No More Learning

" This is an impressive series of transactions that called for an equally impressive number of rhetorical performances or theoretical exploits: between culture and materiality, between a corpus or a prop- er name, Paul de Man, more precisely a very particular place of the posthumous corpus, Aesthetic Ideology ("--a` propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--"). Here, then, is an inheritance that is also a post- humous work of Paul de Man's to which we are invited to refer, be- tween dashes, in the mode of an "a`-propos" that set me to wondering.
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I wondered about this French idiom, which seems untranslatable and overdetermined enough that, I suppose, it was left like the foreign body it remains in your language. Moreover, and apropos, I had for a moment dreamed of entitling my lecture: "Apropos of apropos, apro- pos of all the meanings and all the uses of a` propos and of the a`-propos in French (a` propos, as you know, can be an adverb, a` propos, or a noun, the a` propos). I had thus dreamed, but perhaps I will do it silent- ly, of examining the modalities and figures of reference that are cross- ing in the inimitable and untranslatable expression a` propos--which allies chance to necessity, contingency to obligation, machine-like as- sociation to the internal, intentional, organic link. When one says "a` propos," "a` propos de . . . ," there is from a pragmatic point of view always a mark of reference, a reference to . . . , but it is sometimes a di- rect reference, sometimes indirect, furtive, passing, oblique, accidental, machine-like, also in the mode of the quasi avoidance of the unavoid- able, of repression, or of the lapsus, and so forth. When one says "a` propos," it is because one is at least pretending to leap at the oppor- tunity to speak, metonymically, of something else altogether, to change the subject without changing the subject, or else to underscore that be- tween what is being talked about and what someone wants to talk about there is either a link of organic, internal, and essential necessity, or else, inversely, an insignificant and superficial association, a purely mechanical and metonymic association, the arbitrary or fortuitous comparison--"by accident"--of two signifiers. And yet it is clear that, at that very moment, one touches on the essential or the place of deci- sion. That is where the thing happens, that is where it comes about. When Rousseau, after having stolen the ribbon, accuses Marion so as to excuse himself (and we will come back to this when we follow de Man's magisterial reading), it is because he denounced, he said, "the first object that presented itself [le premier objet qui s'offrit]. "1 Marion herself, or the name of Marion, being there by chance, by accident, it is as if he leaped on the opportunity and said with a`-propos: "Apropos, it's Marion who gave it to me, I didn't steal it. " The "esprit d'a`-propos," in French, is the art, the genius, but also the technique that consists of knowing how to grab an opportunity, to make the best of it, the best economy of contingency, and to make of the Khairos or the Chaos a significant, archivable, necessary, or even ineffaceable event.
So many other things still remained enormous and enigmatic for me in the "a`-propos" of this title--which says everything in advance, be- ginning with "post-millenarian" and "'materialist' thought" ("materi-
alist" in quotation marks), not to mention everything that is put under the "umbrella" of some "afterlife" ("theory, cultural studies, and Marx- ist critique"). When I read this protocol, I asked myself which theoreti- cal animal or which animal-machine of the third millennium could measure up to this inhuman program. If anyone could ever treat the subject in question, it will not be me, I said as I commanded myself to retreat: withdraw toward your own compromise on the subject of these untenable promises, but make every possible effort not to be too unworthy of the square you've landed on in this jeu de l'oie (a French board game that is something like a cross between Chinese checkers and Monopoly). On the poster, I said to myself, you find yourself for- tunately immobilized in the company of Carla Freccero and Hillis Miller. Each time I look at this poster, it makes me think of a jeu de l'oie for a Californian science fiction. A throw of the dice that is incal- culably well calculated has assigned all three of us, Carla Freccero, Hillis Miller, and me, three immigrants from Yale, the burden, and the word is well chosen, of "material events. "
So I pray you to excuse me, but I will not treat the subject. In his ar- ticle "Excuses (Confessions)," apropos of Rousseau, de Man refers in a note to Austin's "A Plea for Excuses. " But he pays no attention to the fact that this text by Austin itself begins by presenting an excuse. It is thereby altogether enveloped, comprehended, included in the event of this first performative. Everything that Austin is going to say on the subject of the excuse will be at once comprehended and signed by the first gesture of the first sentence, by the performative event that is put to work, precisely, by the first words of "A Plea for Excuses. " With the excuse that they implicitly present, these words of introduction make of this text an event, une oeuvre, something other than a purely theo- retical treatise: "The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits. "2 Everything happens as if the title, "A Plea for Excuses," designated first of all and solely Austin's performative gesture that itself presents excuses and alleges limits (time, urgency, situation, context, etc. : "within such lim- its," he says). The title, "A Plea for Excuses," would thus be the name or the description of this lecturer's gesture rather than and before being the announced subject, a theme or a problem to be treated in a theo- retical, philosophical, constative, or metalinguistic mode, namely, the concept or the usage of the word excuses. This text constitutes a "Plea for Excuses," and it even does so in an exemplary fashion. So Austin excuses himself for not treating the excuse in a serious enough fashion.
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He excuses himself for remaining or for leaving his audience in igno- rance on the subject of what is meant by "to excuse oneself. " And this at the moment when (performative contradiction or not), having begun by excusing himself, by pretending to do so, or rather by pretending to pretend to do so, he undertakes to excuse himself for not treating the subject of the excuse. He must, nevertheless, know enough about it, he must presuppose enough on the subject of what his audience knows and understands about it in advance, in so-called ordinary language (which is, moreover, the real subject of this essay), to declare that he will not treat it--even as he introduces it. Will he have treated it? Perhaps. It is for the reader to judge and for the addressee to decide. It is like the scene of writing of a postcard whose virtual addressee would in the future have to decide whether or not he or she will receive it and whether it is indeed to him or to her that it will have been addressed, in the singular or the plural. The signature is left to the initiative, to the responsibility, to the discretion of the other. Get to work. One will sign, if one signs, at the moment of arrival at destination, rather than at the origin, at the moment of reading rather than of writing. (As for the hypothesis according to which Austin as well and already would have allowed himself to get enclosed in a "performative contradic- tion," him without whom we would not even have been able to formu- late a suspicion in this regard, permit us to smile at it along with his ghost. As if it were possible to escape all performative contradiction! And as if it were possible to exclude that an Austin would have had a little fun illustrating this inevitable trap! )
Now, it is not unthinkable that, in Allegories of Reading (a book published just before or even while the texts of Aesthetic Ideology were being prepared), de Man's title "Excuses (Confessions)" also presents the excuses and confessions of de Man himself, if I can put it that way, on some subject or another, and that he played at this scene without playing, that he pretended to play at it, apropos of Rousseau's Confessions and Re^veries, and perhaps, for example (this is only an ex- ample), inasmuch as he only "introduced" it, as Austin said, without really treating it--neither apropos of Rousseau nor in general.
