(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Parker, Andrew. Between Dialectics and Deconstruction: Derrida and the Reading of Marx (146-169)
Bahti. Timothy. Auerbach's Mimesis: Figural Structure and Historical Narrative
(124-145)
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Intellectual debates represent the most public aspects of changes within intellectual disciplines; these changes themselves often only reflect impulses and challenges issuing from thinkers and forces that may not reside within these disciplines' boundaries. As such a derivative phenomenon, our debates are not always an accurate barometer of what is actually going on in a way of thinking; they tend to exaggerate the importance of the new, and to underestimate the recently past. But even when they might be shown to be incorrect in their assessments, intellectual debates can serve to alert one to the perceived import of a shift within a discipline, and to the names and values being attributed to the antagonists.
I have in mind here the debates currently devoted to literary theory, a discipline of thought that scarcely existed in this country two decades ago but that today seems to dominate many journals, departmental decisions, and professional meetings. And my introductory remarks concern the character of public dissatisfaction with such literary theory. A decade or so ago, the accusations tended to be ethical or aesthetic in kind. The new theory, then still called "structuralism," was said to be antihumanist in preferring structure to substance, signs to reference, varieties of otherness to the surety of the self. This seemed to make it particularly pernicious, a kind of trahison des clercs or betrayal from within the very bastions of academic humanism. The aesthetic accusation was not unrelated to this ethical one. The more that textual meaning was said to be "open," "polyvalent," or "plural," the more the literary work of art lost its status as a unified product and artifact, along with its singular intent and meaning. What was at stake here was the image of a unified literary work as the correlative to either the unitary producer and producing period, or the similarly stable and reassured audience, the appreciative observer or reader. The ethical and aesthetic objections may thus be seen as two sides of the same coin, each imprinted with certain values of unity, and put into public circulation to counter what was perceived as a threat to the literary work or its "workers"—its authors and critics.
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Now we know that ethical humanism is a historical development arising with the Renaissance, and one of such tenacious staying power that even much later movements that would think of themselves as revolutionary—such as Marxism or existentialism—have seen fit to declare themselves "humanisms." But it is more important here to recall that Renaissance humanism is not only a historical development, but a development that arises from doing history, that is, from historical philology directed toward the distant past of the classics. Likewise, the aesthetic investment in the unity of the work of art is also a historical phenomenon—with Aristotelian and Horatian antecedents, but with its real efflorescence in the Renaissance and after—but in its most persuasive form in Kant's third Critique, it, too, is of a piece with a historical project, the project of guaranteeing a historical teleology of moral freedom. Thus, the two principal kinds of attacks upon recent literary theory—aesthetic and ethical—shared a historical foundation uniting formal properties and moral proprieties in a common narrative about the past and future.
This point, only briefly sketched and asserted here, allows me to turn toward the final remark I would make in introduction, and it concerns an apparent change in the critique of literary theory. As if the accusers had worked their way beyond the surfaces of the past attacks and arrived at the implicit assumptions that are at work there, the criticism today seems to be that much contemporary literary theory is ahistorical or even antihistorical. A critique such as Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism is organized historically, from its title and contents through its "method" of claiming to uncover the theorists' real sources and thus the real origins of their problems; and it proposes a revamped historical criticism as its alternative, an option proffered, for instance, in the chapter-heading "History or the Abyss." [n1] (One recalls the comedian's rejoinder: "Are those my only choices?") Other examples come readily to mind. Gerald Graff's Literature against Itself similarly would wish literature and literary criticism to be more responsive to their historical worlds once again. [n2] In the New York Times Book Review Robert Langbaum chides J. Hillis Miller for "rejecting that unfashionable discipline" of literary history while also still "doing" it in some sense, almost despite himself. [n3]
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Frederick Crews recently had a public pique, in which he complained that a "progress from historically informed interpretation to vapid attitudinizing could stand for the fate of much 'advanced' academic discourse over the past two decades" [n4]. And this pronouncement of lost historical thought does not only occur in the mode of accusation; sometimes it takes the more revealing form of an admission. Paul de Man's book Allegories of Reading begins with the confession that he set out to write a historical study of romanticism, and wound up with a theory of ahistorical reading instead.5 Likewise, it is sometimes the very dissenters from new trends in literary theory who acknowledge doubts about the viability of literary-historical criticism. Thus Rene Wellek is at once one of our most determined literary historians—in the realm of the history of criticism—and one who has come to despair of literary history's possibilities and potential: his late essay "The Fall of Literary History" frames symmetrically a career that began with such optimistic titles as "The Theory of Literary History" and The Rise of English Literary History [n6].
What I mean this collection of symptoms to suggest is neither a simplistic historical backlash to complex imported theory, nor an indisputable decline in historical writing and in faith in the historical; rather, these phenomena of our contemporary scene suggest how once again a battle between theoretical reflection and interpretive practice is being fought within a conventional opposition between history and the nonhistorical. This battle was fought by a previous generation in our Anglo-American context between the so-called New Critics and more materialist or Marxist historical critics; it was fought in France for decades between the university literary historians and a succession of antagonists, including the "Geneva School" phenomenologists, the French structuralists, and today's so-called "poststructuralists." In fact, this battle of and for the books is an ancient, as well as modern, quarrel: a frustration with literary theory takes recourse to "history"; a frustration with literary history finds theoretical justification, solace, or adventure in theory.
Rather than join in either a blind, polemical dispute about the virtues or naivetes of old-fashioned literary history, or a self-deluding complacency with regard to our knowledge that such disputes always go on, we might take the occasion of this apparent struggle between literary theory and literary history and pause to reflect upon their interaction in an exemplary case: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, from the Germany of the first half of this century.
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My claim that Auerbach's Mimesis is exemplary as literary history is not only that Auerbach's work is one of the few historically organized works of literary criticism that, like M. H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp, for example, still deserves and receives wide readership twenty-five or thirty-five years after its publication—in other words, that it stands a certain test of time as historical writing. Nor is my claim simply that the book stands as a monument to that postwar phenomenon that may be called "NATO humanism" and that survives in the countless "Great Books" courses of our curricula: the organization and teaching of a politicocultural view of the West as a continuous and ultimately consistent body of thought and discourse, the hallmarks of which are historical progress, democratic liberalism, a faith in individual man, and a tolerance of multiple gods. In this context, Auerbach's Mimesis continues to do service as an immensely useful—indeed, uncontested—pedagogic tool in this popular dissemination of literary high culture.
Instead, my claim for the work's exemplary status rests primarily on a recognition of its particular disciplinary or institutional achievements as a literary-historical argument. Mimesis established a term and concept—that of the "levels of style" and their mimetic power—as an indispensible element, at once thematic and methodological, in our literary-critical vocabulary. Considered thematically, the notion of "levels of style" is a key cog—apparently (and by his own word) the key cog—in Auerbach's machine of historical continuity. He traces the now well-known path from the classical doctrine of strictly distinguishable levels of style to that doctrine's initial disruption by the sermo humilis of the New Testament and its story of Christ's incarnation and passion. His narrative then moves on to the theoretical development of sermo humilis under Jerome, Augustine, and the exegetical method of figural interpretation; to the combination of mixed styles and figural representation in Dante; to the further levelling and inmixing of stylistic differences in such figures as Rabelais and Montaigne, Shakespeare and Schiller; until the final destruction of distinct levels of style is achieved, along with the fullest representation of contemporary social reality, by nineteenth-century French realism.
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But this enormous accomplishment—the historical argument about the mixing and levelling of levels of style for which Mimesis is probably best known—is, as I hinted, only one side of the book's critical achievement, the thematic side, that is. The other side is the methodological employment of style in Auerbach's work: not the historical theme of style as an object of study, then, but the critical practice of stylistics as a surprisingly elastic method. One recalls how almost every chapter begins with a stylistic analysis of a brief passage, and how Auerbach can then move from the passage to the work in question, from the work to the author, from the author to the period, and from the period to the history of all periods. This method—one might call it a synecdoche turned into metonymy's revenge—offers as powerful and influential a critical tool qua method as does Auerbach's argument regarding levels of style and representations of reality qua historical themes; and one may remark that in this metonymic elasticity of stylistics, his method represents philology at its most ambitious, implying a methodological continuum that extends from the smallest etymon or morphological unit to the largest dimensions of the histories of languages and literatures. [n7]
I do not wish to contest Auerbach's demonstrable achievements; they are what give Mimesis its critical value and make it worthy of critical scrutiny in its own right. Rather, in what follows I wish to expose and consider the structure whereby Auerbach comes to tell his historical story and arrive at these effects. But first let me situate Auerbach's work in its German intellectual milieu. Germany is exemplary of the problem of history and theory because the so-called "crisis" or "loss of faith" in historiography, and in literary history in particular, played itself out earlier and more decisively there than elsewhere in the West. Our own non-Germanic perspective may prevent our recognition of the stakes involved. French historians today are perhaps more positivistic, and more self-assured in their positivism, than ever; in America, we have many models—psychohistory, cliometrics, demographics, etc.—that professional historians employ with confidence. But since the war years, there have been virtually no outstanding German literary historians or "true believers" in the efficacy of literary historiography: instead there have been "work-immanent" interpreters, theoretical or Hegelian "Frankfurt School" analysts, or religious brooders on the one hand, and more or less vulgar historical materialists on the other.
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In fact, one can say that the most ambitious literary-historical projects by Germans were undertaken in states of exile: Benjamin's unfinished studies of Baudelaire and Paris in the nineteenth century, written in Paris; Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, written in what he called an "inner exile" within Hitler's Germany; Auerbach's Mimesis, written in Istanbul, followed by other historical studies written in this country. Indeed, it is my contention that even as Germany was the country that believed most profoundly and productively in the centrality of historical thinking in the nineteenth century, this heritage—largely the work of Hegel, Ranke, and Dilthey—runs aground or decays from within the German intellectual context at about the same time that it is being most powerfully absorbed into the larger Western context. As literary history flourished in France, England, Italy, and America from the 1860s to the early twentieth century, Germany witnessed the general and devastating critique of historicism delivered by Nietzsche and then Heidegger, and such specific and interestingly failed attempts at literary history as Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Lukacs's Theory of the Novel, and Benjamin's late studies.
Auerbach was aware of this" crisis" in German historical thinking after Hegel and the nineteenth century. On the one hand, he remained devoted to the tradition and saw his discipline of Romance philology as its heir; on the other hand, he sought alternative models for rejuvenated historical studies. As I have written elsewhere, [n8] Auerbach found such an alternative model in an amalgam of Vico's New Science with biblical and medieval figural interpretation. These two concerns—both as objects of historical study and as models for historiography—were in turn associated by Auerbach with the Hegelian problem of the "sublation" (Aufhebung) of historical change. The sublation of historical temporality involves the recuperation of change, loss, negation, and sheer difference through their systematic elevation from contingency to proper—that is, philosophic—meaning [n9]. Historical change is sublated within the philosophic process into the form and concept of its meaning; most succinctly, the truth of time—time's true meaning—manifests itself as the presence of truth, or absolute knowledge. I will have to summarize several points from this earlier essay before we turn to Auerbach's Mimesis to examine the construction of its history and the figural structure of its narrative.
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My first point is that Vico's apparent understanding of human nature—its languages, its institutions, its history (what he called its cose)—postulated at one and the same time the immanent unfolding of historical change and the providential storia ideale eterna. This synthesis is crucial to Auerbach's understanding of his project as a philologist and a literary historian. A second point is that Auerbach's understanding of Vico, while avowedly an attempt to distinguish him from German idealism and historicism, was nonetheless a highly Hegelian understanding, a fact explainable by the assimilation of Vico into post-Hegelian idealism before Auerbach, as well as by Auerbach's own Hegelian leanings. And a third point is that if Auerbach did not explicitly understand Vico's New Science as a treatise on the rhetorical method of historical construction and interpretation—as a work of rhetorical historiography in the sense of the figurative construction and operation of history in its narration and interpretation—this is because he did not need to: having already in hand his understanding of figura as a rhetorical structure at work within historiography.
