lyotard and on literature

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Lyotard and/on Literature Author(s): Anne Tomiche Source: Yale French Studies, No. 99, Jean-Francois Lyotard: Time and Judgment (2001), pp. 149-

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ANNE TOMICHE

Lyotard and/on Literature

At first sight, it might seem that, throughout his ceuvre, Lyotard has more often commented on visual works of art than on literary ones: he has written extensively on a number of painters including Marcel Duchamp, Valerio Adami, Shusaku Arakawa, Daniel Buren, and Bar- nett Newman, and on the relation between the sublime and the avant- garde in painting; he has collaborated on numerous artists' catalogues and he was commissioned to organize an exhibition at the Centre Pom- pidou in Paris in 1985 (Les Immateriaux). Such reliance on the visual arts could be interpreted as the consequence of the emphasis that Ly- otard has placed on the concepts of "figure" and "unpresentable," both of which name that which subverts articulated discourse and might be outside or beyond language.

However, if one looks at the works that frame his career-from Shakespeare, Mallarme, and Butor in the early Discours, figure (1971) up to Joyce and Kafka in Lectures d'enfance (1991), and Malraux in Signed, Malraux (1996) and Soundproof Room (1998)-Lyotard also uses certain literary texts as supports to develop "philosophical" concepts (from the "figural" up to the "event," the "inhuman" and "infancy") that have, in return, shed light on these literary texts. Lyotard begins Peregrinations by telling how, when he was about twenty, he was tempted by creative writing, but quickly gave it up: "I presume my novel might have been something like a nouveau roman, since Michel Butor and Roger Laporte were my classmates at the Sorbonne" (Per., 1). The tone is slightly nostalgic. Does it hint that Lyotard's philosophical and esthetic writings have to be read against the failure of his early experience as creative writer? It might be a way to explain why Lyotard is so cautious when he discusses literary texts. Cautious and almost afraid, it seems. He always stresses the difficulty of commenting on lit-

YFS 99, Jean-Franpois Lyotard: Time and Judgment, ed. Harvey and Schehr, (C 2001 by Yale University.

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150 Yale French Studies

erature, he always underscores how the commentary is never adequate to the literary text.1 It is not until the 1990s that certain texts will be entirely devoted to literature (with Lectures d'enfance, the texts on Joyce and, to a lesser extent and still with much rhetorical precaution, on Kafka, and then, with Signed, Malraux and Soundproof Room on Malraux).

LYOTARD'S LITERARY CANON

Lyotard's literary canon-from Butor to Stein, Joyce and Beckett- includes a genealogy of writers who are heir to a Flaubert asserting his desire to write a "book on nothing" (livre sur rien) and to a Mallarme stating that to write is to assert the absence of things rather than their presence. Such writers focus on "nothingness," "emptiness," and "non-sense"l rather than on plenitude of meaning. They are more interested in the how of representation than in what is represented, more interested, indeed, in questioning the possibility of represention than in producing what Barthes called "reality effects."2 Such literature finds its objects less in referents that would be outside it than in its own functioning and in the "nothingness" that organizes it, in "the Noth- ing ... which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real."3 To put it in different terms, the literature that interests Lyotard is a literature whose stakes are less to create harmonious and beautiful forms than to distort and to give voice to disharmony and excess. As he notes in "Return," "by the time Joyce wrote Ulysses, artists and writers knew ... that ... the stakes of writing are ;. . . now explicitly) not to create beauty, but rather to bear witness to a liability to the voice that, within man, exceeds man, nature, and their classical concordance" (TP, 198). Lyotard even goes so far as to write, in Postmodern Fables, that literature is better equipped than philosophy to give voice to its constitutive void and nothingness: "Gertrude Stein, Joyce, or Duchamp seem like better 'philosophical' minds than Nietzsche or Heidegger- by better, I mean more apt to take into consideration the exitless noth-

1. For example, concerning Gertrude Stein: "No comments. The selection done for the purposes of quoting is already outrageous" (D, 67); and concerning Kafka: "As always, the violence and simple clarity of Kafka's text require no commentary. If anything, commentary will diminish them-a fact to which I resign myself " (TP, 176).

