Revisionism, Irony, and the Mask of Sentiment

Jean-Pierre Mileur

Revisionism is the inherent, creative element in interpretation; also its destructive, nihilistic element. As Hans Frei pointed out in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, the very cumulative action of a well-meaning Higher Criticism eroded the authority of the biblical story beyond repair. ¹ Even Milton runs afoul of the law of unintended revisionist consequences, for if "fit to stand though free to fall" is an effective theoditic defense against accusations that God is responsible for evil, at an even more fundamental level, it raises the question of what a humanity fit to stand needs with God at all. Thus radical protestantism radicalizes itself out of existence (or becomes romanticism).

And while we are on the subject of the death of God, what are we to conclude about the archinterpreter, reevaluator of all values, Nietzsche? Is, as Heidegger claimed Nietzsche thought, nihilism the cumulative and perpetual direction of Western valuation, ² or is it merely the projection of Nietzsche's own interpretive procedures, a consequential apparition resulting from the intense, relentless activity of an interpretation that doesn't get out much?

Harold Bloom, still our most extraordinary theorist of literary revisionism, would certainly say this is true of literary history. "Misreading" is his provocative term for the poet's necessary and founding swerve from the work of the precursor. "Belatedness" names that sense of being too late and born with too little that points to both the intensely personal intricacies of the Oedipus complex and the very public problems of relating to a dominant literary tradition. ³ Indeed, in true oedipal fashion, revisionism contains a conservative element in that it always proceeds from and is defined by what is and has already been. After all, Little Hans wants to kill his father in order to be him. In literary matters, the canon--those works deemed worthy of interpretation and emulation--has served this limiting, conservative function. In a still broader context, the continuing hold of individual identity on the imagination dictates that every relativizing deconstruction of someone else's naive essentialism must sooner or later give way to the "genuine" essentialism of myself and those like me.

Of course, Bloom has often been accused of failing to distinguish [End Page 197] adequately between what is true of literature and what is true merely of his own criticism. Perhaps there is some truth to this: the poet's belatedness is temporal; the critic's is ideological. As Bloom insists, the poet is made by his greater rebellion against the inevitability of his own death. The critic is made by his greater rebellion against the fact of other people.

But I am digressing ever farther into what some might consider a category error. Can't it be argued that a revisionism inherent in all instances of anything is no revisionism at all? In, perhaps, the same sense that nihil is not nihilism or humanity the same as humanism? Doesn't revisionism become truly itself only when the attempt is made to rationalize or systematize the inherent decentering effect of interpretation? In other words, revisionism becomes itself in asceticism, historicism, criticism, philosophy, or, more immediately, whenever we give a gift.

What all of these revisionisms have in common is the enterprise of creating meaning out of experience--predominantly, it seems, of suffering, but also of joy. I realize that in making such an assertion I leave myself open to the by-now all-too-familiar accusation that I naively assume "experience" happens before and apart from meaning (that is, language) when, in fact, experience is embedded in and enabled by language from the very beginning. Historically, we arrive at this point first by making experience a matter of perspective, then by making perspective a matter of language.

Apparently, like Merlin, I am living backwards, and the older I get, the more naive I become until I naively wonder if everything really is embedded in language. For someone like me, who has been swimming in words for so long that I no longer remember learning to read, this is clearly true, trivially so in fact. Still, it is possible to wonder whether we have any access to pre- or nonlinguistic consciousness or being. How about a postlinguistic consciousness, constructing atavistic defenses against the overwhelming dominance of language?

Against the unconscious Hegelian ethical universalizing of "language" we may imagine a true contemporary equivalent to the faith articulated by Kierkegaard under the pseudonym of "Silentio"--a use of language to create "silence," making it possible to reflect at length, for example, on the Abraham story, without "understanding" or "revising" it. ⁴

Perhaps it can at least be observed that language effects like rhetoricity or différance are crucial only when you are playing the kind of language game that would be disrupted by them, which pretty much comes down to metaphysics or those varieties of critical discourse with metaphysical aspirations (all of them?). In other contexts, we function largely by remaining unconcerned about what language is doing when we aren't [End Page 198] looking. Is Language then, like Literature, a game we can choose not to play? Probably not, but we can choose to play it and play against it in a variety of ways, and this ability to choose sets us apart from language. Certainly, we all know how to put ourselves in situations in the woods, on the playing field, gardening, or surfing the crest of a wave, that minimize language and alter our relationship with the words we do use.

So let us at least for the time being treat revisionism as an ongoing negotiation with the given, with what is either in culture or in life. Among those revisionisms most discussed, perhaps because they appropriate the experiences of pain and desire most directly to themselves and mediate them in the material world, are asceticism and gift giving. Yet these discussions, whether by Nietzsche or Lévi-Strauss or Derrida, ⁵ are actually guided and made possible by a form of revisionist consciousness that provides the underlying credibility for most recent intellectual events. I speak of irony, or, more precisely, of ironism, without which most of what we call criticism and theory would be inconceivable.

The Lingering Death of Irony

"Irony," Ernst Behler flatly states, "is inseparable from the evolution of the modern consciousness." He continues:

In one respect, irony is a traditional subject, as old as human speech, codified in manuals, defined in its structure, but as unexciting as these scholastic topics are. In another regard, however, irony is virtually identical with that self-reflective style of poetry that became accentuated during the romantic age, and it is a decisive mark of literary modernity. In a move typical of romantic thought, however, irony was then turned around and discovered in works of literature where it had never before been surmised and thus became almost coextensive with literature itself. There is a general agreement that this decisive extension of irony to a basic critical term took place toward the end of the eighteenth century and coincided with the formation of the romantic theory of literature. Until then irony had been understood mostly as a figure of speech, firmly established and registered in rhetoric. ⁶

To put this slightly differently and to anticipate the drift of Behler's own analysis, irony in this new romantic, modern sense also becomes virtually identical with critical and theoretical writing about literature. Furthermore, if what was initiated in romanticism also goes for the modern, then it goes double for the postmodern, which Behler describes as "neither an overcoming of modernity nor a new epoch, but a critical continuation of modernism which is itself both critique and criticism. Criticism now turns against itself, and post-modernism thereby [End Page 199] becomes a radicalized, intensified version of modernism, as would seem to be implied through a certain nuance of the prefix post" (ID 5).

This prefix paradoxically suggests both a canceling of the past and--because of the lack of an entirely new designation--a preserving of it in good revisionist fashion. "Yet," Behler points out, "in the case of postmodern, this does not work, because modern is already the most advanced period designation and cannot be undone. Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodernity, in its twisted [Oedipal?] posture, seems to be the awareness of this paradox, and consequently of the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion" (ID 4-5).

So postmodernism registers in an ironic, self-reflexive fashion (that is, in a fashion made possible by self-reflexive irony) the paradoxical nature of modernity. Or, to get more specific, it registers the fact that the modernist projects of, for example, bringing about the end of metaphysics or romanticism, or of stabilizing and rationalizing the play of revisionism, cannot be assayed without being reappropriated to metaphysics, romanticism, or revisionism.

This history--at least implicitly pervasive, though seldom so elegantly stated as by Behler--could not exist without irony, indeed, is a history of irony. Putting aside for the moment Richard Rorty's bracing pragmatic advice that we can escape our impasse by "simply changing the subject" of the conversation, ⁷ the ultimate import of the discussion as it is being conducted becomes clear once it is understood that "The spirit of modernity appears to be inseparable from the idea of scientific progress forcefully instituted by Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal" (ID 37). According to Behler (and Bacon), so radical were the changes brought about by science and technology that "the present could no longer legitimately be derived from the tradition, the authority of the tradition was suspended, making truth a daughter of time and not of authority" (ID 37). One implication is the new equivalence (and prevalence) of change, progress, and revisionism. For Behler, the most decisive moment, marking the emergence of a fully developed modern consciousness, comes "when, at the beginning of the romantic age and toward the end of the eighteenth century, poetry, literature, and art were for the first time in human history seen in a process of constant progression" (ID 39).

In this light, we might summarize the postmodern paradox in the question "is it progress to question progress?" What alternatives do we have? To answer these questions, and to gain new perspective on a history that in some form enables almost all we write as critics, we will [End Page 200] indeed have to change the subject, but not arbitrarily; in short, we shall have to commit revisionism.

Until late in the eighteenth century, irony remained merely another trope in the taxonomy of classical rhetoric: saying one thing while meaning another, and saying it in such a way as to make the true meaning apparent (in order to distinguish irony from lying). But the importance to this trope of how things are said already made it important in discussions of figures of speech and style (ID 76). In the classical world and thereafter, the trope of irony was strongly associated with the figure of Socrates, whose particular stance of ironic understatement throughout Plato's writings is called litotes. Socrates' fundamentally ironic character is further reinforced by the contrast between his fabled physical ugliness and the greatness of his mind and spirit.

For Behler, the change can be very precisely identified with a fragment written by Friedrich Schlegel in 1797, in which irony is expanded via the example of Socrates from a relatively isolated and finite effect into a defining characteristic of whole works and even genres. Philosophy (elsewhere defined as "poetry of poetry" [ID 81]), Schlegel says, "is the true homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty" (ID 73). However, his attempt to characterize more precisely the literary and philosophical effect of irony partakes of the short-but-tall, fat-but-thin mystification so familiar from romantic characterizations of imagination: "It contains and arouses a feeling of the indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary" (ID 75).

The Schlegelian expansion of irony enacts a shift from a litotic to a hyperbolic conception of its operation, more commonly associated with "Literature," which is to say literature that is also its own theory or philosophy. ⁸ By century's end, philosophical litotes is associated via reduction and self-denial with asceticism and, via the iconographic figure of Socrates, with death. Hyperbole is associated with literary excess and, via Nietzsche, with madness.

Schlegel's tendency, imitated by most of the many subsequent commentators on irony, to focus on characterizing or exploiting irony as a kind of ultimate state of reflective self-consciousness in art and philosophy, works to obscure the more mundane question of what irony does. What difference does irony make? A clue is provided by Schlegel's characterization of irony as "logical beauty," suggesting that it is essentially an aestheticization of reason in the same sense, for example, that sentiment can be considered an aestheticization of feeling.