Now what are the main points of Auerbach's understanding of figura? [n10] Briefly they are as follows. First, and essential to bear in mind, is his historical and philological thesis about figura. Figura could not have developed its exegetical and representational meaning and power without having first unfolded from its service as a philosophic term for the translation of the Greek schema and typos. From this, figura becomes a rhetorical term for the verbal distinctions between the real and the apparent or seeming, the straightforward and the stylized, the model and the copy, the true and the concealing—most basically, the distinction between the literal and the figurative. In other words, one cannot raise the objection that Auerbach's historical understanding of figural interpretation might have little to do with the theory of figurative language; on the contrary, "figural" in Auerbach's historical sense is grounded upon "figurative" in our conventional sense. A second crucial point may be made by juxtaposing several of Auerbach's definitional remarks on figura in the sense of figural biblical interpretation as it was developed by Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, and other early church fathers. On the one hand, the relational understanding of the figura as an event (in the Old Testament, and in history more broadly) that is prefigural or prophetic of a spiritual event and meaning (in the New Testament, and in Christian or salvation
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history more broadly) that would fulfill the figure [n11]—this relation between the figure and its fulfillment must be, Auerbach insists, between two equally real, concrete, historical events. "Real historical figures are to be interpreted spiritually, but the interpretation points to a carnal, hence historical fulfillment—for the truth has become history or flesh" (F, p. 34).
Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. . . . Both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future. . . since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which either have happened. . . or will happen. (F, p. 53)
And in a third quotation, this time from the epilogue to Mimesis, we read that "an occurrence on earth signifies not only itself but at the same time another, which it predicts or confirms, without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now." [n12] Auerbach's main point regarding figural interpretation is precisely that the "figural schema permits both its poles—the figura and its fulfillment—to retain the characteristics of concrete historical reality. . . so that figure and fulfillment—although the one 'signifies' the other—have a significance which is not incompatible with their being real" (p. 195). But if this is his main point, Auerbach must also recognize that the second pole, event, or sign is necessarily privileged over the first. He writes: "The fulfillment is often designated as veritas . . . and the figure correspondingly as umbra or imago"; but against the obvious disjunction and difference thus established between one event or sign as truthful, the other as merely shadow or image (or, in another patristic formulation, as merely imitatio veritatis, "the imitation of truth"), Auerbach then immediately adds: "But both shadow and truth are abstract only in reference to the meaning first concealed, then revealed; they are concrete in reference to the things or persons which appear as vehicles of the meaning" (F, p. 34). Truth and its shadow or foreshadowing are each concretely situated in the real, historical events which are the "vehicles of their meaning," and this despite the implied tension
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in the concept of figura as a relation between two signs, both of which are to remain real and historical, but the latter of which is to be the truth of the former's mere prefiguration.
The character of this tension may be further indicated by reference to two more aspects of Auerbach's essay "Figura." For one thing, Auerbach makes explicit the rhetorical or, more precisely, the figurative structure which underwrites this interpretive ambivalence between figural truth and its mere prefiguration:
Beside the opposition between figura and fulfillment or truth there appears another, between figura and historia; historia or littera is the literal sense or the event related; figura is the same literal meaning or event in reference to the fulfillment cloaked in it, and this fulfillment is veritas, so that figura becomes a middle term between littera-historia and veritas. (F, p. 47)
In other words, the tension between prefiguration and fulfillment—wherein the latter, as truth, would make the former be less than true, thereby endangering its value as concrete, historical reality—this tension is reduplicated in, or, more accurately, is already implied in the rhetorical structure of figural interpretation: one event, the figura, is historically literal but interpretively figural; the second, fulfilling event, also a historical event, is figuratively the truth (veritas) of the figura. Thus, there is already a first opposition between literal and figural in the figura or prefiguration itself; this then reappears as an opposition between the figura as historical sign, and the later figural truth (veritas) which "fulfills" it, or which reveals the "true" figurative meaning of that first figure.
The last aspect to which I would call attention in Auerbach's "Figura" essay regards this same point, and helps move our discussion back toward Mimesis and the question of its historiography. Auerbach must repeatedly attempt to explain how the fulfillment of a previous figure can avoid annihilating the value of the former's historical reality; he once writes that the latter term "fulfills and annuls" (erfullt und aufhebt, F, p. 51) the former; twenty pages later, he writes that the veritas will "unveil and preserve" (enthullend und bewahrend, F, p. 72) the figura.
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Cancel and preserve—this implies all the difficulty of sublation or Aufhebung in its speculative, Hegelian meaning. The initial figura has the double structure of littera-historia and spiritual meaning, although that meaning is not fulfilled until the advent of the veritas (say, Moses as a historical figure and as the sign of the Christ to come). Within the figura, then, the operation of cancelling-and-preserving the literal-historical event in the production of a spiritual sign seems to obey the economy of sublation. In the same manner, the veritas or fulfillment of this historical figura follows the pattern of the Hegelian "idealization" of phenomenal and historical experience, and so the veritas cancels-and-preserves the historical reality of the previous figura in fashioning truth through this elevation-and-negation. Yet that initial figura, as we have seen, itself displays the double structure of the figurative sign, that is, it is both literal and figurative. What would it mean for the veritas to cancel-and-preserve this sublation of the literal into the figurative which occurs within the very figura which the veritas fulfills? What is sublated, what is cancelled-and-yet-preserved, is precisely this first rhetorical sublation of the historical, the very double structure already at play within the beginning figura. Whatever the prior historical event might be, when it is taken to prefigure some later meaning, it becomes doubled (literal and figural), but the later "fulfillment" of the former's prefigural meaning must at once preserve the former's figural character—as the latter's sign, after all, as its prefiguration—and cancel it, render it nothing but a mere littera, annihilate it into a non-thing, a dead letter or a corpse. This is, I will now argue, the structure and operation of Mimesis: history, as historical reality and as the history of its realistic literary representation, is the historia et littera which, rendered figurative in the hands of Auerbach's figural interpretation, must at one and the same time perpetuate or preserve its figural character in a later fulfillment, and—as this very fulfillment—cancel itself to the extent that it is then merely the dead letter of some other figural meaning of "history."
I take as the operative instances of Mimesis's literary history the chapters on Dante and Flaubert: they are privileged by Auerbach in his epilogue as the two decisive moments, medieval and modern, in realism's overcoming of the doctrine of the levels of style; but as I shall show, Dante and Flaubert are also, in the exact language and texture of Auerbach's chapters, related to one another as prefiguration and fulfillment. When Dante is said by Auerbach to fulfill the structure of figural representation implied in the Christian and medieval concept of figura, and thereby to overcome the very concept which prizes the
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fulfillment over the literal figure, the spiritual truth over the literal historical event or life, he is also seen to carry over the structure of figura toward Flaubert, so that Dante prefigures the "real" fulfillment of Western realism in nineteenth-century French realism: Dante becomes the figure for Flaubert's truth. But if the fulfillment of figural interpretation by Dante is supposed to preserve and value the real historia et littera of the fulfilled figure, then when Flaubert fulfills the figura of Dante, there occurs necessarily the cancellation of Dante's apparent "truth" (now mere prefiguration or figura) and the revelation of a different veritas behind that "first" truth of Dante's fulfillment. This new veritas would be the realization of a lived historia et littera. There are, in other words, three figural moments in this story of Auerbach's about Dante and Flaubert: Dante's realism as figural fulfillment, Flaubert's realism as such, and the figural relation between the two.
Readers of the Dante chapter will recall the exquisite stylistic analysis which is so patiently sustained in the initial treatment of the encounter between the Dante-pilgrim and Farinata and Cavalcante in canto ten of Inferno (it is perhaps the best such example of applied stylistics in Mimesis, and certainly among the best studies of Dante's style that we have in Dante criticism). After Auerbach recounts the nearly "incomprehensible miracle" and "unimaginable" achievement of Dante's mixing of styles in this passage, and after his discussion accounts more largely for the mixture of the sublime and the trivial or comic which the Commedia represents, his discourse turns thematic:
The Commedia ... [is] a literary work which imitates reality and in which all imaginable spheres of reality appear: past and present, sublime grandeur and vile vulgarity, history and legend, tragic and comic occurrences, man and nature. . . . Yet, in respect to an attempt at the elevated style, all these things are not so new and problematic as in Dante's undisguised incursion into the realm of a real life neither selected nor preordained by aesthetic criteria. And indeed, it is this contact with real life which is responsible for all the verbal forms. (p. 189)
Auerbach now begins to argue that the Commedia, with its subject of the status animarum post mortem, represents "God's design in active fulfillment," and yet these dead souls, represented as judged for eternity by God, "produce the impression not that they are dead—though that is what they are—but alive."
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"Here," Auerbach continues,
we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante's realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth—among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante's inhabitants of the three realms lead a "changeless existence." [Auerbach borrows here a phrase from Hegel's Aesthetik, wechselloses Dasein, and continues with Hegel as he adds:] Yet into this changeless existence Dante "plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual deeds and destinies." (p. 191)
As Auerbach characterizes it, the existence of the personae is "final and eternal, but they are not devoid of history. . . . We have left the earthly sphere behind, . . . and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence" (p. 191). Though not yet named here, the basis of Auerbach's Dante interpretation is obviously his understanding of figural interpretation—already foreshadowed in his much earlier book on Dante, [n13] and introduced in the last section of his "Figura" essay. The characters are more themselves, more fulfilled in "reveal[ing] the nature proper to each" here in their state of eternal judgment than they were in their real, historical lives: "We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, . . . behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives upon earth" (p. 192). Auerbach first explains these claims within the context of the poem's theological thematics: God has judged Farinata and Cavalcante, and "not until He has pronounced that judgment has He fully perfected it and wholly revealed it to sight" (p. 192). But when Auerbach then writes of Cavalcante that "it is not likely that in the course of his earthly existence he ever felt his faith in the spirit of man, his love for the sweetness of light and for his sons so profoundly, or expressed it so arrestingly, as now, when it is all in vain" (pp. 192-93)—this statement is saved from absurdity (a "man" more real in literature than in life?) by two particular facts: that Cavalcante, like Farinata, was indeed a real, historical persona; and that the theological thematics of Dante's poem do indeed confirm Auerbach's judgment that the characters' lives are more fulfilled in God's eternal world than they could have been in their real, earthly, historical lives.
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Here, with the examples of human beings represented as more real and more fully themselves after death than in life, thereby retaining "earthly historicity in [the] beyond" as "the basis of God's judgment [and] the absolute realization of a particular earthly personality in the place definitively assigned to it" (p. 193), Auerbach finally and explicitly announces the figural "conception of history" as "the foundation for Dante's realism, this realism projected into changeless eternity" (p. 194): "It is precisely [the] 'full notion of their proper individuality' which the souls attain in Dante's beyond by virtue of God's judgment; and specifically, they attain it as an actual reality, which is in keeping with the figural view. . . . [The dead in Dante represent] the relation of figure fulfilled. . . in reference to their own past life on earth" (p. 196). Auerbach then refers to that feature of the figural conception which I mentioned above, the privileging of the fulfillment as truth over the figure as mere prefiguration: "Both figure and fulfillment possess. . . the character of actual historical events and phenomena. The fulfillment possesses it in greater and more intense measure, for it is, compared with the figure, forma perfectior. This explains," Auerbach concludes, "the overwhelming realism of Dante's beyond" (p. 197).
