by LOUIS ARMAND

... In Nietzsche et le cerle vicieux, Pierre Klossowski asks: how can a doctrine of the Eternal Return even be possible if the experience of it destroys the subject in whom it occurs and marks a rupture in thought and in time? A possible "response" to this question may be found in Derrida's notion of différance which, drawing on the history of the subject's "destruction" in Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Lacan, marks a radical de-marcation of western metaphysical thought centred on the cogito and the history of Being as presence.

It is worth noting Klossowski's presupposition of a subject prior to an experience of the Eternal Return. Rather, and without intending to be too elliptical, one could suggest that it is precisely because of the experience or "event" of the Eternal Return that the subject is able to inscribe itself in its being qua subject (which would include, without commencing with, the formulation of the Cartesian subject). One might also say that the Eternal Return only exists qua Eternal Return precisely because it does not achieve purposive unity, in the Kantian sense, and so marks a "delimiting of subjecthood," and also because it does not allow itself to be conceived within any teleological, historicist framework.

1.

Summing up his theory of the mirror stage [stade du miroir], Lacan states that 'the formation of the 'I' as we experience it in psychoanalysis ... leads us to oppose any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito.'<1> He thus sets the scene at the beginning of his theoretical project for a consideration of the subject as a function not of the cogito but of the gaze (of the Other), the unconscious, and therefore of desire.

According to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, the individual, through a dialogue or discourse with its Gestalt, 'constructs' an idea of itself that is at best described as contradictorily coherent,<2> since the process by which the subject is situated as the 'I' in language is a process of estrangement. Following from a recognition of its mirror image as being the 'same' as itself, the subject then begins to recognise certain 'differences' between itself and its image that qualify to a varying degree the former identification, so that this image 'symbolises the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination.'<3>

Of course one should immediately qualify this by saying that, despite the apparent "totality" of this dialectical model of recognition and difference, at no point does the "subject" stand outside its differential configuration as if it were an observer. The subject is only a subject within the symbolic order, the order of difference, and thus it will already function according to the symbolic when, according to Lacan, recognition "first" takes place. It is already possible at this point to recognise in Lacan's dialectic a signifying structure (and Lacan himself will later acknowledge that the "entrance" into the symbolic is already itself no more than a ruse of language, just as Freud recognised the symbolic function of 'primal repression' as the impetus of a repetition compulsion). What arises from Lacan's theory, then, is that the 'I' in language functions both as the universal signifier of the subject, and as an object within the subject's discourse-and that this function describes the 'fundamental' nature of subjectivity itself. Thus for Lacan:

it is a question of recentring the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that which, at first site, it presents itself as speaking.<4>

This failure of the symbolic to achieve a totality or unity of meaning suggests that the dialectic of identification, along with the order of the symbolic, remains open at its limits to an alterior discourse by which it can be said to be "organised" by the recurrence of an event of the Other. As a consequence the subject is conceived as being 'split' in regards to itself-its desire for a recuperation of 'self' remaining 'asymptotic'-so that it can never properly be one with the assumption of its desire.<5>

Lacan later describes this asymptotic movement in terms of a vanishing and 'punctiform' bar that divides signifiers from "signifieds" (at the same time as simulating a discourse between them through the reflexive and dissimulating play of signifiers) in what amounts to a re-writing of the Saussurean diagram of the Sign using the algorithm (S/s) to represent 'la topique de l'inconscient,' or the 'metaphorical relationship between conscious and unconscious'; the liminal space (/) by which signification is brought into play as differed-differing presence or glissage.<6> Derrida's critique of the (Husserlean) Sign goes a step beyond Lacan's re-formulation, in that Derrida asserts there can be no 'signified' that is not already a 'signifier',<7> thus eliminating the tendency in the Lacanian schema to defer to a latent or unconscious signified (cf. his concept of the 'Real') that is not already at play in the system of differences that constitute language.

The (conscious) subject, in other words, can gain no 'access' to its prehistoric past unmediated by the language of the symbolic order within which it is indelibly inscribed, or, according to the Derridean motto, il n'y a pas de hors texte.<8> This situation is attributed by Lacan to a fundamental 'return of the repressed'<9> that marks the occultation of the advent of signification (wherein the "repressed" signals not some "thing" which has been excluded and which returns in the form, for instance, of a ghost, but rather it signals the "return" itself, as the return of the repressed); the discourse of the Other as a topology of various taboos or prohibitions.<10> In short, such a "return" marks the 'subjection of the subject to the signifier' and inscribes the 'circular' trajectory of the subject's desire through the locus of the Other 'for lack of being able to end on anything other than its own scansion, in other words, for lack of an act in which it would find its certainty' (viz. the Nietzschean concept of the Eternal Return).<11>

The Lacanian Other, the absolute alterity and possibility of the subject, always stands 'outside' the dialectical movement of identification (as its referent), so that the subject and its 'objects' do not constitute an 'opposition' in a properly metaphysical sense.<12> The advent of the signifier facilitates the subject-dialectic but does not close off the subject as a total entity. There is no final raising-up or Aufhebung through which the subject can come to (it)self in its own-most potentiality for being (it)self. Nor does the advent of the signifier centre the dialectical structure, rather it poses the dialectical relation as one inaugurated by a fundamental "misrecognition" or mesconnaissance. The event of the signifier hence inscribes what we might call a hermeneutical will within the "destiny" of the sign: inaugurating the desire for a transcendental signified and at the same time marking the permanent deferral of that desire).

