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Pierres Extraordinary Emergency: Melville and

the Voice of Silence, Part 2

William V. Spanos

Silence permeates all things, and produced its magical power, as well

during the peculiar mood which prevails at a solitary travelers first

setting forth on a journey, as at the unimaginable time when before

the world was, Silence brooded on the face of the waters.

Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

In the first part of this essay (published in boundary 228, no. 2 [sum-

mer 2001]: 10531), I undertook a reading of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

that focused on Herman Melvilles critique of the hegemonic discourse ofAmerica as that imperial and totalizing discourse is reflected in his devastat-

ingly ironic treatment of the American cultural memorys will to monumen-

talize the American past in its obsessive effort to annulto silencethe

ambiguities that would undermine its authorityand the national consen-

sus on which it relies. In the last section, I noted that Melvilles fundamen-

tal intent in thus interrogating the American discourse of hegemony is not

only to thematizeto give voice tothese hitherto invisible and unspeak-

able ambiguities but also to endow them with a positive ontological force. In

boundary 228:3, 2001. Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press.

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134 boundary 2 / Fall 2001

so doing, I claimed, Melvilles novel was anticipating the Copernican revolu-

tion Martin Heidegger inaugurated when he retrieved the nothing that the

discourse of modernity wishes to know nothing about. 1 Taking my point

of departure from this reconstellation of Melvilles novel out of the discur-sive domain in which it has hitherto been imbedded by Americanists into

the postmodern context, I want, in this second installment, to think Melvilles

attunement to that profound Silencethat divine thing without a name

from which those imposter philosophers pretend somehow to have got an

answer 2in terms of the directives for thought and practice suggested by

the most recent explorations of the other silenced by the triumph of the

world, often referred to as the Americanization of the planet.

1

What about this resonant silence? As I have suggested, the pas-

sages on the metaphysics of monuments and on narrative from Pierre

quoted in the previous installment of this essay are written by the narrator

in the context of Pierres extraordinary emergency. They constitute dis-

closures of the dark underside ofthe shadow that belongs tothe lumi-

nously white truth discourse of America. I mean this not simply in the sense

of the negative effects of a totalized thinking/saying that claims to be posi-

tively ameliorative but also in the sense of precipitating into visibility the

ambiguities that, in its will to power over difference, this thinking/saying

finallythat is, essentiallycannot accommodate to its discourse of Pres-

ence: the spectral non-being, as it were, that haunts the dominant discourse

of Being. As Pierre puts this resonant, if unspeakable, revelation in lines im-

mediately following the second passage on the metaphysics of monumen-

talization, quoted in my first installment, lines, not incidentally, that conflate

the metaphorics of memorialization and narrative:

As for the restnow I know this, that in commonest memorials, the

twilight fact of death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambi-

1. Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? trans. David Ferrell Krell, in Basic Writings

from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), rev. and exp. ed. (New

York: HarperCollins, 1993), 96.

2. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker,

and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and TheNewberry Library, 1971), 208. Hereafter, subsequent references to this text will be cited

parenthetically as P.

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Spanos / Pierres Extraordinary Emergency 135

guities of that departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and

insinuates surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared.

Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene

of the last act of mans play;a play, which begin how it may, in farceor comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls on a

corpse. Therefore, never more will I play the vile pygmy, and by small

memorials after death, attempt to reverse the decree of death, by

essaying the poor perpetuating of the image of the original. (P, 197

98)

What Pierre is intuiting in discovering the irreducible and thus dread-

ful ambiguities subsuming his fathers portraitthe hitherto totally charted

temporal and spatial world of Saddle Meadowsis precisely what Ishmaeldis-closes in his narration of Ahabs pursuit of the white whale in Moby-

Dick: the essential unnameability, the unpicturability, the unrepresentability,

the unsayability of being itself.3 In a way that uncannily anticipates the Der-

ridean analysis of the non-concept diffrance, the act of naming/picturing/

monumentalizing/mapping is simply the substitution or supplementation of

a sign for that which would be brought to presence.4 The process of repre-

sentation, whether it takes the form of a memorial portrait, a monument, a

shrine, a narrative, a cultural model, or a structural world, always alreadypostpones or defers that which it would bring to presence, that which it would

re-present. This motif of deferral, which is intrinsic to representation in gen-

eral and to the American discourse of hegemony in particular, pervades

Melvilles novel. Indeed, it could be said provisionally that it constitutes the

irreducible absence that haunts the center of Pierres story. And its spec-

tral force is underscored precisely because it is precipitated into visibility

as a radically contradictory other by the very fulfillment in violence of the

imperial logic of the American discourse of hegemony.

A decisive example of this insistent motif of deferral occurs in Mel-

villes commentary on Pierres burning, but finally abortive, Titanic desire,

in the face of the reigning Olympian gods, to write the comprehensively

compact book that would gospelize the world anew (P, 273) after having

3. See Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle

for American Studies(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 12431; 16972; 197

201; 26970.

4. Jacques Derrida, Diffrance, in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays onHusserls Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University

Press, 1973).

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arrived in the city and taken lodgings with Isabel in the Church of the

Apostles. Instigated by the unprecedentedsituation in which [he] now found

himself (P, 283; my emphasis), Pierre, thus seemingly disburdened of the

last vestiges of the patriarchal tradition, envisions this book as The Book,lex naturae: a spatial miniature that would include digestively . . . the whole

range of all that can be known or dreamed (P, 283).5 In this form, this

comprehensively compact book would thus deliver what he thought to

be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world (P, 283). In-

voking the contradictorily inclusive visualism of this heroic Titanism, Mel-

ville underscores the paradoxical blindness of Pierres vestigial universalist

(metaphysical) narratological perspective to the things themselves: He did

not see [Melville foregrounds Pierres visualism by repeating this locutionthree times in one paragraph] that all great books in the world are but the

mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in

the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own

things; and never mind what the mirror may be, if we would see the object,

we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection (P, 284). In its

reliance on mimesis, that is, the comprehensively compact book Pierre,

the rebellious Titan, would write reinscribes the dominant Olympian cul-

tures essentially metaphysical/spatializing (Hegelian) notion of the work of

art as a microcosm that reflects in miniaturized visible form the macro-

cosm, which in its unmediated form is impossible to see and grasp.6

5. The image Pierre invokes to visualize the kind of book he would write is the atoll: the

primitive coral islets which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest seas, rise

funnel-like to the surface, and present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the

outside everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet lagoon

within (P, 283). Pierre invokes this image because it ostensibly refers to the primordial

nature at which he thinks he has arrived. But his description of this natural phenomenon is

remarkably like the description of a man-made monument intended to resist the ravagesof time. Indeed, it is, as Joseph Riddel, following the lead of Edgar Dryden, has brilliantly

shown, quite like the pyramid that Melville invokes on the next page to deconstruct the

scriptural Book that Pierre, in his unprecedented situation, envisions. See Riddel, De-

centering the Image: The Project of American Letters? in The Problems of Reading in