But with the phrase "overwhelming realism of Dante's beyond," something is set in motion. For the remaining pages now stand this thematic and theologically orthodox understanding on its head as Auerbach goes on to preserve the literal and historical reality beyond the realism of its spiritual fulfillment in Dante's depiction of the afterlife. Auerbach asserts that, in personae such as Farinata and Cavalcante, "never before has this realism been carried so far; never before . . . has so much art and so much expressive power been employed to produce an almost painfully immediate expression of the earthly reality of human beings" (p. 199). Beyond the thematic and theological justification, then, Auerbach refocuses on Dante's style and its "expressive power."
Figure surpasses fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief. . . . What actually moves us is not that God has damned them, but that the one [Farinata] is unbroken and the other [Cavalcante] mourns so heartrendingly for his son and the sweetness of the light. (p. 200)
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In other words, as fulfillment overcomes or surpasses its figura's literal, historical, real life, it also preserves and even elevates that figura to the point where it surpasses its fulfillment. Auerbach seizes upon this counter-surpassing of the fulfillment (the thematic, theological representation of divine judgment) by the figura (the stylistic realism of Dante's representation of the characters' lives in the afterlife) to conclude with these three crucial points. First, this "impression" of the realism of life beyond its thematic fulfillment ("the listener is all too occupied by the figure in the fulfillment," he writes)—this impression "is so rich and so strong that its manifestations force their way into the listener's soul independently of any interpretation" (p. 201). Second,
the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante's work made man's Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it (p. 202).
Third—as if the previous point were not Hegelian enough—Auerbach closes the chapter by saying: "In [the] fulfillment, the figure becomes independent. . . . We are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man's inner life and unfolding [wir erfahren . . im zeitlosen Sein das innergeschichtliche Werden]" (p. 202).
These three closing points of Auerbach's thus expound two kinds of "independence" enacted by a quasi-dialectical Aufhebung on the far side of figural representation: the lived, historical realism of that figural representation of an ahistorical, eternal afterlife becomes so powerful as to be "independent of any interpretation"; the figura as such consequently becomes "independent" of its spiritual meaning in fulfillment. Both of these effects are brought about by the" dialectic" of figural representation itself: an obscuring," "eclipsing" or concealing of revelation in revelation; a "destruction" of fulfilled truth in its "realization"; the figure free of fulfillment in the fulfillment itself; or the literal and historical—the real—returning in its having been turned into the figural and ahistorical or eternal. Auerbach's figural under standing of Dante can therefore be summarized as follows: the historical reality (the past lives of real, historical characters) is made to serve
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as the figura for its fulfillment in divine judgment, but the representation of this fulfillment by its figura is so realistic—more real than life, history, reality itself—that the fulfillment becomes in turn a figure whose fulfillment is the realism of—but now independent of—the figural representation; the fulfillment of that historical reality itself in its realism. Figura in its Christian, spiritual interpretation thus becomes lived reality "independent of any interpretation."
It should already be clear how this conclusion to Auerbach's chapter on Dante foreshadows his treatment of French realism as the fulfillment of Western literature's development toward the objective representation of contemporary social reality. Briefly, the real, historical world whose representation is promised by Dante's achievement (the realism promised by reality set free) no longer receives its literary representation within the domain of figural fulfillment—the spiritual setting of the afterlife in Dante's Commedia —but rather is now fulfilled by the realism of the French novelist, a realism not of an afterlife larger and more real than life as lived, but of the real social-historical lived world itself. No longer would there be a décalage between figure and fulfillment; rather, the real, historical world of nineteenth-century France will be both littera and figura for the novels, the realism of which—like Dante's realism—will now be that literal figure's fulfillment within the very letters of literal figures. Such realistic representation of historical reality is also, then, Mimesis's fulfillment of the figura of Dante in Flaubert. Most generally this unfolding of the "independence" of the figura from its fulfillment and from its spiritualist interpretation is, in Auerbach's literary history, the enactment of Western history according to a double-edged structure of secularization. That is, the argument for the historical secularization of literary realism is coextensive with a writing of literary history according to the model of figural representation, of figura (Dante as medieval figural realism) and fulfillment (Flaubert as modern social-historical realism). Thus, a history of literary secularization is a figural writing of history, a literary history with the accent on the adjective—an allegory of history as its own literalization.
But the matter is not this simple. The tensions between figura and fulfillment are between the literal figura (Dante's liberated realism of life) and the figural meaning of literal representation (the letters of French realism made figurative of a higher meaning in Auerbach's interpretive construction of Flaubert's place in history).
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We need to investigate these tensions more closely now by turning to the chapter on French realism. In striking antithesis to the beginning of the Dante chapter, it begins without a word of stylistic commentary, offering instead several pages of historical information on 1830 and its preceding years as background material necessary for an understanding of a passage extracted from Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir. But this antithesis is not at all surprising; it is rather the first sign of the chapter's figural relation to the Dante chapter. If there one began and ended with literary style as the locus of realism, prior to and finally beyond the poem's thematics of fulfilled judgment, then here one begins with real social-historical detail as the beginning and end, figura and fulfillment, of the novel's realism. But a second contrast to the Dante chapter is perhaps more genuinely surprising, and it foreshadows things to come. While the Dante chapter began and ended by extolling the passionate and vital expression of the characters' fullest possible lives—"We cannot but admire Farinata and weep with Cavalcante," Auerbach wrote (p. 200)—here Auerbach begins with a discussion of boredom:
No ordinary boredom. . . [no] fortuitous personal dullness, [but] a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. . . an atmosphere of pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom. . . mendaci[ty] . . . [people] no longer themselves believ[ing] in the thing they present . . . talk[ing] of nothing but the weather. . . unashamed baseness. . . fear. . . pervading boredom. (pp. 455-56)
This is all in the first paragraph. What has happened here, where the history of realistic Western literature is to reach its triumphant fulfillment? When the chapter, after sections on Stendhal and Balzac, finally arrives at its treatment of Flaubert, the discussion focuses immediately, for the third time and again in the first paragraph, on Emma Bovary's situation of "mediocrity. . . boredom. . . unrest and despair. . . cheerlessness, unvaryingness, grayness, staleness, airlessness, and inescapability" (p. 483). What has happened to Auerbach's argument? Here his analysis must be followed in precise detail.
In remarking upon the selected passage—Emma and her husband at dinner in Tostes
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("toute l' amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette")—Auerbach first comments that the reader "sees [directly] only Emma's inner state; he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her state, in the light of her perception" (p. 483). But if the reader sees through Emma, Auerbach then notes that Emma sees through Charles:
When Emma looks at him and sees him sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of the elle n'en pouvait plus, because everything else that arouses her desperation—the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all—appears to her, and through her to the reader also, as something that is connected with him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different if he were different from what he is. (p. 484)
With this reference to Charles as the "actual cause" of what Emma sees, and of what the reader therefore also sees, one must ask whether it is Auerbach's own voice or his imitation of Flaubert's style indirect libre—that is, of Emma's consciousness—that says all "would be entirely different if he were different from what he is." Is it Emma, in the plot of the novel, wishing Charles were different so that her life might be different as well? Or is it Auerbach imagining that if Charles were different, Emma would be, too, and the reader-Auerbach would see a different world? The question is especially germane since the suggestion of a possibly different life that could be available for representation recalls that larger, fuller, more vital life represented in Farinata and Cavalcante by Dante.
The next paragraph answers our question, and does so with a sentence I find the most bizarre in all of Mimesis. Auerbach begins by recapitulating: "We are first given Emma and then the situation through her," but not in "a simple representation of the content of Emma's' consciousness, of what she feels as she feels it"; rather, "the light which illuminates the picture proceeds from her, [but] she is yet herself part of the picture. . . . Here it is not Emma who speaks, but the writer" (p. 484). Indeed, if the reader gets the scene through Emma, and Emma gets it through Charles, the reader actually gets both through Flaubert. Well enough; but then—in contrast to Flaubert's felicitously phrased expressions, says Auerbach—Emma
would not be able to sum it all up in this way. . . if she wanted to express it, it would not come out like that; she has neither the intelligence
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nor the cold candor of self-accounting necessary for such a formulation. To be sure, there is nothing of Flaubert's life in these words, but only Emma's; Flaubert does nothing but bestow the power of mature expression upon the material which she affords, in its complete subjectivity. (p. 484)
Auerbach's remarks about Emma's lack of self-expression, "intelligence," and "candor" still conform to the critic's conventional thematic commentary on the representation of a character; but then he speaks of her "life" and her "subjective material" And now the bizarre sentence: "If Emma could do this herself, she would no longer be what she is, she would have outgrown herself and thereby saved herself" (p. 484).
"She would no longer be what she is." She would no longer be Emma, the unhappy and doomed heroine of Flaubert's novel. Perhaps—surely in part—Auerbach means she would be a different character, less unhappy, less doomed. But who is "she"? "She" is not, as Farinata or Cavalcante was, a once real and historical person. "She" is the "real" Emma Bovary who is not. A realistic representation of a fictional character is taken by Auerbach as a person—a "complete subjectivity"—who might have been otherwise than she is, that unhappy fiction. And to be real—"she would no longer be what she is"—would be to develop ("outgrow herself") and to be fulfilled ("save herself").
I can now move rapidly to my conclusion. In Dante, realistic representation translates historical lives into the apotheosis of their actuality, until this fullness of representation saves them from their thematic depiction as dead souls in the afterlife of hell; to recall Auerbach's formulation, they "produce the impression not that they are dead—though that is what they are—but alive" (p. 191). The figurae of their thematic fulfillment surpassed and cancelled their own spiritual fulfillment, and were refigured as literal, living, historical figures. Now, with Flaubert, the opposite occurs. The power of the realistic representation of a fictional life set in real, social-historical circumstances appears to Auerbach as the unfulfilled promise of a more spiritually real life that might have been—really, historically, literally. That absent fulfillment would "save" Emma, who is otherwise an inauthentic, unfulfilled, fictional yet realistic figura. To adapt Auerbach, she produces the impression not that she is fiction—though that is what she is—but real.
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Her figura, as the letters on the pages of Madame Bovary producing (signifying, representing) the figure of a real person, would be fulfilled (surpassed, overcome, cancelled) in her becoming more (but also less) than she is—in her becoming disfigured as a figure (a representation of a reality), and being made literal, historical, real. The move, in other words, from Dante to Flaubert is from real historical life transformed into a literature which is more than a reality, to a realistic fictional life transformed into a reality which would be more, should be more, but is not: plus de realité—more, and no more, reality.
Thus, when Auerbach moves, on the next page, to speak of Flaubert's artistic practice, he speaks of "selecting events and translating them into language" as if they were already there, like real, historical lives or a real history, a real past; and he adds: "This is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself far better and more completely than any opinion appended to it could do" (p. 486). This exact echo of the claim made for Dante—realism "independent of any interpretation"—is made here in the absence of an authorial judgment: the self-sufficient truth of verbal representation, or what Auerbach calls "a profound faith in the truth of language" (p. 486). But the truth of language here, its veritas, is the fulfillment or unveiling of Flaubert's figure—Emma—as letters; not as a literal, historical being ("a complete subjectivity"), but as litterae or letters. The truth of literary realism becomes the revelation of the falseness, the fictionality, of its rhetorical or figural representation in and through literal letters.
