable in Cuba. In contrast the M becomes instructively com-
prehensible in Cuba only when it is turned upside down, transformed
into a W and thus indicating an opposing perspective of We. The
individual or Me framework is disrupted and can only function as a
We.
22. Certainly in one respect we can appreciate that this is a story of the
Cuban experience in the United States, which would mean that for
practical purposes the exchanges in Cuba could not be rendered solely
in Spanish. A significant number of US American readers would be
unable to comprehend an untranslated text.
23. With its many national and cultural crossings given its distinctive his-
tory of colonization, Cuba is a wonderful example of the impossibility
of a fixed understanding of nationality or culture. For a detailed and
nuanced examination of culture and identity as inevitably in flux see
Gilroys The Black Atlantic.
24. Being Singular Plural, xiii.
158 Notes

Conclusion
1. See Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue-Between Two Infi nities, the Poem
in Sovereignties in Question.
2. Simon Critchley provides an instructive discussion of Gilroys The Black
Atlantic in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. Although not within the realm
of deconstructive ethics per se, Barbara Johnson approaches Hurstons
Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrisons Sula from a poststructural
perspective.
3. We also must acknowledge the fact that we simply cannot read every-
thing and scholars must certainly be permitted their proclivities for
particular texts and authors. However, such proclivities not withstand-
ing, the lack of attention to ethnic American texts appear sufficiently
significant to merit attention. Also worth noting are the numerous lead-
ing scholars in postcolonial studies that are rectifying these oversights
within that sphere. Obviously deconstructive analysis plays a central
role in postcolonial thought; however, close examinations of deconstruc-
tion and ethics are distinct from postcolonial theory and it is in the realm
of the former that we see the pronounced absence of non-European
texts. Last, US American critics do engage French feminist theory rela-
tively frequently and thus an invocation of Derridean deconstruction is
implicit; however, again, feminist theory is distinct from (albeit related
to) a consideration of ethics alongside deconstruction.
4. Doris Sommers cogent analysis within Bilingual Aesthetics provides an
excellent discussion of the aesthetics of bilingualism and the various
interruptions it offers.
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Wood, David. 2005. The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Index
Abejas, Achy 148
absolute 479, 545
absolute alterity 66
absolute for-itself 44, 50
absolute in-itself 44
absolute transcendence 39
absolutely alone 48
actions, in the material world 42
African American literature 1, 3, 4,
5, 11, 68, 83, 143
Against Ethics 145
Agamben,Giorgio 4
agency 40, 70, 723, 144
aloneness 48
alterity 39
and ethics 24
Anzaldua, Gloria 146
archi-ethics 92
archi-obligation 92
Aryan 51
Bakhtinian dialogics 5
Barthes, Ronald 18, 151, 157
Bataille, Georges 54, 58, 59, 153
Baudelaire, Charles 143
bearing witness 1, 2, 6, 910, 13, 15,
1920, 22, 26, 368, 42, 77, 912,
94, 96, 100, 102, 10813, 117,
11922, 124, 126, 1303, 1367,
1402, 145, 155
Beckett, Samuel 143
beginning and origin 89
being 12, 26, 34, 36, 40, 71, 94
see also specific entries
as an identity 81
as connected 44
as finite 54
as moving toward 39, 44
as outside of itself 61
Being and Time 152
being ecstatic 87, 89
being for-itself 77
being-in-common 12, 61
being outside of being 53, 56,
60, 62
Being Singular Plural 145, 152, 155,
156
being unto-itself 44, 77, 79
being-with 8, 26, 44, 45, 46, 53, 58,
69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 82, 89
bell hooks 11
Beloved 1, 8, 1314, 235, 6998,
1413, 145, 148, 153, 154, 155
between beings aspect 150
Bilingual Aesthetics 16, 155, 158
bilingualism 16, 17
The Black Atlantic 71, 154, 157, 158
black community 73
see also African American
literature
Blanchot, Maurice 4
Borderlands 146
Boricua Literature 145, 146
Bowman, Paul 6, 7, 10, 1467
Calle Ocho 155
Caputo, John 3, 145
carrying 26, 36, 38, 39, 42, 70, 88,
142
Cernuda, Luis 19, 20
co-appearing 56, 58, 60, 62, 64
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 143
164 Index