Contemporary American Criticism, a special issue of boundary 28 (fall 1979): 16566; and

Dryden, The Entangled Text: Melvilles Pierreand the Problem of Reading, boundary2 7

(spring 1979): 16263. The pyramid, it needs to be emphasized, is that fundamental spa-

tial structure projected by civilized man not simply to transcend the ephemeral state of

mortality but also, by way of its panoptic allotrope, to facilitate a dominant cultures domi-

nation of the other. Not too far behind the atoll/pyramid trope, as I am suggesting by wayof invoking the metaphor of the microcosm, is the trope of the map.

6. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the word comprehend, which is intrinsic to the dis-

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After thus disclosing the blindness of Pierres oversight, Melville then

de-structures what we can call his panoptic view. And he does this by in-

voking the sublimethat which Heidegger calls the Nothing and Jean-

Franois Lyotard, the unpresentable 7which it is the finally futile purposeof the comprehensive visualism of the dominant metaphysical perspective

to re-present and domesticate (make docile):

But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do never in

one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full

awfulness of amplitudetheir overawing extent of peak crowded on

peak, and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and

all their wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely or-

dained, that on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, manshall not at once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy pre-

pared for such an encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in

the lowermost snows. Only by judicious degrees, appointed by God,

does man come at last to gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtop-

ping view of these Alps; and even then, the tithe is not shown; and far

over the invisible Atlantic, the Rocky Mountains and the Andes are

yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of man! (P, 284) 8

course of knowledge production in the West, derives from the Latin com, an archaic form

of cum(with) used in compounds and meaning together, in combination or union, al-

together, completely, and prehendereto seize, to take hold of. That is to say, it derives

from two complicitous metaphorical systemsseeing and graspingthat belie the origi-

nality of the truth of being. This etymology thus discloses the pursuit of knowledge in the

West to be a process informed by the will to power over the be-ing of being. I mean the

willful reduction of temporality to spatial form (a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm) or,

what is the same thing, the reification of an essentially unreifiable being for the purpose of

dominating it. Western epistemology, in other words, serves the function of annulling the

anxiety of being-in-the world and/or of transforming the difference that time disseminatesto standing reserve (Heidegger) or useful and docile body (Foucault). Comprehend,

not incidentally, is one of the key philosophical words in the discourse of Hegels meta-

physical dialectics. See Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics

of Destruction(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14144. See also the

chapter entitled Heidegger and Foucault: The Politics of the Commanding Gaze, 13280.

7. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? 100101; Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern

Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 7982.

8. As Dominique Arnaud-Marcais observed in an interesting paper entitled Melvilles

French Connections, delivered at the conference Melville among the Nations, in Volos,Greece, 26 July 1997, Melville seems to be consciously eliding the meaning of the French

word blanc (white) with the English word blank (the absence of presence) in the fol-

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But Melvilles destruction of Pierres vestigial metaphysical vision

does not culminate here. He goes on, in what might be called a Heideg-

gerian repetition, to affiliate the vestigial subject-oriented panopticism of

Pierres comprehensively compact perspective with the tropes that he hasinsistently identified in the novel as the metaphors endemic to metaphysi-

cal/hegemonic perception and the agents of its imperial will to peace: the

monument and inscription (writing as re-presentation):

Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy

lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian

king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first

superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlay-

ered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into theworld, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface.

To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By

vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come

to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the

lidand no body is there!appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of

a man! (P, 285)

The itinerary of the logical economy of naming, of representation, of monu-

mentalizing, of mapping, whose end is to bring temporality and the differ-

ences that temporality always already disseminates to stand, ends para-

doxically in the deferral of the end, which is to say, in the precipitation of

the absence of presence. The representational process claims as its nar-

ratological end a full totality, the perfection and beauty of the All. And this

end is metaphorically re-presented as arrival and figured as the inclusive

and plenary centered circle. But the fulfillment of its logical itinerary para-

doxically discloses the evacuated circle, the zero: the nothing that precedes

naming, or, what is the same thing, the difference that is the condition for

lowing passage from the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale in Moby-Dick: Is it that

by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,

and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white

depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the

visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these rea-

sons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows

a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? (Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed.

Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle [Evanston and Chicago: North-

western University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988], 195). I would suggest that thereference to Mont Blanc in the crucial passage I am quoting from Pierre also plays with

this double meaning and is thus fraught with the same ontological significance.

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the possibility of Identity and that always already haunts the latters imperial

authority.

In the novel, Melville calls this absent presencethe shadowy

other of metaphysical representationSilence. And, it should be noted,this word, or variants of it, resonates throughout Pierre, especially at junc-

tures that refer to the epistemological perspectives that early American-

ists have identified with the American Renaissance. For example, in the

passage in which Melville mocks Plato, Spinoza, Goethe, and, above all,

the preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile

brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their Greek or German

Neoplatonical originals, he, we recall, writes: The profound Silence, that

only Voice of our God . . . ; from that divine thing without a name, those im-poster philosophers pretend somehow to have got an answer; which is as

absurd, as though they should say they had got water out of a stone; for how

can a man get a Voice out of Silence? (P, 208).

Melvilles reiterated invocation of God in these recurrent passages

should not deflect us away from the philosophical, narrative, and social mar-

gins to which his deviant text as such compels our attention, back, that is,

into our inscribed adherence to the concentering, self-present logosand to

the teleological structure, the narrative, the monument, the map that are

intrinsic to its imperial project. His reference to God in his text should be

understood, rather, as being within quotation marks, an ironic comment on

the still powerful Puritan Spirit in antebellum America. The Silence is, in fact,

the Nothing that this secularized Puritan spirit would preclude or include

or occlude. More specifically, it is the ontological and sociopolitical condi-

tion vis--vis speech of having been bereft of the logos by emergency. It

is for Melville, if not quite for young Pierre, the e-mergent unthinkable and

unspeakable, the ex-orbitedperipheralunsayable, that belongs tothat

returns as visitant to hauntthe central, monumental, and imperial Medu-san voice of the dominant metaphysical/hegemonic culture that would have

nothing to do with it.