The truth of modern realism is the "no more reality" that disfigures the "more reality" figured in the representation of a person who is not except as a personage who is "her" letters. It is this truth that surfaces in the final pages of Auerbach's chapter, less as a guilty conscience, perhaps, than as a guilty unconscious. For as his language—in paraphrasing a letter of Flaubert's—still echoes that which he used to praise Dante ("subjects are seen as God sees them, in their true essence" [p. 487]), this truth without interpretation is not that of the plenitude of lived, historical lives, but rather of "a chronic discomfort, which completely rules an entire life. . . . The novel is the representation of an entire human existence which has no issue. . . . Nothing happens, but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive something" (p. 488). He insists that, as with Dante, this interpretation is
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immanent ("The interpretation of the situation is contained in its description" [p. 489]), but he then goes on not in praise, but in a final mounting tirade: Emma and Charles
have nothing in common, and yet they have nothing of their own, for the sake of which it would be worthwhile to be lonely. For, privately, each of them has a silly, false world, which cannot be reconciled with the reality of his situation, and so they both miss the possibilities life offers them. What is true of these two, applies to almost all the other characters in the novel; each of the many mediocre people who act in it has his own world of mediocre and silly stupidity. . . each is alone, none can understand another, or help another to insight; there is no common world of men, because it could only come into existence if many should find their way to their own proper reality, the reality which is given to the individual—which then would be also the true common reality. . . . [But instead it is] one-sided, ridiculous, painful, and. . . charged with misunderstanding, vanity, futility, falsehood, and stupid hatred. (p. 489)
A "silly, false world" which is not reconcilable with reality and which misses life's possibility; stupidity and nothingness, falsehood and misunderstanding, as "what is true" of the characters; and the absence of "true reality" due to the absence of the character's "own proper reality, the reality given to the individual" This, then, is the fulfillment of Dante's promise of the history of Western realism: representation without reality or so much as the possibility of life; truth as falsehood and nothingness; characters lacking both fulfillment and prefiguration of "their own proper reality" except in their figural fulfillment as signifying letters.
Alphabetic characters of inanimate material? Dead letters? Litterae as the corpse, the heavy, oppressive nothing of historia? When Auerbach attempts to turn, at the end of the paragraph I have been quoting, from his dyspeptic tantrum—"In his book the world consists of pure stupidity, which completely misses true reality, so that the latter should properly not be discoverable in it at all" (p. 489)—he attempts to make this turn with a sudden epiphany: "Yet [true reality] is there; it is in the writer's language, which unmasks the stupidity by pure statement; language, then, has criteria for stupidity and thus also has a part in that reality of the 'intelligent' which otherwise never appears in the book" (p. 489).
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Auerbach's phrasing here is precisely right even as his meaning is profoundly wrong. The "true reality" that cannot be fulfilled or revealed in realistic representation—for what is revealed is falsehood and nothingness—is nonetheless to be revealed and fulfilled somewhere; but if it is not in the realistic representation, it is not "in the writer's language" or "in the book" either, as if it were some thematic or semantic representation of meaning to be revealed, fulfilled, and made real in an act of understanding. Rather, it is the language and is the book: the "true reality" of the letters which unmask—literally, "reveal"—their representational stupidity and nothingness by their pure statement, as if to say, we are the littera and its figura, historia and its meaning, which now fulfill and reveal the history of our representations of reality by the pure statement of its stupidity and nothingness—its corpse.
And what can we draw from this" exemplary" case of literary history as the literalization of historical letters? The corpse of Flaubert's language is one thing; as for the language of Auerbach's Mimesis, I come not to bury, but to honor it. I have tried to demonstrate how the figural model of interpretation and representation structures and operates upon the historical narrative of Auerbach's study of literary realism. Literally the figural model structures, and is operative within, his narrative of the two-tiered triumph of the representation of lived, historical reality in Dante and Flaubert. But figuratively, Auerbach's historiography disfigures the literal narrative and its figura by fulfilling them as the letters in a literary history, letters that represent the stupidity and nothingness of the real history that thought itself, in this literary mode, to be more real—but is, alas, no more real—than its representation as letters. In its intellectual content, this is a Hegelian allegory: the allegory of historical meaning (as phenomenal appearance) being preserved-and-cancelled, left behind in the uncovering of its truth and yet retained as the mere letter of this significance.
I understand this as one kind of allegory of history, what may be called the allegory of the nihilism of historical meaning: the meaning of historiography being that historical reality is cancelled or annihilated in its fulfillment in literature, including those genres called history and literary history. What this means is that to write and think the historical is to enter into allegory, to enact a literary, and specifically a rhetorical, mode of discourse.
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It is fortuitous, not merely accidental, that Auerbach's title and object of study is mimesis, for the insight that lies therein is the same one that I have tried to expose within the book's historical narrative: history itself is mimesis, the representation of the dead past, and the figurative structure that appear when history is done is already implied in the rhetorical structure of its ontology, indeed, of its name. The term names two notions, ontologically opposed as origin and representation, and the confusion between the two unfolds whenever historical narrative is attempted. "History" is literally the past, figuratively its meaning as the history that is thought and written. And this history—what we conventionally intend when we use and think the term—must always reduce history as an ontological object into a dead letter, so that it might be "meaningful," the literal sign for an allegorical meaning.
An alternative allegory of history which suggests itself—Walter Benjamin comes to mind—might then be called the allegory of the eschatology of historical meaning: the meaning of historiography being not the representation, but the presentation of reality, as and in history, in its ongoing deferral of fulfillment; reality preserved, that is, as signs to be read, preserved as literature to be read, including history and literary history. But to speak of alternate allegories of history is not necessarily to invoke any question of choice in the matter; the meaning of my study of Auerbach's historiography may perhaps be that the letter always grasps, even to the point of throttling, the figure of its own historical life. Rather, the apparent "choice" with which I began lay between nonhistorical-literary theory and the possibility of literary history. The senses of the alternate allegories of history—nihilism or eschatology, dead meaning or meaning deferred—might be borne in mind today whenever literary history would be so blithely opposed to the labyrinths of literary theory.
Between Dialectics and Deconstruction: Derrida and the Reading of Marx
The Crisis of Theory
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For Stephen Melville
In general terms, this essay asks of Marxism a question which hitherto has been posed solely in connection with psychoanalysis: can a theory of conflict escape the effects of the object it seeks to describe? Some of Freud's best recent readers, such as Samuel Weber, have argued persuasively that such a question can be answered only in the negative, for the inherent instability of the unconscious seems inevitably to rebound upon the very theory that would specify systematically the properties of such an object. [n1] In accordance with this insight, Freud's writings have begun to be read not simply as theoretical accounts of psychic conflict but as textual exemplifications of such conflict as well. The phrase "theory of conflict" thus might stand as an appropriate motto for this revised, "deconstructive" understanding of the conditions of psychoanalytic possibility: at once the explanation and the site of conflict, Freudian theory now finds itself replicating internally the condensations and displacements it sought merely to delineate. One casualty of this reading would be, of course, the traditional practice of "applied psychoanalysis," for if Freud's writing is traversed by the movements of its objects—if it repeats within itself the rhetorical operations of the texts (whether "psychic" or "literary") that it would analyze—then psychoanalysis begins to lose its ostensible coherence as a discrete, self-identical body of knowledge, different in kind from the unstable phenomena it seeks simply to read.
Such a line of questioning has never been brought systematically to bear upon that other "theory of conflict"—Marxism. To extend to the realm of Marxist theory a problematic first developed in relation to psychoanalysis is certainly not to invite renewed attempts at an elusive "Freud-Marx synthesis," nor is it to advocate the creation of something which might be called a "psychoanalysis of Marxism."
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Rather, it is simply to contend that Marx still awaits his poststructuralist readers and that the conflicts characteristic of Marxism as systematic theory have yet to receive the attention they deserve. [Trotsky?] There are, to be sure, sound reasons for this reluctance to submit Marx's texts to the kind of critical reading that distinguishes recent analyses of Freudian theory. Foremost among these, perhaps, is a recognition of the political stakes involved: at a time when, in this country, Marxism has little discernible impact as a force of popular resistance, one might hesitate to contribute to its further weakening by calling its principles into question. It might be argued, however, that the present moment precisely requires just such a careful analysis—especially if the strategic failures of the past are not to be repeated blindly. If, indeed, there are signs that Marxist theory is now beginning to be read rather than simply memorized and recited—if a "commitment to Marxism" can no longer proceed without a rigorous understanding of the letter of Marx's text—we might very well conclude that a deconstructive reading of Marxism would be less an evasion of the political (as might be charged) than a timely attempt to construe the political otherwise.
This essay is an initial attempt to supply protocols for that critical task, to begin marking the internal limits of Marxist theory by describing how the inversions and distortions that form its ideological object ultimately are reproduced within the discourse that would master these effects. Reading what is now commonly referred to as "the crisis of Marxism," it will suggest not only that this crisis if fundamentally "rhetorical" in nature but also that Marx's rhetorical practice might be the best guide for the analysis of (his own) crises. Such a conclusion—which will undermine the assumptions shared by the various extant forms of "semiotic Marxism"—will also raise by implication the question of the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction, a question generating at present a heated debate between the advocates of each discourse. By reformulating this relationship in terms of supplementarity, the essay finally will argue that Marx and Derrida may be viewed most productively as neither antithetical nor complementary figures, thereby opening up a space of interimplication that will redefine as one of its effects the stakes of the current controversy.
THE CRISIS OF THEORY
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Contemporary Marxist theory appears to be suffering from a severe crisis of confidence. As many of its current and former partisans are acknowledging with increasing frequency, Marxism's power as an explanatory model has been damaged irreparably by its inability either to predict or to comprehend the full complexities of twentieth-century history. In 1892, at the time of the Second International, Karl Kautsky still could maintain with conviction the" orthodox" view that
capitalist society has failed; its dissolution is only a question of time; irresistible economic development leads with natural necessity to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The erection of a new form of society in place of the existing one is no longer merely desirable; it has become something inevitable. [n2]
Subsequent events, however, have belied the adequacy—and the implicit optimism—of any such notion of "natural necessity"; indeed, if the trajectory of history in our century has demonstrated anything, it is that the "laws" of historical materialism have shown themselves fallible. Contrary to expectations, the proletariat in the West has not emerged as "the identical subject-object of the historical process" or as the self-conscious agent of revolutionary practice. [n3] The rise of Fascism in the guise of a "workers' movement" and the postwar integration of organized labor into the mainstream of economic life are merely two of the many anomalies that Marxist theory could in no way foresee, could account for only by way of retrospection. The ultimate irony, of course, is that when class struggle did culminate in revolution, it did so in the least likely of places—Russia, where, moreover, the excesses committed in the name of socialism should not have occurred (in theory) once the private ownership of property formally had been abolished. Given the manifest irregularity of such developments—phenomena whose "contradictory" character has proven highly resistant to dialectical sublation—it seems easy to agree with Stanley Aronowitz's conclusion that "the theoretical basis of Marxism [has been] called into question by historical reality," that Marxism's "underlying prophetic value" has been compromised decisively by the very object it purports to comprehend. [n4]
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For many observers, the current crisis of historical materialism—the diminution of its powers "as a scientific discipline and as a guide to political practice"—derives ultimately from Marx's preponderant emphasis on the categories of political economy. [n5] Our era of post industrial capitalism (so these arguments run) has witnessed the formation of a gap between base and superstructure on such an unprecedented scale that the mode of production cannot fulfill its traditional function as the ground of historical determination. Ideology, in our century, seems to have claimed a recalcitrant specificity all its own, while cultural forms and practices appear to evolve in a "relative autonomy" that no longer reflects with any accuracy the conditions of the infrastructure. The feminist and civil rights movements have also contested the primacy that Marxism grants to the mode of production, for the transhistorical existence of sexual and racial oppression cannot be explained entirely by reference to the economic "last instance." [n6] Faced with this mounting evidence of theoretical inadequacy, various Marxists have argued for a modification of the base/superstructure model that would allow for multiple and indirect determinations while still reserving ultimate dominance for the economy. Others, however, have attacked even this revised model for its residual economism, claiming that Marxism's very emphasis on the concept of production—the cornerstone of historical materialism—is itself the offspring of nineteenth-century capitalism, an ideological remainder that defines Marxism as a part of the system against which it would contend. If any weight is to be accorded this latter view, then the title of a recent work of Marxist theory—Is There a Future for Marxism?—must be read as other than narrowly rhetorical. All signs thus point to what seems an inescapable diagnosis: "Western Marxism is in crisis."