commodification 74, 76, 83, 84, Eagleton, Terry 151

85, 105
communication 57, 58, 63
and finitude 58
communism 45
community 9, 10, 43, 58, 60, 70, 71,
82, 89, 96, 1002, 150 see also in-
dividual entries
as slight/abundant 647
compearance 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63,
64, 65, 100, 122
compearing of finitude 64
concentration camp 14, 65, 68
concepts 81
constitutive carrying 39
see also carrying
continental philosophy 1, 37, 24
The Cosmopolitan Novel 147
The Creation of the World or
Globalization 145
Critchley, Simon 3, 8, 1457, 151, 158
critique 8, 147
Cuban American literature 15
cultural studies 7
as deconstruction 7
culture(s) 71, 73
Dalleo, Rafael 15
death 4954, 98, 155
The Death of the Author 157
deconstruction 2, 3, 56, 81
and ethics 3
as justice 6
and politics 6
deconstructive ethics 70, 71
deconstructive subjectivity 72,
73, 144
Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 912, 14,
2031, 3641, 6977, 81, 87, 93,
98, 102, 112, 117, 131, 142, 144,
146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157
differance 7, 9, 17, 22, 33, 35, 37,
812, 119, 124, 144
dreaming 52, 151
Durrant, Sam 145, 149
duty 315, 3940, 109
ecstasis 12, 5360, 90, 100, 101,
103, 153
ecstasy 549, 64, 152, 153
Edelman, Lee 146
ego 36, 39
Ellison, Ralph 155
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 143
Enlightenment 71, 72, 74, 77, 94,
122, 126, 135
An essay on Animality and Human
Nature in Derrida 145
essence 37, 456, 48, 501, 612,
656, 73, 77, 151
ethical component of
community 1, 2
ethico-political 2, 5
Ethics and Politics after
Deconstruction 72, 73, 145
The Ethics of Deconstruction and
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity 145
Eulogy for the Melee 148, 153,
155
exiles 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 94
and being 21
writing of/about 21
experience 73, 81
exposing-sharing 61, 62
exposition 63
and compearance 62
of finitude 60, 624
extra-discursive experience
82, 94
figuration 22
finitude 31, 50, 53, 57, 58, 62, 96,
100, 101, 142, 150
and duty 33
and ecstasy see ecstasy
as ethical 32
of the imperative voice 157
infinite birth of 57
and sharing 38
fixity 100, 101, 103, 108
Foucauldian analysis of power 5
foundational imperative 149

