30.
MP 163; “The Ends of Man” (hereafter cited in the text as
EM), tr. Edouard Morot-Sir,
Wesley C. Piersol, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Barbara Reid, Philosophical and
Phenomenological Research 30 (1969) : 57.
31.”Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche’s Werke (Leipzig, 1911), part 2, vol. 15, p. 47, “Ecce Homo,” On
the Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo op. cit., p. 258.
32.NW VI. ii, 137; Beyond Good and Evil, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth and
Baltimore, 1973), p. 113.
33.”Ecce Homo,” op. cit., pp. 96–97; English tr., p. 306. The problem is, of course, not only
the complicity between yes and no but also that between saying and doing, and being. For an
analysis of the relationship between knowing and doing in Nietzsche, see Paul de Man,
“Action and Identity in Nietzsche,” forthcoming in Yale French Studies. I should mention here
that, in a more restricted way, jean-Michel Rey has noted the need to “erase” certain
conceptual master-words in Nietzsche (L’enjeu des signes: lecture de Nietzsche [Paris, 1971],
pp. 52–53)
34.Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main, 1951), pp.
210–11 (hereafter cited in the text as KPM G) ; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr.
James S. Churchill (Bloomington and London, 1962), pp. 241–42, (hereafter cited in the text
as KPM E). Rey notes the incongruence between Nietzsche and Heidegger in passing, op. cit.,
p. 91 n.
35.Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen, 1961), (hereafter cited in the text as HN) , 1:
463–64. Translations are my own.
36.This very condensed remark by Paul de Man will give a hint of the gravity of the problem:
“ ‘Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world forever justified,’ ... the
famous quotation, twice repeated in The Birth of Tragedy should not be taken too serenely, for
it is an indictment of existence rather than a panegyric of art,” “Genesis and Genealogy in
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,” Diacritics II, iv (Winter 1972) : 50.
37.Götzendämmerung: oder wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, NW VI. iii, 74; Twilight
of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 40–41.
38.NW V. ii, 291; GS 317. This Nietzschean passage might be related to Derrida’s comments
on Lévi-Strauss’s play with the Nambikwara girls on p. 167 (p. 114) of the Grammatology.
39.For a lucid .account of this reinscription, see Jean Laplanche et J.-B. Pontalis, “Fantasme
originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme,” Les temps modernes 19, ccxv (1964)
: 1833–68; translated as “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 49, i (1968) : 1–18.
40.For “the woman’s point of view” on psychoanalysis see Luce Irigaray, Speculum: de
l’autre femme (Paris, 1974). I am grateful to Michael Ryan for suggesting this line of inquiry.
41.I refer the reader to QS, pp. 28o f. Derrida’s play on Nietzsche’s “I have forgotten my
umbrella” should be read in full.
Sao
42.Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen and Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The
Hague, 1950), pp. 70—71; Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1973), p. 32.
See also Formale and transzendentale Logik, part II, chapter 6, Husserliana, Nijhoff edition
(1974), 17: 239-73. Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1969),
pp. 232-66.
43.ED 315; “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” tr. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48
(French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis; hereafter cited in the text as FF) (1972),
p. 93.
44.Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,”
The Language of the Self: the
Function of Language in Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan, tr. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore
and London, 1968) , p. 91.
45.Of a good many examples, I shall cite one: “The ‘lacunae’ to which you alluded, and do
me the justice of believing this, are explicitly calculated to mark the loci of a theoretical
elaboration . . .” (Pos F 85, Pos E II 33), An example of the defense of “my master’s mastery”
is to be found even in Paul de Man’s brilliant essay “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques
Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau” (Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism [New York, 19711): “Rousseau was not deluded and said what he
meant to say. . . . Instead of having Rousseau deconstruct his critics, we have Derrida
deconstructing a pseudo-Rousseau by means of insights that could have been gained from the
‘real’ Rousseau” (pp. 135, 139—40). Yet, as we read Derrida’s own pages on Lévi-Strauss and
Rousseau (part 2, chapter 1, Of Grammatology), we sense the same claim being made for
Rousseau over Lévi-Strauss: both have given writing short shrift, yet Rousseau’s text, if not
Rousseau, had known that simply to do so would have been merely symptomatic. The value of
mastery, of knowledge, of control, even of having got there first, persists, however vestigially.
The “subject” of knowledge then becomes the text. “[The critic’s] use may be no more than to
identify an act of deconstruction which has always already, in each case differently, been
performed by the text on itself” (J. Hillis Miller, “Deconstructing the Deconstructers,”
Diacritics V, ii [Summer 19751: 31). This value-in-mastery too is perhaps a “metaphysical”
axiom that criticism, at the limit, cannot avoid. For those who are “aware” that this battle
cannot be won, there is some measure of comfort in being able to recognize that a text, even
when assigned control, is never sovereign, always ridden by the absence of the subject,
always offering a “lack” that the reader must fill, as well as the materials with which to begin
to fill it.
46.See Jacques Lacan, « L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud, »
Ecrits (Paris, 1966) : 493—528; « The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious, » tr. Jan
Miel, Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann, Anchor Books (New York, 1970), PP. 94-137.
47.Martin Heidegger, Sein and Zeit (Tübingen, Niemeyer edition, 1960), pp. 22, 24; Being
and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston, 1962), PP. 44,
46.
48.de Man,
Blindness and Insight, op. cit., p. 140.
49.Sein u. Zeit, pp. 24, 23; Being and Time, pp. 46, 45.