This widening consensus concerning the crisis of historical materialism is an important development if only because it indicates the willingness of contemporary Marxism to examine itself critically. What is surprising about such acknowledgments, however, is their own failure to recollect that Marxism is itself a theory of crisis—of the periodic
fluctuations of supply and demand that destabilize the capitalist economy. George Lichtheim has outlined the fundamental properties of these cyclical business crises:
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Capitalist accumulation is regulated by the search for profit, while the satisfaction of wants comes in only incidentally. Production is thus divorced from consumption, and though the two are brought together by the mechanism of the market, the latter operates in such a way as to ensure equilibrium between supply and demand only at the cost of periodic upheavals, in which "superfluous" capital is destroyed and large numbers of uncompetitive firms are driven to the wall. Since purchases are divorced from sales, the "law of markets" represents an abstraction to which nothing corresponds in reality. [n8]
Crisis, in other words, results when "the split between the sale and the purchase [of commodities] becomes too pronounced," a development which reflects an underlying lack of correspondence between production and consumption: "Nothing could be more childish than the dogma that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases." [n9] Marx's essential contribution to the understanding of this disequilibrium" is his demonstration of its necessity for the self-regulation of capitalism: "Crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium." [n10] Capitalism thus generates within itself an economic dehiscence in which the production of commodities regularly exceeds the possibility of their consumption; the crisis point is reached when the unequal ratio between supply and demand surpasses acceptable levels of toleration.
Can this brief overview of the Marxist theory of crisis help us to reformulate the issues involved in the crisis of Marxist theory? This question might be answered affirmatively if the theory of crisis were read, in effect, as an implicit theory of figuration. Such a suggestion is not as extravagant as it first may appear, for Marx's account of the relationship between production and consumption under capitalism resembles nothing so much as the relationship between figural and literal language as elaborated consistently throughout the history of Western philosophy. Just as the "law of markets" in the capitalist system constitutes an "abstraction to which nothing corresponds in reality," so, too, has philosophy traditionally condemned the "excesses" of rhetoric as an improper departure from the literal truth.
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The inherent possibility that production might proliferate without any necessary connection to consumption finds its parallel, moreover, in philosophy's recurrent fear that figures might flourish in the absence their referents, that tropes might wander aimlessly without coming rest at a stable source of meaning. This potential for rhetorical aberration seems as intolerable to philosophy as it is to capitalism: in both cases, the drift toward "free play" must be corrected no matter the cost; errancy must be suppressed if each system is to preserve its essential integrity. [n11]
If the Marxist theory of crisis therefore reveals a rhetorical fissure at the heart of the capitalist economy, this very gap will allow us to reappraise the crisis of Marxist theory. For if Marxism takes rhetoric as its implicit object in its analysis of the business cycle, it will also become subject to figural instability to the extent that it construes itself as a science of historical development—a science which, by definition cannot admit the wanderings of (its own) rhetoric. Philosophy's worst anxiety, it has been argued, concerns the potential lack of correspondence between the figural and the literal. Marxism's greatest fear similarly derives from the possibility that a rhetorical gap might intervene between base and superstructure—that political, ideological, and cultural practices might not be grounded firmly in the mode of production. As an "objective" model of historical explanation, Marxism must foreclose this potential disharmony, must bring the free play of the superstructure into conformity with the "literal" base. This capacity of the superstructure to develop in "relative autonomy" is not, however, simply a contingency that could be rectified by means of a more "scientific" analysis; it is rather a rhetorical schism of the kind already identified by Marxism in its theory of business crises. Marxism, in other words, seems unable to escape from the figural object of its own theorization, for the disequilibrium encountered at the level of production ultimately rebounds upon the base/superstructure paradigm as well, forcing the latter to repeat within itself these very rhetorical disjunctions.
Viewed in this manner, the crisis of Marxist theory may be redefined as a tendency to overproduce rhetorical anomalies, to generate a supply of superstructural phenomena that exceeds the demand of the economic base. Marxism's "crisis" is thus not merely a contemporary condition but one which results from a figural "drifting" [derive] intrinsic to the theory as such. For at its most powerful, Marxism has always acknowledged this implicit ability to go astray in the
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rhetorical gaps it discloses: in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, for example, Marx confronts explicitly the eruption of uncanny forces that undermine the correspondences between base and superstructure on which his theory is staked. [n12] When, however, Marxism mistakes itself for a science of historical reality—when it cannot recognize itself in the errancy of its objects—the theory indeed risks complicity with its capitalist adversary, borrowing the latter's techniques of containment in an effort to preserve its own systematic integrity. [n13]
What makes Brecht exemplary for me is properly speaking neither his Marxism nor his aesthetic (although both are very important) but the conjunction of the two: namely of Marxist analysis and thinking about meaning. He was a Marxist who reflected upon effects of the sign: a very rare thing. [n16]
flections, these-strange subjects of reflection for a Marxist." [n17] these statements indicate the comparative marginality of language relation to Marxism's more traditional concerns, then we must ask why many contemporary Marxists have chosen linguistics as the solution to the problem of mediation.
This question might be addressed in terms of the fact that "never, much as at the present has [the problem of language] invaded, j such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the mo: heterogeneous discourses." [n18] If, in other words, our century has bee marked by an all-pervasive "linguistic turn"-if most philosophic, questions have since been redefined as questions of language—it perhaps was inevitable that Marxism would attempt to keep abreast ( the changing episteme by allying itself with the developing linguistic sciences. [n19] Now as never before a properly Marxist theory of language is widely viewed as the only possible remedy for the implicit short-comings of the base/superstructure paradigm; historical materialism is suddenly thought to be "impossible without an adequate theory of language." [n20] The absence of such a theory is now held to be responsible for the failings of traditional Marxist criticism. Georg Lukacs, for example, is currently charged with the crime of treating language as a largely instrumental medium, as a transparent reflection of historical relationships, rather than—as his recent critics would argue—that very site at which such relationships are themselves produced. Ac cording to the new consensus, however, Marxism's linguistic gal could be bridged (and Lukacs's criticism corrected) if sufficient attention were directed to the semiotic component of cultural production-for, in the words of Julia Kristeva, it is the signifying dimension "without which no linkages between 'base' and 'superstructure' can exist." [n21] Although Althusser has contended that any serious investigation into the linguistic nature of ideology must break with the base/ superstructure model itself, it is nevertheless fair to say that most varieties of contemporary Marxism share a commitment to the linguistic sciences as the preferred manner of mediating between the domains of production and ideology.
A common linguistic orientation hence can be shown to underlie the otherwise distinct projects of such theorists as Raymond Williams, who maintains that "a fully historical semiotics would be very much the same thing as cultural materialism"; [n22] Fredric Jameson,
The Ends of Mediation
There are many ways for Marxism to mistake itself for a science, to avoid an acknowledgment of its inherent capacity to stray from itself. Foremost among these, perhaps, are the theories of mediation developed in recent years in an attempt to provide "Marxism's missing link between infrastructure and superstructure."14 Focusing on language as the essential connection between the economic and the political, many Marxists have borrowed heavily from the fields of linguistics and semiotics, claiming that "ideology is made of language in the form of linguistic signs" and thus that it is incumbent upon Marxism to produce a theory of language in order to account more precisely for ideological formations.15 Such a turn towards language nevertheless should strike us as inherently surprising, for Marx left only a few scattered remarks on the subject-nothing, in short, that would warrant the central role that language has come to play recently in Marxist analyses of culture and society. As late as 1971, for example, Roland Barthes still could express his admiration for Brecht in terms of the latter's idiosyncratic interest in the dynamics of language:'
Also in 1971, Fredric Jameson could characterize Walter Benjamin's writings on the rhetoric of memory in the following way: "Strange re
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whose entire career to date might be described as a "search for a [linguistic] method," for a semiotic model that would combine "the findings of narrative analysis, psychoanalysis, and traditional as well as modern approaches to ideology"; [n23] Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, for whom sign systems occupy "an intermediate position between modes of production and ideological institutions"; [n24] and the now defunct Tel Quel group, whose former goal was to inaugurate a properly "materialist" semiotics. [n25] This catalogue of theorists is not, of course, intended to be exhaustive; the point is simply that, despite genuine differences in method, all of these writers fully subscribe to the view that some form of linguistic model is necessary in order to resolve "1'impasse de langage dans le marxisme" and to establish, thereby, an adequate theory of mediation. [n26]
There are, however, several reasons to doubt the ultimate viability of this attempt to remedy the faults of Marxism by employing the tools of linguistics. In the first place, it is simply not self-evident that a "theory of language" is, in fact, absent from Marx's writings. Although such a theory would not, of course, find expression in any explicit or systematic form, it nevertheless might be located in the characteristic (if unpredictable) ways his texts perform rhetorically. We have seen above, for example, that Marx's theory of crisis can be read as an implicit theory of figuration. Capital is similarly not about language in any overt or sustained manner, yet in its description of the commodity form as "a social hieroglyphic" [eine gesellschaftliche Hieroglyphe], we encounter another rhetorical crux around which much of this text can be said to (un)hinge.27 By thus reading Marx as a "rhetorical theorist" -by examining in detail the tropological labor of his writing (etymologically, its "slippage," its "sliding")-we might succeed in elaborating a general economy of Marxist figuration that could reopen, among its many possibilities, the question of Marxism's repressed "literary" heritage: the early poetic and dramatic works which, according to the leading Marxologists, supposedly were "transcended" [aufgehoben] by Marx in his later writings.
A second reservation concerning Marxism's linguistic turn is, perhaps, more substantial, for the very notion that language can be used to cure the deficiencies of the base/ superstructure model seems inherently dubious. This is surely not to say that the paradigm is without serious shortcomings, that there is no gap between its two poles.
15
What I would argue, rather, is that this gap cannot be bridged by Ian guage since it is itself the product of language—of an inversion between cause and effect accomplished through the figure of metalepsis. Marxism necessarily thinks of the infrastructure as its first principle, as the cause ("in the final instance") of the superstructure's effects. The primacy of the base could be challenged, however, if one were to acknowledge that
the first is not the first if there is not a second to follow it. Consequently, the second is not that which merely arrives, like a latecomer, after the first, but that which permits the first to be the first. The first cannot be the first unaided, by its own properties alone: the second, with all the force of its delay, must come to the assistance of the first. The "second time" thus has priority of a kind over the "first time": it is present from the first time onwards as the prerequisite of the first's priority.
The base, in other words, might now be regarded less as an original, self-identical entity than as the rhetorical effect of a prior effect—of the superstructure. Marxism's most elementary principle thus has undergone inversion, for if the superstructure allows the base to become the base, then it is the superstructure which must be counted as the fundamental term, as the base's condition of possibility. [n28] This inversion of cause and effect—the characteristic feature of the figure of metalepsis—will preclude definitively any possible linguistic correction of Marxism, for the discontinuity between base and superstructure can now be construed as a product of language in the "first" place. The remedy therefore turns out to be the disease it attempted to cure; "constituted by the very distances and differences it seeks to overcome," language is not Marxism's solution to the problem of mediation but the name of this problem itself. [n29]
Marxism Versus Deconstruction?
