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Singularities: On a Motif in Derrida and Romantic Thought (Kant's Aesthetics, Rousseau'sAutobiography)Author(s): Ian BalfourSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 46, No. 3, Romanticism and the Legacies of JacquesDerrida: Part 2 of 2 (Summer/Fall, 2007), pp. 337-360Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25602108 .

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IAN BALFOUR

Singularities: On aMotif in

Derrida and Romantic

Thought (Kant's Aesthetics,

Rousseau's Autobiography)

let thy tongue tangwith arguments of state; put

thyself into the trick of singularity. . .

?Shakespeare, TwelfthNight

CAN

ONE WRITE OR THINK WHAT IS ONE AND ONLY ONE, WHAT IS MERELY

single or singular?One might say thatDerrida's thinking has tirelessly

engagedthe idea and the actualities of difference andwould not themost

differentof differences, as itwere, be thatwhich isonly one? Not nothing,not two or three, and not anything else. Only

one.

In Derrida's writingon thinkers and writers of the Romantic era?

broadly conceived, that is, as an historical period of the late 18th and early19th centuries rather than as amovement

typified by the most "Romantic"

of thinkers,poets, and artists?the matter of what is singular isparticularlyresonant, notably in his readings of Kant and Rousseau.1 In what follows I

tryto tease outwhat is at stake in theproblematic of singularity,principally

by considering certain aspects of Rousseau, in the Confessions, and Kant, in

The Critique of udgment,with attention to how Derrida addresses Rousseau

inOf Grammatology aswell as in the long essay "Typewriter Ribbon" and

how he analyzes Kant in the "Parergon" essay, all of them works on the

subject of the subject. (I follow a tangent or two not so explicitly treatedbyDerrida or addressed in detailed fashion, though Iwould like to think thateven those remarks are in the spiritofDerrida and indeed my own think

ing in thesematters is likelymore massively indebted tohim than I know.)

1.Though I am not concerned in this essay to readRousseau and Kant in relation to each

other, one might note that "Rousseau and Kant" are not just any couple. The former greatlyinfluenced the latter, of which the anecdotal evidence of Kant's daily walks only ever being

interrupted by the publication of certain works by Rousseau is only one striking index.

SiR, 46 (Summer/Fall 2007)

337

8/2/2019 Balfour, S


338 IAN BALFOUR

The singular is in some sense a decidedly unphilosophical topic. Does

notphilosophy

move in the realm of the general and the universal, the do

main of logic and what is susceptible to logic, the universe of thought that

isby definition or in principle able to be formulated in language and madeavailable to all in thatmedium? To be sure, philosophy has to come to

termswith particulars but does it not tend to operate in amode that re

solves those particulars,as in the natural sciences, into some

higheror more

inclusive category or class? The sheer particular or the sheer singular, if

there is such a thing, could be said to be thatwhich most successfully resists

philosophical discourse?and it resistsphilosophy inpart because it is resis

tant tolanguage, period.

The fate of the singular in thehistory ofWestern philosophy surely tooka

significantturn when, almost all of a sudden, in Descartes, a certain phi

losophy turned things on their head or turned things "to" the head, one

might say, shiftingfrom the object to the subject as its startingpoint and its

ground, in the formulation of the cogito ergo sum.2Descartes' path of

thought, his meth-odos, led back to and then out again from the thinking

subject, an itineraryrecounted, not incidentally, in the strikinglyautobio

graphical account that isThe Discourse onMethod.3 And when Locke subse

quentlyundertook to

investigatethe

workingsof the human understand

ing, he advocated nothing other than turning into oneself, examining in

painstaking fashion what went on in one's "own breast." Empiricism, then,

began at home in the solitude of the single self, the new source, inLocke

and his progeny, of property and the proper.4 Thus the so-called Copernican revolution of Kant's critical philosophy?dedicated

not just to know

ing but to examining the conditions of knowing and theirvery possibilityin the human subject?had actually begun to "revolve" before him, even if

Kant's protocolswere more radical than his great predecessors and with

him the "revolution" would be complete. So the challenge for thisphase of

philosophy?and we have not simply left this "phase" behind in the past?was to construct, beginning with "the subject," consequential frameworks

of knowledge and thought thatwould have a purchase on the objective,

2. For a trenchant account of this process, see Theodor W. Adorno "On Subject and Ob

ject," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans.Henry W. Pickford (New York:

Columbia UP, 1998) 245-58. Heidegger comments on the switch in orientation and termi

nology with regard to "subject" and "object" in his "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and

Mathematics," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993)303 ff.

3. For Derrida's reflections on method and related matters inDescartes, see the first two

chapters (but especially the second) inEyes of theUniversity, ed. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford

UP) 1-42.

4. See the classic if still debated analysis by C. B. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism: The

Political Theory of Individualism (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1962).

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ON A MOTIF IN DERRIDA AND ROMANTIC THOUGHT 339

the truth, and what could be shared, in principle, by everyone, by everyone.

Let us begin by considering how singularity figures inDerrida's most

general characterization of the project of the Critique ofJudgment and itsmechanisms:

The thirdCritique is not just one critique among others. Its specific

object has the form of a certain type of judgment?the reflective

judgment?which works (on) the example in a very singularway. The

distinction between reflective and determinant judgment, a distinction

that isboth familiar and obscure, watches over all the internaldivisions

of the book. I recall it in itspoorest generality. The faculty of judgment ingeneral allows one to think the particular as contained under

the general (rule, principle, law).When the generality is given first,the operation of judgment subsumes and determines he particular. It is

determinant (bestimmend), it specifies,narrows down, comprehends,

tightens. In the contrary hypothesis, the reflectiveudgment (reflekt

ierend)has only the particular at itsdisposal andmust climb back up to,return toward generality: the example (this iswhat matters to us here)is here

given prior

to the law and, in its

very uniqueness

as

example,allows one to discover. Common scientific orlogical discourse pro

ceeds by determinant judgments, and the example follows in order to

determine or,with a pedagogical intention, to illustrate. In art and in

life, where one must, accordingto Kant, proceed

to reflective judgments and assume (by analogy with art:we shall come to this rule fur

ther on) a finality the concept of which we do not have, theexample

precedes. There follows a singular historicity and (counting the

simulacrum-time) a certain (regulated, relative) ficture [sic]of the the

oretical . . . (51, 59?60; Derrida's emphases)5

First things first, then,when it comes to the aesthetic inKant's Critique of

Judgment,a

critique which is not, Derrida underscores, "one among oth

ers," notjust any critique. It emerges, in this general account of generality

and particularity ("I recall it in itspoorest generality"), that thiswill be a

singular critique not least because singularitywill turn out to be the verystructure of the aesthetic and in such away as potentially to disallow the

importation of a pre-existing conceptual framework appropriate to realmsoutside of the aesthetic. As if to emphasize hyperbolicalry the situation of

the singular in reflective judgment, Derrida refers to itworking (on) the

example "in a very singular way." A thingor a situation should either be

5. The English word ficture is indicated as "rare" in the Oxford English Dictionary. It

means, inEnglish, a feigning. It corresponds to the almost equally rare French word ficture.