The sign, according to Derrida, 'is from its origin and to the core of its sense' marked by a paradoxical 'will to derivation and effacement',<13> so that every 'significatory event is a substitute (for the signified as well as the ideal form of the signifier).'<14> Since there can be no concept of a sign without signification, and since what is signified is absent from the scene of the desire of the signifier (except insofar as it "represents" that desire as something "belonging" to the other of the signifier), then the desire of language itself should be thought as always already divided from itself in an irrecoverable fashion. The implication of this for the subject, constituted as it is through its relation to and in signification, is an indefinite deferral of its assumption of 'self' through a proliferation of discourse; the substituting of 'incessant deciphering for the unveiling of truth as the presentation of the thing in its presence' (again, viz. Eternal Return).<15>

The subject, continuing from Lacan, projects its desire onto objects (from which it appears to have split itself off) and internalises those objects in the process of constructing self-identity. Consequently the subject internalises the differences which define it against everything that it is not, so that the 'horizon' marking the subject's desire is both consumed and consummated in an on-going process of 'inscription' and 'effacement.' This process, the incessant substitution of signifiers,<16> and the resultant significatory chain (of metaphor and metonymy), can otherwise be considered as both the elision and horizon of the subject.

This horizon is also characterised as the play of significatory forces that arise within a signifier, multiplying its possible significations in such a way that the signifier is made to 'waver', as a 'vibration of grammar in the voice,'<17> allowing more than one meaning to be 'heard.' One recalls the Freudian theory of neurotic symptoms and of dream interpretation, in which a given symbol is understood to resonate simultaneously with conscious and unconscious significations, serving contradictorily as both the desire to fulfil an impulse and the desire to suppress an impulse. It is therefore possible to say that the 'consumption-consummation' of the (desired) other or subjective horizon 'never 'really' takes place. It hovers between desire and fulfilment,'<18> so that the subject is always suspended in the 'between', in such a way that it can be said that the subjectification of the subject to the signifier constitutes the subject as the subject of desire and not that of a reflexive consciousness.<19>

2.

When we speak of the horizon of the subject, of the subject's perpetual hesitation "toward" the Other, of a general suspension of the subject's assumption of its desired self, what we are beginning to address is precisely the question of the gaze.

Hélene Cixous, writing on the work of James Joyce, has suggested that we can account for this "hesitation" in the configuration of the subject by considering the text (textuality in general) to be "crossed right through by a subject-waiting-for-itself" which would assume the "formal appearance of a quest"<20>-a quest we might otherwise acknowledge as what we have already called the hermeneutical will. This hermeneutical will becomes, in Derrida's text, the perpetual differed-deferral of the subject's desire (as the desire of the Other); so that the "subject-waiting-for-itself" will effectively come to symbolise, in Lacanian terms, its "own vanishing and punctiform bar in the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself seeing oneself, in which the gaze is elided." However, the gaze that the subject encounters "is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined [by the subject] in the field of the Other";<21> a bi-partition of the Other and its so-called semblance. In the elision of the gaze the Other gives of itself a mask, a double or a ghost.

This bi-partition marks the punctiform and evanescent function of the Saussurean algorithm S/s. The mark of division (graphically proximate to the English pronoun I) denotes a general displacement in the modality of reference: it arrests the subject in its desire for the Other, but does not substitute itself as a stable referent in place of the Other (it remains only as supplementarity -precisely as the horizon of subjectivity). No sooner does the Other's phantom "present" itself than it fades, diffused with other significations (cf. again Lacan's notion of glissage).

This punctiform, evanescent function is also evident in Lacan's mirror metaphor, allowing at least a tentative glimpse at the (textual) difference that separates, however tropically, the eye from the gaze - a difference which is also the topos of (a) desire.

For Lacan so-called desire of the subject thus "originates," or rather is "received" by the subject in the form of a gift, as the desire of the Other. Thus we can also say that the eye of the subject is situated, according to (a narrative of) the scopic field of the Other, in a reflexive way; as a series of evasions (the elision of the gaze) by which is meant the desire of the subject to glimpse what is going on "behind" the mirror, or in the tain of the mirror: between the "I" that designates the subject and the spoken "I." (This narrative - "'I' say I" or the illusion of "I see I, I see myself seeing myself" - would be nothing more than a romance of the trace.)