To suggest, as I have done, that Marxism can stray from itself—that it avoids the consequences of this drifting insofar as it relies on theories of linguistic mediation—is, by implication, to raise the question of the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction. Much has been written of late on the subject of this relationship, most of which
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has taken a highly predictable form. Although Michael Ryan has argued at length that Marxism and deconstruction are complementary discourses, both of which offer powerful critiques of the principle of self-evidence, most theorists have chosen simply to defend one "side" against the other, arguing that Marxism and deconstruction are mutually exclusive in their implications. [n30]
There is much, in fact, to substantiate this claim that Marxism and deconstruction are antithetical practices. If, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, "the task of hermeneutics. . . has always been to read a text and distinguish the true sense from the apparent sense, to search for the sense under the sense, to search for the intelligible text under the unintelligible text," we then can state unequivocally that Marxism has always construed itself as a critical hermeneutics-a discipline devoted to the demystification of the ideological through the unconcealment of its buried truth. [n31] "It is always," writes Marx, "the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers. . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure." [n32] This notion of truth (aletheia) as the unveiling of a disguised presence comprises, however, precisely one of deconstruction's main targets, leading Derrida to insist that his is not a critical, hermeneutic enterprise: "Deconstruction is not a critical operation; criticism is its object. Deconstruction aims, at one moment or another, at the confidence expressed in the critical instance, in the critico-theoretical, that is, deciding instance, in the ultimate possibility of decidability itself." Since the Marxist conception of ideology constitutes one such "deciding instance," Derrida can detect in it "a certain logic of representation, of consciousness, of the subject, of the imaginary, of mimesis" -a logic that will always confer on the notion of fetishism a negative valuation. For Derrida, however, there has
never been anything but fetishism: no simple, pure, originary state that subsequently could be degraded into alienation. Though he recognizes "the necessity of the problematic domain designated by the Marxist conception of ideology," he nevertheless maintains his distance from Marxism insofar as it continues to view itself as a foundationalist enterprise:
To the extent that it includes a system named dialectical materialism, doesn't Marxism present itself as a philosophy (whether elaborated or
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to be elaborated), as a founded philosophical practice, as a "construction"? . . . I haven't known any Marxist discourse-considered as such or said to be such-which would respond negatively to this question. Nor even, I might add, which poses or recognizes this as a question. [n33]
Where, then, Marxism subscribes to "a sense of society as a totality" which would" allow social phenomena once again to become transparent," [n34] deconstruction would contend that any "totality" is undermined by its irreducible lack of self-identity, that social phenomena have always already lost their putative transparency. Where Marxism necessarily remains committed to a notion of history as the history of sense-a history guaranteed by the operation of the dialectic as it transforms local contradictions into universal truths-Derrida would linger over the detritus that resists dialectical sublation, producing as a result "another concept or conceptual chain of 'history"': a history inherently different from itself. Where, finally, production constitutes Marxism's fundamental category, deconstruction would argue that "everything begins with reproduction." [n35]
By all appearances, then, Marxism and deconstruction remain opposed to one another. This is, indeed, the common verdict reached by the majority of supporters of each of these discourses: Hillis Miller "views as naive the millennial or revolutionary hopes still present in one way or another even in sophisticated Marxism"; Terry Eagleton claims that "many of the vauntedly novel themes of deconstructionism do little more than reproduce some of the most commonplace topics of bourgeois liberalism"; Jacob Rogozinski maintains that Marxism's belief in proletarian revolution is merely "the last avatar of political metaphysics"; Andreas Huyssen contends that "Derridean deconstruction. . . remains indifferent to its own historical moment, let alone that of the texts it reads." 36 For each of these partisans, then, Marxism and deconstruction are inherently incompatible; one must choose sides between them.
Derrida, however, does not make this "choice." Although he has written on the texts of Marx and of Marxism only in passing-an "omission" that has generated a plethora of commentary-he nevertheless indicated relatively early in his career that the absence of Marx in his writings represents not an objection to Marxism per se but a constellation of lacunae explicitly calculated "to mark the loci of a the
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oretical elaboration which, from my standpoint in any case, remains yet to come."37 More than a decade after this statement, however, Derrida's readings of Marx remain Ii venir-and might very well be deferred endlessly. Marxism did form an occasional topic explored by Derrida and his interviewers in the 1970s, and Marx is analyzed very briefly both in Dissemination and in Glas. In recent years, moreover, Derrida seems to be thinking increasingly of Marxism, affirming that "there is some possible articulation between an open Marxism and what I am interested in," and that "Marxism is not to be attacked like such and such other theoretical comfort" [comme tel ou tel autre confort theorique].38 But despite the good will expressed by these suggestive comments, the question remains as to why Marx continues to be absent from Derrida's texts. How can we account for Derrida's reticence on the subject? Will an answer to this question help us to reformulate the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction in a way that avoids the usual reductive choices?
Deconstruction can derive from Marxism the broad political and sociohistorical outlines which it now lacks. Like bourgeois feminism which dictates its own limits-limits which Marxist-feminists are beginning to overcome-deconstruction as it exists projects limits which can only be overcome by placing its at once more local and more general uJ;ldertaking (because the critique of logocentrism is limited in comparison to social theory, but it nevertheless deals with a phenomenon that characteriz_s all western, not only bourgeois, rationality) within the framework of a broader revolutionary theory.
adds that Marxism, too, can "benefit" from its encounter with deconstruction (he finds the latter" a means of detecting and correcting residual idealism in Marxist theory itself"), his argument nevertheless typifies the terms of the current controversy in its attempt to rank these theories hierarchically, to draw discernible and stable boundaries between them-even if the asymmetry of "at once more local and more general" offers a troubling, though momentary, pause. 39
The claim that Marxism incorporates deconstruction-that the latter is far more limited than the former-surfaces as well in the last three interviews collected in Positions (between Derrida and the Tel Quel Marxists Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta). Like Ryan, Houdebine contends that deconstruction is already contained within the practice of Marxist-Leninism, that Derrida's "concept" of differance in fact can be assimilated to "the motif of heterogeneity [which] is the motif of a-the? - basic dialectical materialist contradiction." 40 The interview in which this allegation occurs, however, is marked by a bizarre pas de deux: Houdebine and Scarpetta insist repeatedly that Derrida define his position with respect to Marxism (as if it were a matter of asking him, Are you for or against?); each of these demands elicits a lengthy response from Derrida which, strangely enough, only seems to reinforce his interviewers' frustration (thereby prompting them to reiterate their question to him in a slightly altered form). If, in general, the intent of an interview is the facilitation of direct communication between two discrete parties, then the sheer perversity of these exchanges between Derrida and his Marxist critics-their evident lack of communicative success-seems to call out for a psychoanalytic reading that would account for the insistence of the pattern. In what follows such a reading will be undertaken in an effort to displace the kind of territorial warfare currently afflicting the dialogue between Marxists and deconstructionists; we might, in this way, discover that the two theories ultimately cannot be "comprehended" in the form of a stable hierarchy-that, indeed, the borders between them are far less secure than previously had been imagined.
In reading the Positions interview, one may be struck by the curious fact that the questions put to Derrida resemble, in their blind insistency, nothing so much as the Freudian" compulsion to repeat" [Wiederholungszwang]-for if the interviewers remain unsatisfied despite receiving answers fitted. to their questions, then theirs is a co.m
In the Crypt
As typically conducted, the debate between Marxists and deconstructionists has turned on the issue of Who encompasses Whom, of which theory can incorporate a wider range of phenomena (including, of course, the other). Marxists, for example, regularly charge that deconstruction does not know its place, its own limitations relative to Marxism-a position defended by Michael Ryan, for whom deconstruction literally is comprehended by Marxist theory:
Deconstruction, in other words, is inherently lacking, is limited with respect to Marxism's greater powers of explanation. Although Ryan
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pulsion that "cannot ultimately be reduced to . . . the interplay between the pleasure principle and the reality principle." Nor can this compulsion to repeat be understood simply as a desire to master deconstruction-to subject Derrida to the mastery of Marxism:
What then is this function of traumatic repetition if nothing-quite the reverse-seems to justify it from the point of view of the pleasure principle? To master the painful event, someone might say-but who masters, where is the master here, to be mastered? Why speak so hastily when we do not know precisely where to situate the agency that would undertake this operation of mastery?41
tween deconstruction and Marxism. Freud characterizes the ego in this work as a "boundary creature" [Grenzwesen] eluding all classification in terms of simple, binary categories; mediating between the world and the id, the ego seeks to defend itself from "internal" threats by treating them as though they came from without. This ability of the ego to interchange insides with outsides has been identified by Margaret Ferguson as the distinctive feature of the "textual defenses" produced by such authors as Sidney and Shelley (among others):
Neither, however, can Derrida assume this position of mastery, for his is literally a "defensive" position-a stance characterized by a rhetoric of defense [Abwehr]: "There is what you call this 'encounter' [with Marx] which has seemed to me indeed, for a long time, absolutely necessary. You may well imagine that I was not completely unconscious of it." [n42]
This defensive tone marks as well a discussion in La Carte postale in which Derrida objects to the translation (in a recent French edition of The German Ideology) of the phrase aufgelost werden konnen as peuvent etre deconstruites. The passage in question is a famous one in which Marx distinguishes between the merely intellectual analysis of ideological forms and a truly revolutionary practice that overthrows the real determining structures of material production. The new translation quietly places" deconstruction" in the former category. Derrida protests: "Once the amalgam is accomplished, the appropriation incorporated [incorporée], we hear [on laisse entendre] that 'deconstruction' is destined to remain limited to the 'intellectual criticism' of superstructures. It is as if Marx had already spoken the word [on fait comme si Marx l'avait deja dit]." [n43] Who hears this traducing of deconstruction? Has slander been the translator's surreptitious motive? Can this phrasing be construed solely as the product of malicious intent? If, in this instance, Derrida is clearly overreacting, is it merely a coincidence that such behavior occurs in the vicinity of Marx's name?
In noting this conjunction of a compulsion to repeat with the operation of a persistent rhetoric of defense, we seem to find ourselves reading not an interview between Derrida and his critics but Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text whose insights into the nature of the ego's precarious boundaries will bear ultimately on the relationship be
[Beyond the Pleasure Principle] provides a useful way of thinking about textual defenses-including Freud's own-as "productions of the ego." Defenses generally occur as responses to threats which may be seen as coming from an "external world," and they also characteristically employ a "rhetoric of motives" to express wishes and fears that may be said to come from within the authorial psyche. The distinction between "internal" and "external" in the realm of textual defense is, hew ever, no less complex than Freud suggests it to be in the realm of psychic survival. [n44]
If the interview from Positions may qualify as such a "textual defense," it is because it calls into question-like the ego described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle-the stability of the border between "inside" and "outside." Not only are the questions addressed to Derrida phrased in terms of which discourse is outside of (that is, more comprehensive than) the other, but even the very form of this interview poses and reposes a problem of borders: when does the interview end with the termination of the recorded dialogue or with the final exchange of letters? Where are its boundaries between writing and speech, between the spontaneity of its conversation and its supplementary process of editorial revision? If, in addition to a compulsion to repeat, a defensive rhetoric indeed inheres in the structure of this interview, these then are tropes whose topographies" do not yield to the norms of formal logic: they relate to no object or collection of objects nor in any strict sense do they have either extension or inclusiveness [comprehension]." [n45]
This topographical indeterminacy is responsible, as well, for our inability to identify simply whose is the ego producing this "textual defense," whose is the ego that forms both "the stake and the agent" of such defensive maneuverings.46 Rather than attributing this ego-function either to Derrida or to his interviewers (for the phenomena
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under consideration cannot be reduced to the interplay between individual psyches), perhaps we can suggest that what is at stake is the ego of deconstruction as such. In doing so, we might discover that the connection between this general effacement of limits and Derrida's defensiveness on the question of Marx is something that, in Derrida's words, "belongs to a different labyrinth and a different crypt." [n47]
A different crypt? According to Derrida's essay "Fors," a crypt is a defense mechanism taken to extremes (or, if such a word existed, to intremes). As Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok developed this notion, a crypt is an uncanny ruse of the ego which mimics the operations of the unconscious. While space does not permit a detailed elaboration of this process, what will be stressed here is the crypt's ability to incorporate a foreign body within the self, thereby exceeding any possibility of distinguishing between the inside and the outside:
The cryptic enclave, between "the dynamic unconscious" and the "self of introjection," forms, inside the general space of the self, a kind of pocket of resistance, the hard cyst of an "artificial unconscious." The interior is partitioned off from the interior. . . . The inner safe (the self) has placed itself outside the crypt, or, if one prefers, has constituted "within itself" the crypt as an outer safe. One might go on indefinitely switching the place names around in this dizzying topology (the inside as the outside of the outside, or of the inside; the outside as the inside of the inside, or of the outside).48
The existence of a crypt may be detected through cryptonyms which both "protect against a mortal repetition of an excruciating pleasure and provide a displaced expression of a desire which would otherwise have to remain irrevocably silent." 49 Cryptonyms work anasemically, establishing correspondences between words not on a semantic basis but through "lexical continguity" or "formal consonance"; the cryptonym is then treated as a synonym of the initial (interdicted) word of which it functions as a translation. (Derrida's play in Glas on the homonymity between the way Hegel is pronounced i_ French and the word aigle [" eagle"] might be understood as an illustration of these cryptonymic procedures.) Since such an operation can occur both within languages and between languages, the potential for cryptonymic substitution appears unlimited.