Understood in the context of the thematics of the thinkable and un-

thinkable, the sayable and unsayable, as the novels overdetermination of

the question of language demands, Melvilles evocation of Silence as the

end of the metaphysical/hegemonic thinking/saying of America con-

stitutes anotherindeed, the most importantinsight that is remarkably

proleptic of the postmodern occasion, namely, the recognition, first an-nounced by Heidegger, that the end of philosophy in post-Enlightenment

modernity constitutes not simply the fulfillment of its logical economy but

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its demise.9 I mean the recognition that, in fulfilling its spatializing logic,

in coming to closure, as it were, Western metaphysical thinkingthinking

from after or above (meta) the temporal processhas transformed the be-

ingthe always already differential temporal dynamicsof being to a total-ized World Picture (Weltbild) 10 and in so doing has exposed to view the

temporality or, what is the same thing, the nothing that metaphysical think-

ing, in its certainty that an answer is finally dis-coverable, will have nothing

to do with. With the completion of metaphysical thinking, which is to say,

with its arrival at the limits of its logical economy, the Silence that meta-

physical thinking cannot think shows itself as the shadowy contradiction

the irreducible excessthat delegitimizes its authority. Silence, as it were,

e-mergesfrom the saying that is permissible as the spectral presence thathaunts metaphysical thinkings triumphant hegemony.

The language of spectrality I have all along insinuated into my text

to suggest the affiliation of Pierres extraordinary emergency with the

postmodern occasion is not gratuitous. In a late essay on the poetry of

Georg Trakl, for example, Heidegger refers to this occasion as die Abge-

schiedenheit, the place of apartness, and the poet who inhabits it, die Ab-

geschiedene, the one who is apart. He or she is the stranger who is

bereft of languageexiled from a discursive homelandby the total map-

ping/colonization of saying by the Spirit of metaphysical thinking, but who

finds, precisely in that diasporic condition of bereavement, a spiritual lan-

guage: the ghostly voice of silence that is the other of the logos, or the

Spirit:

The apartness [die Abgeschiedenheit] is ghostly. This wordwhat

does it mean? . . . Ghostly means what is by way of the spirit, stems

from it and follows its nature. Ghostly means spiritual, but not in

the narrow sense that ties the world to spirituality. . . . [O]f the

spirit means the opposite of material. This opposition posits a dif-

ferentiation of two separate realms and, in Platonic-Western terms,

states the gulf between the supersensuous noeton and the sensu-

ous aistheton. Of the spirit so understoodit meanwhile has come

to mean rational, intellectual, ideologicaltogether with its opposites

belongs to the world view of the decaying kind of man. But the dark

9. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, in On Time and

Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1977), 5573.10. Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Tech-

nology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 11554.

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journey of the blue soul [of the Abgeschiedene] parts company

with this kind. . . . Apartness is spiritual, determined by the spirit, and

ghostly, but it is not of the spirit in the sense of the language of

metaphysics. . . .What, then, is the spirit? . . . Trakl sees spirit not primarily as

pneuma, something ethereal, but as a flame that inflames, startles,

horrifies, and shatters us. . . .

Trakl sees spirit in terms of that being which is indicated in the origi-

nal meaning of the word ghosta being terrified, beside himself,

ek-static.11

There are, admittedly, problems in Heideggers definition of the ghostli-

ness of die Abgeschiedene. It could be said, with Jacques Derrida, thatit remains vestigially metaphysical.12 But I want to identify the spectral

one who is apart with the Dasein of Being and Time. This is the being-

in-the-world who, with a break in the referential totality (Verweisungs-

ganzheit), e-merges from the world as it is publicly interpreted 13the

de-differentiated or charted or colonized world, as it were, reified by the

privileged concentering logos. He or she is the stranger, the wanderer,

the nomad, the orphan, whose dis-location from the homeland compels him

or her into the de-centered and uncanny world of not-at-homeness (dieUnheimliche Welt), where, all the points of reference as on a map having

dissolved, he or she comes face-to-face, in anxiety, with the unspeakable

nothing.

It would be quixotically optimistic to identify this condition of lack in

terms of the conventional understanding of the word positive. And yet it is,

precisely in its diasporic or dis-seminated character, a condition of positivity.

This is because it discloses the lack of the Abgeschiedene not simply as

lack but as the lack ofthe lack that belongs tothe plenary totality of

the imperial thinking that has driven him or her outof a homeland (beside

him- or herself), because, that is, it reveals this lack as the Silence that not

only haunts what is permitted to be said by metaphysical thinking but calls,

precisely in its haunting, for the rethinking of (hegemonic) thinking itself. It is

11. Martin Heidegger, Language in the Poem: A Discussion of Georg Trakls Poetic Work,

trans. Peter D. Hertz, in On the Way to Language(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 177

79.

12. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Benningtonand Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

13. Heidegger, Being and Time, 1027; 16466.

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a positive condition, in other words, not only because it opens upthe reified

and closed-off realm of temporality and possibility to a kind of ec-static

thinking hitherto foreclosed by the achieved dominion of metaphysical think-

ing but also because the condition of silence, in signaling an excess thatis beyond the reach of the representational thought of metaphysics, consti-

tutes a directive for such a rethinking of thinking that would render thinking

adequate to the task of resisting the will to power informing what can now

be called alternatively the spatial, monumental, cartographic, imperial im-

peratives of the Truth.

Read in the context of this emergent, still to be adequately thought

postmodern initiative, Pierre Glendinning is the Abgeschiedene. With the

dis-integration of the world of Saddle Meadows, Pierre undergoes an ex-traordinary emergency that renders him, in Heideggers terms, an ec-

static in-sistence. 14 He becomes acutely aware, that is, of a reality that

hitherto, in his mergent state, has been foreclosed to him. In his e-mergency,

he not only comes to realize that the truth of the world of Saddle Mead-

ows is a lie, a fabrication imposed on it by the dominant imperial Ameri-

can culture. He also comes to the realization that his being-in-the-world is

a condition of thrownness, bereft of cartographic coordinates and thus of

language. He becomes the one apart, the alienated stranger or nomad who

has been exiled from the homeland or, truer to Melvilles text, the Father-

land of American discourse into the uncanny not-at-home, the diaspora,

where silence resonantly reigns.