In order to understand the significance of this statement, we have to [End Page 201] leap forward to Paul de Man's influential essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality," ⁹ which draws on the example from Baudelaire's "De l'essence du rire," of a man who falls down in the street and laughs at himself. In some sense, such behavior both anticipates and blunts the mockery of others; it repairs the dangerous isolation occasioned by the pratfall and allows us to rejoin the group on terms of equality--or not. But what makes this possible is the self's internal distance from itself, the position of objective observer of the self made possible by the very stance of rationality. Irony as "logical beauty," the aestheticization of reason, celebrates the capacity of this objective distance to remove us from our thralldom to the immediate and contingent circumstances of our normal being in the world; it allows an exalted image of the self's capacity to redeem and remake itself. The potential relationship to fundamental notions of progress is clear, and although de Man is way beyond "naive" progressivism, he clearly thinks it makes a positive difference that we think in terms of allegory rather than symbol, just as we have all come to think it makes a difference that we can (indeed, cannot help but) view ourselves from an ironic distance.

The essay is further instructive because it helps define what might well be called the "sentiment of irony," or the illusion that irony makes a difference (or a more-than-aesthetic difference). This is itself "ironic," since in Blindness and Insight de Man is so successful in debunking two of the defining "sentimental ironies" of the New Criticism prevalent at the time: (1) literary language is different from other kinds of language; and (2) literature is distinct from other "noncreative" and less formal endeavors, such as criticism and philosophy. ¹⁰ The Baudelaire example makes it clear that de Man's central concept of allegory is still another expansive characterization of irony. The sentimental insistence that this makes a difference is expressed in his famous concluding reading of Wordsworth's "A Slumber did My Spirit Seal," which insists that something, everything, happens in the blank space or ironic distance between the first stanza in which the speaker is deluded in the physical and temporal moment and the second stanza in which the speaker both mourns and celebrates the majesty of a new awareness of mortality. For de Man, this second stanza, made possible by ironic, objectifying distance, represents Wordsworth's metaleptic grasp (and implied acceptance) of his own death, even though most of the evidence indicates that this is the one thing whose impossibility made Wordsworth the poet he was and dictated the ultimate limitations of his poetic project.

So what are we to make of this outburst of sentimentality? Is it a genuine instance of false consciousness or merely a consequence of de Man's being in his own text, as sentiment is a consequence of being too much in the world, without ironic distance? Like his famous notion of [End Page 202] "blindness," is it a consequence of the rhetorical nature of the activity rather than a sign of actual personal delusion? ¹¹ Even after de Man is finished, it is difficult to know what to make of the poem. If the essence of the ironic is the refusal to let the story have its way with you, if the willing suspension of disbelief in stanza one is so dangerous, why should we give ourselves unquestioningly to the sad sublimity of stanza two?

As with so much surrounding the question of irony, everything depends on what we know and when we know it. Irony presents itself as placing the real above the desired. But what if you know or suspect something is illusory but desire it and are loyal to it anyway? What if you believe you can make it more real by living it, by your commitment to it come what may? After all, it is not revelation but bad luck that brings the Lucy poet to his senses--or seduces him into a new sentimental myth of the profundity of his own sense of loss, the myth Wordsworth used to try to comfort himself over his own mortality. So, was he too sentimental or not sentimental enough?

For Behler, de Man is something of an exception to the general postmodern tendency to reject irony as a special, perhaps transcendent, form of consciousness. Like just about everyone else, Behler traces this postmodern turn to Nietzsche, who, ironically, also represents the culmination of the romantic expansion of irony from trope to defining characteristic of "real" literature and philosophy, to a world-historical principle.

Even Hegel, whose attacks on Schlegelian irony on behalf of the eventual triumph of reason and system are unremitting, admits the ironic element in a dialectic dictating that each "ultimate" expression of the world-historical spirit must contain within it the seeds of its own destruction for progress to occur. And, at least as early as Heine, there develops a world-historical irony that turns on a sense that God is somehow absent or withdrawn, leaving a created order without end or goal and thus with no meaning.

Nietzsche's famous "God is dead and we have killed him" is both a culmination and a critique of this form of expansive irony. As Behler points out, Nietzsche usually avoided the term irony and was critical of ironists in this melodramatic mode, regarding them as life-negating and fundamentally despairing. Nietzsche's own explicit assertions of the ironic center rather on the notion of the "mask," related to the classical notion of irony as dissimulatio. ¹² Interestingly, this kind of individual knows how to hide in language, to use it as his mask. Behler reads the passage thus:

Toward the end of the aphorism Nietzsche concentrates on the communicative actions of such a "concealed" human being who "instinctively needs speech for [End Page 203] silence and for burial in silence." Such a person is "inexhaustible in his evasion of communication" and obviously "wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends." Here we realize that the original reference points of semblance and truth, appearance and reality, concealment and shame are lost and cannot be reconstituted. Indeed, Nietzsche continues with regard to the desire for a mask on the part of the human being: "And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there--and that is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives." (ID 97)

If the nature of the mask is to shield from interpretation, then it follows that "perhaps such a philosopher writes books precisely to conceal what he harbors," or, as Nietzsche himself puts it, "Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hide-out, every word also a mask" (ID 98). The obvious question, the interpreter's question that Nietzsche's "refined style of humanity and philosophy" would avoid, is what constitutes Nietzsche's mask and what is behind it? Behler has little to say about Nietzsche's manner of writing, although Nietzsche's style is, at least arguably, more fundamental even than his ideas. It is, after all, the persistent, pervasive, ironizing hyperbole of his writings that makes Nietzsche the ultimate ironist and his work the ne plus ultra of the ironic sensibility. But if, as this implies, irony allows us to hide in language, what hides in irony?

The question is all the more compelling if we recognize that, with Ecce Homo, Nietzsche pushes his hyperbolic ironism to the point of self-parody ("why I am so clever," "why I write such good books") and, if you like melodrama, to the point of madness. This is the nihilist Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who becomes, as it were, his mask, or simply realizes that his supposed dissimulatio was really a simulatio all along. This is the death of irony, which, like religion (or Little Nell), can nonetheless go on endlessly now that it lacks its defining end or point. Or does the self-parody that deironizes irony actually point us in another direction or directions?

Behler remarks Neitzsche's praise for Epicureanism, certain kinds of overtly cheerful personalities, and even science for a kind of willful superficiality, a positive desire to be misunderstood. He speaks in Beyond Good and Evil of science as another disguise that creates a cheerful appearance, and argues that scientists do as they do "because being scientific suggests that a human being is superficial--they want to seduce others to this false inference" (ID 98). To this list, we might well add the kind of interpreter who does not try to pry behind the mask, who is able [End Page 204] to say less than he knows, who has outgrown this "bad taste, this will to truth, to truth 'at any price.' . . . We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn" (ID 99).

Are we to take these "profound" souls for Rortians, inner ironists but cheerfully liberal on the outside? What is the basis of Nietzsche's identification with them? Despite his assertions of gaiety, his mask is anything but superficial even on the face of it, and, in the end, however indirectly, he cannot resist drawing attention to the cleverness of his own dissimulatio. And he is a prodigious render of veils. Perhaps it is best to regard these souls as Nietzsche's doubles and opposites, in that what they share is a sense of the limited utility of truth as the exposing of things "as they really are," a sense that this exposure is a dead end of sorts. Yet what the scientist conceals is what Nietzsche wears as his mask, the irony that undercuts notions of truth and, beyond that, notions of the end of progress. But what Nietzsche's ironism also masks is the deeper superficiality underlying both the surface superficiality and the ironic skepticism of the scientist, a superficiality that guards the affections and fosters the conviction that something can make a difference. This conviction turns Nietzsche in his own mind aside from nihilism toward self-overcoming--whatever that may be. Call it sentiment, and let us consider for a moment that what hides in the language of irony is sentiment and that the history of irony is the history of the sentimental, masked.

As we noted a moment ago, there is a sense in which the ironic consciousness initiated by Schlegel reaches its effective end with Ecce Homo, and not just the idea of irony but also the anxious reaching after cleverness and effect, the brittle triumphalism that much of Nietzsche shares with the Athenaeum Fragments. ¹³ But Nietzsche's alternative to nihilism, self-overcoming--a future state so discontinuous with what we know that it scarce admits of definition at all--is profoundly and rigorously sentimental in a way that looks back beyond Schlegel to Schiller. "How well disposed must you be not just to endure but to embrace the eternal return of the same" is the question asked of would-be übermenschen in "The Greatest Stress," in a test of the fundamental emotional orientation to reality that precedes and drives all reflection. ¹⁴

There is a certain tendency to do as Behler does, to ignore Schiller's "sentimental" as a kind of false start in the modern history of the ironic, as irony not yet fully formed. In effect, the sentimental as a serious idea and intellectual practice is incorporated into Schlegelian irony, and the residue is treated as a matter of literary style, and a minor mode at that. ¹⁵ But this, I think, is a serious error, not only because it skews our understanding of what Nietzsche is about, but also because it prevents us [End Page 205] from recognizing the true, operative relationship between the ironic and the sentimental, or from, at the very least, exploring the notion that the sentimental is the type of which irony is a more specialized instance.

In "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," ¹⁶ Schiller distinguishes between a natural poetry, unself-conscious and focused on the surrounding world as it is (the naive), and a poetry caught in the perceived gap between the ideal and the real. This second poetry, the sentimental, is reflective and self-conscious, its impressions always mediated by ideas and, therefore, always struggling with antagonistic concepts. The naive is the mode of perfection within the definite limits of nature; the sentimental is the mode of imperfection within the infinite of the ideal.