I will add two subtitles to my title, namely, "machine" and "textual event. " These are words de Man uses in "Excuses (Confessions). " I will thus propose that we interrogate together, at least obliquely, the use of these words, machine and textual event, in Allegories of Reading. Their use as well as their supposed meaning. My hypothesis is that de Man reinvents and signs these words, in a certain way, even as he leads
us, if we can still put it that way, toward the "thinking of materiality" that comes to light in Aesthetic Ideology. The coherent use, the perfor- mative inaugurality of these words (machine and textual event), their conceptual effects and the formalization that will follow, in semantics and beyond semantics, this is what will affect in a necessary fashion all of de Man's writing and thus the destiny of all the other words he put to work. For example, but these are only examples, despite their fre- quent occurrence in this book from 1979, the words deconstruction and dissemination. My timid contribution would thus describe only a modest divergence in relation to the gigantic program proposed to us by Tom Cohen, Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. This displace- ment would remain discreet, micrological, infinitesimal--and literal. Perhaps it will be limited to underscoring "materiality," in place, so to speak, of "matter," then insisting on "thought of materiality," or even "material thought of materiality," in place, if I may put it this way, of "materialist" thought, even within quotation marks.
But we will see what happens when the moment comes.
I
There is a memory, a history, and an archive of confession, a genealogy of confessions: of the word confession, of the rather later Christian in- stitution that bears this name, but also of the works that, in the West, are registered under this title and whose status as works of literature remains to be decided. Augustine and Rousseau, both authors of Confessions, speak more often the language of excuse rather than of pardon or forgiveness. Augustine speaks of the inexcusable (inexcus- abilis), Rousseau of "excusing himself. " I must recall this even though or because, in this context, in the course of his exemplary and from now on canonical reading of Rousseau's Confessions, de Man never speaks of Augustine and of this Christian history. 3 I must make at least some minimal reference to this because the sedimentation in question forms an interior stratum of the very structure of Rousseau's text, of its "textual event. " It is not certain that a purely internal reading can legitimately neglect it, even supposing that the concept of "textual event" (and I remind you that these are de Man's words) leaves stand- ing the distinction between internal and external reading. For my part, I believe that if there is "textual event," this very border would have to be reconsidered.
I don't know if anyone has ever noticed, in this immense archive, that Augustine and Rousseau both confess a theft and both do so in
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book 2 of their Confessions, in a decisive or even determining and para- digmatic place. That is not all: in this archive that is also a confession, both of them confess that, although it was objectively trifling, this theft had the greatest psychical repercussions on their whole lives. Apropos, this apparently insignificant theft was committed by each of them at the precise age of sixteen; apropos, and on top of it all, each of them presents it as a useless theft. Their abusive appropriation did not take aim at the use value of the thing stolen: pears in the case of Saint Augustine, the famous ribbon in the case of Rousseau (presuming that one can know with certainty the use value of a fetishizable thing). Both of them insist on the fact that the use value was null or secondary. Augustine: "For I stole a thing of which I had plenty of my own and of much better quality. Nor did I wish to enjoy that thing which I desired to gain by theft, but rather to enjoy the actual theft and the sin of theft. "4 Rousseau will likewise speak of the trifling value, or even the insignificance, of the ribbon. We will see what fate de Man reserves for what he then calls the "free signifier" of a ribbon become available for a "system of symbolic substitutions (based on encoded significations arbitrarily attributed to a free signifier, the ribbon). "5 Even though, at this point in his itinerary, de Man seems to expose, rather than counter- sign, a psychoanalytic or even self-analytic interpretation of the Lacan- ian type--he speaks of a "general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse" (ibid. )-- everything seems to indicate that he does in fact consider the ribbon to be a "free signifier," thus indifferent as regards its meanings, like that purloined letter concerning which Lacan said that its content had no importance. I am less sure of this point myself in both cases, as I have shown elsewhere and I will return to it. As you know, the first title de Man thought of giving to this text was "The Purloined Ribbon. "
No more than its immediate use value, Augustine and Rousseau likewise do not covet the exchange value of the stolen object, at least not in the banal sense of the term. It is the very act of stealing that be- comes the object of desire, or the equivalent of its metonymic value for a desire that we are going to talk about. Augustine thus confesses, in book 2 (chapter 4, 9ff. ), the theft of pears. But to whom does he address his confession? In the course of this long confession and the prayer on which it is carried, he addresses the theft itself: "What was it that I, a wretch, loved in you [Quid ego miser in te amavi? ] oh my act of theft [o furtum meum], oh my deed of crime done by night in the sixteenth year of my life, o facinus illud meum nocturnum sexti decimi anni
aetatis meae? " (chapter 6, 12). Augustine himself thus archives his age at the time of the theft. He registers the age he was at the moment of the sin and declares his age to the theft itself. His addressee, the desti- nation of his addressee, his address and his addressee is the theft. He addresses the sin in order to tell it two things, which he thereby ar- chives and consigns: both its date, the date of the event of the theft, and his own age, the age of the thief at the moment of the misdeed. Theft, o theft, my theft (o furtum meum), know that I committed you, that I loved you, like a crime (facinus), theft, I loved you and I perpe- trated you that night when I was sixteen years old.