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340 IAN BALFOUR

singularor not but here reflective judgment's relation to the classical status

of the example (itselfalways in some sense singular and not) is said to be

"very singular" [tres singuliere],an

impossible but strangely apt formulation.

In the discourse of particularity and generality in the natural sciences, atleast, the particular is always, in

principle, resolved into some"higher" ge

nus or species that includes any number of examples, each ofwhich, in

principle, has exactly the same status.Yet this latter sortof example obtainsin aworld inwhich one can know the law, rule, or principle towhich the

example relates: asingle crustacean (to take one of Kant's unexpected

ex

amples of the beautiful) can belong, unproblematically, to its larger class of

crustaceans, all ofwhich are, at a certain level of abstraction, indifferently

alike,with all non-pertinent differences obliterated or suspended. One factor thatmakes the thirdCritique singular, so very singular, is that it isby no

means self-evident that one cansimply translate a

conceptual schema ap

propriate to understanding nature, thatof logical judgments (as inThe Cri

tiqueofPure Reason) to a realm of purely singular feelings. It is a question ofthe conceptual schema doing justice to thematters at hand, even if those"matters" are

feelings.

What might authorize Derrida's otherwise illogical formulation, "very

singular," is that ifKant is correct?and even if not "correct," we shouldtake seriously what he posits?aesthetic experience entails the experienceof something singularwhose possibly pertinent larger group is not given,certainly

notgiven in advance. It is, in the first instance, only singular and

the relation to alarger genus or

species is, at least momentarily,an open

question. Such is the structure of reflective judgment and all aesthetic judgments (of the beautiful, the sublime) are of this order. In aesthetic judgment then, for Kant, there is a certain temporal and "conceptual" priorityto the example,

to the single, singular judgment. "The

example precedes,"

as

Derrida stresses. And prior to the aesthetic judgment proper, there is some

thing even more singular, ifthat expression can be allowed: the feeling that

prompts the judgment. For prior to the priority of the aesthetic judgmentlies the sheer feeling of the beautiful or the sublime or any other aesthetic

experience. The judgment takes place, as itwere, silentlybut it is "less silent" than feeling itself.Feeling isnon- or pre-linguistic, in the sense thatone can have any number of feelings that are not

accompanied bya use of

language.6 This is the case even ifour feelings are also or inpart formed and

informed discursively. The feeling of aesthetic experience does not?or not

yet?take theform of language.

6. On the status of "feeling" in Kantian aesthetics, especially of the sublime, see JeanFrancois Lyotard, Lessons on theAnalytic of theSublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford:Stanford UP, 1994).

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Philosophy has almost always had itsproblems with feelings.With the

determination, in Plato, of philosophy as the discourse of logos, feeling

poses something of a threat, anunruly, irrational or a-rational force resis

tant to its being mastered by its supposed counterpart or opposite: reason.

True, even some of the most "rationalistic" of thinkers give feeling its due,

such as Descartes, with his attention to the "passions" of the soul or Hume,

even though few would go so far as he in describing reason as the "slave of

the passions," much less in thinking that such a dynamic were somehow a

proper stateof affairs.7 nd ifHegel could maintain that "nothing greatwas

everaccomplished without passion,

"8that dictum seems not nearly

as char

acteristic of his thought than the farmore often quoted slogan, "the ratio

nal is the real." Feelings resistphilosophy, even if,in thewake of the development of psychoanalysis and psychology, one can sometimes discern a

"logic" in those feelings, that is, even if they, in some sense, make "sense."

Feelings are generally thought primarily to be of the order of the sensibility,which seems closer, as the very word suggests, to the realm of the sensible

than that of the intellectual. For Kant, aesthetic experience, priorto aes

thetic judgment, is amatter of feelings, "nothingmore than . . .

feelings."9

Indeed, any given pure aesthetic experience is amatter of afeeling of plea

sure, unadulterated by anyadmixture of mere charm or

agreeable feeling,to say nothing of the over-determinations of commercial culture or any

economies ofmeans and ends: a single feeling of pleasure in a single subject

responding to a single object, a tulip, say, and preferably, forKant, awild

one. Even ifwe hastily might think thatflowers or tulips or wild tulips are

in general beautiful, we would be making, accordingto Kant, a category

mistake as far as the aesthetic is concerned just by providing a category, for

it is alwaysamatter, at the outset, of sheer singularity. As Derrida remarks:

The tulip is not beautiful inasmuch as it belongs to a class, correspond

ing to such-and-such a concept of the veritable tulip, the perfect tulip.

This tulip here, thisone alone isbeautiful ("a flower, for example, a tu

lip"), it, the tulip of which I speak, of which I am saying here and

7. For an excellent account of the stakes in thesematters from the vantage of contempo

rary theory, see Rei Terada, Feeling inTheory: Emotion after theDeath of theSubject (Cam

bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), especially Chapter One, "Cogito and the History of the

Passions."

8. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie derGeschichte, Theorie-Werkausgabe,Vol. 12 (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp 1970), 38; my translation.

9. I am here rehearsing (including recalling once again, irresistibly, the Barbara Streisand

song behind this phrase, quoting itwithout quotation marks) a number of points about the

Kantian aesthetic in relation toRomantic poetry made inmy essay: "Subjecticity: Kant and

the Texture of Aesthetics," Romantic Praxis, ed. Forrest Pyle, February 2005. <http://

wwAV.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/balfour/balfour.html>

8/2/2019 Balfour, S


342 IAN BALFOUR

now that it isbeautiful, in front ofme, unique, beautiful in any case in

its singularity.Beauty is always beautiful once [unefois], even ifjudgment classifies it and drags that once [lafois] into the series or into the

objective generality of the concept. This is the paradox (the class

which?immediately?sounds the death knell of uniqueness in

beauty) of the thirdCritique and of any discourse on the beautiful: it

must deal onlywith singularitieswhich must give rise to the universal

izable judgments.Whence theparergon, the importation of the frames

in general, those of the firstCritique in particular. (93, 105-60; Derri

da's emphases)

At the end of theparagraph Derrida veers out to theorganizing principle ofthe essay as a whole, the motif of the parergon, that which stands "outside"

but adjacent to thework, to the ergon itself that is the work of art. The

frame of a painting is a paradigmatic example of thatwhich somehow pertains to the work of art, framing the painting as awork of art?and yet is

patently or apparently distinct from the painted canvas. The frame is the

non- orquasi-work of art that marks out the work of art as such. Derrida

shows, characteristically, that the neat separation of the outside and inside

of thework isnot soeasily

maintained.Furthermore,

he demonstrates how

theproblematic of the frame in a discursive sense is also crucial to the elab

oration of the thirdCritique insofar as it isno smallmatter to decide what

sortof conceptual "framework" should be brought to bear on the aesthetic

when the subject matter, so tospeak, of the aesthetic is so

categorically dif

ferent from the objects of logical judgments (things of nature, say) as laid

out in theCritique ofPure Reason. (Derrida rightlyqueries a sensitive pointinKant's argumentation: why should one think that the feelings of aes

thetic experience should correspondto aesthetic judgments in the same or

strictlyanalogous fashion as objects of nature correspond to logical judgments? Why should the frame of categories appropriate to the knowledgeof nature [as, for example, the grid of quality, quantity, modality and rela

tion] correspond to those appropriate to sheer feelings of sheer pleasure?)But theprincipal burden of thisparagraph is to show what is atwork and at

play in the aesthetic experience per se and how it leads to the aesthetic

judgment that follows it "as the night follows the day," only faster: almost

immediately or, in effect, immediately. Derrida's gloss here underscores the

immense role language plays in constructing the "bridge" toward?and

against all or most odds?the universal. (Kant describes the architectonic

function of the thirdCritique as a "bridge" between the first and second

Critiques.) For the subject, it appears, is not content simply to register the

unadulterated pleasurea

tulip affords. Rather, for one reason or another?