3.

[...]

"Effaced before being written. If the word trace can be admitted, it is as the index that would indicate as erased what was, however, never traced. All our writing... would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present but in the past to come."<22>

The trace signifies for Blanchot, as for Derrida, the lack of an origin, because the trace never offers the recuperation of an original marking. Moreover, although the trace does not "destroy" referentiality (Derrida insists that language will continue to refer to its Other) it does not posit itself in a temporal relationship with its "referent" in any way that can be articulated according to a concept of priority. Blanchot writes:

The mark, it is to be missing from the present and to make the present lack. And the trace, being always traces, does not refer to any initial presence that would still be there as remainder or vestige, there where it has disappeared.23

The step beyond, the recuperation of the referent as a transcendental signified, and hence of a phenomenological "revealing of truth," will not be accomplished (in Lacan's text this is exemplified by the subject's retracing of his own steps, traversing familiar terrain with an acute experience of the uncanny, mapping, according to Freud's notion of the Unheimlich, the topology of the subject's desire as the discourse of the Other). The Eternal Return of the trace marks the impossibility of transgression. And it is no accident that I say here that the Eternal Return of the trace marks. It calls for another limit, it institutes its own crossing:

The circle of the law is this: there must be a crossing in order for there to be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as uncrossable, summons to cross, affirms the desire (the false step) that has always already, through an unforeseeable movement, crossed the line.<24>

Thus we might say that the subject, inscribed through its "affirming" experience of the Eternal Return (of the letter, the signifier), inscribes itself as its own transgression (effacement, or "destruction" according to Klossowski).

[...]

4.

Beginning on the first page of Severin's Journey into the Dark [Severins Gang in die Finsternis] is a reference to a gaze that will, quite surreptitiously, quite invisibly almost, structure the text from the outset. Moreover, it will introduce the reader, by various metaphors, into a "web" of associations congruous with those that have already begun to be outlined via the texts of Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot (and Nietzsche).

Leppin writes of Severin:

The relentless monotony made his hands tremble. A disturbing weariness bored into his temples and, with his fingers, he pushed his eyeballs into his head until they started to hurt. For an entire rainy October week he had not seen Zdenka. Every day her letters begged him to come to her, but he pushed them aside with irritation and did not answer them. Zdenka could not fulfil the wishes that had begun to stir in the half-articulated rhythm of his blood... With his eyes wide open he looked into the city, where people were moving like phantoms. (13-14)

The motifs of desire, of the letter, and of the gaze are already manifest here. Also the motif of the phantasm or spectre (the book is subtitled "A Prague Ghost Story") recalling Derrida's reading of spectrality (Specters of Marx) and of a certain "haunting" of metaphysics in the work of Nietzsche (Spurs):

Distance-woman-averts truth-the philosopher. She bestows the idea. And the idea becomes transcendent, inaccessible, seductive. It beckons from afar... Its veils float in the distance. The dream of death begins.<25>

Our attention, in Severin's Journey, is continually drawn to the manifold topology of women; its constant shifting between virgins, society prostitutes, mothers, daughters, wives, phantasms, all of whom seem to coalesce as a paradigm for the desire of the subject, and yet who remain multiple, variegated, contradictory even. Moreover, woman, and her "ultimate" association, in Leppin's text, with the spider and its "web", calls to the inner ear of the subject's will with a Circean allure ("half-articulated rhythms"); a call which Derrida situates in the "ever veiled promise of transcendence."<26>

[...]

The subject, as Lacan repeatedly emphasised, is never resolved in its own relation to, and as, the ghost of the signifier. It vacillates always in the between, or "fold", of signification-between the eye and the gaze-in the resistance of fantasy, where "the model is always the dreamt-of ghost."<27> This resistance marks the paradoxical economy of an "I" that speaks in what Lacan has called "the very lacunae of that in which, at first site, it presents itself as speaking."<28> The subject, marked from the outset by his estranged relationship to the letter and to the resonances of desire within language (symbolised by his relationship to the phantasms of the city and to the absence of Zdenka), is constantly deferred in this desire, throughout the text, from one fantasised object to another, precisely according to the elision of the gaze.

This gaze will have marked out in advance the Heimlich/Unheimlich mode of the subject's horizon of experience (of the Eternal Return). And not necessarily in the restricted sense of a de-familiarised terrain or topography of desire. Severin's journey is as much about migration and transgression, the stibogram, and the eternal recurrence of the same (and this same, of course, resonating with the sense of "différance"): this time as the Will to Power, infused with irony, laughter and derision.