As Lesley Sharpe has pointed out, Schiller's theory, far from being a nostalgia for things Greek, is intended to vindicate the modern by defining an appropriate and distinctive response to a perception of a split between the ideal and the real that strongly anticipates subsequent versions of "world-historical irony." ¹⁷ In this sense, it is de facto an anticipatory theory of the sentimental content of modern ironic writing. Schiller's theory is also progressive in that it argues that the sentimental, despite its inherent imperfection and incompleteness, is more profound than the naive. Indeed, though he hedges somewhat over this, Schiller seems to hold out the possibility of a future reconciliation with the naive (that is, the natural) via the path of the ideal.

There is probably little point in making a big deal out of the fact that, for whatever reason--Schiller belongs to the previous generation; he is too closely identified with Goethe--Schlegel considerably exaggerates the difference between irony and the sentimental. Wondering "to whom is the naive naive except to the sentimental?" he famously suggest that Schiller is unaware that the naive (and nature, for that matter) are sentimental ideas of the "natural," even though Schiller says just this in his essay. Actually, in Athenaeum Fragment 51, when Schlegel remarks that "the naive is the natural carried to the point of irony" (PF 24), he seems to come very close to acknowledging that the ironic and the sentimental are, if not the same, then indivisible--that irony will always be the effect of sentiment's attempt to project itself in the form of the concept.

Schlegel does distinguish himself ideologically by rejecting Schiller's hints at a possible future reconciliation with the naive or natural, only in order to embrace all the more strongly Schiller's notion of the ultimate superiority of the poetry of yearning over the poetry of perfection. Embracing, even celebrating, the incomplete and necessarily self-perpetuating nature of sentimental (now ironic) self-reflection, Schlegel sees himself as appropriating a sentimental of the feelings and poetry to a new, ironic thought of the infinite, associated with theory. The result is the practice (and theory) of the fragment, which seems to me to [End Page 206] constitute the greatest real difference between Schlegel and Schiller, but also the new ideal of the work of literature that is also its own theory--a projection of sentiment in the form of the concept if I ever saw one.

Indeed, insofar as Schlegel clearly believes that ironic consciousness represents an advance, and insofar as he is notoriously vague about what irony actually does (and therefore about where that superiority lies), I am tempted to suggest that Schlegel has his own dream of reconciliation, in which irony is a means of somehow overcoming or leaping beyond the rhetorical, limiting "nature" of "mere" language.

Looking back, it is further tempting to say that theory and history are the proper contexts of an irony that is only contextually different from a sentimental that takes poetry and nature as its distinctive domains. Or we could say this if the distinctions between poetry and theory, history and nature were not, dare I say it, sentimental. The ironic accuses the sentimental of being naive in its idealizations, yet continues to depend on sentiment to affirm an ironic difference; sentiment, we might infer, shares and anticipates irony's reservations about the future, yet chooses to envision, if not absolute progress, then some positive mitigation via the ideal.

These complexities are already reflected in what is often misunderstood as Schiller's theory of poetic genres. According to Schiller, we moderns, trapped in the sentimental, have choices to make about how we will deal with the gap between the ideal and the real. We can look down on the real from the vantage point of the ideal (and write satire); we can mourn the loss of the ideal (and write elegies); or we can celebrate the ideal in the face of the real--Schiller's preference, at least in theory--(and write idylls). Though they bear the names of familiar genres, Schiller insists that he is describing not poetic modes but different organizations of feelings about reality, which are to be understood not in contrast to rational reflection but as preceding, motivating, and finding expression in literature and philosophy alike. I want to call them "aesthetics" in an encompassing sense.

Returning now to Behler, the primary postmodern response to Nietzsche's example has been to avoid irony as a topic--a response itself ironic since most postmodern theorizing would be impossible apart from a fundamental ironic orientation. Behler speculates: "In postmodernist writing . . . the shunning of irony seems to be related to the primary position of irony in the modern intellectual world, its concomitant relationship to reason, and its mitigating function amidst a general rationalism. Irony seems to have compromised itself through this alliance and therefore appears unfit for describing the postmodern mood, although there is no better word for this complex phenomenon (ID 101). In other words, if it quacks and waddles. . . . ¹⁸ [End Page 207]

Behler's iconic postmodernist is, of course, Jacques Derrida, whose central notion of différance resonates richly with the distance internal to irony. Yet Derrida clearly works to differentiate himself from those predecessors who claim that their ironies are somehow epochal in their significance--markers, if not of progress, then of change. The ironic contemplation of the absolute revisionist limits of irony, by now so familiar, has come to be known as "irony of irony." But can the notion that irony makes a difference be so easily transcended by raising irony to the second power? And even if it is, does it make a difference to say that irony makes no difference? If so . . . how ironic! How are we to go about changing the subject?

The difficulty is illustrated in Behler's own treatment of Derrida (which reappropriates him ultimately to the more or less continuous intellectual history of irony that is Behler's forte):

Almost all of the words and concepts used to describe difference, and especially such terms as interval, dividing, retention, and protention, rest on the metaphysics of identity and self-presence which Derrida attempts to dislocate, to decenter, and to deconstruct. Difference thereby appears to be the most stringent example of the "impossibility and necessity of complete communication" which Schlegel listed among the characteristics of irony. This linguistic indisposition, if we call it provisionally by this negative name, is for Derrida only another sign of difference. Language, looked at from this perspective, is not derived from a speaking subject and is not a determinable function of this subject, but this subject is inscribed in language, is a function of language, conforms to the deployment of difference, and is part of the game. (ID 109)

Although Behler doesn't make the point, it seems fair to wonder why this isn't simply the revisionist assimilation of world-historical irony to language. But the key and absolutely typical moment comes in the very next paragraph, when Behler seeks to define the difference: "Derrida is fully conscious that he is caught up in a circle as far as the task of designating difference is concerned and that he will never be able to transcend the thinking of presence and identity because his language will not permit him to do that. Yet he considers it absurd to renounce the concepts of metaphysics if one is engaged in thinking metaphysics. 'We have no language--no syntax and no lexicon--which is foreign to this history'" (ID 109).

"Derrida is fully conscious" . . . adduced as if this defines the difference in différance, the ironic difference between using the concepts and language of metaphysics because we have no choice, and really believing them. The tremendous weight postmodernism puts on the difference made by awareness reveals that the irony of ironies is, in sentiment. [End Page 208]

Ironies of Reception

It is so tempting to follow Behler in focusing on the consciousness of the ironists themselves that we may forget that revisionism is a phenomenon of reception. Ironism constructs the identity of the revisionist, yet the goal of revisionism, mediated by sentiment, is the (re)construction of the naive. More commonly, this naiveté is masked within the ironic critique it energizes and enables, yet it is by no means ignorant or unsophisticated and may be or become quite self-conscious.

Yet reception is inherently unpredictable, and even more so as the contemporary audience--much less the audience not even born yet--becomes more diverse in experience and interests. Reception presents the challenge of an utterly contingent irony (you never know who may be listening) for which the writer can be held accountable long after death has silenced any possible self-defense. In this sense, we might say that ironism is formed by the anticipation of revisionism (as in Nietzsche's maskings).

Jacques Derrida attempts to confront the irony of reception in two extraordinary performances, "Otobiographies" and The Gift of Death. ¹⁹ I have pointed out repeatedly that the presence of an unreflective sense that awareness makes a difference constitutes the sentimental at the heart of irony. Yet it might be argued that while this remains true of the modernist sentimental, we must not make the mistake, for example, of doing what we appeared to do earlier, mistaking Behler's naiveté for Derrida's. No, it might be argued, Derrida's particular postmodern, postironic preoccupations in these two essays have to do with the perhaps untheorizable problems of reception and grope determinedly toward an awareness and a writing that intends rather to make no difference at all.

In "Otobiographies," Derrida struggles to come to terms with Nietzsche's appropriation by the Nazi propaganda machine of Josef Goebbels. The essay unfolds in three parts. The first explores the question of what it is about Nietzsche that would facilitate such an appropriation. Just when it seems that Derrida is content to argue that Nietzsche is culpable and "should have known better," part two appears to exonerate him in the sense that the real villain is the totalizing Hegelian State, whose power of abstraction appropriates promiscuously. So instead of (in addition to?) blaming Nietzsche's contingent individual fault, Derrida seems close to articulating a "world-historical" irony of reception. But in still another shift of ground, part three appears to define a space apart from these filial and patriarchal complexities, the space of woman or, specifically, of the mother. He seems at once to play with and to reject the sentimental elevation of the marginalized female, [End Page 209] as if to ask indirectly, even unconsciously, what might constitute the sentimental on this new ground--the sentimental which is as good a name as any for what beckons to the Nazis. And this is a fair question for us too--not so much where the sentiment in Nietzsche is, but what is the nature of the sentimental linked to this irony of reception, this ultimately Oedipal sense that none of us can know who may be listening, who our son or sons will turn out to be?

Perhaps we can begin an answer by observing that the mother, who is both venerated as the source of life and shunted aside as a nonplayer in the patriarchal game of af-filiation, sentimentally represents impact or presence without consequence or accountability and masks in her turn the postmodern sentimental ideal, implicit here and in Derrida's entire corpus, of innocent writing--clever and dense enough to attract attention, yet claiming to change nothing and therefore leaving no trace, no footprints by means of which it can be tracked down and laid open to appropriations beyond control and reason.

Of course, behind the discussion of Nietzsche's case, the problem of Derrida's own experience of being "misappropriated" is all too clear: is it possible to say little enough and still say anything at all? Or has Derrida himself already said far too much?

Nietzsche is particularly important, Derrida begins, because "he has perhaps been alone in putting his name--his names--and his biographies on the line, running thus most of the risks this entails: for 'him,' for 'them,' for his lives, his names and their future, and particularly for the political future of what he left to be signed" (O 6). For Derrida, this possibly unique status is related to what looks perilously like a simple thesis: that it is not by accident that what Nietzsche "willed in his name resembles . . . poisoned milk which has, as we shall see in a moment, gotten mixed up in advance with the worst of our times" (O 7). Yet the more Derrida tries to specify exactly what it is about Nietzsche that constitutes the necessity of his involvement with the worst of our times, the more closely he describes the preconditions and ambiguous powers of writing itself. For example, in order to distinguish himself clearly from Nietzsche, Derrida must imply a power of resistance to misappropriation, a siteless, originless nonspecificity probably inconsistent with writing itself and certainly inconsistent with anything that we are accustomed to calling "great" writing.