The rhetoric Melville uses in Pierre to characterize the represented

American homeland, as we have seen, circulates around the tropes of

memorialization: the monument, the shrine, the relic (behind which lies the

metaphor of the seed [sporos]), the portrait, the canon, the (meta)narrative.

But if we read Pierre in the context of Moby-Dick (which, not incidentally,

precedes Pierreby one year), as, that is, a domestic allotrope of the globalscope of the earlier novel, in which the chart and the classificatory table

predominate, it becomes clear that this metaphorical chain associated with

memory and cultural formation (the making of the nation-state) also includes

the trope of mapping, a trope which, as postcolonial critics have made deci-

sively clear, is endemic to and the sine qua non of the colonialist project. In

Moby-Dick, Melville overdetermines these geographic tropes in order to in-

terrogate the geopolitical imperial project of the United States in the antebel-

14. Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. John Sallis, in Basic Writings, 132

35.

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lum period.15 In Pierre,asin Israel Potter(a novel, not incidentally, which also

traces the genealogy of the American discourse of hegemony back through

the American Revolution to its origins in the Puritans providentially ordained

errand in the wilderness), he overdetermines the metaphorics of monu-mentality in order to interrogate the American domestic hegemonic project.

But these privileged metaphorical systems circulating around memorializa-

tion and mapping, and the American practices to which they refer, are, as

I have been suggesting, not incommensurate, but indissolubly continuous:

They spatialize history and the differences that history disseminates for the

purpose of dominating it and them. Culture and colonization derive ety-

mologically from the Latin colonus, the planter/settler who domesticates

at-homesthe agr(i)os, the wild and savage earth and its nomadic deni-zens.16

For Melville, in other words, the mapping and colonization of

America inaugurated by the Puritans founding of the unmapped New

World wilderness had been implicitly (theoretically) if not actually accom-

plished by the middle of the nineteenth century, when he was writing Moby-

Dickand Pierre. I emphasize these affiliated key wordsfounding, mapping,

colonizationnot to indicate that they are simply metaphors drawn from the

discourse of Western imperialism proper. Rather, in keeping with Melvilles

remarkably proleptic intention, I do it in order to suggest that they refer liter-

ally both to geographic space andto knowledge production itself, that is, to

a Western thinking that, at least since the Romans and increasingly there-

after, is informed by a spatial metaphorics that represents the truth of being

(knowledge) as a territory or province or domain, or field or area or

realm or region to be won and dominated.17 In other words, the being of

15. See Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, esp. 191203.

16. Wei-chee Dimock makes explicit the pervasiveness in Pierreof the metaphorics of em-pire and shows convincingly that the domestic topos which the novel overdetermines is

utterly continuous with the geopolitical. See Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics

of Individualism(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 14849.

17. Region (of knowledge), for example, derives from the Latin regere, to command;

province, from vincere, to conquer; domain, from dominus, master. See Michel Fou-

cault, Questions Concerning Geography, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and

Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 69. As

Heidegger suggests, territoryderives from the Latin terra, earth, understood not, like the

Greeks gaia or ge, as the in-between in which aletheia (un-concealment) happens but

as territorium, which means land of settlement as realm of command and in which canbe heard an imperial accent (Parmenides, trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz

[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 60).

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American thought in Pierre, even more than the being of American space,

has been reduced by an epistemological comportment toward it that sees

its darkly differential, ambiguous, and ineffable dynamics from the end (all

at once) to a classified space, to an (enlightened) comprehensively com-pact map, as it were. By putting every detail in time and space in its proper

place within the larger identical whole, to put it alternatively, this episte-

mological comportment toward beingthis spatializing thinkingfacilitates

imperial domination of the wild (nomadic) other. In short, the world of ante-

bellum American thought in Pierrehas been utterly colonized and domesti-

cated (at-homed) under the aegis of the metaphysical/hegemonic discourse

of Manifest Destiny. Even the emergent dissident who would resist the domi-

nation enabled by this totally mapped/colonized American thinking is com-pelled to do so in the imperial metaphysical language of the American

world that must render errancy docile even if, as a last resort, it must kill

him or her.

This, I think, against the New Americanist readings that interpret the

narrators distance from Pierre as a decisive condemnation of his protago-

nists narcissistic subjectivity, is the testimony of Pierres futile Titanic at-

tempt, against the prevailing Olympian gods, to write a comprehensively

compact book that would gospelize the world anew. 18 It is not Pierres self-

18. In a provocative New Americanist reading of Pierre, Patricia Wald interprets Pierres

declaration to gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apoca-

lypse!I will write it, I will write it! in the following way: His use of gospelize suggests

that he cannotreject the basic tenets he thinks he has overthrown. Pierre wantsto be the

instrument through which an absolute eternal truth is filtered; he wants to transcribe rather

than write (my emphasis). In this, Pierre is to Wald, following Donald Pease, not only

Ahabs heir . . . but Ishmaels as well. She thus reads Melvilles attitude toward Pierres

declaration as one of mockery: Pierres text, which also features an author-hero, mirrors

both Pierre and Pierre; the former is, again, not conscious of the full implications of reflec-tion, whereas the latter exploits it. Melville ridicules Pierre, whose manuscript betrays not

the darkness of his vision that horrifies his publishers, but the ludicrousness that under-

mines his tragedy (See Hearing Narrative Voices in Pierre, in New Americanists: Re-

visionist Interventions into the Canon, a special issue of boundary 2 17, no. 1 [spring 1990]:

12526). Wald, I think, is right in saying that Pierre cannot reject the basic tenets he thinks

he has overthrown. But I would take issue with her subtle restatement of this negative in

positive terms: as wanting to be the instrument through which an absolute eternal truth

is filtered. Melville, I submit, is not ridiculing Pierres juvenile obtuseness. He is pointing,

rather, to the depth to which Pierre is inscribed by the triumphant hegemonic discourse

of America, that is, to the global scope and power of the discourse he would overthrow.He cannotreject it because no other language but that of the dominant imperial culture is

available to him.