Rousseau also speaks of his age in direct reference to this theft, at the precise moment when he writes: "this ribbon alone tempted me. I stole it . . . " As always, he speaks of it both to clear himself and to add to his burden of guilt. "My age also should be taken into account. I was scarcely more than a child. Indeed I still was one" (89). That ought to clear him. But he right away adds: "In youth real crimes are even more reprehensible than in riper years. " That ought to aggravate his fault. But he right away adds: "but what is no more than weakness is much less blameworthy, and really my crime amounted to no more than weakness. " He does not say here that he was exactly sixteen years old at the time, but he had pointed it out earlier (I will cite this later) and, moreover, an easy calculation allowed me to deduce without any risk of error that he too was just sixteen years old when, in 1728, dur- ing the summer and fall, he spent three months as a lackey in the house of Mme de Vercellis where the affair of the ribbon took place. 1728: Jean-Jacques, son of Isaac Rousseau, was born in 1712; so he was six- teen years old. Exactly like Augustine. And this theft, which is also confessed in book 2 of the Confessions, was, by Rousseau's own ad- mission, a determining event, a structuring theft, a wound (a trauma, to use the Yale and Cornell neologism), an endless scarring, the repeat- ed access to the experience of guilt and to the writing of the Confessions. And this is true in both cases, even if the experience and the interpreta- tion of guilt appear different, at first glance, in the two cases. As if, through a supplement of fiction in what remains a possible fiction, Rousseau had played at practicing an artifice of composition: he would have invented an intrigue, a narrative knot, as if to knot a ribbon around a basket of pears, a "plot," a dramaturgy destined to inscribe itself in the archive of a new quasi-literary genre, the history of confessions en- titled Confessions, autobiographical stories inaugurated by a theft, each time the paradigmatic and paradisical theft of forbidden fruit or a
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forbidden pleasure. Augustine's Confessions were written before the Catholic sacrament of confession was instituted; those of Rousseau, the converted Protestant, were written after this institution and, more- over, after his abjuration of Calvinism. As if it were a matter for Jean- Jacques of inscribing himself into this great genealogical history of confessions entitled Confessions. The genealogical tree of a more or less literary lineage that would begin with the theft, from some tree, in the literal or the figural sense, of some forbidden fruit. A tree with leaves or a tree without leaves that produced so many leaves of paper, manuscript paper and typing paper. Rousseau would have inscribed his name in the archival economy of a palimpsest, by means of quasi quo- tations drawn from the palimpsestuous and ligneous thickness of a quasi-literary memory: a clandestine or encrypted lineage, a testamen- tary cryptography of confessional narration, the secret of an autobiog- raphy between Augustine and Rousseau, the simulacrum of a fiction right there where both Augustine and Rousseau claim truth, a veracity of testimony that never makes any concessions to the lies of literature (although fiction would not constitute a lie for Rousseau: he explains himself on this score with clarity and acuity in all his refined discourses on the lie, especially in the Fourth Promenade, precisely, where he con- fides to paper the story of the ribbon).
To be sure, before reaching the age of sixteen, Rousseau had already stolen, moreover, he had stolen forbidden fruit, just as Augustine had done. More orthodox than Augustine, he had already stolen apples, rather than pears. He confesses it with delight, lightheartedness, and abundance in book 1 of the Confessions. What is more, he stole con- stantly in his early youth: first asparagus, then apples. He's inex- haustible on the subject, and he insists on his good conscience, up until the theft of the ribbon: since he was punished for all these earlier thefts, he began, I quote, to "voler plus tranquillement qu'auparavant," "to thieve with an easier conscience than before, saying to myself, 'Well, what will happen? I shall be beaten. All right that's what I was made for'" (43) ("Je me disais: qu'en arrivera-t-il enfin? Je serai battu. Soit: je suis fait pour l'e^tre"). As if corporal punishment, physical in- jury, the automatic and justly repaid sanction exonerated him from any guilt, thus from any remorse. He steals more and more, and not only things to eat but also tools, which confirms his feeling of inno- cence. Rousseau, as you know, will have spent his life protesting his in- nocence and thus excusing himself rather than seeking to be forgiven: "Really the theft of these trifles [the master's tools] was quite innocent,
since I only took them to use in his service" (43). The thefts predating the theft of the ribbon when he was sixteen years old engender no feel- ings of guilt; they have no repercussions, there is no common measure with the trauma of the story of the ribbon, at sixteen years old, an episode that is like the credits or the matrix of the Confessions. As is well known, the appropriation of the ribbon was less serious as a theft than as a dissimulating lie. He allowed someone else to be accused, an innocent girl who does not understand what is happening to her: he ac- cused her in order to excuse himself.
I don't know whether there are any archives other than Rousseau's writings (the second book of the Confessions and the Fourth Prome- nade) that give access to this story of the ribbon. If, as I believe, Rousseau was the only testimonial source and the only archivist of the event, every hypothesis is possible (although I will abstain here from making any) regarding a pure and simple invention of the episode of the theft out of a compositional concern (at sixteen years old and in the sec- ond book of his Confessions like the great ancestor of the Confessions, Augustine, with whom, in the ligneous lineage of the same genealogical tree bearing forbidden fruit, it would be a matter of sharing the titles of nobility: the same tree, the same wood, the same paper pulp). A delicate and abyssal problem of conscious or unconscious archivation. De Man does not speak of Augustine. It is true that his project allows him legiti- mately, up to a certain point, to dispense with talking about him. But as for Rousseau, he did read Augustine. And he talks about him. But he does so also, as you will hear, to avoid him. He at least alludes to him, precisely in the same book 2 of his own Confessions. Let us be more precise, since it is a matter of the obscure relations between memory (either mechanical or not), archive, consciousness, the unconscious, and disavowal. Rousseau does not in truth admit that he had read Augustine, Saint Augustine himself, in the text of his great corpus. He recognizes merely that he had nevertheless, without having read it, re- tained many passages from this text. He did not read it but he knew some passages by heart:
"He [an old priest] thought he could floor me with Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory, and the other Fathers, but found to his utter surprise that I could handle all the Fathers as nimbly as he. It was not that I had ever read them. Nor perhaps had he. But I remembered a number of passages out of my Le Sueur [author of a History of the Church and the Empire up to the Year 1000] . . . (70)
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The question remains as to what it means to "know by heart" certain passages cited from a secondary source, and whether the second book of Augustine's Confessions was included there. It all comes down to the faith one can put in a given word, be it a word of avowal or confession.