In the first section of his preface to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche remarks:

the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live. [End Page 210]

I only need to speak with one of the "educated" who come to the Upper Engadine for the summer, and I am convinced that I do not live.

Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom--namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else. ²⁰

"I live on my own credit" is the phrase that draws Derrida's attention most strongly: "the identity he lays claim to here is not his by right of some contract drawn up with his contemporaries. It has passed to him through the unheard-of contract he has drawn up with himself. He has taken out a loan with himself and has implicated us in this transaction through what, on the force of a signature, remains of his text (O 8). Nietzsche can never know "in the present, with present knowledge or even in the present of Ecce Homo, whether anyone will ever honor the inordinate credit that he extends to himself in his name, but also necessarily in the name of another" (O 9).

Inordinate (hyperbolic?) is the word that resonates. Nietzsche claims so much in his own name, demands so much of the future, and of us. Moreover, the strength of his demand is such that his phrase "it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live" has, for Derrida, the force of a prejudice against "mere" life. And it is disturbing, the way the "live" seems to depend so much on reception and recognition. On the other hand, doesn't the bitter irony, directed at those educated ones who fail to recognize Nietzsche for what he is, mask a positive recognition that faith in oneself is necessarily a "prejudice"? Doesn't the phrase at least arguably refer back to the remark in Twilight of the Idols that "the value of life cannot be estimated"--which is to say that that life itself requires prejudice, a sentiment for life, as its enabling force, whatever the cost? Indeed, doesn't this insight require the "genealogy" as its distinctive genre?

By what right, Derrida seems to say, does Nietzsche make such inordinate claims, claims against his own life, as it were, prejudiced for the "name of Nietzsche" and against Nietzsche. And what duty (and to whom) prompts him, against his habits, against the pride of his instincts (against his "prejudices"?) to say: "Hear me! . . . I am . . . do not mistake me for someone else"?

Having made the connection between prejudice and sentiment, we can scarcely be surprised when Derrida evokes Nietzschean irony: "Forcing himself to say who he is, he goes against his natural habitus that prompts him to dissimulate behind masks. You know, of course, that Nietzsche constantly affirms the value of dissimulation. Life is dissimulation" (O 10). Half-true--life is prejudice and dissimulation (the moral of [End Page 211] Toward a Genealogy of Morals, in which prejudice and dissimulation are the parodic shadows of truth and fiction). Or to put it in the terms we have been using, life is both a sentiment and an irony.

Though it initially appears that Derrida objects to Nietzsche's failure to mask, to dissimulate the inordinacy of his project, it quickly becomes apparent that Derrida has problems with Nietzschean irony as well:

Let us assume, in the first place, that the "I live" is guaranteed by a nominal contract which falls due only upon the death of the one who says "I live" in the present; further, let us assume that the relationship of the philosopher to his "great name"--that is, to what borders a system of his signature--is a matter of psychology, but a psychology so novel that it would no longer be legible within the system of philosophy as one of its parts, nor within psychology considered as a region of the philosophical encyclopedia. Assuming, then, that all this is stated in the Preface signed "Friedrich Nietzsche" to a book entitled Ecce Homo--a book whose final words are "Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified" [gegen den Gekreuzigten], Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Christ but not Christ, nor even Dionysus, but rather the name of the versus, the adverse or countername, the combat called between the two names--this would suffice, would it not, to pluralize in a singular fashion the proper name and the homonymic mask? It would suffice, that is, to lead all the affiliated threads of the name astray in a labyrinth which is, of course, the labyrinth of the ear. (O 10-11)

Nietzsche's plurality of names, the masks behind which he advances (perhaps even the irreducible multiplicity of styles that Derrida argues for in Spurs ²¹ ) are sufficient to lead "all the affiliated threads of the proper name astray" in the labyrinth of the ear. Nietzsche's labyrinth of dissimulations, Derrida seems to suggest, make it all too easy for his posterity to go astray in the labyrinth of the ear. Yet this labyrinth, as we know, is inhabited by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as well as (certainly better than) by Josef Goebbels. Indeed, isn't this leading astray precisely the charge that has been leveled against Derrida, the philosopher versus philosophy, the very name of the versus in some contemporary circles?

In Nietzsche, Derrida sees a "contradicting duplicity"--"all statements, before and after, left and right, are at once possible (Nietzsche said it all, more or less) and necessarily contradictory (he said the most mutually incompatible things and he said that he said them)" (O 15)--which he associates with his famous account of origins:

The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and becoming old. This dual descent, as it were, both from the highest and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time a [End Page 212] decadent and a beginning--this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from all partiality in the total problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me. I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par excellence for this--I know both, I am both. (EH 679)

Derrida remarks of this passage:

There, this is who I am, a certain masculine and a certain feminine. Ich bin der und der, a phrase which means all these things. You will not be able to hear and understand my name unless you hear it with an ear attuned to the name of the dead man and the living feminine--the double and divided name of the father who is dead and the mother who is living on, who will moreover outlive me long enough to bury me. The mother is living on, and this living on is the name of the mother. This survival is my life whose shores she overflows. And my father's name, in other words, my patronym? That is the name of my death, of my dead life. (O 16)

According to Derrida, on the basis of "this unrepresentable scene" (O 16), on the basis of "the demonic neutrality of midday delivered from the negative and from the dialectic" (wouldn't it be as accurate in context to say "the promiscuity--like the promiscuity that Socrates attributes to Sophistic writing--that opens up what ought to be closed?"), Nietzsche claims that "I am a master, I am the master, the teacher [Lehrer] 'par excellence'" (O 17).

The "demonic neutrality" (which, to me at least, seems to beckon so compellingly toward Derrida's own account of the Platonic condemnation of the promiscuous nature of writing in "Plato's Pharmacy") ²² is more immediately associated by Derrida with eternal recurrence (which calls not just for acceptance but for an embrace), the doctrine that provides the substance of his teaching and determines his stance. Clearly, much depends here on whether eternal recurrence is a "doctrine" that Nietzsche "teaches" in the way, for example, some would argue that deconstruction is a doctrine also demanding a "demonic neutrality" on questions of fundamental value, as taught by Derrida.

Even more important here is Derrida's characterization of this scene as "unrepresentable." The fact that this scene has been represented, however imperfectly, again and again, suggests that perhaps what Derrida really means is that this primal scene of writing shouldn't be represented, that a sense of the immorality of writing really is a part, perhaps the central part, of the generic specificity of philosophy.

Freud, for instance, imagined this primal scene; rather, he imagined that the Wolf Man saw it, then he imagined that the Wolf Man only imagined it, then he imagined that it was pretty much the same thing-- [End Page 213] this copula/coupling out of which we are "thrown," which is also the "unrepresentable" origin, norm, or ground, of the hyperbole of writing itself. This primal scene differs from the Wolf Man's in that the forbidden sight of the coupling of male and female, father and mother, is not misunderstood as a sadistic assault; the birth of the son kills the father and gives the son over to the mother, to the life which is "his" but which will nonetheless go on without him (as Derrida points out, it turns out in Nietzsche's case that the mother goes on without him in a way that suggests the hyperbolic writing beyond-the-self that posits the Übermensch as its far-distant and essentially fantastic self-representation and eternal recurrence as its equally fantastic "perilous path").

If the primal scene is, for Freud, a way of confirming and exploring the terms of his authority to attribute, or rather to "read" the expressions of the unconscious, such representations of the unrepresentable scene have a far older provenance in the literary tradition that is recalled by Nietzsche's insistence on the importance of his special link to his dead father. Indeed, the insistence on representing the unrepresentable may neatly summarize the irresponsibility of writing from the point of view of philosophy, as well as Derrida's sense of what is so dangerous in Nietzsche.

The fatality that Nietzsche associates with "his" dual origins is at once general and specific: from Homer at least, this sense of belonging partly to the living and partly to the dead has marked the writer. His particular descent into the underworld and the specific knowledge he brings back gives him the distinctive voice that makes him the writer he is. This distinctiveness can come only from the dead, perhaps for reasons that have to do with an intuition of the aloneness of one's own death; to be alive is to be one of many. The patronym is privileged partly because the connection with the dead is traditionally made through the father--inheritance in our culture has been largely patrilineal--either literally, as in the case of Aeneas and Anchises, or figuratively, as in the case of Dante and his poetic father, Virgil.

But if this "fatality" is the necessary fatality of Nietzsche the writer, it is also the contingent fatality of Nietzsche, the finite and specific man, whose father died and whose mother lives. His role here, as we have already noted, is reminiscent of Oedipus. But here in Ecce Homo, his is now the position not of the challenged but the challenger, of the riddler rather than the riddlee; he stands in the role of the Sphinx, fatality itself, the embodiment of knowledge, half human, half lion and the other monster inhabiting the "labyrinth of the ear."

