Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida

Cultural Graphology

Cultural Graphology

Writing after Derrida

Juliet Fleming

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

JULIET FLEMING is associate professor of English and director of the MA program in English at New York University. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39042-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39056-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226390567.001.0001

Publication costs were supported by the Department of English at New York University, through the generosity of the Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publication Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fleming, Juliet, author.

Title: Cultural graphology : writing after Derrida / Juliet Fleming.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001194 | ISBN 9780226390420 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226390567 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Derrida, Jacques. | Literature—History and criticism. | Writing—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC B2430.D484 F55 2016 | DDC 194—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001194

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: From Grammatology to Cultural Graphology

1  The Psychopathology of Writing

2  Type Ornament

3  Sign Tailoring

4  Psychoanalytic Graphology

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the students in Cambridge and New York who lent their youthful energies to reading Derrida with me and to the English translators whose work made that possible. John Forrester, Mary Jacobus, Sarah Kay, and other members of the Cambridge Psychoanalytic Reading Group offered stimulating conversation as I started work on this project, and the department of English at NYU, and the wider community of scholars in New York City and New Haven, provided a congenial environment in which to finish it. Jason Scott-Warren and Adam Smyth have been generous friends, interlocutors, and guides to the archive. Two anonymous reports (in one of which I recognized the brilliant hand of Tom Conley) and the careful scrutiny of Gary Tomlinson and Margreta de Grazia allowed me to significantly improve the final manuscript. I am indebted to all four readers for their transformative suggestions and corrections. Margreta has for many years cast her protective brilliance over the slow growth of this book. My deepest thanks are to her; to my son Raymond Fleming, who followed his mother up the steep paths of his childhood without flagging or complaint, until it became my turn to follow him; and to my dearest husband and partner in thought, Gary Tomlinson, to whom this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

Works by Derrida

Other Works

CJ Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911.

Écrits Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977.

LGR Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945. London: Vintage, 1998.

SE Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953–74.

SPL Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of the Purloined Letter. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48 (1973): 39–72.

Introduction

From Grammatology to Cultural Graphology

Analytical bibliography: the study of books as physical objects; the details of their production, the effects of the method of manufacture on the text. When Sir Walter Greg called bibliography a science of the transmission of literary documents, he was referring to analytical bibliography. Analytical bibliography may deal with the history of printers and booksellers, with the description of paper or bindings, or with textual matters arising during the progression from writer’s manuscript to published book.

«TERRY BELANGER¹»

Of Grammatology is the title of a question: a question about the necessity of a science of writing, about the conditions that would make it possible, about the critical work that would have to open its field and resolve the epistemological obstacles; but it is also a question about the limits of this science

«DERRIDA, Positions, 13»

Cultural graphology names a new approach to the study of texts; it is the work of this book to explore and explain it. But I have hesitated over my subtitle. I first thought to identify the field that was to be changed by Derrida’s thought as bibliography, which is, strictly speaking, the study of the material transmission of texts. But since cultural graphology is a speculative and interpretative discipline with a much wider task than that of bibliography, and since I have no practical commitment to bibliography, Book History after Derrida seemed a better description of what I am up to. And yet this project cannot be described as book history, nor can it even be described as the transformation of that field. First, because I have scarcely engaged with the work of even the most eminent book historians, second, and more consequentially, because I take seriously Derrida’s observation that both the Greek term "biblos and its Latin counterpart liber" first designated not books but rather the papery support for writing that was derived from plant material (PM 6). My readings thus resist many of the assumptions on which book history is built. Indeed, my topic, as I have come to recognize and name it, is writing conceived without the guardrails of the book.

I should also acknowledge that my use of literary theory is also both selective and motivated. Although I am old enough to have met Derrida or at least to have heard him speak, I did neither. I am not part of that group of Derrida’s friends and colleagues who, in writing about him now, must continue to mourn his passing, nor do I seek to position my work among theirs. If many excellent readers of Derrida are not mentioned or are mentioned too briefly in what follows, this is because I do not seek to intervene in Derrida’s legacy in any programmatic way. Rather, my aim is to use his writing in tandem with what is currently being done in book history to throw light on the local initiative that Derrida tentatively called cultural graphology. While I hope the result proves to be theoretically suggestive, I am primarily writing for those interested in the history of texts who want to do something other than what they could do just as well (or better) as bibliographers, philologists, or historians of reading. It is for such readers that I am propounding whatever of Derrida’s thought might be most useful for their own purposes.² And if, by the end of this, you are exhausted, it is certain that, as Derrida said of his own reading of Genet, you will not have exhausted the resources of Derrida’s writing (G 117b).