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induced failure to realize his Titanic project to gospelize the world anew

in the form of a novel that brings Melvilles novel to its close. That end

begins, ratherand this violence is the measure of Melvilles agonized con-

sciousness of the apartness of the Abgeschiedenein antebellum Americawith the awesome Silence of the resounding suicidal pistol shots Pierre fires

into the body of the relentless representative of the American world and

its saying, a Silence, moreover, in which is also heard the outragedand

ominousvoices of those other constituencies of American society who

have been denied speech: the Indian, the black slave, or freeman, the ser-

vant, the female, and the intellectual.19 And it is that dreadful Silencethat

possible consequence of the bereavement of languagemuch more than

Pierres ineluctable adherence to the principle of self-reliance that Melvilleintended his antebellum American audience to think.

2

Pierres silencehis failure to realize the indissoluble affiliation be-

tween the representation of being as such, of self, and of world, and thus

to say what he has intuited about themimplies in one sense his utter

defeat by the world. But, as I have tried to suggest by invoking Heideg-

gers Abgeschiedene, Melville, as narrator of Pierres story, also suggests,

paradoxically, something more positive, something that is only now, at the

extreme limits of the late phase of the postmodern occasion, beginning to

be thought: when, that is, the domestication and forgetting of the original

emancipatory force of the postmodern initiative by its reduction to a peri-

odizing reference that equates it to the logic of late capitalism has become in

some degree manifest. Pierres silence means that he has no language with

which to resist the vengeful world that has closed in on him in his place of

refuge. But for Melville, who, unlike Pierre, does complete his novel withoutsuccumbing to the disabling metaphysical imperatives of comprehensively

compact completeness, it also implies e-mergence, an incipient under-

standing of the indissoluble continuum of being that is totally foreign to the

19. These pistol shots constitute a reversal of the binary logic that justifies the worlds vio-

lence against the unaccommodatable other. As such, of course, it leaves this binary logic

intact. I am not saying that Melville endorses such a reversal. I am suggesting, rather, that

he is disclosing to his self-righteous and complacent American audience that such a re-

tributiverevolutionaryresponse of the silenced other is endemic to its truthand,more fundamentally, that the only way of transcending the violence of binarist logic is to

think positively the silence that lies behind it.

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representation of being that informs the worlds discourse. As the one a-

part, as stranger, as exile, as outsider (withinhis homeland), Pierre, in Mel-

villes view, is indeed the barbarian at the gates, not, however, in the negative

sense given to this word by the imperial Romans but in the positive sense,ultimately deriving from the ancient Greeks, given to it by the e-mergent dis-

course of contemporary postcolonialism: One who does not speak Greek,

that is, does not think/say in terms ofrefuses to be answerable tothe ac-

commodational imperatives of the truth discourse of the dominant order. As

such, Pierres death, which is to say, his silencing by the hegemonic Ameri-

can culture, precipitates his spectral return. Though Pierre fails to think his

occasion to its radically emergent end, Melville does not. For Melville, dead

Pierre becomes the ghost that, according to Heidegger, haunts the reifiedand reifying thought of modernity which will have nothing to do with ghosts,

or, in Derridas version (which, in politicizing the trace, thematizes the im-

perial visualism that informs Western logocentric thinking), the revenant, the

dead who returns to visitthe (colonial) visitor.20

It is this resonant contradiction, this spectral silence, that e-merges

with the fulfillmentthe violent narrative endof the benign circular logic

of the world of antebellum America. The last spoken words of the novel,

which Isabel pointedly addresses to the world that has murdered Pierre,

are: Alls oer now, and ye know him not (P, 362; my emphasis). The dra-

matic narrative of Pierres life has arrived at the denouement of its fifth act.

But this decisive end does not bring the peacethe catharsisof ca-

nonical tragedy, which, in rendering the catastrophic ontologically intelli-

gible, reconciles Man to Being. This denouement, that is, does not en-

able us to distance ourselves, as we want endings to, from the horror of

this extreme American event. It does not allow us, as we would wish, to

see Pierres catastrophic fate as an essential detail in a larger and mean-

ingful structural or aesthetic whole, a monument, as it were, that not onlyobliterates the polyvalent violence at its core but vindicates it perpetrator.

Instead, the closure of Pierres storyhis, Lucys, and Isabels deaths

releases this differential detail as an ominous and disconcerting irregular

force, a force that disrupts the will to harmonize and regulate. Isabels last

words, in other words, constitute a silent, irrepressibly phantasmic, accu-

sation directed against the all-knowing American worlds global truth

which would include representing Pierres deadly assault on Glen Stanly as

20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and

the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 99102.

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a murderand against the American reader/auditor who would sublimate

social violence against the shadowy other of the enlightened world in the

name of the universal (tragedy, for example): the Talismanic Secret. And

ye know him not: Your knowing gaze, Isabel seems to say, has silencedhim, turned him into stone, compelled him into his proper and intelligible

place in the knowledge-producing discourse of the larger American whole.

But he has escaped the grasp of your Medusan eye. And, despite his inter-

ment, you will hearfrom him again.

In his magisterial reading of Pierre, Sacvan Bercovitch notes Mel-

villes use of the metaphorics of shadowing to evoke the return of the oblit-

erated violence of the American past to haunt the hegemonic American

present in all its social and political manifestations. But it is Isabel, notPierre, whom he identifies with this ghostly visitation: Isabels shadow falls

across all aspects of Saddle Meadows: across Indian mound and traces

of slave-quarters; across Mary Glendinnings abuse of Delly Ulver; across

Falsgraves abuse of religious principles; across the relations of master and

servant, lady and tenant farmer; across the class hierarchy thriving in the

heart of a republic. 21 Bercovitchs evocation of the metaphor of the shadow

constitutes a significant insight into the essence of Melvilles interrogation

of America in Pierre. But because it is, I think, misplaced, it remains for

Bercovitch nothing more than a disposable metaphor, a conclusion war-

ranted by the fact that it vanishes from his text. This is not to say that the

terrible fate of Isabel at the hands of the truth of Saddle Meadows/America

is irrelevant. It is to say, rather, that Bercovitchs dissociation of Isabels fate

from Pierres forecloses the possibility of thinking what Melvilles uncanny

text wants us to think: the indissoluble affiliation between the metaphorics

of the shadow and the theme of Silence. After all, it is not so much Isabel as

it is Pierre who, in his extraordinary emergency, is given the task of thinking

to the terrible and futile end the relation between Isabels predicament andthe world that has abandoned her: her non-being and the worlds truth,

the saying that hegemony permits. As a result of his dissociation of Isabel

and Pierrea dissociation I would suggest is incumbent on an American-

ists continuing faith, despite his obvious suspicions about American excep-

tionalism, in the viability of American discourseBercovitch fails to think

Melvilles insistent reference to the shadow adequately, fails, that is, to per-

ceive that for Melville the shadow is not simply a metaphor but an ontologi-

21. Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of

America(New York: Routledge, 1993), 296. The phrase he quotes is from Pierre, 17.