Still, we cannot help but feel that our own reading reflects the partiality of Derrida's. Derrida fails to see that Nietzsche's "announcement" of the death of his father is not simply a prejudice against life. [End Page 214] Since the death the father is the necessary prerequisite to inheritance, it also signals a desire to inherit and enjoy the fruits of that inheritance early, while still alive. Derrida's recoil from the Nietzschean "thanatography" is answered in the literary tradition by a reluctance to submit to being "merely" one of the living. Nietzsche transgresses this distinction and further distinguishes himself from Freud in imagining that the primal scene is his own. Perhaps then, we might say that the primal coupling that Nietzsche announces and which gestures so insistently toward the monstrosity of Sphinx/Minotaur is writing and conception, literature and philosophy. This crossing is indicated in the striking chiasmus of value terms that dominates the parallelism of the passage we have been discussing: instead of the association of life-highest-beginning over and against death-lowest-decadent, we find death-highest-decadent versus life-lowest-beginning--a transmutation of mortality into self-overcoming that goes Wordsworth one better. Instead of trying to answer the trauma of death with the fiction of a forelife "already lived," Nietzsche puts that trauma behind him, as an "already dead" or "having died already":

My father [Nietzsche continues] died at the age of thirty-six: he was delicate, kind, and morbid [aren't we all?], as a being that is destined merely to pass by--more a gracious memory of life than life itself. In the same year in which his life went downward, mine too, went downward: at thirty-six, I reached the lowest point of my vitality--I still lived, but without being able to see three steps ahead. Then--it was 1879--I retired from my professorship at Basel, spent the summer in St. Moritz like a shadow, and the next winter, than which not one in my life has been poorer in sunshine, in Naumburg as a shadow. This was my minimum: The Wanderer and his Shadow originated at this time. Doubtless, I then knew about shadows. (EH 678)

The father's fatality was to pass by, to die for the son, who followed his path to the point of becoming a shade himself before diverging and returning to the light. If anything, Nietzsche's father suffered from not being sufficiently there--a fate from which Nietzsche is saved, paradoxically, by his tortured body:

The following winter, my first one in Genoa, that sweetening and spiritualization which is almost inseparably connected with an extreme poverty of blood and muscle, produced The Dawn. The perfect brightness and cheerfulness, even exuberance of the spirit, reflected in this work, is compatible in my case not only with the most profound physiological weakness, but even with an excess of pain. In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for [End Page 215] which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold [as the dead, perhaps?] enough. My readers know perhaps in what way I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence; for example, in the most famous case, the case of Socrates. (EH 678-79)

This remarkable passage not only links Nietzsche's physical ailments to his mental achievements in a formidable myth of compensation, but also recounts something like an involuntary asceticism, which therefore does not require the rejection of "this" world yet achieves the same transport to a "higher" plane. Nor can we easily imagine anything farther from the Greek (Apollonian) ideal of mens sano in corpore sano, yet an Apollonian clarity of mind follows directly from a Dionysian riot of the bodily functions from which, finally, it is imperfectly distinguishable. In this parodic reversal of normal poetic inspiration, the body, wracked and degenerate, appears in the role of muse. Moreover, as an Oedipus who does not have to murder his father, his plagues work for rather than against him. In all these ways, Nietzsche goes on to say, he embodies--as the result of genealogy and constitution--the reversal of perspectives that makes a revaluation of all values possible (EH 679).

This longer version of the brief account of origins at the beginning of Toward a Genealogy of Morals brings forward the fictionality of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and gives the form of the genealogy its mythic dimension as that history which requires, in this case, Nietzsche as the embodiment of its decadence and of its self-overcoming. For Derrida, what is essential in this account is that:

The contradiction of the "double" thus goes beyond whatever declining negativity might accompany a dialectical opposition. What counts in the final accounting and beyond what can be counted is a certain step beyond.* I am thinking here of Maurice Blanchot's syntaxless syntax in his Pas au-delá ["The Step Beyond"]. There, he approaches death in what I would call a step-by-step procedure of overstepping or of impossible transgression. Ecce Homo: "In order to understand anything at all of my Zarathustra, one must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am--with one foot beyond life." A foot,Ý and going beyond the opposition between life and/or death, a single step. (O 19; footnote references in original)

"Overstepping," "over-reaching"--in effect, hubris--is that what this is all about? Later, Derrida produces a passage from Ecce Homo which he has "kept . . . in reserve"--the famous swelling passage of "Why I am a Destiny" culminating in "It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics." "It gives us to understand," Derrida continues, "that we shall read the name of Nietzsche only when a great politics will have effectively entered into play" (O 31-32). It is not just that Nietzsche--that most "literary" of philosophers--makes a claim to fame, a demand [End Page 216] on the future that is excessive and implicates us without our consent; it is that he willingly takes responsibility in advance, lends the future his name. That is now too risky, too monstrous, when there is no way of telling who may be listening, no telling what he might inadvertently be calling to himself.

Yet once again, there is a partiality of Derrida's argument that betrays an essentially generic bias toward philosophy. After all, he is re-posing here the Socratic question, not "how can we honor the poet?" but "can we afford him at all?" only in a distinctly modern generic and political context. In the second of the two footnotes to the "overstepping" passage quoted above, Derrida attempts to account for (in order to avoid) the whole question of his avoidance of the subject of Oedipus: "The death of the father, blindness, the foot: one may be wondering why I am not speaking here of oedipus or Oedipus. This was intentionally held in reserve for another reading directly concerned with the Nietzschean thematic of oedipus and the name of Oedipus" (O 19).

This innocently circumstantial disclaimer ("Who can say everything in a single piece?" "I cannot do justice to this topic here") is, true to the law of the supplement, "central." The oedipal comparison, which Nietzsche courts so aggressively and which Derrida tries to detach from his account of Nietzsche's relationship to the political future (perhaps as an aspect of his own oedipal effort to distinguish himself from Nietzsche, to whom he owes much), suggests that Nietzsche is as responsible for the use the Nazis made of him (and in the same way) as Oedipus was responsible (or not) for the plagues visited on Thebes.

In addition, the note foregrounds the question of what is "held in reserve," of "reserve" itself, as what Nietzsche doesn't have. Earlier, I spoke of a kind of "involuntary" asceticism, by means of which Nietzsche lays claim to dialectical clarity by virtue of an (in)disposition that is at once natural and unique. Against this Nietzschean asceticism Derrida ranges an asceticism of his own, based and insisting on the difference between hyperbole and litotes, made possible not by the contingency of illness nor anything else confusable with nature, but by an act of amputation--the same amputation or act of self-editing that excludes Oedipus from Derrida's text. Derrida is an amputee, Oedipus is lame, and Nietzsche is perpetually ill--headachy, fevered, nauseous; each of them, each of their genres, finds identity in a relation with the body, and who is to say who is the "healthiest"?

The first footnote belongs to Peggy Kamuf, the translator, who notes simply that Pas au-delá not only means "a step beyond"--the meaning that Derrida exploits--but also "not beyond"--a signification which, perhaps, he is also holding in "reserve." This is important because if Nietzsche's account of origins is in some sense "transgressive" and [End Page 217] dangerously so, there is another sense in which it is "not beyond." Both of these senses, not merely the first, are bound up in Nietzsche's sense of himself as "fatherless."

For Derrida, Nietzsche's sense of his own specialness, his fatherlessness, not only provides the basis for his claim to being a teacher par excellence, it also invokes compellingly the very early and determinedly unpublished lectures entitled "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions." In these lectures, Nietzsche complains that contemporary teaching disfigures the living mother tongue, German, which is contrasted with a dead paternal language. A true master, a good teacher, obeys the laws of the living tongue, and there is a need, if the mother tongue is to be restored, for constraint, for discipline under a guide or leader, which today's students lack (führerlos).

Fatherless/Führerlos. "Doubtless," Derrida says, "it would be naive and crude simply to extract the word 'Führer' from this passage and let it resonate all by itself in its Hitlerian consonance, with the echo it received from the Nazi orchestration of the Nietzschean reference, as if the word had no other possible context" (O 28). Then again, like the politician who piously declares, "It would be reprehensible for me to make an issue of my opponent's mistresses," Derrida is not exactly holding this "naive" and "crude" extraction in reserve either. Yet, finally, Derrida is telling the truth; this is not his point: his final argument is quite different, so different that it is not at all apparent that it need be approached by the path of the father at all. All of which suggests that Derrida's treatment of Nietzsche's relationship to Nazism is shadowed by and intertwined with the oedipal question, which Derrida tries to hold in reserve, of Derrida's relation, debt even, to Nietzsche.

The missing element, the partiality in Derrida's reading of Nietzsche's account of origins, is the complement of the transgressive power that Nietzsche discovers and takes on himself as the compensatory consequence of his father's weakness and his own strength. There is a sympathy for and appreciation of his father--of his delicacy and kindness, which are linked to his morbidity--that point to another quality Nietzsche associates with origins. This quality is a certain generosity, a willingness to be overcome so that the son might come into his inheritance early and make full use of it. This willingness to be overcome in the work and by it is the necessary and arguably redeeming complement of the artistic demand that strikes Derrida the philosopher as so monstrous--and this sense of monstrosity exists quite apart from any association between Nietzsche and the Nazis, though the shape of Derrida's argument works to disguise this difference.

When we add this other face of Nietzsche's "fatherlessness" to our [End Page 218] considerations, we can see that Nietzsche's "literariness" is expressed as a willingness to be overcome but not to amputate himself. And this returns us for a last time to the question of precisely what it is that Derrida holds in reserve, of what the object of his particular asceticism is. The by-now-familiar answer to this question is "the self," what Lévi-Strauss called "the detestable first person singular," that luxury which Derrida and many other structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers suggest that we can no longer afford or that political and social developments have rendered obsolete.

Though Derrida continues to insist that "there is nothing absolutely contingent about the fact that the only political regimen to have effectively brandished his name as a major and official banner was Nazi" (O 31), in the end this contingency is not unique to Nietzsche, at least not determinately so. After all, there is no way to know for sure if "Nietzsche's politics" have even run their course, whether National Socialism was Nietzsche's "great politics" or only an aberrant episode on the way to them.

As it turns out, "the main defendant indicted in this trial" is not Nietzsche, nor even "the name of Nietzsche" but "The State," which is the name and product of a Hegelian power of abstraction that dissolves differences (O 33). "We are not," Derrida argues, "bound to decide" whether Nazism is the true form of Nietzschean politics. For one thing, our decision would not be a reading of a "hermeneutic or exegetical sort" (that is, a "commentary on") so much as it would constitute still another of the "political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destination" (O 32):

This is the way it has always been--and always in a singular manner--for example, ever since what is called the end of philosophy, and beginning with the textual indicator called "Hegel." This is no accident. It is an effect of the destinational structure of all so-called post-Hegelian texts. There can always be a Hegelianism of the left and a Hegelianism of the right, a Heideggerianism of the left and a Heideggerianism of the right, a Nietzscheanism of the right and a Nietzscheanism of the left, and even, let us not overlook it, a Marxism of the right and a Marxism of the left. The one can always be the other, the double of the other. (O 32)

Pointing to "On the New Idol" from Thus Spoke Zarathrusta, Derrida argues that Nietzsche's lectures "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions" can "be read as a modern critique of the cultural machinery of [the Hegelian] State and of the educational system that was, even in yesterday's industrial society, a fundamental part of the State apparatus" (O 33). Derrida then applies Nietzsche's analysis of the intervention [End Page 219] of the State on the university classroom to his or our own situation, to the professor/pupil, speaker/listener relationship now, as it is being reproduced in "Otobiographies."