perhaps ultimately for the sake of reason itself?one finds oneself saying

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something on the order of "this tulip isbeautiful." The feeling is translated

into a judgment, a passage from the sheer subjective feeling to a judgment

seemingly not subjective in the least.What lies behind the proposition is

themere subjective feeling, yetwhat itprompts does not take the form of asubjective proposition. Kant maintains in The Critique ofPure Reason that

the phrase "I think" [Ich denke] could accompany any proposition and we

might in our turn, glossing the stock scenario in The Critique of udgment,

say that the phrase "Ichfuhle," [I feel] could accompany any aesthetic judgment. Yet the virtual "I feel" is effaced and the resulting judgment has, to

all appearances, the look of a logical judgment, as if itwere an objectivestatement characterizing the ontological status of an object: "this tulip is

beautiful." This is the linguistic turn from feeling to judgment, wherebythe singularityof the experience of aesthetic pleasure gets transformed into

something apparently other and more than singular.

Derrida also emphasizes, via his calling attention to theword once (beautyis always beautiful once) that the aesthetic judgment is an event: it isnot justthatone is looking at and taking pleasure from a single, singular (preferably

wild) tulip. It is a one-time gaze at the tulip, a singular encounter with a

singular object in the case of the beautiful or something?not necessarily a

"thing"?that triggersa

feelingof the sublime.

Thus, doublyor

triplysin

gular: the one-time experience bya

single subject of asingle "object."

Even ifone were repeatedly to derive such pleasure from a series of wild

tulips, there would be no pertinent relation between one beautiful event

and the next. "Einmal istkeinmal," runs the German proverb (sometimesinvoked byWalter Benjamin), literally"one time isno time." But the "one

time" is the only possible time of the aesthetic, as far asexperience is con

cerned, and the aesthetic isnothing but amatter of experience, in the first

instance, asposited by Kant.

Is there a language adequate to thismultiply singular experience of theaesthetic? Derrida intimates that the turn to

language, the seemingly inexo

rable movement in Kant's account, is itself violent, in subsuming the singu

lar to the universal.What is the general voice (allgemeine timme) towhich

Kant appeals? Can one pass so easily and so assuredly in the real of aesthetic

judgment from the subjective feeling to the (demanded) assent of, in prin

ciple, absolutely everyone? The desire tomake sense of the singular in

terms that are not themselves singular isunderstandable, indeed inevitable,

to the extent that language cannot possibly be of the order of the sheer singular and stillbe intelligible: there cannot be a discourse of single termsfor

every single object or experience, as if itwere a vast network of absolutelyproper names.

Elsewhere Derrida underscores, in a somewhat different mode, how the

work of art, especially the visual work of art, is at odds with language:

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344 IAN BALFOUR

As for painting, any discourse on it, beside it or above, always strikes

me assilly, both didactic and incantatory, programmatic, worked by

the compulsion ofmastery, be itpoetical or philosophical, always, and

themore sowhen it ispertinent,

in theposition

ofchitchat, unequaland unproductive in the sight ofwhat, at a stroke [d'un trait] does

without or goes beyond this language, remaining heterogeneous to it

or denying any overview. (155)

And then, with more particular reference to some works by Valerio

Adami:

And then if Imust simplify shamelessly, it is as if there had been, for

me, two paintings in painting, one, taking the breath away,a

strangerto any discourse, doomed to the presumed "mutism" of the thing

itself, restores, in authoritative silence, an order of presence. Itmoti

vates ordeploys, then, a poem or

philosopheme whose code seems to

me to be exhausted. The other, therefore the same, voluble, inex

haustible, reproduces virtually an old language belated with respect to

the thrustingpoint of a textwhich interestsme. (155-56)

It isnot simply that the visual work of art is in some obvious way "silent":

indeed, the "scare quotes" indicate Derrida is suspicious of the easy pre

sumption of the "mutism" of thework of art.But he does see language as,

in animportant way, "heterogeneous"

to the artwork and vice versa.10 The

singularity of the visual work of art, then, would be an even more pro

nounced version of the resistance characteristic of artworks in general. But

Kant, againstsome odds, so builds into aesthetic experience the turn to lan

guage and thus to a certain objectivity thatwhat risks resistingphilosophy

altogether?the sheer feeling or pleasure or (in the case of the sublime)

negative pleasure?turns out to constitute, retroactively, the bridge between knowing and acting, understanding and reason, with the imagina

tion articulating itself ith theunderstanding (beautiful) or the reason (sub

lime). Thus the singularity of aesthetic experience bears an extraordinary

burden for thewhole project of the critical philosophy.11

io. Derrida is often accused of fetishizing language when, on the contrary, he argued ex

plicitly and tirelessly against it.This is in part based on amisunderstanding of his pronounce

ment?turned into a slogan?"il n'y a pas de hors-texte," usually translated, not so precisely,as "there is

nothingoutside the text." Derrida

is,of course,

scrupulousin his attention to the

workings of language but he is at least as interested inwhat resists language and thus in the

violence language imposes.11.On the structural burden of the aesthetic in the architectonics of the system, see Paul

de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in his Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis:

U ofMinnesota P, 1996) 70-90, Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the

Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, and David Martyn, Sublime Fail

ures: The Ethics ofKant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003).

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If the irreducibly singular experience of the aesthetic poses something of

a threat to philosophy, might not the "subject" writ large or at large presenta similarobstacle, as the locus of feelings, desires, ideas and a body, and thus

the locus of something other than thought proper, the putatively properdomain of philosophy?

The insistence on singularity takes a different, though not unrelated, form

in thewritings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and inDerrida's reading of them,not least regarding the singularity of Rousseau's person or persona as in

scribed in his texts.Derrida's tracing ofRousseau extends from his early,

ground-breaking Of Grammatology to a late, lengthy essay entitled "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink

(2)"focused on the

Confessions.The

topicof

the subject, of the "I," inRousseau is not "one among others." That dou

ble-edged phrase, however, so often favored byDerrida, might stand as an

apt title gesturing towards the extraordinarily complicated relations be

tween self and other inRousseau as well as toward Rousseau's divided

"exemplarity" in the two not easily compatiblesenses of the term: one

among many others, with noparticular differences among them, and one as

the exampleto or

for others. In this regard Derrida has occasion to cite, in

his "Typewriter Ribbon," the opening rhetorical gambit of the once scan

dalous Confessions, featuring perhaps the most extravagant claim to singu

larityon record:

I have resolved on an enterprisewhich has no precedent [exemple],and

which, once complete, will have no imitator.My purpose is to displaytomy kind [mes semblables]a portrait in everyway true to nature, and

theman I shall portraywill be myself.