Another superficial reference to Saint Augustine appears at the end of the Second Promenade. Rousseau briefly names him at that point in order to oppose him. I will not do so here, but one could, "within such limits," reserve a structuring place for this objection and thus for this difference in the archive and the economy of a religious history of con- fession, but as well in the genealogy of autobiographies entitled Con- fessions. The place of the passage, at the end of the Second Promenade, is highly significant. Rousseau has just evoked humanity's "common plot" against him, what he calls the "universal conspiracy [l'accord universel]" of all men against him. 6 Here, then, is an agreement too universal and too "extraordinary to be a mere coincidence. " Not a single accomplice has refused to cooperate with this plot, with this veri- table conjuration, since the failure of just one accomplice would have caused it to fail. Rousseau evokes "human malevolence," a malevo- lence that is so universal that men themselves cannot be responsible for it, only God, only a divine secret: "I cannot help regarding as a divine secret beyond the reach of human reason the plot that I previously saw as nothing but the fruit of human malevolence" (45) ("Je ne puis m'empe^cher de regarder de? sormais comme un de ces secrets du ciel impe? ne? trables a` la raison humaine la me^me oeuvre que je n'envisageois jusqu'ici que comme un fruit de la me? chancete? des hommes. ") This "oeuvre" (translated as "plot"), this fact, these crimes, this conjura- tion, this misdeed of men's sworn [conjure? e] will would thus not de- pend on the will of men. It would be a trade secret of God, a secret im- penetrable to human reason. For such a work of evil, only heaven can answer. But since one cannot accuse heaven any more than human malevolence of such an extraordinary work of evil, of this "universal conspiracy . . . too extraordinary to be a mere coincidence," thus of the necessity of a machination, Rousseau must then at the same time turn toward God and put blind trust in God, in the secret of God: beyond evil and beyond the machination of which he accuses him. It is at this point that he makes a brief allusion to Saint Augustine in order to oppose him. In this last paragraph of the Second Promenade, you will notice the at least apparent de-Christianization of Augustine and of Rousseau's Confessions:
I do not go so far as Saint Augustine, who would have been content to be damned if such had been the will of God. My resignation is of a less disinterested kind perhaps [Rousseau thus confesses that his confessions obey an economy, however subtle or sublime it may be], but its origin is no less pure and I believe it is more worthy of the perfect Being whom I adore. God is just; his will is that I should suffer, and he knows my innocence [this takes us to the other extreme from Augustine, whose Confessions are made, in principle, so as to beg pardon for a confessed fault--God knows I am a sinner--whereas Rousseau confesses every- thing only so as to excuse himself and proclaim his radical innocence; at least at first glance, this will already mark the difference between the theft of the pears and the theft of the ribbon]. That is what gives me confidence. My heart and my reason cry out that I shall not be dis- appointed. Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and my turn will come sooner or later. (45)
This "sooner or later," which signs the last words of the Second Promenade, is extraordinary--like other "last words" that are waiting for us: "everything will find its proper place in the end and my turn will come sooner or later. " "Sooner or later": this patience of the virtual stretches time beyond death. It promises the survival of the work, but also survival by the work as self-justification and faith in redemption-- not only my justification but the justification of men and of heaven, of God whose order and indisputable justice will return. This act of faith, this patience, this passion of faith comes to seal in some way the virtu- al time of the work, of une oeuvre that will operate by itself. The work will accomplish its work of work, son oeuvre d'oeuvre beyond its sig- natory and without his living assistance, whatever may be the time re- quired, whatever may be the time to come; for time itself no longer counts in the survival of this "sooner or later. " It little matters the time that this will take, time is given, thus it no longer exists, it no longer costs anything, and since it no longer costs anything, it is graciously given in exchange for the labor of the work that operates all by itself, in a quasi-machine-like fashion, virtually, and thus without the au- thor's work: as if, contrary to what is commonly thought, there were a secret affinity between grace and machine, between the heart and the automatism of the marionette, as if the excusing machine as writ- ing machine and machine for establishing innocence worked all by it- self. This would be Rousseau's grace but also his machine whereby he
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pardons himself in advance. He excuses himself by giving himself in advance the time needed and that he therefore annuls in a "sooner or later" that the work bears like a machine for killing time and redeem- ing the fault, a fault that seems therefore only apparent, whether this appearance be the malevolence of men or the secret of heaven. Sooner or later, grace will operate in the work, by the work of the work at work, in a machine-like fashion. Rousseau's innocence will shine forth. Not only will he be forgiven, like his enemies themselves, but there will have been no fault [il n'y aura pas eu de mal]. Not only will he excuse himself, but he will have been excused. And he will have excused.
Apropos of this extraordinary machine of the future (namely, a machine that by itself, in a machine-like fashion, overturns the machi- nation, the conjuration of all those who would have conspired against Rousseau, of all those enemies who would have universally sworn his demise), apropos also of this allusion to Augustine at the end of the Second Promenade, in a context that de Man no doubt, and perhaps rightly, considered "hors de propos," extrinsic to his "propos," I would like to evoke the beginning of the Fourth Promenade. Allusion is made there to the theft of the ribbon, to the lie that followed it, and to the story of the one whom he will later call, in the same Promenade, "poor Marion. " But I would also like to recognize or see get put in place there a kind of machine that articulates among themselves events of a kind that ought to resist any mechanization, any economy of the machine, namely, oaths, acts of sworn faith: jurer, conjurer, abjurer, to swear, to conjure, to abjure or forswear.
I will first underscore the act of swearing (swearing before heaven in order to proclaim his innocence). Very close by, the word "de? lire" (folly, "irresponsible folly") will have the charge of naming above all the extraordinary coincidence between, on the one hand, the irra- tionality of the machine that is irresponsible or beyond my control, the mechanism that caused me to do evil, and, on the other hand, the ab- solute sincerity, the authentic innocence of my intentions. On the one hand, the extreme self-accusation for an infinite crime, which is incal- culable in its actual and virtual effects (the "sooner or later" of these effects, conscious or unconscious, known or unknown), the coinci- dence or the unheard-of compatibility between this feeling of properly infinite guilt, which is confessed as such, and, on the other hand, the just as unshakable certainty in the absolute, virgin, intact innocence, which will "sooner or later" appear, the declared absence of any "repentance," of any "regret," of any "remorse" for the fault, the theft, and the lie.