2. See Roland Barthes, "L'effet de r6el," in Le bruissernent de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 167-74; translated as The Rustle of Language by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).

3. Samuel Beckett, Murphy [1938] (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 246.



ANNE TOMICHE 151

ingness the West gave birth to in the first quarter of the twentieth century; and by 'philosophical,' I mean, if it is true that philosophizing is a matter of 'style,' what Paul Valery concludes . .. in Leonardo and Phi- losophy" (PF, 23).

Ultimately, Lyotard's literary canon is constituted of writers who are more interested in words themselves than in narratives. Just as in the field of visual arts, Lyotard privileges a tradition of nonrepresentational painting that goes back to Cezanne's greater emphasis on color than on forms, in the literary field he privileges a tradition that is more interested in words than in plots, for he draws a parallel between color as the "matter" of painting and words as the "matter" of writing and thinking: "Perhaps words themselves, in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e., what it cannot man- age to think.... As Gertrude Stein thought, to write is to respect [words'] candor and their age, as Cezanne or Karel Appel respect colors" (Inh, 143). Hence Lyotard's interest in the nonnarrative prose of Stein, Joyce, or Butor. Yet even when dealing with Shakespeare, Lyotard focuses on words rather than on the story. At the end of Discours, figure, he introduces what he calls a "Shakespearian episode" to discuss Ham- let. However, he does not focus on the scenario of the play but on what he reads as the lapsus made by one of the comedians hired by Hamlet to perform Priam's murder: "But who, 0! who had seen the mobled queen" (386). The term "mobled," to which Hamlet reacts, is taken by Lyotard to function as the trace left upon words by the operations of the primary unconscious (i.e., condensation-of "mob," "motley," "mobile," and "mother"-and displacement, from Hecuba to Gertrude).

It seems equally surprising to see Lyotard focus on a "narrative" writer such as Malraux, that is, a writer interested in content, plot, and meaning, and to see him devote two books to such figure.4 Lyotard does not hide, however, that the point of his study of Malraux's "anties- thetics" is to have him included in a canon of much less narrative writers such as Celine, Bataille, Artaud, and Joyce. He concedes certain "compositional shortcomings" (travers d'ecriture) on Malraux's part, which he identifies as an inclination for epic writing, the eloquence of a public figure (CS, 20), the fact that "narration ... evokes realities . . ., uses words as a function of their content and arranges them from one

4. Signg Malraux (1996) is what Lyotard calls a "hypobiography," while Chainbre sourde (1998) focuses on Malraux's esthetics, or rather "anti-esthetics" (the book's subtitle).




end to the other of the narrative with the aim of providing a meaning for an eschatology" (CS, 64). However, in spite of these "compositional shortcomings," all of which have to do with too much narrativity and too much focus on the construction of meaning, and in order to bring Malraux into his literary canon, Lyotard emphasizes two dimensions of Malraux's esthetics: abjection and inarticulation. The abject is that which is at the very foundation of Malraux's writing, that against which writing struggles but that which is constitutive of writing. Hence the emphasis on the putrid in the first two chapters of Sound- proof Room, on what Lyotard, after Malraux's Lazarus, calls "dread" (epouvante), whose "horror proliferates within" (CS, 25). Focusing on abjection puts Malraux in the company of Celine, Bataille, and Artaud. The concept of inarticulation that Lyotard has explicitly developed in Lectures d'enfance as well as in "Emma," and which is inseparable from the concept of articulation developed in The Differend, takes here the form of what Lyotard, after Malraux himself, calls "stridency": "stridency is not commensurable with speech, perhaps not even commensurable with some phone" (CS, 98). Lyotard even goes so far as to compare Malraux's voice in his speech for Jean Moulin's funeral in the Pantheon to Artaud's voice in his 1947 radio broadcast "To Have Done with the Judgment of God."5 If indeed one might compare the excess in Malraux's and Artaud's voices and their ability to modulate an in- credible scale of sounds, the comparison seems much less appropriate when one considers the stakes of both discourses and the stakes in the very use of the voice. Lyotard does not try to push the comparison in that direction. Yet to put Malraux in the company of Artaud could mean going so far as identifying the lyricism and the call for pathos in Malraux's speech for Jean Moulin with Artaud's antilyrical rumbles and glossolalia intended to disrupt both articulated discourse and such values as "the nation" or "God."