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cal reality that is at the dark heart of his novel, that, like the suns shadow,

belongs tothe saying of the American world.22

This dark other that returns to haunt the world in the form of

Isabels ominous accusation is not, as I have suggested, restricted to thetype of Pierre. According to the antilogical logic of Pierre, it also includes,

as Bercovitch observes, women (the dark Isabel and the deviant Lucy

Tartan), the working class (Delly), and, not least, if we are attuned to the his-

torical (antebellum) context of the composition of Pierreand to the national

(monumental) framework in which Melville places his domestic romance,

Native Americans and black slaves (including those in the North who have

been freed since the days of grand old Pierre Glendinning [P, 30]). In

thinking the occasion of Pierres extraordinary emergency, Melville makesthinking the spectral nothing and its worldly manifestations possible. We

might say, in keeping with the metaphor of the monument (and that which is

inscribed in Pierres name), that he has in some latent sense gotten water

out of a stone, which is to say, a Voice out of Silence. This miracle, it

should be emphasized, is not restricted to Pierre. It is also the resonant tes-

timony of Israel Potter (the retrieved voice of the forgotten veteran of the

American Revolution), of Bartleby the Scrivener, (the echoing accusation of

the law clerks I prefer not to), of Billy Budd(the stutter that returns to haunt

the official naval narrative that brings to a decisive close the terrible events

on board the HMS Indomitable), and, if we understand Ishmaels errant gar-

rulousness as the obverse face of silence, of Moby-Dick.23 I am referring, of

course, to those orphans or, as Thomas Pynchon would say, those apo-

retic preterites that the hegemonic discourse of a divinely or historically

elected American Fatherland has passed over (in silence). Indeed, if we

attend to the ghostly history of his reception in America, it might also be said

that this is the resonant testimony of Melvilles creative life itself, especially

22. My interrogation of Bercovitchs dissociation of Isabel and Pierre applies as well to

John Carlos Rowe, who invokes Bercovitchs reference to Isabels haunting shadow to

claim that Isabel is . . . a key to Melvilles social theory of the American family, especially

as it relates to the issue of labor (see At Emersons Tomb: The Politics of Classic American

Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 73). Rowes overdetermination

of the labor characterizing the antebellum American family (as this motif is embodied in

the figure of Isabel), at the expense of the ontological ground of this family structure (the

ground that Pierre, above all, is attempting to think), deflects his attention away from the

substantialityof the shadowits affiliative relationship to the light of the world of Saddle

Meadows. It thus precludes his attending to the question of silenceor, rather, the ques-tion of the Voice of Silencewhich I take to be Melvilles supreme theme in Pierre.

23. See Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, 27174.

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after the publication of Pierre, when the custodians of the self-satisfied, ar-

rogant, and lethal American Cultural Memory turn[ed] their critical Aegis

upon him to freeze him into silence. 24

It is, I submit, this voice of silencethis saying of what the think-ing of the dominant American culture renders unsayablethat constitutes

Melvilles most revolutionary legacy to the postmodern occasion. For in

thus wrenching by violence a polyvalent positive content from Pierres

silence, Melville anticipates the postmodernist diagnosis of modernity as

the end of philosophy. I mean, after Heidegger, its disclosure that the ful-

fillment of modernitys imperial spatializing logic in the Age of the World

Pictureand, not incidentally, its ensuing pronouncement of the end of

historyparadoxically precipitates into invisible visibility the nothingtheexcessthat this reified and reifying (stony) logic necessarily cannot finally

accommodate. Melville, as we have seen, insistently identifies this uncon-

tainable nothing with the emerged errant orphan. I, in order to identify it

with the underdetermined question of thinking itself, have followed Heideg-

ger in identifying it with the Abgeschiedene, the one apart, the stranger,

the wanderer. Whether orphan or Abgeschiedene, or, for that matter,

pariah (Hannah Arendt) or differend or jew (Lyotard) or catachrestic

remainder (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) or the singular event (Michel

Foucault) or specter (Derrida) or nomad (Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guat-

tari),25 he or she is the spectral non-being who, at the extreme limit of the

discursive empire, returns to haunt the Being of metaphysics and the total-

24. George Washington Peck, in a review of Pierre, in American Whig Review16 (Novem-

ber 1852): 44654. Reprinted in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville:

The Contemporary Reviews(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 443.

25. Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism, part 1 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:

Meridian, 1958), and Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968);

Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Ab-belle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Heidegger and the jews,

trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1990); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Marginality in the Teaching Machine, in Outside in the

Teaching Machine(New York: Routledge, 1993), 5376; Michel Foucault, Theatrum Philo-

sophicum, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed.

Donald Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1977), 16596, a review of Gilles Deleuzes Diffrence et rptition (1969) and

Logique du sens(1969), which inaugurate Deleuzes sustained effort to think the phantas-

mic excess of the Western philosophical tradition that culminates in the rhizomatic think-

ing of the nomad in his and Guatarris A Thousand Plateaus; Derrida, Specters of Marx;and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-

nia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Routledge, 1987).

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ized hegemonic world that has constructed itself on its imperial foundation:

the world that, as it were, has buried him or her at its periphery in silence.