"Repentance," "regret," "remorse" (repentir, regret, remord) are Rous- seau's words, on the same page, when he speaks of what he himself calls an "incredible contradiction" between his infinite guilt and the absence of any guilty conscience.
It is as if he still had to confess the guilt that there is, and that remains, in not feeling guilty, or better yet, in saying he is innocent, in swearing his innocence in the very place where he confesses the worst. As if Rousseau still had to ask forgive- ness for feeling innocent. (Think of the scene where Hamlet asks his mother to forgive him his own virtue, to forgive him in sum for hav- ing nothing to forgive him for, to forgive Hamlet the fact that he has nothing to be forgiven for: pardon me my virtue, he says in sum to Gertrude; and perhaps it is also on Rousseau's part another address of the same discourse of innocence to his mother. )
When I set out the next day to put this resolution into practice [the reso- lution to examine the subject of falsehood], my first thought on begin- ning to reflect was of a terrible lie I had told in my early youth, a lie the memory of which has troubled me all my life and even now, in my old age, adds sorrow to a heart already suffering in so many other ways. This lie, which was a great crime in itself, was doubtless still more evil in its effects; these have remained unknown to me, but remorse has painted them to me in the cruelest possible colors. Yet, if one were to consider only my state of mind at the time, this lie was simply the prod- uct of false shame, and far from its being the result of a desire to harm the girl who was its victim, I can swear to Heaven that at the very mo- ment when this invincible shame dragged it from me, I would joyfully have given my life's blood to deflect the blow on to myself alone. It was a moment of irresponsible folly which I can only explain by saying what I feel to be true, that all the wishes of my heart were conquered by my innate timidity.
The memory of this deplorable act and the undying remorse it left me, instilled in me a horror of falsehood that ought to have preserved my heart from this vice for the rest of my life. . . .
What surprised me most was that when I recalled these fabrications I felt no real repentance. I, whose horror of falsehood outweighs all my other feelings, who would willingly face torture rather than tell a lie, by what strange inconsistency could I lie so cheerfully without compulsion or profit, and by what incredible contradiction could I do so without the slightest twinge of regret, when remorse for a lie has continually tormented me these fifty years? I have never hardened myself against
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my faults; my moral sense has always been a faithful guide to me, my conscience has retained its original integrity, and even if it might be cor- rupted and swayed by my personal interests, how could I explain that, remaining firm and unmoved on those occasions when a man can at least excuse himself by his weakness in the face of passion, it loses its integrity precisely over those unimportant matters where vice has no excuse? (63-65)
"I can swear to Heaven," "Je puis jurer a` la face du ciel," says the Fourth Promenade. But he had abjured many years earlier. At the age of sixteen, a few months before the theft of the ribbon (a theft and a lie, a perjury confessed more than a decade earlier in book 2 of the Confessions but committed at the age of sixteen), Rousseau, then, ab- jures. At sixteen, he abjures Protestantism and converts to Catholicism. A few pages earlier, before the recital of the theft, he had recounted how he was "led in procession to the metropolitan Church of Saint John to make a solemn abjuration" (73). This debate between Protestantism and Catholicism tormented the whole life of this citizen of Geneva who shared, as he tells us in the same book of the Confessions, "that aversion to Catholicism which is peculiar to our city. It was represent- ed to us as the blackest idolatry and its clergy were depicted in the most sordid colors" (67). Then, noting that "I did not exactly resolve to turn Catholic," he writes:
Protestants are generally better instructed than Catholics, and neces- sarily so, for their doctrine requires discussion, where the Roman faith demands submission. A Catholic must accept a decision imposed on him; a Protestant must learn to decide for himself. They were aware of this but they did not expect from my age and circumstances that I should present any great difficulty to men of experience. (69)
Couldn't one say that Catholicism is more machine-like, machinistic, mechanistic, and therefore more literalist, whereas the Protestantism that Rousseau abjures is freer, more intentionalist, more decisionist, less mechanistic, less literalist, and therefore more spiritualist? Rousseau abjures and converts therefore mechanically to the Catholic mechanism; he abjures without having had the intention to abjure, he becomes a renegade without having resolved to do so, and what is more, and this is another mechanism, without being of an age to do so. Like an immature child, he mechanically pretends to abjure intention- alist and decisionist Protestantism; he feigns this event of rupture so as
to convert to mechanistic and authoritarian Catholicism. He feigns me- chanically to become mechanistic. But nothing happens in his heart; nothing happens. He converted mechanically, as if by chance, but op- portunistically, for the circumstance, with a`-propos, to a literalist and mechanistic religion of the a`-propos.
Apropos, remaining still on the edge of these things, on the barely preliminary threshold of what is going to interest us, since we have begun to wander or to rave deliriously apropos the kind of notations that seemed to me unavoidable upon a first rereading of these scenes, I also noticed something else, apropos of Catholicism and the debate, within Rousseau himself, between the Catholicism of his conver- sion and his originary Protestantism (the Catholicism of his conversion and of confession--since one-on-one confession to a confessor and Protestantism are mutually exclusive; the word confession, which means both the confession of sin and the profession of faith--and which has an enormous textual, semantic, and social history in the Bible--did not come to designate a Catholic, rather than Protestant, institution until well after Augustine's time). It so happens in fact that the recital of the theft of the ribbon begins right after the recital of the death of Mme de Vercellis, the Catholic woman in whose home the young Rousseau was both housed and employed, his "principal occu- pation" being, as he himself puts it, to "write [letters] at her dicta- tion. " Paul de Man, in "Excuses (Confessions)," devotes a note to this situation of the two accounts, to this linking of the two accounts (the death of Mme de Vercellis, then the theft of the ribbon). At the point at which de Man is seeking, as he puts it, "another form of desire than the desire of possession" with which to explain "the latter part of the story," the part that "bears the main performative burden of the ex- cuse and in which the crime is no longer that of theft," but rather of lying--and we will see in which sense, in particular for de Man, this crime excludes two forms of desire, the simple desire or love for Marion and a hidden desire of the Oedipal type--at this point, then, de Man adds the following note: "The embarrassing story of Rousseau's rejec- tion by Mme de Vercellis, who is dying of a cancer of the breast, imme- diately precedes the story of Marion, but nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection" (285; emphasis added).