Myself alone [moi seul\. I know my own heart and understand my

fellowman [leshommes].But I ammade unlike any one [comme ucun]I have ever seen; I will even venture to say that I am unlike any of

those in existence. Imay be no better but at least I am different \je uis

autre].Whether nature did well or ill in breaking themould inwhich

she formedme, is amatter that can only be judged afterone has readme.

Let the last trump sound when itwill, I shall come forward with

thiswork inmy hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge,and

proclaimaloud: "Here iswhat I

have done. WhatIhave thought,what I have been." I have said the good and the bad with the same

frankness.12

12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Pen

guin, 1953) 17. (Translation modified here and elsewhere.) The French original is Jean

Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Completes, Vol. 1, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond

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346 IAN BALFOUR

The proximate occasion forDerrida's "Typewriter Ribbon" was Paul de

Man's essay, "Excuses," devoted to the Confessions and focused on the

performative character of Rousseau's text. Derrida expandson de Man's

concerns by attending to, among other things, swearing, promising, excus

ing, and the like, along the lines of the first installment of "Limited Inc," a

response to John Searle regarding aspects of Derrida's still earlier essay,

"Signature Event Context" that had engaged J.L. Austin's theory of speechacts.We shall follow elements ofDerrida's argument, dwelling on some of

the enigmatic complexity of this passage from Rousseau in terms of the

figure of singularity.Upon citing the opening of theConfessionsDerrida re

marks:

Commitment to the future, toward the future, promise,sworn faith

(at the risk of perjury, promising never to commit perjury), all these

gestures are exemplary. The signatorywants to be, he declares himself

to be at oncesingular, unique and exemplary, in a manner

analogousto what Augustine did in a more

explicitly Christian gesture.. . .But

taken formyself (moi seul:Rousseau insistson both his solitude and his

isolation, forever, without example, without precedentor

sequel,

without imitator), the same oath also commits, beginning at the ori

gin, all others yet to come. It is a "without example" that, asalways,

aims to be exemplary and therefore repeatable. (140)

Not only is the enterprise of this autobiography utterly singular (no prece

dent, no future imitation), its subject or subject matter (which here

amounts to the same thing) is also absolutely singular. In crafting this por

trait true to nature, Rousseau finds that nature, in itswisdom, has broken

the mould of its creation, eventhough it apparently

was used onlyonce: a

"one-off"production,

a

hapax legomenon

in the realm ofpeople.

The claim

for this singularity is then doubled or re-doubled by the similar claim for

the uniqueness of the text, asingular accounting for the singular life. Auto

biographyas a genre is, to a

point, always predicatedon the irreducible sin

gularity of the individual subject but Rousseau's "enterprise" seems all the

more singular in itspretensions. Yet the opening passage complicates some

of its own claims to singularity: on the one hand, Rousseau insists that

there isno one like him [fait ommeaucun], neither among those he has seen

nor even in all of existence; on the other hand, the passage invokes his

"semblables," those who resemble him. Which is it? esemblance or no re

semblance? Rousseau addresses his kind to say that he isnot of theirkind,that he is suigeneris. Perhaps the claim to singularity lies in the difference

(Paris: Pleiade, 1959) 5.Relevant page numbers will be given in the body of the text, first to

the English, then to the French.

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between what is similar and what is the same?Others might be similar to

Rousseau but no one is the same. Still, there is somethingmore than faintly

paradoxical about the utterly singularJean-Jacques Rousseau addressing his

story tohis semblables, ith a claim to individuality thatgoes farbeyond the

common-garden-varietyones of modern bourgeois culture with its pre

vailing ethos of individualism.13

At some level, the fact that ousseau's autobiography is addressed to the

similar ones, les semblables, makes sense in terms of the genre, which tends

to imply a certain substitutabilityof writer and reader. Not only is autobi

ography structured as the performance of a self readinga

prior version or

versions of itself ut implicitlyor sometimes explicitly the textof autobiog

raphy holds open the possibility of the reader putting herself or himself inthe position of thewriter, despite possible and considerable differences of

race, class, sex, language, and/or historical period. Some of this is legible in

the extravagantwritings ofGertrude Stein, who takes itupon herself not

only towrite The Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas?how exactly does one

write the autobiography of another person??but also the even more im

possibly entitled textEverybody's Autobiography. Surely few people could

completely identifywith so singular a figure asMalcolm X, not able fully

to substitute the one "I" for another, and yet it is inkeeping with the logicand rhetoric of autobiography that,for example, Spike Lee's film,Malcolm

X, could have a whole slew of young schoolchildren proclaim,one after

another, in the film's coda: "I amMalcolm X." The history of autobiogra

phy is riddled with such exemplary "I"s, however much the genre mightalso and at the same time appeal to its subject's singularity.

How did this "I," this Imore or less substitutable "I," come to be what

it is?Here is the virtual opening ofDerrida's "Typewriter Ribbon" refer

ringto a certain

"they"before

any propernames have been

divulged:

Here, they told us, iswhat happened to them before coming down tous. Both of them are sixteen years old. Several centuries, more than a

millennium apart. Both of them happened, later, to confess their re

spective misdeed, the theft committed when each was sixteen. In the

course of both the theft and the confession, there was at work what

13. The Reveries du promeneur solitaireopens with a similarly paradoxical positioning of the

self as itsown society in the absence of society proper, singular in himself but to such an ex

tent that his identity is a question mark: "Me voici done seul sur la terre, n'ayant plus de

frere, de prochain, d'ami, de societe que moi-meme. Le plus sociable et le plus aimant des

humains en a ete proscrit par un accord unanime. . . .Mais moi, detache d'eux et de tout,

que suis-je moi-meme? (Oeuvres Completes i: 995). [Here I am then alone on the earth, no

longer having any brother, acquaintance, friend, or society other thanmyself. The most so

ciable and loving of humans has been proscribed by a unanimous accord . . .But me, de

tached from them and from everything, what am I,myself?] (my translation).

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348 IAN BALFOUR

we could call in Greek a mechane, at once aningenious theatrical ma

chine or a war machine, thus amachine and amachination, something

both mechanical and strategic. (71)

Only in the next paragraph do we learnwho exactly is involved in this

double scenario of somewhat mechanical theft and confession: "Augustineand Rousseau not

onlywrote or confessed what thus happened

to them.

They confided inus or letus understand that if hat had happened had not

happened thatdaywhen theywere sixteen years old, iftheyhad not stolen,

theywould probably never have written?or signed?these Confessions"

(71). Derrida then glosses this scenario thus:

As if , as ifsomeone saying /got around to addressing you to say,and

you would stillbe hearing it today: "Here is themost unjustifiable, if

not themost unjust, thing that I ever happened to do, at once activelyand passively, mechanically, and in such away thatnot onlywas I able

thus to letmyself do itbut also thanks to it,or because of it, Iwas able

finally to say and to sign J.