The Free Voice of Man
(Retreating the Political) 13, 26
fundamentally finite 32
Garcia, Cristina 148
Gardinia, Michael D. 145
Genet, Jean 14
Gilbert-Walsh, James 33, 151, 157
Gilroy, Paul 24, 713, 153, 154,
157, 158
glory 151
goodness 97, 98, 99
Hall, Gary 146
Hall, Stuart 6, 7, 145, 146
Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy 147, 156
Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 31, 152
Heideggerian Being 59
Heideggerian Dasein 152
Heideggerian Mitsein 69, 150, 152
Herbrechter, Stefan 7, 147
Her Mothers House 110, 141
Holderlin, Friedrich 143
humanism 45, 55, 69, 87
Hurston, Zora Neale 158
imagination 22
immanence 456, 46, 49, 505, 87,
99, 150
immigrants (immigration) 16, 94
see also exiles
imperative ethicity 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 19, 20, 24, 36, 38, 69, 81,
94, 96, 98, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116,
117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126,
131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 142,
150, 151
imperatives 13, 29, 37, 108
and finitude 31
kinds of 28
and writing 35
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd 1,
8, 1316, 25, 938, 124, 134,
1413, 148
individual 44, 49, 69, 71, 79
Index 165
Inner Experience 153
inoperative community 88
The Inoperative Community 6, 13, 43
Interrogating Cultural Studies 8, 146
interruption of being 12
interruptive intervention
6, 811, 147
Invisible Man 155
issue of intervention 7
Johannessen, Lene 212, 148
Johnson, Barbara 158
Kandiyoti, Dalia 148
Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics 31
Keats, John 143
Kellner, Douglas 145
Kindred Specters 145
Laclau, Ernesto 119, 145, 147, 156
Land or Language 18
Language Is Never Owned
(Sovereignties) 93, 147
language(s) 1718, 69, 77, 94
gap of 12
nonrepresentational
language 74
and place 18
poetic language 12, 26, 37, 38, 77,
92, 151
representational language 74, 77
Lawlor, Leonard 145
literal death 51
literal exile 21
literary criticism 15, 9, 1011,
15, 17
Literary Theory: An Introduction 151
Luis Cernuda and the Politics of
Exile 19
Mallarme, Stephane 143
mapping 22
meaningless-meaning 73, 88, 89, 90
memory 19, 21, 94, 108, 121, 125,
127, 128, 133
166 Index
Menendez, Ana 1, 8, 1213, 15,
1235, 1401, 144, 148
metaphysical truth 98
metaphysics 47
Miller, Hillis 3, 7, 11, 145, 146, 147
Mohanty, Satya 234
moral universals 23
Morrison, Toni 1, 8, 12, 13, 14, 23,
70, 144, 153, 158
mortal being 50, 53
Mouffe, Chantal 119, 145, 147, 156
multilingualism 18
Nancian community 6, 13, 60, 70,
87 see also community
unworkability of 10
Nancian sharing 39
see also sharing
Nancy, Jean-Luc 1, 34, 7, 914, 17,
2241, 4374, 76, 812, 8690,
978, 1003, 105, 112, 11517,
122, 126, 1412, 144, 145, 147,
148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153,
155, 156
narrative 148
Nazism 50, 51
negotiable identity 73
Newman, Joshua I. 145
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 4
No Future 146
nondiscursive imperative 31
nonidentity and deconstruction 5
nonphilosophical imperative 31, 149
nonrepresentational language 72, 74
nostalgia 19, 52, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,
100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109,
110, 155
obligation 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36, 40, 69, 70, 77, 84, 85, 87, 88,
89, 90, 92, 122, 126, 132, 153
Of Grammatology 157
originary ethicity 38, 42
otherness 16
other being 38, 39
The Other Heading 147, 153
other of being 40
Perera, Jennifer Ballantine 148
Perez-Firmat, Gustavo 18, 19,
139, 156
Perez-Torres, Rafael 153
Peterson, Christopher 145, 149
philosophical and concrete 41, 42
philosophical discourse 27, 28
elements 29
philosophical endeavor and
imperatives 27
philosophy and action 42
poem 38
poetic bearing witness 38
poetic language 12, 26, 37, 38, 77,
92, 151
Poetics and Politics
of Witnessing
(Sovereignties) 13, 30, 37, 69
Postcolonial Narrative and the Work
of Mourning 145
postmodernism 23
power of definition 90
power of song 73, 154
presence 98, 107
proof 29, 30
proper being 33
Puerto Rican Negro 146
pure Aryan being 51
purity 98, 99
Questioning God 145
Rams 26, 36, 38, 69, 142
real world 145
recontextualizations 143, 144
recuperation 52, 89, 92, 94, 113,
131, 133
relational being 55
representational language 74, 77
resistance of community 678, 108
Retreating the Political 40
Rilke, Rainer Maria 93, 137, 143
 Index 167

Rimbaud, Arthur 143 thinking

Rivero, Eliano 15 and acting 41
Romantic 71, 77 as acting 151
rupture 93 thinking community 46
time 94, 107
Saez, Elena Machado 15 to-ness 80, 81, 82
Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa 11, 145, 146 totalitarianism 45
Santangelo-Caminero, Marta 146 totalization of being 76
Santiago, Esmeralda 146 toward an other, being 53
Schoene, Berthold 147 trace 6, 17, 20, 24, 38, 47, 69, 71, 73,
secret as secret 37 802, 91, 112, 123, 139, 151
Seidel, Michael 22 Travis, Molly Abel 234, 149
senseless meaning of death
4950, 51 Ugarte, Michael 1920
sharing 58, 60, 150 unheimlich 9, 25, 30, 33, 122, 129,
and finitude 38 132
singular being 43, 53, 5663, 96 US American literature 34, 9, 91,
singular death 50, 52 143
singularity 5461 US Latino literature 1, 35, 11,
slavery 70, 74 1516, 68, 143
social bond 62, 63
Socolovsky, Maya 148, 149 Violence and Metaphysics 150
Sommer, Doris 1618, 155, 158 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 16
The Sonnets to Orpheus 93
sovereignty 5860 Western logocentric foundation 94
spacing 56, 59, 70, 150 What is to be done? 401
Sula 158 What now? 41
When I Was Puerto Rican 146
tears 106 will to essence 17, 45, 46, 51, 734,
teleological thinking 41 97, 99, 109 see also essence
telling 154 will to immanence 501,
testimony 36, 38 658, 97, 100, 110, 152, 155
as testimony 37 see also immanence
Their Eyes Were Watching God 158 Wood, David 3, 24, 723, 145
theory 11, 150 writing 29, 335, 101, 142
and practice 41 and finitude 33