Still, it must be admitted that the personal stimulus for this project is my long engagement with, and desire to do justice to, Derrida’s mistranslated, overpraised, and undervalued magnum opus De la Grammatologie (1967), a work already old when I was young. I will begin by explaining the grip it has exerted on me over many years.

We must start with a bibliographical issue, a warning in Derrida’s own words: in what you call my books, what is first of all put into question is the unity of the book and the unity ‘book’ . . . with all the implications of such a concept (Po 3). Derrida defies the borders and boundaries of what we normally call a book by playing with typographic conventions, asserting that he has not yet begun when he gets to the end of a work, or by writing several volumes at once, fracturing, blending, and redistributing arguments within and between them. His early work was often provoked by readings of other writers that were so close, so parasitic, that the inexperienced can find it hard to distinguish Derrida’s commentary from what it is commenting on—and here the question of where a book begins and ends is already pressing. Derrida also used his own writing as the occasion for further thought, and would have been the first to say that he was never done with anything; he was preoccupied with the proposition that if nothing is ever simply there as its present self, nor is it ever simply gone (this is what he means by "différance). And as if all this were not already enough to baffle a bibliographer, to read Derrida’s writing is to experience that presentiment that Jean-Luc Nancy described in relation to Derrida’s work as the sensation that allows us to already know that which has nevertheless not yet begun."³ You can scarcely see three paces in front of you, you can’t begin to say what might happen, and yet you are feeling that it has already occurred and is only awaiting the confirmation of your reading eye.

Although another of Derrida’s famous neologisms "destinerrance" is designed to avoid the thought that anything runs a determined course (he once said, in response to a question as to where he was going with an argument, I’ll say that I’m trying to get to the point where I myself don’t know where I’m going) he was, nevertheless, the conscious architect of presentiment as a sensation and sensitive to his own experience of it when reading the work of others—writing on Jean-Luc Nancy, he confessed in turn, I’ve hardly taken a step and he’s already running ahead of me, never out of breath, touching and re-touching his text, taxing my belatedness in advance (OT 131).⁴ This vision of Derrida outstripped by his prolific friend will comfort and amuse his own readers (you should know that no one has ever come close to keeping up with Derrida—no serious reader should try). But it is not only Nancy’s continuing output that forces Derrida to fall behind, like Tristram Shandy narrating his own life and finding after six weeks of hard writing that he has not yet got to the moment of his birth; rather, it is Derrida’s own sense that whatever he can find to say about Nancy’s writing has already been anticipated by that writing.⁵ Put so bluntly, this may describe the position of any literary critic, but as I know from my own reading of Derrida, presentiment is something other than this: it is the experience of being bound and freed by a powerful text. So in his account of the Phaedrus in Dissemination (1972), after a long digression on the relation of myths to philosophical discourse, Derrida advises readers that he will now return to Plato’s text, assuming we have ever really left it (D 98). He made the same gesture in Mes Chances (1983) to indicate that at some level, whatever else he is doing, he is never not reading Freud, and ten years later he was still not done, remarking that years of such reading had done nothing to assuage his engagement with Freud’s themes, with figures, with conceptual schemes that are familiar to me to the point of obsession and yet remain no less secret, young and still to come (AF 26).

In Aphorism Countertime, a reading of Romeo and Juliet, Derrida developed the concept of presentiment as a theme not only of that play but of drama itself: We hope everything will turn out well, we believe that it might, and yet, even before the curtain goes up, even before the lovers are coupled together, we know from the names Romeo and Juliet that disaster has already struck (AC 414–33). In a comedy, similarly, we know that mischance is inevitable, even if we can’t predict the form it will take. Still, presentiment is more than a theory of drama, and even to call it the single theme of literature would be to straiten it, for it is the burden and mood of writing itself, a name for its propensity to look forward as well as back: it is because writing is inaugural, in the primal sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation towards the meaning that it constitutes, and that is, primarily, its future (WD 11).

Which is another way of saying that, with or without us, ready or not, writing is what happens. Or even better, since writing, like everything else, is constitutively out of joint and can never be punctual to its own occasion, we might say that writing is what just happened. Derrida gave testimony that this was his own experience as an author when in 1983 he told an interviewer who had incautiously asked about his destiny as a writer that what he wrote resembles a dotted-line drawing that would be circling around a book to be written in what I call for myself ‘the old new language,’ the most archaic and the most novel, therefore unheard-of, unreadable at present. This book would be . . . an interminable anamnesis whose form is being sought. Are you going to write it? she persisted. You must be joking, he replied (Pt 119). The uncanny feeling that things are precipitating without intention towards an unknown future that both could and could not have been different is, I think, a fundamental literary effect, and one that is intimately linked to what Derrida calls the literality of the letter. I explore these issues in later chapters. For