I have underscored the phrase "nothing in the text. "
No doubt de Man is right to beware a grossly Oedipal scheme (but there are more refined Oedipal schemes) and I am not about to plunge
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headfirst into such a scheme in my turn; he is also no doubt right to say that "nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection. " But what does "nothing" mean here? "Nothing in the text"? How can one be sure of "nothing" suggested in a text? Of a "nothing in a text"? And if really "nothing" suggested this Oedipal substitution, how does one explain that de Man thought of it? And that he devotes a footnote to it? (Apropos, I might ask moreover, for the fun of it, whether every footnote is not Oedipal. In pure apropos logic, is not a footnote a symptomatic swelling, the swollen foot of a text hindered in its step- by-step advance? ) How does one explain that de Man devotes an embarrassed footnote to all this in which he excludes that the "em- barrassing story," as he puts it, suggests an Oedipal substitution of Marion for Mme de Vercellis, that is to say, first of all of Mme de Vercellis for Maman? For Mme de Vercellis immediately succeeds Maman in the narrative, the same year, the year he turns sixteen. She succeeds Mme de Warens, whose acquaintance Rousseau had made several months earlier--and who had also recently converted to Catholicism, like the Calvinist Jean-Jacques.
It is, moreover, soon after this meeting that he travels on foot to Turin and finds shelter at the hospice of the Holy Spirit where he ab- jures. (This episode is told at the beginning of the Creed of a Priest of Savoy--a text that we ought to reread closely, in particular because it contains, at the end of its seventh chapter, an interesting comparison between the respective deaths of Socrates and Jesus, who both grant, but differently according to Rousseau, the first his blessing and the sec- ond his forgiveness to their executioners, the first conducting himself as a man, the other as a God. The conclusion of the book recommends the wager of remaining in the religion of one's birth. Yes, the wager, in the quasi-Pascalian sense of the machine, because it is the best calcula- tion, in case of error, with which to obtain the excuse or the forgive- ness of God. Here is the argument, in which I underscore the lexicon of excuse and of pardon or forgiveness:
You will feel that, in the uncertainty in which we find ourselves, it is an in- excusable presumption to profess another religion than the one in which you were born, and a falsehood not to practice sincerely the one you pro- fess. If you wander from it, you deprive yourself of a great excuse before the throne of the sovereign judge. Will he not rather pardon the error in which you were reared than one which you dared choose yourself? 7
I return now to my question concerning the substitution among all these women, who are more or less mothers and Catholics by more or less recent confession. )
If one supposes that there is nothing, as de Man notes, "nothing" positive in the text to suggest positively this substitution, "nothing" in the content of the accounts, what is the meaning of the mere juxtaposi- tion, the absolute proximity in the time of the narration, the simple linking of places, there where de Man says that "nothing in the text [what does "in" the text mean here? ] suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection" (moreover, I don't see the reason to speak here of rejec- tion: there is no more a simple rejection of one than of the other)? The mere concatenation of places, the sequential juxtaposition of the two accounts is not nothing, if one wanted to psychoanalyze things. The juxtaposition of the two accounts, even if nothing but chronological succession seems to justify it, is not "nothing in the text," it is not a textual nothing even if there is nothing, nothing else, in the text. Even if there were nothing else that was posed, nothing positive, this topology of sequential juxtaposition can have by itself a metonymic force, the very force that will have suggested to de Man's mind the hypothesis of the substitution that he nevertheless excludes. In order to exclude it, it still has to present itself to the mind with some seduction. It still has to be tempting. And the temptation suffices. We are talking here only about temptation and forbidden fruit. So even if there were nothing in the text of these two accounts, the simple topographic or sequential juxtaposition is "in the text," it constitutes the text itself and can be interpreted: it is interpretable, I don't say necessarily in an Oedipal fashion, but it is interpretable. One must and one cannot not interpret it; it cannot be simply insignificant.
Two series of arguments could confirm this interpretability. One concerns this time the content of the two accounts; the other, once again, their form and their place, their situation, their localization. I will not insist on the content; however, a very large number of traits that you would not fail to recognize, stretching over many pages, de- scribe the at once amorous and filial attachment that Rousseau feels for Mme de Vercellis, whose appearance succeeds the meeting with Mme de Warens in the second book of the Confessions. Mme de Vercellis, a widow without children, as he repeats several times, suffered from a "cancer of the breast," which he also comes back to innumerable times. This illness of the maternal breast, "which gave her great pain,"
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he writes, "prevented her from writing herself. " Jean-Jacques becomes, by reason of this infirmity, her penholder; he holds her pen like a secre- tary, he writes in her place; he becomes her pen, her hand, or her arm, for "she liked writing letters. " On the scenes of letters and testaments that follow, we could offer infinite glosses, before coming back to a topography of the border, of border substitution at the border, of par- ergonal composition in which we find once again in passing both the memory of the abjuration (thus the frontier "Protestantism- Catholicism" as passage from childhood to adulthood in a sort of in- ternal history of the confessions, of the confession) and what I will en- title the last word of the other and of self, the double silence on which the double episode closes: that of the theft-lie that wrongs Marion and that of the death of the stepmother, the childless widow, the death of Mme de Vercellis. Rousseau praises Mme de Vercellis even as he speaks ill of her. He also criticizes her insensitivity, her indifference, and more precisely her lack of mercy [mise? ricorde], of "commisera- tion": as if she had no mercy, no heart, or, for a mother, no breast. She is, moreover, going to die from that, from the illness called, and that Rousseau also calls literally, "cancer of the breast" and that will have eaten away her breast. What good she does, she does mechanically, au- tomatically, out of duty and not from the heart ("She always seemed to me to have as little feeling for others as for herself; and when she did a kindness to anyone in misfortune, it was in order to do something good on principle, rather than out of true commiseration" [84]). More- over, the breast is the heart and the place of commiseration, especially for Rousseau. A few pages after these allusions to the "cancer of the breast" and to the double expiration of Mme de Vercellis, who lacks commiseration, Rousseau writes this, in which I underline a certain "not even":
Nevertheless I have never been able to bring myself to relieve my heart by revealing this in private to a friend. Not with the most intimate friend, not even with Mme de Warens, has this been possible. The most that I could do was to confess that I had a terrible deed on my con- science, but I have never said in what it consisted. The burden, there- fore, has rested till this day on my conscience without any relief; and I can affirm that the desire to some extent to rid myself of it has greatly contributed to my resolution of writing these Confessions. (88)
Twice a last word, I said. A double silence comes to seal irreversibly an end. Here, first of all, is the first last word:
She liked writing letters, which diverted her mind from her illness. But they put her against the habit, and got the doctor to make her give it up, on the plea that it was too tiring for her. On the pretense that I did not understand my duties, two great louts of chairmen were put in my place. In the end they were so successful that when she made her will I had not entered her room for a week. It is true that after that I went in as before. Indeed I was more attentive to her than anyone else, for the poor woman's suffering tore my heart, and the fortitude with which she bore it inspired me with the greatest respect and affection for her. Many were the genuine tears I shed in her room without her or anyone else noticing it.