This event of the theft in itselfand in conjunction with the latter-daynar

ration of it is so crucial that it comes to be themain event in the formationof the "I," the subject of the autobiography to come, virtually the condi

tion of itspossibility. Derrida draws our attention to a strikingconjunctionin the autobiographies ofAugustine andRousseau, texts thatbear the iden

tical title of Confessions, stressing once again the determinant role of the

theft in the constitution of the "I":

Has anyone ever noticed, in this immense archive, that Augustine and

Rousseau both confess a theft? nd thatboth do so inBook 2 of their

Confessions, in a decisive or even determining and paradigmatic place?This is not all: in this archive that is also a confession, both of them

confess that, although itwas objectively trifling, this theft had the

greatest psychic repercussions on theirwhole lives. (80)

The overlap is indeed uncanny, though ifwe did not confine our "search"

to protagonists aged sixteen,we could addWordsworth to the listof auto

biographical thieves (his two thefts ccur inBook 1of The Prelude), aswell

asMalcolm X and JeanGenet, among others.Why might theftbe so pecu

liarly formational for these exemplary subjects, these model autobiogra

phers? Though Derrida does not explain it in quite these terms,one might

say that theft, more than most events, more than mosttransgressions, helps

delineate what belongs to the "I" and what does not. And it tends to con

jure up the other or others rather more dramatically than other events, be

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cause whatever is stolen tends tobelong

to someone. Few things settle and

unsettle the subjectso much as

stealing.

The occasion of deMan's essay?among other things?prompts Derrida

to ask ifone can think "the event and themachine" at one and the sametime. The most particular focus of de Man's essay is the epoch-making

event inRousseau's lifewhen, as young man (or is it an old boy? Rousseau

claims to have been old since he was young and stillboyish when old14) he

steals a ribbon and upon being questioned about it,he lies?or, in effect,lies?and blames the young girl in the household named Marion, who is

subsequently dismissed from her job. The misdeed, cast byRousseau and

underscored by deMan as decidedly mechanical, hauntsRousseau, for de

cades and decades. It is arguably themajor turning point inRousseau'searly life and in the Confessions, asDerrida seems to contend.

Rousseau's account of the event in the Confessions begs many questions,

not least because his self-accusation assumes the form of an excuse, with a

number of phrases seeming calculated to distance Rousseau from his re

sponsibility in thematter. "Marion" emerges as "the firstobject thatpresented itself" [lepremierobjet qui s'qffrit],hich de Man takes tomean that

he would have blamed the firstperson (or thing,were itpossible) thatpre

sented itself: itjust happened thatMarion was the first. e are asked to believe thatRousseau had no illwill, no intention of harming or even blam

ingMarion for the theft?though he unambiguously did both blame and

harm her. Rousseau's more or less contorted account issues in the hopeor

prayer or entreaty: "May I never have tospeak of it again."

Yet he does just that, returning to the scene of the crime decades later in

the Fourth Promenade of theReveries.15 If the phrasing in the Confessions

already tried to absolve Rousseau of some or all of the responsibility forhis

misdeed(but

ithaunts him as ifhe wereresponsible!)

he isarguably

even

more off the hook, in his own view, when he returns to the episode in the

Reveries. Twice, as Derrida makes clear (following de Man), Rousseau has

recourse to the figure of themachine inhis account of his (verbal) actions:

"My heart followed these rulesmechanically beforemy reason had adoptedthem" and "Thus it is certain thatneither my judgment nor my will de

tailedmy reply, but that itwas themechanical effect [1'effectmachinal] of

my embarrassment" (51; 1032, 1034). Already at the heart of the self?the

heart of all places?one notes the effectof themachine. This figure of the

14- "These long details of my early youth may well seem extremely childish, and I am

sorry for it.Although in certain respects I have been aman since birth, Iwas for a long time,and still am, a child inmany others" (Confessions 169, 174).

15.One notices that the category of the "promenade" sounds here like an established lit

erary genre, one whose dream, inRousseau's case, would be to do justice, inwriting, to

what one thinks and feels while walking.

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350 IAN BALFOUR

machine is no merefigure,

not one among others, since, for de Man and

Derrida, the machine operates in and through the text whether or not it is

thematized as such. Derrida quotes de Man as follows: "There can be no

use of language which isnot,within a certain perspective thus radically for

mal, i.e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed

by aesthetic, formalistic delusions," amechanicity de Man usually associates

with grammar.16 More specifically, de Man sees the sequence of guilt,ex

cuse, more guilt (forhaving excused, forwriting the excuse, formakingthe crime the matter of a confession that one

publishes inmore or less self

serving fashion) as amechanical and inexorable one, even iftheprecise tex

ture of the reflections (and some of their content) are undeniably Rous

seau's own.

De Man's analysis of the singular and yet exemplary crime and its singularyet exemplary textual elaboration helps prompt Derrida to ask in amore

general way:

How, then, is one to reconcile, on the one hand, athinking of the

event, which I propose withdrawing, despite the apparent paradox,from an

ontologyor a

metaphysics of presence (itwould be a matter

of thinking an event that is undeniable but without pure presence)and, on theotherhand, a certain concept of machineness [machinalite]?The latterwould imply at least the following predicates: a certainma

teriality, which is notnecessarily

acorporeality,

a certain technicity,

programming, repetition or iterability,a cutting off from or independence from any living subject?the psychological, sociological, tran

scendental, or even human subject, and so forth. In two words. How

is one to think together the event and the machine, the event with the

machine, this here event with this here machine? In a word, and re

peating myself in quasi-machinelike fashion, how is one to think together the machine and the event, a machinelike repetition and that

which happens/arrives [arrive]. (136)

The event and themachine should be mutually exclusive. The event

would entail an "insistence on the arbitrary, fortuitous, contingent, alea

tory,unforeseeable. An event that one held to be necessary and thus pro

grammed, foreseeable, and so forth, thatwould be an event" (158). The

event, then, would also be of the order of the singular, whereas the ma

chine produces, by definition, what is not singular: the (necessarily) re

peated, the general, and the not-at-all individual. But the analysis of events

16. The passage Derrida cites comes from Allegories ofReading (New Haven and London:

Yale UP, 1979) 294. It is cited in "Typewriter Ribbon" 105. On a related matter in

Wittgenstein, seeMichael N. Forster, Wittgenstein on theArbitrariness ofGrammar (Princeton:Princeton UP, 2005), especially Chapters 2 and 3.

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as they come to us in texts suggests the mutual implication of text and

event such that the task is,Derrida suggests, to think both at once. Even a

reading focused on the event-character of the eventwould need to account

for any effects of the machine, the non-singular and the singular at the

same time.

Some of thisdynamic might be inscribed in the seemingly innocuous ti

tle: "Typewriter Ribbon." What is a typewriter? It suggests, at aminimum,a machine that enables writing

or a mechanical writing,a machine that

produces the same letter in the same form every time the samekey is

struck. Derrida, following de Man, raises the suspicion that the writer is, to

a limited extent but also by definition, a kind of typewriter.When asked

his opinion ofJackKerouac's On The Road, Truman Capote caustically remarked: "That's not writing, that's typing." That is to say: merely mechan

icalwriting. Yet there is a more neutral and not at all dismissive sense in

which allwriting is typing, in twoways: i) insofar aswriting cannot tran

scend or circumvent itsmechanical character and 2) insofar as what appears

to be singular and particular emerges rather as not so singular, a kind of

"type," rather as when, in analyzing comedies, Aristotle contends that the

characters, with apparently proper names, only appear to be individuals

(Poetics 1451b). Poetry, Aristotle claims generally, "aims at generality,"as

"has long been obvious in the case of comedy." The individual isnot (so)

individual, the seemingly singular not (so) singular.All writing is typewrit

ing, because one cannot write what is only one, what ismerely particular.