This is an extraordinary move because "Otobiographies" is only staged as a lecture; in fact, it is an act of writing pretending to be an act of speech and the ear that admits the State is actually the avertable eye of the reader. How strange that Derrida of all people would efface the written in this way. Yet how strangely necessary, since it repeats the (Hegelian?) movement of abstraction by means of which philosophy converts the partiality of writing into a disposable irrelevance. The labyrinthine detour of writing, the privacy of the reader, and the writer's privacy (as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 4) subvert the power of the "Hegelian" state--which is to say, of philosophy--and mark the limits of its reach. What remains to set Derrida apart and links him to literary critics (and to Nietzsche) is his position as critic of a specific tradition and its partiality (rather than as purveyor of an abstract "truth")--which constitutes his own partiality and makes him the writer he is.

So (to summarize) Nietzsche's account of himself suggests that his particular, contingent relationship with his mother and father, most especially his "fatherlessness," determines the fundamental relationship to the given that makes him the unique writer and thinker he is. This is essentially the same myth of origins familiar to us from Wordsworth's Prelude, except that Wordsworth defines himself as "motherless." Via führerlos, "fatherless" beckons to the State as surely as motherless beckons to nature. It is, after all, National Socialism, and it doesn't matter that it is actually the State's debasement of the "mother" tongue that Nietzsche appeals against; the Hegelian State abstracts such details out of existence. Yet there is still no way to determine once and for all what this means: the (mis)appropriation of the name of Nietzsche continues, as Derrida himself demonstrates.

But Derrida has still one more turn of the screw to offer:

even if we were all to give in to the temptation of recognizing ourselves, . . . it would still be, a century later, all of us men--not all of us women--whom we recognize. . . . [W]oman, if I have read correctly, never appears at any point along the umbilical cord [connecting us to the State], either to study or to teach. She is the great "cripple," perhaps. No woman or trace of woman. And I do not make this remark in order to benefit from that supplement of seduction which today enters into all courtships or courtrooms. This vulgar procedure is what I propose to call "gynegogy."

No woman or trace of woman, if I have read correctly,--save the mother, that's understood. But this is part of the system. The mother is the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra. She gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the background of the scene like an anonymous persona. Everything comes back to [End Page 220] her, beginning with life; everything addresses and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining at bottom. (O 38)

Why should Derrida suddenly develop this stylistic tic: "If I have read correctly . . . if I have read correctly . . . no woman or trace of woman"? Does his uncertainty stem from the fact that woman appears throughout the Nietzsche corpus, but particularly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as the embodiment of the challenge posed to man by life ("how well disposed must you be?")? Is he wondering if the replacement of this absent coquette by the mother might be the point? Does he suspect that the "trace" of woman is here, in true Derridean fashion, in her absence?

And what are we to make of the "gynegogy" remark? Does calling attention to his possible insincerity make him more sincere? If he is not raising the question of woman here, at the bitter end, to curry favor, to exploit the "supplement of seduction," what is he doing and why doesn't he say so? If the specter of bad faith attends anything, it is not his raising of the question of woman but the abrupt shifting away from the subject of philosophy and, perhaps, the shifting on to woman ("the great 'cripple'") of the question of Oedipus which has been continually evaded (and is being evaded again).

To point to Nietzsche's masculine partiality is to say nothing. To connect this with the masculine partialities of the State, of philosophy, of literature is to say little more. To connect Nietzsche's partiality, its degree and nature, however tenuously, with his appropriation by the Nazis is a "vulgarity" just like that of gynegogy. This Derrida will not do. But if none of these, then what?

That Derrida does shift his ground in this way suggests that the fundamental question about Nietzsche involves not Nazism (Führerlos-ness) but the nihilism that may or may not attend Fatherlessness, the death of God; it is the question of whether Nietzsche is the physician or the most virulent carrier of the disease. What are the consequences of fatherlessness and of the devaluation of the masculine that attends it? Are they the same everywhere? Who is saved? Is woman, for example, exempted by her exclusion?

As we have already noted, Nietzsche frequently stages this question as a challenge posed to man by life, a woman. "In his dreams," as we say--that is, in the great fiction Thus Spoke Zarathustra--Nietzsche imagines that life wants him, that his readers want him, as a woman might the one man who resists her charms. Furthermore, in "The Other Dancing Song," he imagines himself whispering in life's ear precisely that secret knowledge that it is her very nature to withhold: "I whispered something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses. 'You know that? O, Zarathustra? Nobody knows that.' And we looked at each other [End Page 221] and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was." ²³ Man and life, man and woman are reconciled only when he is relieved of the necessity of pursuing this secret, and she of withholding it. But there is a further twist because man, not woman, is the true withholder here: he withholds the knowledge that he knows. And what he knows is the sentimental content of his own ironism, the naiveté he shares with woman in her "foolishness," which goes by the name of life.

What does it mean to replace woman with the "understood" mother, "part of the system"? True enough, in the Nietzschean, Statist, philosophical system, the mother "survives on condition of being at bottom"--connected with Life, her self-sameness cuts her off from the capacity for self-overcoming that man seeks to derive from a special relationship to death. But the Nietzschean mother is not simply, as Derrida puts it, "the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra," who "gives rise to all the figures by losing herself." More than figure figuring, she is Life with a capital "L"--a power of abstraction associated with conception, with philosophy; she is also a power of personification, whose role it is to take abstraction into her own body and thus to naturalize it. This mother is a figure for the relationship that philosophy has sought--unsuccessfully--with nature.

Derrida is quite right; the Nietzschean mother is not Nietzsche's mother, at least not in anything like the sense in which we recognize Nietzsche's own father in his description. But the partiality is the point. His claim to know both his father and his mother, to be both and to know death through one and life through the other, necessarily suffers from an "economic" imbalance (the same that he approaches in Toward a Genealogy of Morals), for these two kinds of knowledge, one immediate and personal, one distant and abstract, refuse totalization.

Nietzsche implicitly questions philosophy's characteristic gesture of self-sufficiency even as he seeks to combine the abstract and conceptual with the partiality out of which his writing proceeds. Because this genealogy is, in fact, a heterogenealogy, the mode of this combination cannot be a reconciliation; it can only be an embodiment. Nowhere is Nietzsche more clearly the precursor of Freud than here, where the problem of knowledge, of its conception and embodiment, is the problem of sexual differentiation.

The specific partiality that Nietzsche betrays in his account of origins tends to confirm Harold Bloom's insistence that the poet (here, the literary philosopher) is distinguished by his greater rebellion against--and hence, partiality to--the fact of his own death. The movement from coquette to mother, to return now to this question, marks a repositing of [End Page 222] the question of life in a more challenging, frightening way. "What if this woman doesn't love me?" is a very different question from "what if my mother doesn't love me, never wanted me? What if life, instead of being her gift, was in fact her curse? What if my birth, like my death, is personal in an intimate and destructive way? How well-disposed do you have to be then?" David Farrell Krell has pointed to Nietzsche's sardonic suggestion that "his mother and his sister were the two irrefutable objections to the eternal recurrence of the same." ²⁴

Despite his continuous skirting of the question of Oedipus (or maybe because of it), it must be said that Derrida does end up at least implying a striking reading of the story, one in which Oedipus really isn't all that important. Rather it plays between the perspective of Oedipus's (and Nietzsche's) father--and the insight that you never really know who your son will turn out to be--and that of the never-even-mentioned Jocasta, most enigmatically of all at once mother and coquette: life that we love and that loves us; life that doesn't love us despite our love for it; life that we pretend not to love as if that would make it love us; life that bears, seduces, yields, kills, and sometimes even dies.

Derrida deals far more directly with his own problems of reception in The Gift of Death, replacing Oedipus with Abraham, and Nietzsche with Kierkegaard, ²⁵ and speaking more than a trifle defensively of those who criticize his work for its lack of ethical concern, "the moralizing moralists and good consciences who preach to us with assurance every morning and every week, in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and on television, about the sense of the ethical or political responsibility. Philosophers who don't write ethics are failing in their duty, one often hears, and the first duty of the philosopher is to think about ethics, to add a chapter on ethics to each of his or her books and, in order to do that, to come back to Kant as often as possible" (GD 67). Derrida invokes Kierkegaard and the story of Abraham and Isaac to argue that ethical choice can never be rationalized in this way. The moment of decision, if not exactly madness, is at least a paradox that such "philosophy" cannot help us with. For, as "monstrous, outrageous, [and] barely conceivable" as it is, the story of the "'sacrifice of Isaac' illustrates . . . the most common and everyday experience of responsibility" (GD 67).

Just as Abraham is torn between his "absolute responsibility" to God and his "ethical duty" to Isaac, we are all, according to Derrida, trapped between our responsibility to our friends, our loved ones, our neighbors and all the others to whom we also have a responsibility, with no way to justify our preference:

what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice. There are [End Page 223] also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility (what Kierkegaard calls the ethical order). I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], every one else is completely or wholly other. The simple concepts of alterity and of singularity constitute the concept of duty as much as that of responsibility. As a result, the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia. Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and finitude. (GD 68)

With this, Derrida comes to the same limit we have been playing around since this essay's beginning. What happens next is truly extraordinary; Derrida launches into a sustained passage of a rhetorical intensity (and weirdness) in my view unsurpassed elsewhere in his writings. I cannot do more than provide a few tastes of the three or four pages in question:

I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. . . . Let us not look for examples, there would be too many of them, at every step we took. By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation and sickness. (GD 68-69)

Nor, he insists, is this "just a figure of style or an effect of rhetoric." The three religions who claim the Abraham story as their own are even now fighting over the same ground where the sacrifice is supposed to have taken place. "Issac's sacrific continues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front" (GD 70). And this goes on until Derrida reaches his bathetic crescendo: "How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people?" (GD 71).