Finally we lost her. I watched her die. She had lived like a woman of talents and intelligence; she died like a philosopher. I may say that she made the Catholic religion seem beautiful to me, by the serenity of heart with which she fulfilled its instructions, without either carelessness or affectation. She was of a serious nature. Towards the end of her illness she displayed a sort of gaiety too unbroken to be assumed, which was merely a counterpoise to her melancholy condition, the gift of her rea- son. She only kept her bed for the last two days, and continued to con- verse quietly with everyone to the last. Finally when she could no longer talk and was already in her death agony, she broke wind loudly. "Good," she said, turning over, "a woman who can fart is not dead. " Those were the last words she spoke. (85-86)
Here now the second and last last word. After this fart, this last breath, this agony, and these "last words she spoke" like a double ex- piration, a fart and a testamentary metalanguage on a next-to-the-last breath, here is the last last word, right at the end of the account of the ribbon that itself follows without transition the double expiration of Mme de Vercellis. After it was said of her "Finally . . . she could no longer talk," she still farts and adds a living, surviving gloss, the fart, to this after-the-last word. Here, then, is the absolute last word, after the respect due to Marion will have been, like the young girl herself, violated both by the theft and by the lie, that is, by the perjury, by the false testimony accusing Marion to excuse himself. I read this conclu- sion beginning with the allusion to age, which shows clearly that, even if Rousseau, at least at this point, does not say, like Augustine, "I was sixteen years old," he underscores the element of his age as an essential feature of the story, a feature that both accuses and excuses him, accus- es and charges him, condemns him all the more but clears him of guilt by the same token, automatically.
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My age also should be taken into account. I was scarcely more than a child. Indeed I still was one. In youth real crimes are even more repre- hensible than in riper years; but what is no more than weakness is much less blameworthy, and really my crime amounted to no more than weakness. So the memory tortures me less on account of the crime itself than because of its possible evil consequences. But I have derived some benefit from the terrible impression left with me by the sole offense I have committed. For it has secured me for the rest of my life against any act that might prove criminal in its results. I think also that my loathing of untruth derives to a large extent from my having told that one wicked lie. If this is a crime that can be expiated, as I venture to believe, it must have been atoned for by all the misfortunes that have crowded the end of my life, by forty years of honest and upright behavior under difficult circumstances. Poor Marion finds so many avengers in this world that, however great my offense against her may have been, I have little fear of carrying the sin on my conscience at death. That is all I have to say on the subject. May I never have to speak of it again.
He will speak of it again, of course, as if he had gotten a second wind in his turn in the Re^veries. And there again, he will call Marion "poor Marion" (74).
On the subject still of this age of sixteen years, what must one say? Although, of course, Rousseau does not indicate his age at the moment of the story of the ribbon, he proliferates to a really obsessive degree remarks about his age in the first two books of the Confessions. Apropos, since we are talking about substitutions (Marion for Mme de Vercellis, Mme de Vercellis who succeeds Mme de Warens--and the logic of the a`-propos is also a logic of substitution), some months earli- er in the same year, 1728, in April, a few months before the death of Mme de Vercellis, therefore before the theft and the lie of the ribbon, Rousseau meets Mme de Warens. This is the beginning, as you know, of his singular passion for the one he called Maman. Well, almost in the very sentence in which he notes the first meeting with Mme de Warens, like Saint Augustine he makes note of his age, sixteen years:
"Finally I arrived and saw Mme de Warens. This stage in my life has been decisive in the formation of my character, and I cannot make up my mind to pass lightly over it. I was half way through my sixteenth year and, without being what is called a handsome youth, I was well- made for my modest size, had a pretty foot, a fine leg . . . (54-55)
The same year, the year he was sixteen, decides his life twice. And in the same second book of the Confessions, this decision is distributed over a single sequence of metonymic transitions; one sees the succes- sion there, all along the same chain of quasi substitutions, before "poor Marion," the Catholic Mme de Warens, and the no less Catholic Mme de Vercellis, Marion and the theft-lie of the ribbon. I will not exploit this Marial chain of three women to whom a desire without desire links him as to the breast of a virgin mother. I will not exploit the name of poor Marion so as to recognize the diminutive figure in a scene of passion and martyrdom. But who could deny that Jean- Jacques puts himself on a cross, even as he seems to de-Christianize the Augustinian confession? "Sooner or later," "dans les sie`cles des sie`cles," as one says in Christian rhetoric, people will know he has suf- fered and expiated as an innocent martyr for all men, and at the hands of the wicked men who do not know what they do. And God the fa- ther is not to be accused of it. 8
II
Over three pages, toward the end, the second book of the Confessions multiplies the ends, its own ends. It divides them and doubles them. Two ends, and two times a last word: first, the double expiration of Mme de Vercellis ("Those were the last words she spoke"), then the very last word of the chapter, the end of the story of the ribbon ("May I never have to speak of it again").