The merely "one" cannot quite exist in writing,no matter how deter

mined or over-determined the textmight be. This has, once

again,conse

quences for the writing of autobiography, the genre with perhaps the

greatest claim to being the textual mode of the singular subject.17Ifone were to look for the likeliest formal marker of the

identity,self

sameness and continuity of the human subject, and thus the ability to sign"I," itmight well be the proper name. The body and the face change, as

does the mind, but the name remains?or tends to remain?the same.

Even if language in general hardly operates with the perfection of a di

vinely authorized Adamic naming of things (or people or animals), the

proper name seems to hold out the possibility of unambiguous, unique

naming and indeed in a good many instances of daily (or other) life, the

name does function perfectlywell. And yet one and the same proper name

could always refer to more than one person: "Jane Doe" or "Kwame

Appiah" does notnecessarily

name one and onlyone person.

Some of what is at stake in the proper name emerges powerfully in

17. As we take leave of the subject of typewriting, one might note thatRousseau himself

was variously employed as an engraver and a copier ofmusic, a kind of typewriter.

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352 IAN BALFOUR

Derrida's reading of Levi-Strauss and his Tristes Tropiques, a text inwhichthe modern-day anthropologist pays tribute to Rousseau as the founder of

anthropology and amodel still to be emulated. Levi-Strauss studies there

"the lostworld" of theNambikwara, a people apparently innocent of orfree fromwriting. One isperhaps astonished to learn that thispeople haveno proper names, or, more

precisely,no proper names on first acquain

tance. The anthropologist learns from young girls in the tribe thatbeyondthe "nicknames" for everyone, people do have "secret" proper names. The

elders prohibit the use of such names, an extraordinary state of affairs that

(nonetheless) prompts Derrida to comment:

This prohibition is necessarily derivative with

regard

to the constitu

tive erasure ofwhat I have called arche-writing, within, that is, the

play of difference. It isbecause theproper names are already no longerproper names, because their production is their obliteration, because

the erasure and the imposition of the letterare originary, because theydo not supervene upon a proper inscription; it is because the propername has never been, as the unique appellation reserved for the pres

ence of a unique being, anything but the original myth of a transparent legibility present under the obliteration; it is because the propername was never possible except through its functioning within a

classification and therefore within a system of differences, within a

writing retaining the traces of difference, that the interdictwas possible, could come into play, and, when the time came, as we shall see,

could be transgressed, transgressed, that is to say restored to the oblit

eration and non-self-sameness [the im-propriety, non-propriete] at the

origin. (109)

Thus what

appears

to be so unusual?the

example

of a tribe that "has" but

also prohibits proper names?occasions aninsight into the fundamental im

propriety of the seemingly "proper"name. Derrida can show how, in

Levi-Strauss' own terms, drawn from the latter's The Savage Mind: "one

never names . . . one classes."18 Names have to function in a system, have

to be legible, repeatable and thus always potentially or actually not quite as

proper as they appear. Derrida "concludes": "The death of absolutely

proper naming, recognizing in a language the other as pure other, invokingit aswhat it is, is the death of the pure idiom reserved for the unique"

(110). Or as he summarizes bluntly: "the proper name is improper" (111).19

18. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1966)181.

19.On the problematic of the proper name and the signature, see the following authorita

tive studies: Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution ofAuthorship (Ithaca: Cornell

UP, 1988) and Geoff Bennington, Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilee, 1991).

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A stable proper name, however, or the stability of the entity to which

the proper name refers,would seem to be one condition of possibility of

autobiography. In this regard it is not amatter of indifference thatRous

seau sometimes adopted and was addressed by numerous other proper

names: the anagrammatic Vaussore (Confessions, Bk. 4) or the more im

probable Dudding (Confessions,Bk. 6). The former he adopted at a time

when he noted he was "not reallyhimself" and the latterwhen he did not

wish to be recognized for who he really was (but rather an English

Jacobite!). Rousseau seems to oscillate between the two poles staked out byDescartes and Montaigne, two of his great autobiographical predecessors:

Descartes, who thought that ourthoughts

were"entirely within our

power" (Discourse onMethod) andMontaigne, who maintained that "we arenever at home with ourselves" [nous

sommesjamais chez nous].20 Rousseau

does seem, from virtually the outset of his Confessions and elsewhere, al

ready divided against himself. The opening page's formula "je suis autre" [Iam different, I am other]might be less radical thanRimbaud's laterprocla

mation: "je est un autre" [I is another].21 But Rousseau is so

eminentlyca

pable ofmultiplying his uneasily co-existing selves that the "I" does indeed

seem at least something of an other?even to itself?from the very start,

ratheralong

the lines of how Rousseauwould, contemporaneous

with the

Confessions, write a series of dialogues under the rubric Rousseau, Juge de

Jean-Jacques, premised on a split in the self that allows for the distance of

judgment, including judgment of oneself.22 The text presents a distanced,

20. Descartes maintains in the Discourse onMethod that "My thirdmaxim was to tryalwaysto conquer myself rather than fortune, and to altermy desires rather than change the order of

theworld, and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely within

our power but our own thoughts. ..." The Philosophical Works of escartes, Volume i, trans.

Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (no place of publication: Dover, 1931) 96?97. [Matroisieme maxime etoit de tacher toujours plutot a me vaincre que la fortune, et a changer

mes desirs que l'ordre du monde, et generalement de m'accoutumer a croire qu'il n'y a rien

qui soit entierement en notre pouvoir que nos pensees. . ..]The passage fromMontaigne is

from The Complete Essays, trans.M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991) 11 (from essay no.

3 in Book 1, "Our emotions get carried away beyond us).21. As ithappens, Gilles Deleuze invokes this slogan fromRimbaud in his "On Four Po

etic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy," inEssays Critical and Clinical,trans.Daniel W. Smith andMichael A. Greco (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1997) 27-35.

22. Levi-Strauss stresses not the vainglory of the Rousseauean exemplary, self-divided

subject but its humility: "In truth, I am not 'I,' but the feeblest and humblest of 'others.'Such is the discovery of Confessions. Does the anthropologist write anything other than con

fessions? First in his own name, as I have shown, since it is themoving force of his vocation

and his work; and in thatvery work, in the name of the society, which, through the activities

of its emissary, the anthropologist, chooses for itself other societies, other civilizations, and

precisely theweakest and most humble; but only to verify towhat extent that first society is

itself'unacceptable'" (as quoted by Derrida, Of Grammatology 114).

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354 IAN BALFOUR

divided account of a subject divided and distanced from himself. But this

division?giveneven the precarious unity of consciousness over (a long)

time?is still felt and thought as ifcontained by some more encompassingand still somehow unified subject to the extent that the signature, Jean

Jacques Rousseau, would be referential.