Severin's "journey" begins with a defiant gesture aimed at his mundane mode of being. He misrecognises this gesture as an heroic overcoming until the final "epiphany" when, at the "moral" summit of his self-sacrifice, he is cast down into the depths of abjection with derisive laughter ringing in his ears (no longer the throbbing of desire in his blood). Ironically this laughter can also be interpreted as the Nietzschean affirmation, the yes-laughter of the Eternal Return. Severin, stubbornly self-pitying to the last, shares Klossowski's penchant for misrecognition. He sees the "Eternal Return" ("embodied" by the "slut" Mylada) as the catalyst of his fall.

Bataille characterises it differently:

Once you realize you've been abandoned and that your vanity has been rendered helpless between the absence of a solution and the banal answer of the mysteries of a self, there's nothing left in you but a wound.<29>

This is not simply an oscillation between Apollonian and Dionysian forces in a dialectical sense. We might say that there is something markedly Orphic about Leppin's text, especially as an allegory of writing, and here I defer to Blanchot's essay 'The Gaze of Orpheus':

Writing begins with Orpheus' gaze... [His] purpose is not to find Eurydice's daylight reality and superficial charm, but her nightmare darkness and elusiveness, her secret body and her inscrutable face... not to possess her in the intimacy of familiar surroundings but in the unfamiliarity of that which is deprived of intimacy, not to make her live but to perceive alive in her the fullness of her death.<30>

These words point to a strange prescience in the last lines of Severin's Journey, which tends neither to epiphany of transcendence, but to what Bataille has described as an experience of sovereignty - an intoxication arising from decrepitude, translating pathos into a teetering abasement:

A deadly shame threw him to the ground. He knelt down and laid his head in her lap. Sobbing overcame him and he began to cry. But the drunken laughter passed over him and transformed his tears to an unclean and burning sludge.

We might say that the climax of Severin's sudden eclipse is the distant memory of Orpheus' gaze, his wistful gaze toward the uncertainty of origins. Tears transformed to sludge - a sublimation which is not the metaphorics of an (Hegelian) Aufhebung. Severin's "fall" is rather the "affirmation" of an eternal return, what Bataille calls the "laughter at the summit" or the experience of soveriegnty in the yes-laughter that resonates between desire and derision [...]

NOTES

* All quotes from Leppin refer to the English edition of the text, Severin's Journey into the Dark, trans. Kevin Blahut (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1993).

1 Lacan: Ecrits: A Selection, 1.

2 Cf. Derrida: 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', Writing and Difference, 278.

3 Lacan: Ecrits, 2.

4 Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 83. See also Derrida: 'Coming to One's Own', 138: "A 'domain' opens up in which the 'inscription' of a subject in his text is also the necessary condition for the pertinence and performance of a text, for its 'worth' beyond what is called empirical subjectivity...."

5 Lacan: Ecrits, 45.

6 ibid, 146.

7 Derrida: 'Structure, Sign and Play...', 279-80.

8 Derrida: Of Grammatology, 158.

9 Derrida: 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', Writing and Difference, 196-7. Also Lacan: Ecrits, 4 and Heidegger: Being and Time, 219ff ["repression" as Verfallen and the undisclosedness of Dasein].

10 Lacan: Ecrits, 312: .".. the unconscious is 'discours de l'Autre.'"

11 ibid., 304. The "circularity" of the trajectory of the subject's desire - a circularity which remains unclosed and elliptical or decentred - is critiqued by Derrida in The Postcard, and The Ear of the Other as the structure of the subject's difference from itself and the situation of desire and signification in the field of the Other.

12 Cf. Derrida: 'Différance', Margins of Philosophy, p6: Différance marks that opening in which ontotheology "produces its systems and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return."

13 Derrida: Speech and Phenomena, 51.

14 ibid., 50.

15 Derrida: 'Différance', 18.

16 Lacan: Ecrits, 2-4. See also Hegel: The Philosophy of History, on 'Phases of Individuality Aesthetically Conditioned', 241-250.

17 Derrida: Cinders, 22.

18 Derrida: 'Dissemination', 343.

19 Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 89.

20 Cixous: 'Joyce and the (r)use of writing', in Post-structuralist Joyce, eds. Attridge & Ferrer, 15.

21 Lacan: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 84.

22 Blanchot: The Step Not Beyond, 17.

23 ibid., 54.

24 ibid., 24.

25 Derrida: Spurs, 51.

26 ibid., 89.

27 Derrida: The Truth in Painting, 217.

28 Lacan: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 83.

29 Bataille: Guilty, 14.

30 Blanchot: The Siren's Song, 180-181.

(c) LOUIS ARMAND, 1994. Louis Armand is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, and a lecturer in art history at the University of New York, Prague. He is the author of Techne: Joycean Hypertexts, Finnegans Wake and the Question of Technology. louis_armand@yahoo.com www.louis-armand.com

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