The billions suffering for lack of Derrida are bad enough but . . . Oh no! Not the kitties! As Wilde remarked of the death of Little Nell, "You'd [End Page 224] have to have a heart of stone not to laugh." What on earth has happened here, and why?

We may initially be inclined to mutter something about the astronomer in Rasselas, or to quote Ortega y Gasset on the ethical mandarinism of those who fail to know "the conditions without which things cannot be." ²⁶ Instead, let us try to work our way into the problem with a few observations.

First, there is a curious reversal of ground. Derrida invokes precisely Kierkegaard's insistence on the incommensurability of the Abraham story with anything in the domain of the ethical (which is to say, normal experience) in order to mock the smugness of the moralizers on the matter of decision. Yet, in the very same rhetorical movement, he insists that it is the most common thing in the world, almost as if there is no alternative to reappropriating the story to the ethical in some way if it is to be spoken of at all.

Second, any distinction between commission and omission, active sacrifice and failure to save someone (or something) whose existence we are aware of only in the most abstract sense, collapses. Every possible melioration is rendered valueless by comparison with a standard of total amelioration, which by definition does not and has never existed. This is some kind of projection, I am tempted to say, of disciplinary standards onto the ethical (count how many times, for example, the adjective "absolute" appears in these few pages).

Third, Derrida's attempt to equate Abraham's "absolute" responsibility to God, so at odds with his ethical duty, with our choice or preference for those we know or love over all others, actually reverses the true situation of the story. There, Abraham's responsibility to God and his "ethical" preference for his son are at odds, not congruent. This confusion is made possible because Derrida repeats Kierkegaard's questionable characterization of the primary source of tension in the story. Is there any reason (other than the fact that Kierkegaard has an ax to grind with Hegel) that we must characterize Abraham's attachment to Isaac as offending against the "ethical universal" and not, say, the "natural affections"? Surely it is the violation of our natural affection for our own children (and theirs for us) that shocks and grips us. At least arguably, what is at stake in the story is sentiment and the affections; if you do not believe that they are efficacious in ordering reality, or if you exclude their legitimate agency entirely, then naturally, what lies at the finitude of the conceptual, beyond philosophy, is the impasse that others might call a mystification since, by virtue of its very asserted universality, this is a paradox, scandal, and aporia that we negotiate every day. [End Page 225]

What begins as Derrida's use of one more version of the ironic incommensurability of orders of existence to mock naive moralism suddenly turns upside down. Derrida's distance collapses, and he falls into the same quandary he poses as a trap for these others. Irony fails him, and he is ultimately paralyzed by the lack of a language to articulate "what difference it makes." Another way to look at this is to say simply that Derrida is overwhelmed by the thought of his audience and by the problem of reception. Of course, this audience is a projection, the others conceived as his "absolute" contrary, the complement of his "impactless" project.

We are familiar, of course, from Bloom and others, with ironism as a device to hold one's precursors at a distance; we are less familiar with it as a primary means of achieving distance from the audience as well. We might speculate that the rise of the ironic corresponds to an increasing sense of alienation from and uncertainty about those who are receiving all this writing. To this degree, I have suggested that these pages represent a failure of irony. Yet to the degree that Derrida deprives himself of a language fit to describe how we actually do deal with ethical paradox in order to preserve a sense that our efforts nonetheless matter, it is an even more fundamental failure of sentiment.

Later in the essay (in part 4) Derrida regains himself somewhat. Pointing out that neither Kierkegaard or Levinas is able to erect a distinction between the ethical and the religious that will stand up, he concludes: "The concept of responsibility, like that of decision, would thus be found to lack coherence or consequence, even lacking identity with respect to itself, paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or an antinomy. That has never stopped it from 'functioning,' as one says. On the contrary, it operates so much better, to the extent that it serves to obscure the abyss or fill in its absence of foundation, stabilizing a chaotic process of change in what are called conventions" (GD 84).

The fact that this "aporia or antinomy" is not paralyzing is treated dismissively; the "mere" in front of "conventions" is almost audible. He goes on:

What is thus found at work in everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice, and first and foremost in the axiomatics of private, public, or international law, in the conduct of internal politics, diplomacy, and war, is a lexicon concerning responsibility that can be said to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere to be found, even if we can't go so far as to say that it doesn't correspond to any concept at all. It amounts to a disavowal whose resources, as one knows, are inexhaustible. One simply keeps on denying the aporia and antinomy, tirelessly, and one treats as nihilist, relativist, even poststructuralist, and worse still [End Page 226] deconstructionist, all those who remain concerned in the face of such a display of good conscience. (GD 85)

There now. Distance is restored, the other once again in its place. But only at the cost of Derrida's own admission that nothing he says will cause the slightest disturbance in this arrangement. It doesn't matter to anyone (other) that this concept is nowhere to be found. Their behavior only "amounts to" a disavowal; they may well know everything he does and be willing to admit it--only they can't see the point. And Derrida's "concern" might just as well (or better) be unconcern, for all that it matters.

I cannot help but feel that this entire state of affairs can be traced back to the effacement of the "natural" affections under the heading of the ethical. For what separates Derrida most profoundly from these worldly disavowers and ties him most profoundly to the naive moralizers is a reluctance to acknowledge that we do indeed live at each other's expense, and that all ethics and all critiques of ethics will equally find their significance within this limit.

It should come as no surprise that Derrida moves from his "breakdown" to the reconstitution of his usual distance via the path of the ironic. Toward the end of part 3, at the heart of his treatment of the Abraham story proper, Derrida follows Kierkegaard in focusing on Abraham's sole quoted utterance. Asked by Isaac what they will use for the burnt offering, he replies, "The Lord will provide." For Kierkegaard, this cannot be an utterance of assured faith; otherwise, all tension flows immediately from the story. This is a speaking in the mode of silence, which he associates with irony. For Derrida, there is a (to my mind) curious comparison with the "I would prefer not to" of Bartleby, the Scrivener: "The responses without response made by Bartleby are at the same time disconcerting, sinister, and comical; superbly, subtly so. There is concentrated in them a sort of sublime irony. Speaking in order not to say anything or to say something other than what one thinks, speaking in such a way as to intrigue, disconcert, question, or have someone or something else speak (the law, the lawyer), means speaking ironically" (GD 76).

"I would prefer not to" does not really resonate in the same way as "The Lord will provide," which must count at least as an insight or intuition, understood as an assurance of sorts by Isaac if, under the circumstances, it is not to count as a lie. No, Bartleby's utterance actually has more in common with the "It doesn't matter" (via speaking in order to say nothing) that I have used to articulate Derrida's implicit self-characterization. Derrida continues: [End Page 227]

Irony, in particular Socratic irony, consists of not saying anything, declaring that one doesn't have any knowledge of something, but doing that in order to interrogate, to have someone or something (the lawyer, the law) speak or think. Eironeia dissimulates, it is the act of questioning by feigning ignorance, by pretending. The I would prefer not to is not without irony; it cannot not lead one to suppose that there is some irony in the situation. It isn't unlike the incongruous yet familiar humor, the unheimlich or uncanniness of the story. On the other hand, the author of The Concept of Irony uncovers irony in the response without response that translates Abraham's responsibility. Precisely in order to distinguish ironic pretense from a lie, he writes: "But a final word by Abraham has been preserved, and insofar as I understand the paradox, I can also understand Abraham's total presence in that word. First and foremost, he does not say anything, and in that form he says what he has to say. His response to Isaac is in the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and still do not say anything." (GD 76-77)

But there is one element of Socratic irony overlooked by both Derrida and Kierkegaard: we all know that Socrates is feigning ignorance, and he knows we know--that is the point. Not to care whether the audience knows you know, perhaps not to know yourself, is to speak beyond characterization; it is certainly to speak beyond irony, as Derrida himself recognizes:

Abraham doesn't speak in figures, fables, parables, metaphors, ellipses, or enigmas. His irony is meta-rhetorical. If he knew what was going to happen, if for example God had charged him with the mission of leading Isaac onto the mountain so that He could strike him with lightning, then he would have been right to have recourse to enigmatic language. But the problem is precisely that he doesn't know. Not that that makes him hesitate, however. His nonknowledge doesn't in any way suspend his own decision, which remains resolute. The knight of faith must not hesitate. He accepts his responsibility by heading off towards the absolute request of the other, beyond knowledge. He decides, but his absolute decision is neither guided nor controlled by knowledge. Such, in fact, is the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion, or explicitation. It structurally breaches knowledge and is thus destined to nomanifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret. (GD 77)

A sentimental reading of these passages would be that "it doesn't matter" is the only way to articulate--to articulate by truly masking, without winking or hints that we all know better--the desire that we feel differently about a state of affairs that we are helpless to think differently about, lacking terms other than those we already have. This, of course, is not Derrida's reading; he is still struggling to get his terms right. The "irony" he describes is more than "metarhetorical," it is "metaironical." [End Page 228] It is what we have been calling "sentimental" throughout this essay. And, to judge by the text we have been examining, it is not quite true to say that that which breaches knowledge is doomed to "nonmanifestation." In fact, it is manifested in the form of a story--where the "willing suspension of disbelief" and the "teleological suspension of the ethical" converge.

Derrida seems to acknowledge, however fleetingly, an utterance beyond rhetoric, made and (apparently) grasped, though we struggle to characterize why and how. He simply "would prefer not to" discuss it. Derrida does act finally as if the Abraham story was a parable, rhetorical, and in doing so falsifies or at least revises it. But the singularity of the story, as he tells us over and over without quite grasping his own point, is that it strongly resists revisionism. It works only as long as it remains a story, a fiction, the unique instance of itself. To the degree that Derrida wants to insist that this is the most common thing, no matter how uncanny he insists such an equivalence makes the everyday seem, he is still evading the task of characterizing or thinking the uncanniness of the tale, which resides in each reader's personal relationship with something so foreign to experience.