Rousseau's multiplenames would be one index of this self-division,

thoughDerrida's Of Grammatology suggests thatwriting itself s arguably the

pre-eminent medium of Rousseau's alienation from himself. It is one of

the great achievements of Derrida's text to have analyzed with such pro

fundity and tenacitywhat is at stake forWestern thought in the idea and

the fact(s) ofwriting. Derrida accords Rousseau a singular place in the his

tory of the thinking of writing, poised "between Plato's Phaedrus andHegel's Encyclopedia" (97), constituting a kind of intensification of the

"modification," asDerrida terms it,from object to subject associated with

the name of Descartes. Within thismore circumscribed epoch, that be

tween Descartes and Hegel, Rousseau, according to Derrida, "is undoubt

edly the onlyone or the first one to make a theme or a system of the re

duction of writing profoundly implied in the entire age" (98). At once

typical and singular,Rousseau makes legiblewhat is at stake in the subject

ofwriting. And he does this in both theory and practice, that is, in generalreflections on writings, as in the SecondDiscourse and theEssay on theOrigin

ofLanguages, where he laments the loss of immediacy and indeed even the

loss of a possibility of thepublic in an age inwhich thevoice of orators can

no longer even be heard and inwhich one is reduced to viewing placards

saying "Give Money,"23 aswell as inhismore or lesspurely autobiographical writings.

Derrida's general account of the subject of writing draws on, among oth

ers, his great predecessors Saussure and Freud, who argued variously that

language "is not a function of the speaker" (OfGrammatology 68) and posited a fundamental "unconsciousness of language," such that Derrida, after

them, can write:

With orwithout these propositions the complicity of their authors, all

these propositionsmust be understood as more than the simple

rever

sals of ametaphysics of presence or of conscious subjectivity. Consti

tuting it and dislocating it at the same time,writing is other than the

subject, in whatever sense this latter is understood. Writing can never

be thought under the category of the subject; however it ismodified,however it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, itwill

23. I am summarizing brutally here a more complex and ambivalent position. Derrida

conducts themost painstaking analysis of the relevant works by Rousseau throughout Of

Grammatology.

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refer,by the entire thread of itshistory, to the substantialityof a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the selfsame [le

propre] in the presence of self-relationship. (68?69)

Subject to the relentless sway of difference, the subject cannot master the

language of its own utterances, aswriting always exceeds them. The subject

cannot be simply andwholly subject, ifwe understand that term to entail a

more or less popularized version of theCartesian "I," transparent to itself

and master of its owncertainty.

The consequences for thewriting subject are nowhere more legible than

in the genre of autobiography, to say nothing of the autobiography with

themost explicit claims to singularityand exemplarity. If the opening of the

Confessions announces a self-assured subject in command of just what ittakes towrite his own autobiography (e.g. "I know my own heart"), anynumber of subsequent passages come to

complicate the self-same identity

of that subject on which the success and integrityof the text seem to de

pend. To judge from Rousseau's own account, the best presentationor

representation of his selfwould be one that corresponded to hismost "pedestrian" thoughts:

In thinking over the details ofmy lifewhich are lost tomy memorywhat Imost regret is that I do not keep diaries ofmy travels.Never

did I think somuch, exist so vividly, and experience somuch, never

have I been somyself (tant etemoi)?if Imay use that expression?asin the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is somethingabout walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts.When I

stay in one place I can hardly think at all.My body has to be on themove to setmy mind going [il faut que mon corps soit en branle pourymettre mon

esprit].(157-58;

162)This isbad news for the project ofRousseau's autobiography, since it is so

very difficult towalk and write at the same time. The writing of theCon

fessions isnecessarily the product of conditions (being sedentary or station

ary) that are not at all conducive tothought. Staying in one

place,or espe

cially sittingat his desk,means thatRousseau, inwriting, can hardly get hismind

"going." Moreover, onemight assume that one is always oneself

(how could itbe otherwise?) butRousseau posits a kind of sliding scale of

being (at one with) oneself,with walking being the condition thatbest allows one to be oneself and to think (about, among other things, oneselfand being oneself). The diary formwould stand as a better account?

though still not immediate?than the belated, retrospective confession,

given the shorter interval between the experience of thought and feelingwhile walking and itsbeing written down.

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356 IAN BALFOUR

The brief "forward" to theConfessions, towhich Derrida draws our at

tention, a strange page without any heading (such as"Avant-Propos") and

often printed without a page number that faced the first page of the

Geneva manuscript24 is almost redundant (though coming first) in the lightof the final opening of theConfessions. Itpresents a similar sortof claim to

exemplarity but here the phrasing stresses themotif of totality: promises a

portrait "in all its truth" [dans toute saverite], one of the many claims to to

tality: "Here is the only portrait of aman, painted exactly according to na

ture and in all its truth,which exists and which probably everwill exist"

(3). It corresponds to another famous passage, made paradigmatic by

Starobinski, stressing totality and the desire tomake that totalityknown:

I should like in someways tomake my soul transparent to the reader's

eye, and for thatpurpose I am trying to present it from all points of

view, to show it in all lights, and to contrive thatmore of itsmove

ments shall escape his notice . . . (169; my emphasis)

If totality and truthform the goal of theConfessions, it isnot so fortuitous

thatRousseau, almost always writing retrospectively, has sowildly differingaccounts of his own

capacity for remembering events, things, words.

Rousseau claims to have "no verbal memory"?by which he means princi

pally the aptitude for remembering oral or written passages. The larger pas

sage, however, seems to invoke a less circumscribed mode of memory,

linked with the difficultyofwriting down his thoughts in general:

I have never been able to do anythingwith a pen inmy hand, andmydesk and paper before me; it is on my walks, among the rocks and

trees, it is at night inmy bed when I lie awake, that I compose inmy

head;and

youcan

imaginehow

slowly,for I am

completelywithout

verbal memory and have never been able to memorize half a dozen

verses inmy life. (113?14; 114)

The very nextparagraph, however, underscores the vivacity of his memory

in alarger

sense:

I have studiedmen, and I think I am a fairlygood observer. But all the

same I do not know how to seewhat is beforemy eyes; I can only see

clearly in retrospect, it is only inmemories thatmy mind canwork. Ihave neither feeling nor understanding for anything that is said or

done or thathappens beforemy eyes,All that strikesme is the external

manifestation. But afterwards all comes back tome, I remember the

24. Numerous editions and translations opt not to print this page as prefacing the Confessions.

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place and the time, the tone of voice and look, the gesture and situa

tion; nothing escapes me. (114; 114; my emphasis)

And yet this is the sameRousseau (or is it?)who says a little earlier "... noman has ever

passed the sponge sorapidly and so

completelyover the past

as I" (103; 102). One witnesses an almost systematic oscillation between the

claims to total memory and the total or near total absence of it.25

IfRousseau has "neither feeling nor understanding for anything said or

done or thathappens before [his] eyes" can he be said to experience any

thing at all, anything other thanmemory? Because it all comes back, even

ifnot experience as such in its immediacy. All experience is only experi

enced latterly,n

themode ofNachtrdglichkeit.And"it is

onlyin

memories"that Rousseau's mind can work." Paradoxicallyor not, memory gets in the

way of experience?or experience is always suspended, deferred to its fu

turememory. One might think that the occasional claim to totalmemory

("nothing escapes me") would be an ideal condition for self-presence and

yet at the outset of the very next paragraph (following the claim that

"nothing escapes me") Rousseau notes, "Seeing that I am so little master of

myself when I am alone, imagine what I am like in conversation. ..."