The first "last words," attributed to the dying woman, belong to a sentence in the constative form, in the past: this is what she said. The last last word, however, forms a performative sentence, at once a wish, a promise, a commitment, or a prayer in the first person: this is what I myself say, now, for the future. Although its grammar is such that, at least in French, the first person is not a subject, the "I" reappears in the English translation ("Qu'il me soit permis de n'en reparler jamais"; "May I never have to speak of it again").
These two occurrences of a last word sink into the abyssal depths of a palimpsest. "Within such limits," we will not have time to reinscribe them in the endless archive of last words that are not words of the end: from Socrates' last word in an apologetic scene in the Hippias Minor to Blanchot's Le dernier mot, passing by way of Austin's "A Plea for Excuses"--this address that speaks to us also of machines and of a "complicated internal machinery," even as it explains in passing that, although ordinary language is not the last word, it is in any case the
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first ("ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can be sup- plemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word"; the question of "ordinary language" is perhaps, apro- pos, the real question of "A Plea for Excuses"). 9 At a certain moment, Blanchot's Le dernier mot (1935) takes the figure of the French expres- sion "il y a. " I would have been tempted to relate this moment to the long meditation by Levinas on the "il y a. " For this problematic of the "il y a" (in ordinary, which is to say untranslatable, French) has a per- tinence for our conference. But I must leave this for another time.
One could also reread the whole de Manian interpretation of the purloined ribbon as the displacement of a "last word. " The last word of the Confessions on this subject, the ultimate decision which he would like never to have to go back on ("May I never have to speak of it again," "Qu'il me soit permis de n'en reparler jamais"), was, accord- ing to de Man, only the next-to-last. Rousseau will have to reiterate this confession many years later, in the Re^veries, which delivers the last last word. One of the many interesting and original things about the de Manian analysis is that it takes into account this difference between the very last word and the next-to-last, and it mobilizes what seems necessary in order to explain the history and the mechanism that trans- forms the last into the next-to-last.
If I insist on this paradoxical instance of the "last word," it is be- cause forgiveness or pardon, the excuse, and the remission of sin, ab- solute absolution are always proposed in the figure, so to speak, of the "last word. " A pardon that is not granted with the assurance, the promise, or in any case the meaning of a last word, or an end of his- tory (even if it is according to the virtualizing logic of the "sooner or later"), would that still be a pardon? Hence the disturbing proximity the pardon maintains with the last judgment--which nevertheless it is not. A pardon does not judge; it transcends all judgment, whether penal or not. Foreign to the courtroom, it nevertheless remains as close as possible to the verdict, to the "veridictum," by the irresistible and ir- reversible force it has as, precisely, "last word. " I forgive you has the structure of the last word, hence its apocalyptic and millenarian aura; hence the sign it makes in the direction of the end of time and the end of history. We will later get around to this concept of history that de Man wants to link not to time ("History is therefore not a temporal notion," as he will say in "Kant and Schiller")10 but to "power," to the "event," and to the "occurrence. " I have tried to show elsewhere that what I call "le mal d'archive" has to do with the fact that the archive,
which is always finite and therefore selective, interpretive, filtering, and filtered, censuring, and repressive, always figures a place and an in- stance of power. 11 Destined to the virtuality of the "sooner or later," the archive produces the event no less than it records or consigns it.
After having analyzed two long series of possible readings, de Man explains, then, these two times of the end: after a certain failure of the confession in the Confessions (begun in 1764-65, the second part com- pleted at the latest in 1767 and the whole in 1770), after this first last word, Rousseau was to write the Fourth Promenade (in 1777, there- fore at least ten years later). The last word of the Confessions would thus have marked a failure. After the avowal, the vow ("May I never have to speak of it again") does not succeed in sealing an authentic last word signing the end of the story or of history. According to de Man, this failure, this becoming next-to-last of the last is what motivated, compulsively, the writing of the Fourth Promenade and the return, let us not say the repentance, the rewriting of the confession in the form of excuse.
But the text offers further possibilities. The analysis of shame as excuse makes evident the strong link between the performance of excuses and the act of understanding. It has led to the problematics of hiding and revealing, which are clearly problematics of cognition. Excuse occurs within an epistemological twilight zone between knowing and not- knowing; this is also why it has to be centered on the crime of lying and why Rousseau can excuse himself for everything provided he can be ex- cused for lying. When this turns out not to have been the case, when his claim to have lived for the sake of truth (vitam impendere vero) is being contested from the outside, the closure of excuse ("qu'il me soit permis de n'en reparler jamais") becomes a delusion and the Fourth Re^verie has to be written. (286)
How is one to understand this incessant passage that transports and deports beyond the last word of excuse, from the Confessions to the Re^veries, for example? De Man himself here calls upon a logic of sup- plementarity to explain the relation between excuse and guilt. Far from effacing guilt, far from leading to the "without-fault" or the "without- defect," excuses add to it, they engender and augment the fault. The "plus de faute," "no more fault" (innocence), becomes right away the "plus de faute," all the more fault (endless guilt). 12 The more one ex- cuses oneself, the more one admits that one is guilty and the more one feels guilt. Guilty of excusing oneself. By excusing oneself. The more
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one excuses oneself, the less one clears oneself. Guilt is thus an in- effaceable inscription, inexorable because inexonerable (this will be de Man's lexicon). The written excuse produces guilt. The inscription of the work, l'oeuvre, the event of a written text generates and capitalizes a sort of interest (I won't be so bold as to say surplus value) of guilt. It overproduces this shame, it archives it instead of effacing it. I under- score effacing or exonerating, and inexonerable guilt, for two reasons of unequal importance. Here first is the passage where all of these threads are knotted together in the most visible and tightly wound fashion:
Excuses generate the very guilt they exonerate, though always in excess or by default. At the end of the Re^verie there is a lot more guilt around than we had at the start: Rousseau's indulgence in what he calls, in an- other bodily metaphor, "le plaisir d'e? crire" [the phrase occurs at the end of the Fourth Promenade], leaves him guiltier than ever. . . . Additional guilt means additional excuse. . . . No excuse can ever hope to catch up with such a proliferation of guilt. On the other hand, any guilt, includ- ing the guilty pleasure of writing the Fourth Re^verie, can always be dis- missed as the gratuitous product of a textual grammar or a radical fic- tion: there can never be enough guilt around to match the text-machine's infinite power to excuse. (Ibid.