I have been known to remark that philosophy knows everything about language except what a rhetoric is; criticism knows everything about literature except what a fiction is. Here Derrida willfully takes a fiction for a rhetoric--as revisionism must always do.

By rights, the Abraham story is so bizarre it should not touch us at all. It does so precisely because it is not "the most common thing in the world." There is a particular kind of sublimity involved, in which what is at issue is our own capacity, in part to endure and negotiate what is unendurable and nonnegotiable. Kierkegaard both characterized and obscured this ability as faith, but he projected the feeling it engendered in his famous statement, "the single individual is higher than the universal," ²⁷ which is not a paradox but a sentiment. We are limited and cruelly so, but within those limits, infinite and terrifyingly so.

Schiller speaks of the distinctively modern, sentimental affection for nature as a response to an idea of nature, and then goes on to project each of his modes of relating to this condition--satiric, elegiac, idyllic--as, in effect, the "feeling of an idea." This dealing only with "ideas of things"--the limited purchase on reality which Lukacs credited Schiller with being first to perceive--feeds revisionism.

More subtly, Schiller's account tells us that "nature"--that is, our ideas of nature--name a relationship of difference that constitutes a distinctly human identity (current theories of animal rights, which actually operate to put a foundation under the concept of human rights, provide [End Page 229] a perfect example of how this works). This also means that "nature" is appropriated to intellectual projects as their sentimental, motivating core.

For Derrida, this is problematic precisely because it is by your version of "nature" that you are caught, characterized, and (mis)appropriated by revisionists. To do entirely without "nature" (or to bury it so deeply it never sees the light of day) is the essence of the deconstructive project. In "Otobiographies," Derrida points to Nietzsche's claims of the natural origins of his extraordinary powers and point of view (his sense of being, in Wordsworth's words, "a power like one of nature's") as the element that makes him available to National Socialism. In The Gift of Death, Derrida defends himself against those indicting him for, in effect, refusing to manifest a "nature" that would motivate an overtly ethical project. Derrida turns on his critics a devastating critique of their implicit assumption of the congruence of the ethical and the "natural." But in this movement, as we have seen, he falls into an "abyss" of his own making.

One can meet and refute an idea of nature only with another idea of nature. This Derrida has, but will not acknowledge. Because he is unwilling to assert the "naturalness" of his own version of nature (without which his argument would not be possible), he is unable to give voice to the ways in which we actually do deal with ethical "paradoxes" grounded in different ideas of nature. His critique becomes a mystification of a not unfamiliar kind.

Of course, if I am right, and Derrida has to include some ultimately sentimental idea of nature somewhere, then where? In both essays, he invokes and evades nature via the "problem of woman." In "Otobiographies," he speaks as if restoring woman to her literality would undo the suspect and enabling versions of nature her effacement make possible. But Derrida doesn't really have anything interesting to say about Jocasta or Sarah. He simply doesn't want to go there because, willy nilly, that way nature lies.

In The Gift of Death, at bottom Derrida's entire argument depends on the recognition that we do, indeed, exist at one another's expense--an admittedly deplorable idea of nature he will not own and thus cannot pursue. As a result, he finds himself shrouding in "secrecy" what everyone knows.

University of California,
Riverside

Jean-Pierre Mileur is Professor of English and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Vision and Revision: Coleridge's Art of Immanence (1982), Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (1985), The Critical Romance (1990), and (with Bernd Magnus and Stanley Stewart) Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy As/And Literature (1993).

Notes

1. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, 1974).

2. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, tr. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1979).

3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1973).

4. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, tr. Alastair Hannay (New York, 1985). In his dissertation, Adorno argues precisely against the notion that Kierkegaard's pseudonyms achieve any real status beyond that of transparent vehicles of Kierkegaard's meaning (Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic [Minneapolis, 1989]).

5. I have in mind The Genealogy of Morals, Tristes Tropiques, and Given Time.

6. Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle, 1990), p. 73; hereafter cited in text as ID.

7. Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982).

8. For an extensive discussion of this development and its consequences, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (Albany, N.Y., 1988).

9. Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 187-228.

10. See Paul de Man, "Criticism and Crisis" and "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism," in Blindness and Insight, pp. 3-35.

11. See Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Blindness," in Blindness and Insight, pp. 102-41.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1968), pp. 240-41.

13. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, tr. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1991), pp. 18-93; hereafter cited in text as PF.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1982), pp. 101-2.

15. One recent attempt to "rehabilitate" the sentimental is Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Cambridge, 1996). McGann sees himself as rescuing the reputations of the styles of sensibility and the sentimental, as well as of a largely female body of poetry, unjustly suppressed by a masculinist, Eliotic high culture more sinister than the Trilateral Commission, determined to deny its debt. McGann insists that he is interested in sensibility and the sentimental not as ideas, but as poetic modes or styles, specifically literary practices. Indeed, he implies, to defend the sentimental is to defend literature (and feeling) against the tyranny of suspect critical and philosophical abstractions. This stance, along with his insistence on gendering these modes "female," pretty much reinscribes, despite his efforts to the contrary, the notions that these are slight, largely ineffectual modes that do not need to be taken seriously.

This is all the more puzzling, since McGann devotes considerable space to demonstrating the essential roles of both sensibility and the sentimental in making possible the works of high romanticism. But since his argument is, in effect, that the romantics masculinized these modes in order to make them more authoritative and efficacious by linking them to a progressive vision of the redeeming role of art, he is left to argue that the distinctive feature of the female poetry of the sentimental proper (and the upshot of the "freedom" he associates with it) is its bleak realism about its own limited prospects in the face of patriarchal authority and natural limitation.

The particular dramatic frame that McGann places around his argument leads to a conceptualization of the sentimental considerably less contemporary and sophisticated than Schiller's. "Sensibility," McGann argues, is about the mind in the body, whereas the "sentimental" is about the body in the mind. More useful theoretically and more descriptive historically would be to say that sensibility focuses on loss, especially mortality, and is characterized by melancholy, if not melancholia, which moderates into a reflective and pleasing (if not autoerotic) tristesse. The great periods of Sensibility, the latter half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century, are those in which an ironic consciousness of the limitations of the previous influential periods (Enlightenment and romanticism, respectively) blocks the belief in a future transformation or restoration. By contrast, the sentimental--particularly as it has evolved--is about compensation; it requires some emerging vision of the future, or at least of some more satisfactory relation with what is, and becomes efficacious within the ironic whenever some such vision begins to assert itself. Both modes are keyed to the limitations of the finite individual, which the self-conscious intellectual sublimity of the high philosophical mode and the visionary ambitions of the high romantic literary mode are not.

16. Friedrich Schiller, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," tr. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York, 1993), pp. 179-260.

17. Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge, 1991), p. 172.

18. One possible (and influential) response to the apparent dead end of irony has been essayed by Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), who begins from the recognition that ironists can and do put down their pens to lead lives based on imperatives different from those expressed in their writings. Sensible ironists don't, and by implication shouldn't, live as they write. Rorty argues: "Whereas Habermas sees the line of ironist thinking which runs from Hegel through Foucault and Derrida as destructive of social hope, I see this line of thought as largely irrelevant to public life and to political questions. Ironic theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seem to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics" (p. 88).

But Rorty does not really pursue the argument he says he does. As it turns out, he does see a link between private irony and the kind of public liberalism he wants to endorse strongly. I would argue that this link is, in fact, sentimental, and that, whether he knows it or not, Rorty is actually making a case for a certain version of the sentimental as the effective public language with origins in private irony.

The private identity fostered by ironism turns out to be a specific kind of moral agency which has public and political implications because it is associated with a certain enlightened and tolerant brand of liberalism. Here is how this occurs. The ironist's awareness of the historical and normative nature of his own final vocabulary of values leads to an enhanced awareness of the multiplicity of other such vocabularies. This awareness in turn leads the ironist to wonder if he has inherited the right vocabulary. Now the ironist as ironist has no external vantage point from which to answer this question. Yet someone--if not the ironist then someone influenced by ironism's example-- uses the very different instruments of literature, ethnography, and so forth, to tell the stories of others and their vocabularies.

The stories they tell are the stories of the suffering of others because, for the liberal, "cruelty is the worst thing" (conservatives, I suppose, revel in the blood of the innocent). This is essentially an ethical stance which, in another familiar move, is equated with political agency, as if once we have demonstrated our moral superiority, our work is done. It is fair, I think, to question whether things are as they are because we are insufficiently aware of the suffering of others (as opposed to, say, the view that we are so overwhelmed by information about the suffering of others that passivity and cynicism are the results). Even more fundamentally, Rorty's argument makes sense only if we assume--sentimentally--that if we were sufficiently aware, things would be different. And beneath this assumption, doesn't there lie the further unarticulated sense that we need not exist at the expense of others, that if human desire and its fulfillment are not innocent, they can and should be? Surely this is the political "naive" projected by a sentimental divided between the ideal and the real, the public and private, the ironic truth and liberal care; what is at issue is how and against what standard we are to measure the melioration of our condition.

19. Jacques Derrida, "Otobiographies," tr. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1985), pp. 3-38; hereafter cited in text as O. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (Chicago, 1995); hereafter cited in text as GD.

20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings, p. 673; hereafter cited in text as EH.

21. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, tr. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1979).

22. Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), pp. 61-171.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Portable Nietzsche, p. 339.

24. David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), p. 3.

25. Our concern with this long and complex essay is primarily with parts 3 and 4. However, it is worth noting here that in parts 1 and 2, Derrida offers an all-but-textbook demonstration of supplementarity as a formalization of revisionism as irony. Patôcka (used as something of a stand-in for Levinas, I think) wants to oppose responsibility to secrecy, banishing the latter to the margins of the ethical. But as Derrida shows, secrecy is absolutely necessary--central--to responsibility. Not only that, the gift of death, unique to each and therefore "secret," is the basis of the individual identity capable of assuming responsibility.

26. José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, tr. Howard B. Wescott (New York, 1972), p. 108.

27. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 84.