Thus theConfessions,whose project is to tell the story "in all its truth" (in

cluding the truth about lying, stealing and other "faults"), seems to careen

wildly between accounts that suggest authoritative truthful renditions

girded by total memory and self-presence,a

singularly successful presenta

tion of self, overagainst something like its opposite. No memory, no verbal

representation would correspond to the lively thoughtswhen his mind is

"going" somewhere, preferably while walking. Is it any wonder, then, that

this subject of writing, this written life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is precar

ious from the startand throughout?If the subject, the desiring subject, who is same and other, other even to

himself, is remarkably divided from the first, one might think that the

other, the other other, so tospeak, would be more unified and able to be

experienced in his or her singularity,not least because it is so much easier

to render the other, discursively,as

homogeneous inmore or less reductive

fashion. To be sure, any number of others are first presented in their vari

oussingularities through the Confessions only to

give way to a certain sense

2$. Witness also this passage that calls attention to gaps in the record only to assert that

nothing essential ismissing: "There are some events inmy life that are as vivid as if they hadjust occurred. But there are gaps and blanks that I cannot fill except by means of a narrative

asmuddled as thememory I preserve of the events. Imay therefore have made mistakes at

times, and Imay stillmake some over trifles, till I come to the days when I have more certain

information concerning myself. But over anything that is really relevant to the subject I am

certain of being exact and faithful, as I shall always endeavour to be in everything" (128,

130).

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358 IAN BALFOUR

of substitutability.One of themost remarkable dynamics ofRousseau's life

lies in his engagements with women. They tend to take place under the

sign of the mother, not least, perhaps, because Rousseau's mother died

within days of giving birth to him. With the absence of his actualmother?and Rousseau meditated a good deal on the role of themother in

the upbringing of the child, including the importance of breast-feeding?Rousseau's life ismarked by any number of substitutes for the lostmaternal

presence, mostspectacularly in his relation toMadame de Warens whom

he came to call "Mama" before consummatinga romance with her. Can

there be a mother in quotation marks, a mother that is not a mother, but

the citation of a mother, a woman not the mother but called by the

mother's name, not a proper but a

generic

name that nonetheless should, in

principle, onlyever be applied

to one person?to one's mother bya son or

daughter?26 In any event, the force ofRousseau callingMadame deWarens

"Mama" canhardly be overestimated, given that when the sexual relation

shipwas initiated,Rousseau recognized: "I felt as if I had committed in

cest" (189; 197). It feels like incest because this is one forceful instance

when, "the irreplaceable is replaced" (OfGrammatology 145?46). Madame

deWarens is the closest of all the female figures to themother and yet theyall seem to be, at one level or another, substitutes for her, a "chain of sup

plements," as Derrida terms it, resembling each other by their positionwithout resembling each other, blurring the distinction between metaphorand metonymy. And the mother would be only the extreme of these sub

stitutions or almost the most extreme: for weresomething

or someone to

provide absolute pleasure (which perhaps entails a return to the origin) that

would mean death, asRousseau explicitly hypothesizes.

I do not want to leave readers with the impression that singularity,so cru

cial in Derrida's readings of the Romantic era, is confined to the period.

Derrida's invocations of singularity tend to cluster in his treatment of justice, death, especially the death of a friend, the event, thework of art, and

the subject.He has argued, for example, inhis suggestive but enigmatic es

say "Force of Law" thatjustice is always of the order of the singular.Any

"general" application of the law would treat the specificcase as, precisely,

general. Justice requires a judgment that isnot simplymechanical or givenin advance, otherwise a machine or computer could do a

perfectly good

job at it.Justice is always and only singular. Indeed the phrase "doing jus

26. I am voicing a tradition here, not my opinion. There are often perfectly good reasons

(as in adoption) for the term "mama" or its variants being applied to more than one person.On the curiously pervasive form?across many languages?of the term in question here, see

Roman Jacobson "Why Mama And Papa?" in On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and

Monique Monville-Bursten (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1990) 305-11.

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tice" to something oftenmeans respecting the singularityof thematter at

hand: a text, an event, a person.

Derrida, like a lot good of teachers (Socrates, Jesus,Lao Tzu, Nietzsche),

is fond of a good paradox, and he takes a not-so-secret pleasure in arguingthat even an event which would seem to have an

air-tight claim tosingu

larity could, against all odds, comeagain and again. His great essay on Paul

Celan, "Shibboleth," opens with the seemingly self-evident claim, "One

time only: circumcision takes place only once,"27

onlyto have the essay go

on to trouble?via analysis of the date, the anniversary, the necessarilyre

petitiveor iterative character of inscription?the one-timeness of even that

event, and only partly thanks to the figurative character of circumcision.

Thus often whatappears

to besingular

is revealed to be crossedby anynumber of forces that are something other than singular and often indeed

generic,as with the partly transgressable "law of genre." In eulogizing the

death of a friend, so often and so eloquently performed by Derrida, one

feels the law of genre operating (and indeed Derrida "respects" the law ofthe eulogy, the epitaph, the obituary) even as there isno doubt as to the ir

reducible singularityof the person lost, the singularityof the loss, and the

unique protracted event of individual and group mourning. But even here

thepathos of the individual loss of the individual can pan out to the "pan,"to the "all" or at least the imagined form of the collective, as in the final

moment of his tribute to his colleague and friend Louis Althusser. In clos

ingwhat cannot easily be closed, Derrida cedes the finalword toAlthusser,from the latter's early "Bertolazzi and Brecht":

Yes, we are united byan institution?the performance?but, more

deeply, by the samemyths, the same themes, that govern us without

our consent, by the samespontaneously lived ideology.

. . .we eat of

the same

bread,

we have the same

rages,the same

rebellions,the same

madness (at least in memory, where this ever-immanent possibilityhaunts us), if not the same

prostration before a time unmoved by any

History. Yes, like Mother Courage,we have the same war at our

gates, and a handsbreath from us, ifnot inus, the same horrible blind

ness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We

have even the same dawn and night,we skirt the same

abysses: our

unconsciousness. We even share the samehistory?and that is how it

all started.28

In onequoting the other, not just any other, Derrida's singular voice gives

way toAlthusser's in amemorable formulation of how the singular is tra

27. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties inQuestion: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas

Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2006) 1.

28. Jacques Derrida, The Work ofMourning, ed. Pascale Anne-Braut and Michael Naas

(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2001) 118.

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360 IAN BALFOUR

versed by any number offerees, historical, linguistic, discursive. Languageand text in thebroadest senses thatDerrida helped give to thosewords?byno means reducible to

language and textliterally

so called?sustain, and

undercut the self, the singular self that language in part, but only in part,made possible in the firstplace.

York University, Canada

balfour, s

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