And, as such, it thus calls for thinking.26

But the disclosure instigated by the reconstellation of Melvilles Pierrefrom the Americanist context in which it has been imbedded into the contem-

porary global context opened up by recent continental theory is not limited to

the urgency of the question of thinking/saying as such. If, as I think Melville

intends, we read the domestic mise-en-scne of Pierre in the global geo-

political context of Moby-Dick, and if we attend to his insistent identification

of his defeated preteritessocial de-viants such as Pierre and Bartleby,

authentic and spontaneous believers in the dignity of free humanity such as

Israel Potter and Billy Budd, mariners, renegades, and castaways such asthe crew of the Pequod, women, blacks, Native Americans, servants, and

ethnic migrantswith the one who has been orphaned (exiled) from the

American Father(land) by the American symbolic order, we are allowed

indeed, compelledto project his proleptic thematization of the e-mergent

specter into a wider social context. Specifically, such a reconstellation of

the domestic site of Pierre will enable us to see that Melvilles infusion of

a latent positive content into Pierres silence is also, however inaugurally,

proleptic of that polyvalent strategy of resistance to capitalist power that

Deleuze and Guattari, by way of positing a smooth, deterritorialized, rhi-

zomatic thinking against the striated, territorialized (mapped) thought of

the modern capitalist dispensation, have called nomadology. 27 I am refer-

ring particularly to the late or post-postmodern theoretical initiative that, in

infusing a positive emancipatory content into the minorerrantterms

26. Priscilla Wald verges on thematizing this momentous, but still to be adequately

thought, postmetaphysical legacy: Insofar as we come to see the narrators perspec-

tive as an alternate narrative (as, that is, an other, not the other narrative), then perhapsSilence can indeed speak to the attuned reader. The narrative unravelling that follows

undermines narrative authority and alerts the reader to the possibility of an alternate dis-

course. Silence (and its counterpart, meaningless noise) emerges in resistance to narra-

tive and meaningful language, not as an absence but as an alternate presence, the em-

bodiment, perhaps, of possibility (Hearing Narrative Voices in Melvilles Pierre, 12021).

But because her insight is occluded by her vestigially American exceptionalism, she is

compelled to refer to Pierres predicament as a problem more or less of authorial iden-

tity and to contain Melvilles Pierrewithin the scene of writing. She thus fails to perceive

the global scope of Melvilles domestic drama and, above all, of the possibility vis--

vis thinking inhering in his evocation of the Silence to which the American world reducesthose who refuse their spontaneous consent to its truth.

27. Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 351423.

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of the triumphant binary logic of Western metaphysical thought, has pre-

cipitated a certain inaugural polyvalent postcolonial discourse most sugges-

tively, but far from adequately, exemplified by Edward Saids Culture and Im-

perialism, Spivaks The Postcolonial Critic, Homi Bhabhas essays in TheLocation of Culture, and, in a more theoretical way, by Derridas Specters

of Marx. This is the emancipatory postcolonial discourse that takes its point

of departure precisely from the massive global demographic displacements

that constitute the terrible legacy of the modern Western nation-state and

its imperial project (and, according to Arendt, from the anti-Semitism/racism

that is endemic to these),28 from, that is, the extraordinary emergency of a

vast population of emigrs, exiles, displaced persons, migrantsnomads,

as it wereor, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris apt word, the multi-tude,29 who have been unhomed, both as subjectivities and as citizens, by

the depredations of modern (post-Enlightenment) colonialism:

[It] is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mis-

sion, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and

ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, estab-

lished, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, de-

centered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is

the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual andartist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms,

between homes, and between languages.30

Like Melvilles in Pierre, this emergent postcolonial discourse is a deterrito-

rialized or diasporic or hybrid discourse that, in intuiting the impotency

of the power of the binarist spatial logic of Western representational think-

ing, is learning not simply to refuse to be answerable to the saying of the

imperial First World but to turn that refusalthat thunderous silenceinto

an effective emancipatory practice. It is, in short, an e-mergent discourse,that, like Melvilles at the site of domestic America, is learning to get a Voice

out of Silence.

The reconstellation of Pierre I have attempted should by now have

28. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism.

29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2000). See also their commentary on Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener, 2034.

30. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism(New York: Knopf, 1993), 332. See also the

chapter entitled Thinking in the Interregnum: Prologomenon to a Spectral Politics, inSpanos, Americas Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2000), 191206.

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made clear the irony of Melvilles e-mergent occasion. It is not simply that

his sustained effort since Moby-Dickand especially in Pierreto think his

estrangement from the American homeland in the context of the history of

Old World philosophy culminates in the explosion of the myth of Americanexceptionalism. In thinking his emergencyhis being outside in the Ameri-

can cultural machinehe anticipates the de-centered and errant thought of

the new Europeans and thus becomes truly an American exceptionalist.

3

It is, in other words, this resonantly proleptic Melvillean insight into

the emancipatory possibilities inhering in the spectral Voice of Silence thatthe Old Americanistswhether those early critics who pronounced the

Melville who wrote Pierremad or branded him a moral monster to be frozen

into silence, or those much later revivalist critics of the 1920s who reified his

fictions into monuments of the humanist American Spirit, or those founders

of American literary studies who, identifying his work with an American Re-

naissance, harnessed Melville to the ideology of the Cold Warhave tried

to obliterate in the name of the truth of American exceptionalism. Never-

theless, these Old Americanist efforts have been futile. The obsessively

recurrent historical projects to willfully accommodate Melvilles late fiction

we can now call them spectral textsto the central and, to appropriate the

key word of Moby-Dick, concentring (nationalist) myth of American excep-

tionalism bear resonant witness to the anxiety their silence has always pro-

voked. For the supplemental character (in Derridas sense of the word) of

these accommodational efforts has increasingly marked the deferral of the

Melvillean presence they would bring to stand within the space of the

nation, would, that is, turn into a marbleized monument of American excep-

tionalism. Like Pierre, Melville always already returns to haunt the Americaneye that would know and silence him.