Keeping in mind this pocket sketch of the workings of the crypt, we
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can take up once more our long-deferred question of Marx's absence from Derrida's text, and conclude that we have simply been searching in the wrong place. For when Derrida writes that "there is no paradigmatic text: only relations of a cryptic haunting from mark to mark or when he argues that translation bears on the concept of economy in its "relationship with time, space, counting words, signs, marks" we indeed have discovered "a certain foreign body. . . working over our household words." Just as Derrida locates a proper name in the sounds of the Freudian text, so we too can recognize such an (improper) presence in the texts of deconstruction. 50 The cryptonym in question is, of course, that of mark(s)/marque(s)/Marx. As the inside of the inside of deconstruction's outside, or the outside of the outside of deconstruction's inside, Marx thus inhabits within the confines of deconstruction a very precarious place. It is no wonder that the Positions interview bears this same abyssal structure, for when the name of Marx is the subject in question, the deconstructive ego is apt to be highly defensive. Marx, in short, is not "absent" from Derrida's texts as so often is claimed; encrypted in the crypt of its ego, deconstruction has Marx in its protective custody.
The Displacement of Politics
While the discussion above has been somewhat less-or morethan serious, it should serve at least to emphasize that there is something drastically amiss in the oppositional and hierarchical rhetorics typically employed by both Marxists and deconstructionists. For H Marx indeed is encrypted within deconstruction's ego, then the possibility of binary opposition begins to dissolve: "sides" cannot be drawn between these discourses since the one incorporates the other in such a way that neither can claim any longer a discrete, self-identical status. Where Marxists have argued that their theory encompasses deconstruction, our "psychoanalytic" reading reveals instead a paradoxical situation in which the supposed container is enveloped by what it contains-a situation that resists any hierarchical ordering in its unstable boundaries between "inside" and "outside." Marxism and deconstruction thus do not simply remain opposed: interimpli164
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cated in each other's borders, both theories are (as Shoshana Felman says of philosophy and madness) "eccentric to the very framework of their opposition, rebellious to the very structure of their alternative." [n51]
If, however, Marxism and deconstruction are not to be seen as antithetical practices-if, indeed, the one forms the other's difference from itself-then neither may they be construed as simple analogues of one another. The latter is a position maintained by Michael Ryan in his recent Marxism and Deconstruction, a work which argues at length that Marx and Derrida (despite their many differences) are best viewed as complementary figures. Yet if, as Ryan admits, "there are points of direct contact" but "no strict homology" between his two theories, then the relationship between them must be structured in a very curious way. Ryan is the first to identify this structure as one of supplementarity: "Deconstruction lacks a social theory" but this lack "can be supplemented by German critical theory. . . . Critical theory itself requires the kind of anti-metaphysical differential analysis that deconstruction offers." 52 Ryan, though, never pursues the radical implications of this discovery, choosing instead to ground his analysis largely on the model of analogy, of complementariness. Yet the dual terms of this model, by virtue of being additions to as well as replacements of one another, not only exceed the limits of analogy but alsoin so doing-ineluctably exceed themselves. If, in other words, the integral identities of both Marxism and deconstruction are compromised reciprocally by this supplementary logic, then it frankly becomes questionable whether Ryan's analogical method can, in principle, succeed-especially when, in proximity to the other, neither discourse can simply remain "itself."
Marxism and deconstruction hence pose themselves in dissimilar, though not strictly antithetical, ways, each answering to distinct disciplinary objects: Marxism criticizes capitalism, ideology, structures of class oppression; deconstruction criticizes criticism. Like the conflict between consciousness and the unconscious which, in Freud's words, "cannot be settled promptly because-there is no other way of putting it-they are localized in the subject's mind in such a way that they do not come up against each other," so are Marxism and deconstruction related to one another, the former contained in the latter "as its otherness-to-itself, its unconscious." 53 As a result of this supplementary relationship, it finally becomes impossible to say which of these discourses "forms the border of the other," for "each includes the other, comprehends the other, which is to say that neither comprehends the other." 54 We thus are confronted with a kind of irreducibly structural lability: Marxists will always be able to "contextualize" deconstruction as a reflection of the chaos of late capitalism; deconstructionists will always be able to reply that context inevitably exceeds all such attempts at semantic saturation; and so on indefinitely.
The effects of this supplementary logic can be glimpsed, for example, in the dissimilar responses of Marxism and deconstruction to the customary attribution to literature of some essential, autonomous property called "literariness." Although both discourses will find this post-Kantian, aestheticizing concept to be fraught with inherent political implications, each will assess these implications in a manner radically distinct from-though not simply opposed to-the other.
While Herbert Marcuse considered "the aesthetic dimension" as a universal reservoir of potentially contestatory values, most contemporary Marxists identify this domain as itself the product of bourgeois culture and hence as an ideological rather than essential construct. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that the "aesthetic" and the "literary" did not attain their present significance until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and thus command only a relative rather than a universal bearing within the confines of post-Romantic culture.55 Accordingly, it is only in a restricted sense, and not as an ensemble of timeless textual properties, that the term "literature" may appropriately be employed today, now designating, in Tony Bennett's words, "a particular, historically determined form of writing, defined by the major forms of bourgeois society, instead of, as is customarily the case, a set of universal attributes which all major forms of writing, from Homer to Kafka, are held to have in common. . . . There is no such 'thing' as literature, no body of written texts that self-evidently bear on their surface some immediately perceivable and indisputable literary essence." 56 Nevertheless, critical practice since 1800 has proposed one definition of the essence of literature after another. The origins of this essentializing practice have been traced directly to Kant, whose very attempt to differentiate the properly aesthetic from the moral and the cognitive is now seen as betraying an ultimately ideo
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logical desire to deny the historical condition of all experience as such. As Frank Lentricchia summarizes it:
[Kant's] very intention of isolating the distinctive character of the aesthetic experience was admirable, but his analysis re sulted in mere isolation. By barring that experience from the truth of the phenomenal world, while allowing art's fictional world entertainment value, he became the philosophical father of an enervating aestheticism which ultimately subverts what it would celebrate. 57
come infected by contact with this radical lack of selfsameness. Retaining the name "literature" (always used in quotation marks) as that which "breaks away from [the essentialist concept of] literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name," Derrida would demonstrate that Kant's founding distinction inevitably must undo itself-not, as the Marxists claim, in its failure to comprehend the historicity of the categories involved, but as a consequence of the subversive impact of "literature" on the integrity of these categories themselves. 58 If, then, it is Marxism's goal to displace the literary from an essentialist into a political dimension, it is Derrida's to indicate that the assumed stability of this very notion of the political (as a historically determined, univocal "final instance") is itself susceptible to displacement through the disseminative powers of "literature."
The double genitive in "displacement of politics" thus can be identified as a supplement in its two mutually exclusive though necessary readings: displacement names both the operation performed by politics and the object of this operation as such. This heading, as a result, can stand emblematically for the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction, for while "literariness" indeed is confronted by each, the terms of this encounter are neither purely antithetical nor complementary but rather supplementary. If the logic of the supplement exceeds the parameters of consciousness on which the notion of choice is dependent, then one cannot simply choose between the two theories-for, as Derrida notes in a different context:
Kant's own distinction between the aesthetic and the quotidian thus is vitiated by the fact that the former exists only as a historical function. Condemning as an inherently ideological gesture-as a naturalization of class-specific practices-any such recourse to essentializing categories, these Marxist theorists rely on a notion of an ultimate historical foundation by which to displace the concept of the literary from an aesthetic to a political register.
While for Derrida, too, there is "no such 'thing' as literature," it must be acknowledged at once that "literature" plays a role in his writings which, undermining the univocal status of all existing "things" (itself included), is finally irreducible to the Marxist relativization of the term. In Dissemination, for example, Derrida concurs with the Marxists' view that there are no ascribable essences which make literature literature; he similarly criticizes any conceptual category that aspires to universality, that "seems to aim toward the filling of a lack (a hole) in a whole that should not itself in its essence be missing (to) itself." If, however, Derrida agrees that the specificity of literature consists only in its lack of any proper self-identity-if the relationship between the literary and the nonliterary thus is compromised from the outset-he is quick to draw the unprecedented conclusion that literature therefore must function as the exception to everything else as well: "at once the exception in the whole, the want of wholeness in the whole, and the exception to everything, that which exists by itself, alone, with nothing else, in exception to all." If, in other words, literature voids itself continually in its total absence of propriety, in its structural inability to differentiate itself as a discrete entity, then everything that defines itself in opposition to the literary (which, in the Kantian system, is "everything") necessarily will be
I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing-in the first place because here we are in a region (let us say, provisionally, in a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and, in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground and the differance of this irreducible difference. 59
Having come, now, to some understanding of the common ground and the differance both between and within our two theories, we might try to utilize these insights in a detailed rereading of the Marxist canon-a rereading that would not merely seek to criticize the vari,ous institutionalized versions of Marxism in the name of some" original" Marx supposedly untouched by all subsequent vulgarizations, but one that would begin to acknowledge the uncanniness of Marx's
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Notes
writings, the differences between these writings and themselves. The goal, in short, would be to recall Marxism to itself-not in order to contain "scientifically" its own lack of selfsameness, but to indicate how Marxism is most itself when that self accedes to the very conflicts it describes. We would recognize, perhaps, that Marxism is located in the space "between dialectics and deconstruction"; but this, of course, is a task for subsequent re-marx. 60
The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature? by Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller
1. See our "Suggestions for Further Reading" at the back of this volume.
2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 19.
3. Josue V. Harari, "Critical Factions / Critical Fictions," in Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 10. Harari seems to modify this requirement by the end of his essay; see pp. 70- 71.
4. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 12.
5. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 7-11.
6. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 82.
7. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 52.
8. Of course this is an extreme reduction of Derrida's various and complex reading strategies. In general Derrida does not deconstruct literary texts; he produces unlikely graftings-of Plato and Mallarme, Blanchot and Shelley, Hegel and Genet-which resist reappropriation by the systems of formal or thematic criticism. On this topic see Samuel Weber, "After Eight: Remarking Glyph," Glyph 8 (1981): 232-37; and Rodolphe Gasche, "Deconstruction as Criticism," Glyph 6 (1979): 177-215. See also Derrida's Signeponge/ Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) for a recent instance of deconstruction's strategies in reading literature.
9. Jacques Derrida, "The Parergon," October 9 (1979): 18, 20, 24-26. This essay is an excerpt from Derrida's La Verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). The quotation from Kant appears in Critique of Judgment, "Analytic of the Beautiful," paragraph 14.
10. Derrida, "The Parergon," p. 20.
11. On double writing see Derrida, Positions, pp. 39-46; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 3-6, 173-285; and Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 179-82.
