"New" Repetition by Sande Cohen
The President of the American Historical Association insists that criticism of "autonomous subjectivity" has gone too far -- the "souls" of ordinary people "crave" meanings which give answers to the big questions, a.k.a. verbal inoculations against painful reflections which cannot be washed out by language.1 Such cultural officials should have no fear, since the repetition of words like "soul," hinged to concepts of submission to cultural ideals, comprises a pronounced aspect of the landscape of present so-called historical and critical writing.
A friend passes to me a magazine2 which has a book-review section of interest to artists, and I start reading, after glancing at a photo of Harold Bloom indexed as a face become the Eternal Sufferer. He writes that Walter Benjamin's letters are "wonderful,'' that the "conceptual image of the aura" is a "representative metaphor for the death of the Western canon." Auratic death is so satisfying; but it's difficult to take from a critic who, thirty-odd years ago, emphasized "...the unitary instincts of Innocence ... relieve the artist as he recovers from his fall into division."3 Bloom is in mourning -- for a lost Power, the myth of the unity of disparities.
I pass onto a review of Ronell's latest text, and stop on this quotation "...I am writing for writing because it died ... writing is necessarily bound up with mourning." "Bound up" is a synecdoche whose satisfaction is elicited from its being cause and effect, and is a figure related to "died" and "mourning" as a mummy is to the body it was. The equation writing = mourning or writing = mummification recasts Melancholy Idealism, strange from a writer who is one of our strongest critics.
From there I move to a passage by Andrew Ross, who cannot resist verbally urinating on ''noncommercial purism" (e.g. Ulysses) as outmoded, this because ''the same circuit of investment that brings low-wage employment to Haiti distributes far and wide the most politicized forms of music, already shot through with international influences." This is said to constitute a "dialectic" between production, or capitalist exploitation, and consumption, or emerging voices of dissent, but just exactly where and when such music is "dialectical" if it has the same mode of investment as degraded human labor (there is no dialectic in economics) remains a mystery. One magazine, three small texts, and a concatenation of repetitious returns -- because writing is removed from conflict with all but cultural ideals.
Derrida, who now tends to repeat figures (Of Spirit reads as an extended displacement of questions which could never be answered), suggests that repetition is not something which happens once within any system. As writing (inscription), as the memorializing functions (traces), or as the negotiations over social life (exchange), repetition happens differently as it happens over and over again in different ways. Generalized, no concept is ever a "serene presence" and, because of this failure, I find my thoughts attracted to roaming about in this conceptual area. Language appears to always install identifications, "scientized," for example, as the principle of double articulation. But concepts do not provide identifications, and insistence upon non-identification may well be little more than a chimera, perhaps just figuration within identity, and so a confirmation that in the end language = identity, with pauses in it, now and then, which would be the adventures of literature and poetry, stammering and psychosis, pleasure and pain, the sublime, and other deviations from, but of, identity.
The up-to-the-minute texts of Derrida's indicate one of the disasters of repetition. From Pascal, who insisted that there must be no sleeping while Jesus is in agony, to Benjamin, with the delirium of the straight-gate which might usher in a messianic instance shattering present negative forces, intellectuals have set up communication with the dead as their self-delusion or transcoding of religious precepts. There's nothing strange about this until it is made a "stake" in the ability of intellectuals to work, once such demands are normalized and institutionalized as work/writing permits. Hardly anyone can write on Benjamin without demonstrating their commitment to "spirit."
So too with Derrida: Specters of Marx will circulate as a raising of the ante of historiographic discourse on account of its dramatistic (in Kenneth Burke's sense) phrases taken as signs and signals of a "higher reflection" in the scholarly endeavor to install a taste for "spirit". "Haunting," Specters insists, "would mark the very existence of Europe. It would open the space and the relation to self of what is called by this name".4 No discussion of European venality in the Opium Wars or the French treatment of Algeria in the l9-20th century should intrude.
This insistence is an equation: historiography and haunting are one and the same. Haunting stands in for the "uncanny" and irrepressible past of Europe -- but is this so? There must be a return to Europe's "spirit" -- isn't that what "irrepressible" means, when re becomes fused with "never leaving Europe"? Are there truly mysteries to be said/written about the history of Europe? Even if no decisive historical judgments can be rendered at the level of the "significance of Europe," it does not follow that there are any outstanding problems to be addressed. A ''haunted existence" attributed to Europe could be seen as something else: a way for a European intellectual to maintain the openness of the European past, A way of giving historicity back to Europe, or at least reclaiming a historicity never settled. An infinite re-reading of European history is thus made possible as recoding through the haunted. This recoding, which claims to upset the chronicity of names, also makes for a more inclusive successivity. The specter-thing can be figured forth not just as a way to dislodge the dominance of presence, but also as a device for hyper-continuity: as asymmetrical, the specter "interrupts here all specularity ... it recalls us to anachrony ... we do not see who looks at us."5 Anachrony = never = eternity, and does not mean just out of time or the untimely or disjunction, as Derrida insists; it also means what is invisibly continuous, a super-continuity such that History is subject to a new law: "all semanticization is given over to mourning, to the voice, and to the work of the 'spirit.' The question 'Whither Marxism' whispers to us to follow a ghost."6
Historiographically, then, the function of the "ghost" is to return a historicity to Europe, stripped of the semantics of conflict, where none of the narrative models available to ordinary historiography are of use, and the new terms of continuity are posed by hauntology. There will be a return to History. And "soul," and ''melancholy," and ...
The cycle starts up again -- instead of fluid relations with language, used to the point where repetition is unable to repeat, there is today return to the representation and recoding of the obvious -- the bottomless pit of Nihilism, worked over until ...
1. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 207-14
2. Artforum, 1994
3. H. Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (New York, 1963), 305
4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7
5. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 7
6. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 10
Sande Cohen lives in Venice and teaches at Cal Arts.