It is no doubt the visible recalcitrance of Melvilles spectral texts

their silent excess that refuses to be accommodated to American saying

that has, in part, precipitated the so-called New Americanist project to

interrogate the Old Americanist problematic: the field imaginary that ema-

nates radially and totally from the American exceptionalist center. But this

initiative, however productive in exposing the reactionary nationalist imperial

(cold war) agenda subsuming the abortive effort to monumentalize Melvillesnovels, remains vestigially blind to what I have called Melvilles essential

legacy. And this is because, with some exceptions, the New Americanist dis-

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course, unlike Melville himself, remains too parochially withinthe American

exceptionalist problematic it would call into questiontoo indifferent, there-

fore, to the critical imperatives of the voices of the exilic or outside others

silenced by the imperial American exceptionalist culture. As Paul Bov hasput this disabling limitation, in a telling critique of Bercovitchs general New

Americanist project that aptly appropriates Spivaks version of the post-

colonial subject:

While honoring the values of distance and the experience of exile that

theorize it as a critical necessity, one must also wonder if the study

of culture does not require an even more complex and difficult posi-

tion: being in and of ones locale while understanding its needs and

hence ones own projects in terms of a global or transnational set ofinterlocking perspectives. The best critical emblem for our time might

be what Gayatri Spivak has taught us to call the postcolonial sub-

ject, that is, the gendered intellectual engaged in agonistic analysis

of global issues central to regional and national concerns and always

motivated by an understanding of the complex position that any citi-

zen of a postmodern cultural multiplicity must occupy.

I want to suggest . . . that American Studies taken as a field in

its theoretical fullness . . . has not yet reached the point of exilein relation to itself and its nationalist projects.31

In the specific case of Melville, the consequence of this vestigial paro-

chialism has been a tendency to represent Melville as essentially an Ameri-

can writer, a writer, its seems, who eschews theoryby which I mean the

question of thinkingas a decadent European penchant and therefore ir-

relevant or even detrimental to the good American life. Despite its interro-

gation of the myth of American exceptionalism, that is, the New American-

ist literary discourse fails to perceive that Melvilles fiction, especially fromMoby-Dick on, has its essential point of departure in his critical recognition

that American exceptionalism is a myth that obscures Americas filial rela-

tionship to a Europe that, in founding and historically reproducing its iden-

tity on metaphysicsthe perception of temporality (and its disseminations)

from the endis imperial in essence. In thus failing to thematize this origina-

tive thrust of Melvilles fiction, this New Americanist discourse also has failed

31. Paul A. Bov, Notes toward a Politics of American Criticism, in In the Wake of Theory

(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 63. See also Gayatri Chakra-vorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, and Dialogues, ed. Sarah

Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Outside in the Teaching Machine.

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to recognize that its force (in the Nietzschean sense of this word, which is

to say its proleptic relevance to the late postmodern occasion) derives pre-

cisely from his acute consciousness of being both inside and outside of his

culture: from, that is, having reached the point of exile in relation to [him-self] and [his] nationalist projects. To put it in the terms that Pierre makes

possible, what this vestigial parochialism of the New Americanist discourse

misses in its revisionary readings of Melvilles late texts is his proleptic an-

nouncement of the end of the kind of thinking that has mapped not simply

American (and global) geographic space but, in its subjection of thinking

to spatial categories, the space of thinking itself. By end, as I have sug-

gested, I do not simply mean fulfillment: the establishment of a plenary con-

dition that renders any other way of thinking/saying impossible. I also meanlimit: the e-mergence at the endin the fifth actof this enforced Silence

as a catachresis: a spectral Voice that cannot finally be accommodated by

and to the saying of (metaphysical) thinking and thus calls for thinking.

As I have suggested in thus reconstellating Pierre into the late post-

modern global context, it is precisely the now urgent question of thinkingand

its relationship to sociopolitics that constitutes the supreme theme of Mel-

villes writing from Moby-Dick on. Or, more precisely, it is his urgent sense

of the need to rethink an American democratic thinking, a thinking that, far

from exceptionalist, brought the deadly European metaphysical virus and

its sense of an ending into the New World wilderness. For this project, the

American Melville availed himself, perhaps more than any other American

writer before and after him, with the exception of Henry Adams, of the en-

tire history, or at least the primary monuments, of Western philosophical

thoughtof what Heidegger aptly calls the ontotheological tradition. And

the knowledge he gained from his own reconstellation of this tradition al-

lowed him not only to recognize the social and political violence its meta-

physics enables but also, however inaugurally, to think the Silence that thetriumph of metaphysical thinking has precipitated as an e-mergent contra-

diction, as the specter that always already haunts the Pax Metaphysicaand

its imperial end-of-history discourse. It is his reading of the ontological iden-

tity of America and Europe that affiliates Melville proleptically with a certain

polyvalent emancipatory strain of postmodern or post-European thought

that begins with Heidegger and Arendt (pace her Habermasian disciples)

and culminates in the late postmodern initiative of the Bhabha of The Loca-

tion of Culture, the Lyotard of The Differend, the Deleuze and Guattari ofA Thousand Plateaus, the Derrida of Specters of Marx, the Giorgio Agam-

ben of The Coming Community, and, on a more immediately praxis-oriented

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register, the Spivak of Outside in the Teaching Machine, the Said of Cul-

ture and Imperialism, and the Negri and Hardt of Empire. I am not simply

referring to those ontological initiatives of postmodern thought that would

think the nothing, or the trace, or the aporia, or the diffrend, or the cata-chrestic remainder, or the hybrid (the minus in the origin) that the meta-

physical thought of the West, especially its modern, instrumentalist, allo-

trope, will, at all costs, have nothing to do with. I am also referring to those

political initiatives of postmodern thoughtindissolubly if still only symptom-

atically related to these ontological initiativesthat would think that mas-

sive and diverse constituency of the human community that the Western

polis, especially in its modern, liberal democratic/capitalist manifestation,

has had to reduce to non-being in its relentless effort to achieve hegemonyover the planet: the pariah, the migrant, the migr, the stateless, the un-

homed, the denizen, the multitude. It is, in turn, Melvilles critical reading of

American exceptionalism that calls New Americanists to the task of availing

themselves of this spectral post-European thinking to rethink American

democratic thought and practice from an American point of view that is also,

and simultaneously, beyondoutsidethe American periphery. From, that

is, an ec-static, in-sistentghostlyperspective that haunts the Pax Meta-

physicaand the Pax Americanait enables and justifies. What, in short, the

silent specter of Melville calls for now, in the age that the intellectual depu-

ties of the official culture of America have called the end of history and

the advent of the New World Order presided over by the United States, is

a spectral politics, a politics that puts into positive practice the dislocating

refusals of Pierre, of Bartleby, of Ishmael, of the Confidence Man, of Billy

Budd. Until that comes to pass, resistance, no matter how vocal, will remain

complicit with Americas apparatuses of capture.

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