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Notes to Stephen Greenblatt
11. For Harsnett's comments on witchcraft, see Declaration, pp. 135-36. The relation between demonic possession and witchcraft is extremely complex. There is a helpful discussion, along with an important account of Harsnett and Darrel, in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Wei denfeld and Nicolson, 1971).
12. Brown, Cult of the Saints, pp. 109-11.
13. Thomas, Religion, p. 485.
14. S. M. Shirokogorov, The Psycho-Mental Complex of the Tungus (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935), p. 265.
15. Brown, Cult of the Saints, p. 110.
16. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1981).
17. See Edmund Jorden, A briefe discourse of a disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London, 1603).
18. Michel Leiris, La Possession et ses aspects thetitraux chex les Ethiopiens de Gondar (Paris: PIon, 1958).
19. On attacks on the Catholic church as a theater, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 66-131 and passim.
20. Harsnett, Discovery, p. A3r.
21. On the significance of the public theater's physical marginality, its location in the "Liberties" of London, I am indebted to work in progress by Steven Mullaney of MIT.
22. For a brief account of the whole tangled history of Darrel, see D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
23. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock
(London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 15.
24. Edgar's later explanation-that he feared for his father's ability to sustain the shock of an encounter-is, like so many explanations in King Lear, too little, too late.
25. Words, signs, gestures that claim to be in touch with superreality, with absolute goodness and absolute evil, are exposed as vacant-illusions manipulated by the clever and imposed upon the gullible.
26. This is, in effect, Edmund Jorden's prescription for cases such as Lear's.
27. In willing this disenchantment against the evidence of our senses, we pay tribute to the theater. Harsnett has been twisted around to make this tribute possible.
28. O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 220-52.
29. C. L. Barber, "The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 196.
4.Notes to Timothy Bahti
181
30. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 135.
Auerbach's Mimesis: Figural Structure and Historical Narrative by Timothy Bahti
1. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
2. Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
3. Robert Langbaum, "Mysteries and Meaning," The New York Times Book Review, 4 April 1982, p. 15.
4. Frederick Crews, "Criticism without Constraint," Commentary 73, no. 1 (January 1982): 69.
5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. ix.
6. Rene Wellek, "The Fall of Literary History," in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erziihlung, ed. R. Koselleck and W.-D. Stempel (Munich: W. Fink, 1973), pp. 427 -40.
7. In this, Auerbach's method is (his own differentiations notwithstanding) essentially the same as Leo Spitzer's, who likewise, in "Linguistics and Literary History," claimed to demonstrate the methodological continuity that obtains between the analysis of a particular word or stylistic feature of an author, and the study of the author's psychology, his place among his people and their time, and ultimately, his place in the life of his language; d. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. lOff.
8. Timothy Bahti, "Vico, Auerbach and Literary History," Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 239-55.
9. For the most trenchant critical reading of the sublation of the negative in Hegel's philosophic system, see Theodor W. Adorno, "Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei," Drei Studien zu Hegel, GesammeIte Schriften 5, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), esp. pp. 374, 375.
10. Erich Auerbach, "Figura," Neue Dantestudien, Istanbuler Schriften 5 (1944): 11-71; trans. Ralph Manheim in Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11-76. Henceforth cited in the text with the abbreviation F followed by a page number.
11. The technical term is implere, but the language of revealing, realizing, consummating, etc., also appears.
12. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendliindischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946), p. 516; trans. Willard R. Trask as Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ_rsity Press, 1953), p. 555. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text by page number only.
182
13. Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1929); trans. Ralph Manheim as Dante, Poet of the Secular World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
1. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xvi.
2. Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm, cited in Alex Callinicos, Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976), p. 14. On the crisis of Marxism, see Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, UnOrthodox Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Louis Althusser, "The Crisis of Marxism," in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies, trans. Patrick Camiller et aL (London: Ink Links, 1979), pp. 225-37; Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (New York: Praeger, 1981); Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism and Domination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Murray Bookchin, "Beyond Neo-Marxism," Telos 36 (Summer 1978): 5-28; Fernando Claudin, "Some Reflections on the Crisis of Marxism," Socialist Review 45 (May-June 1979): 137 -43; Lucio Colletti, "A Political and Philosophical Interview," New Left Review 86 (July-August 1974): 3-28; Oskar Negt, "Reflections on France's Nouveaux Philosophes and the Crisis of Marxism," Sub-Stance 37/38 (1983): 56-67; Paul M. Sweezy, "A Crisis in Marxist Theory," Monthly Review 31, no. 2 (June 1979): 20-24; and Goran Therborn, Science, Class, and Society (London: New Left Books, 1976).
3. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 199.
4. Aronowitz, Crisis in Historical Materialism, pp. 6, 20. In Aronowitz's conception, "the entire paradigm of historical change offered by Marxism collapses" if it fails in its task of specifying the precise conditions under which revolutionary struggle will occur (p. 7).
5. Alex Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism? (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 2. For a superb exposition and analysis of Marxism's investment in economic determinism, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: Oxford University Press, i982), especially the section entitled "The Dialectic of the Final Instance."
6. In general terms, orthodox Marxism has responded to these movements simply by asserting the priority of class over gender and race. For an analysis of the implicit weakness of this response, and for descriptions of the various neo-Marxist attempts to outline a synthetic approach to these questions, see Aronowitz, Crisis in Historical Materialism, pp. 73-121.
7. Balbus, Marxism and Domination, p. 3. The need to reformulate the basel superstructure relationship links the otherwise dissimilar projects of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. See especially Gramsci's Selections from th Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Ne\i York: International Publishers, 1971); and Althusser's For Marx, trans. Bel Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977). For the critique of Marxist econo mism, see Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975); and Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical ReasOJ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
8. George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd editiOl (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 192. See also Aronowitz, Crisis in Historical Mate rialism, pp. 142-44; Russell Jacoby, "The Politics of the Crisis Theory," Telos 2_ (Spring 1975): 3-52; and Trent Schroyer, "Marx's Theory of the Crisis," Telo: 14 (Winter 1972): 106-25.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Internationa Publishers, 1967), p. 113.
10. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Internationa Publishers, 1976), p. 249.
11. Philosophy's inability to acknowledge the irreducibility of the figura constitutes, of course, one of deconstruction's most insistent thematics. See for example, Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text 0 Philosophy," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Universit) of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207-71, and Paul de Man, "The Epistemology o. Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 13-30. See also Derrida'_ "Economies de la crise," La Quinzaine litteraire 399 (August 1983): 4-5, and dE Man's "Criticism and Crisis," in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 3-19, for somewhat analogous treatments of thE rhetoric of crisis.
12. As Fredric Jameson admits, "any doctrine of figurality must necessarily be ambiguous"; see The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 70. This lesson, of course, will be lost on those who-like John McMurty-would attempt to rescue Marx from "the charge of pervasive ambiguity": "We undertake to distill from the enormous and perplexing range of [Marx's] corpus a clear and integrating structure, which is both propositionally lucid and faithful to his texts. We undertake, in short, philosophy's classic task of underlaborer." See The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 3, 18. To the extent that Marx's readers continue in this way to reduce his writings to a simple inventory of his themes, we may conclude that Marxism-contrary to the famous assertion in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach-still remains implicated in the philosophical project it would reject. By virtue of its capacity for critical selfengagement, The Eighteenth Brumaire has attracted a number of interesting readings in recent years. See, for example, Gouldner, Two Marxisms, pp. 299-304; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 268-90; Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); J.ohn Paul Riquelme, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Karl Marx as Symbolic Action," History and Theory 19, no. 1 (1980): 58-72; Edward Said, "On Repetition," in
Between Dialectics and Deconstruction: Derrida and the Reading of Marx by Andrew Parker
184
18
The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 111-25; and Hayden White, "The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation," in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 213-29.
13. In certain respects, this view is consistent with the positions of Baudrillard (Mirror of Production) and Sahlins (Culture and Practical Reason). I do not wish, however, to endorse their conclusion that the category of production has therefore outlived its usefulness. For when Derrida writes that "production is necessarily a text" (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], p. 164), he acknowledges that production (like representation) is an indispensable, limiting term that cannot simply be surmounted. For a very different reading of this passage from the Grammatology, see Wlad Godzich, "The Domestication of Derrida," in The Yale Critics, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 20-40.
14. Aronowitz, Crisis in Historical Materialism, p. 36.
15. David Forgacs, "Marxist Literary Theories," in Modern Literary Theory, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), p. 160. These formulations are inspired by the classic work on the subject of a Marxist semiotics, V. N. Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and 1. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).
16. Roland Barthes, "Reponses," cited in Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 51.
17. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 62.
18. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 6.
19. See The Linguistic Turn, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). One sign of this epistemic change is the fact that even Stalin could not restrain himself from offering his comments on language; see J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972). For the ensuing debate among Soviet linguists, see The Soviet Linguistic Controversy, trans. John V. Murra et al. (New York: King's Crown Press, 1951).
20. Albrecht Wellmer, "Communication and Emancipation," in On Critical Theory, ed. John O'Neill (New York: Seabury, 1976), p. 247.
21. Julia Kristeva, "Pratique signifiante et mode de production," Tel Quel60 (Winter 1974): 26. On Lukacs and language see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 34-36.
22. Raymond Williams, "Marxism, Structuralism, and Literary Analysis," New Left Review 129 (September-October 1981): 65. See also the chapter entitled "Language" in his Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 21-44.
23. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 6.
24. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, "Sign Systems and Social Reproduction," Ideology & Consciousness 3 (Spring 1978): 58. See also his Linguistics and Economics (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), and Language as Work and Trade (So. Hadle; Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).
25. For what is, perhaps, the fullest exposition of the Tel Quel project, se Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
26. See Jean-Louis Houdebine, Langage et marxisme (Paris: Klincksied 1977), pp. 117-73. Among the many recent studies that attempt to combin Marxism with linguistics, the following are of special interest: Jean-Loui Baudry, "Linguistique et production textuelle" and "Le Sens de l'argent," iJ Tel Quel: Theorie d'ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 351-64 and 406-11, respec tively; Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980); Jean-Piem Faye, La Critique du langage et son economie (Paris: Galilee, 1973); Jean-Josepl Goux, Economie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973); Bennison Gray, "Is Languag4 a Superstructure?" Semiotica 25, no. 3/4 (1974): 319-33; Stephen Heath, "Lan guage, Literature, Materialism," Sub-Stance 17 (1977): 67-74; Dean MacCan
nell and Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Time of the Sign (Bloomington: Indian< University Press, 1982); Peter Madsen, "Semiotics and Dialectics," Poetics _ (1972): 29-49; Michel Pecheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology (New York St. Martin's Press, 1982); John Rajchman, "Semiotics, Epistemology, and Materialism," Semiotext(e) 1, no. 1 (February 1974): 11-27; David Silverman and Brian Torode, The Material Word (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Genevieve Vaughn, "Communication and Exchange," Semiotica 29, no. 1/2 (1980): 113-43; Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars, 1978); and Peter V. Zima, ed., Semiotics and Dialectics: Ideology and the Text (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981).
27. Marx, Capital, 1:74.
28. For the passage quoted, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 145. See also Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 86-89, and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 107-10. The inversion of priority between base and superstructure would not simply install the superstructure in the position formerly occupied by the base, thereby creating a new "final instance"; rather, it will allow us to posit a "generalized superstructure" as the condition of possibility for any subsequent differentiation between base and superstructure (understood here in their customary senses).
29. Barbara Johnson, translator's introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. ix. One might reread, the famous exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin in light of the conclusion drawn above. Adorno criticized Benjamin's "metaphorical" understanding of the relationship between base and superstructure, contending that attention must be directed to the problem of mediation. Benjamin, however, seems to be arguing for the irreducible figurality of the base/superstructure