Does the precautious author of just Gaming do justice to Malraux's literary ceuvre? Whatever the answer is, he does do justice to a certain conception of writing, which he has always privileged when he turns "Malraux" into a nonrepresentational literature that questions nine- teenth-century modalities of representation, a literature that subverts

5. Andr6 Malraux, "Transfert des cendres de Jean Moulin au Panth6on," in CEuvres completes, vol. 3, 948-55. Antonin Artaud, "Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu" [1947] in CEuvres competes, vol. 13 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 67-118; translated as "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" by Clayton Eshleman in Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), 281-307.



ANNE TOMICHE 153

and transgresses "laws" of narrativity and rationally linked discourses. In that sense-because of Lyotard's emphasis on the transgressive power of such literature and on the way it questions linkages-, his ap- proach to literature resonates with some of the philosophical concepts he develops on the basis of his readings of Kant, Wittgenstein, and Freud: the figural (Discours, figure), the event (The Differend), or the inarticulate phrase (The Inhuman, Lectures d'enfance). The question then becomes: What is the status of the literary text in relation to the philosophical concept with which it "resonates"?

LITERATURE AS ILLUSTRATION

In the 70s and 80s, from Discours, figure to The Differend, literature seems to function in Lyotard's texts to illustrate philosophical concepts. In Discours, figure, the analyses of the visual dimension of Butor's texts illustrate the operations of the figural within discourse (360-75); the first player's lapsus in Shakespeare's Hamlet is used to illustrate the traces left in articulated discourse by "a fragment of primary unconscious space" (386). EIluard's and e.e. cummings's poetry comes into play in the book to illustrate the work of condensation and the transgressive nature of poetry (324-26). In The Differend, Gertrude Stein's statements on sentences in How to write are quoted and commented on as illustrations of Lyotard's concept of "phrase" as event and of the question of linkage from one phrase to the next.6

To limit our analysis of the status of the literary text in Lyotard's work to its illustrative function would, however, be reductive. For, as the example of Lyotard's readings of Butor shows with particular clarity, the very question of "illustration" is called into question by the literary texts Lyotard analyzes and by the concept itself (i.e., the figural) that they "illustrate." Indeed, in order to "illustrate" the work of the figural within discourse, Lyotard compares two texts written by Butor both of which have to do with the "representation of the United States": a text entitled "L'appel des Rocheuses" (the call of the Rock- ies), published in the journal Realites and presented as a commentary on four photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston; the section in Illustrations I entitled "Les Montagnes Rocheuses" (the Rocky Mountains) with the subtitle "on 4 photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston." What Lyotard's reading shows is how from Realites

6. Lyotard's phrase is an event, an occurrence: "A phrase 'happens"' (D, xii). It is a quod, the fact "that it happens" before all determination of "what happens."




to Illustrations, Butor problematizes the illustrative relation between text and image.7

In Realites, Butor's text spreads over four double pages, each of which shows a photograph illustrating the textual commentary (the Grand Tetons Range, Yosemite, Death Valley, and Mount Whitney, re- spectively). Although the relation between the text and the photograph is problematized by the nature of the texts (descriptive for some, poetic or mythical for others), the written text and the photograph remain outside each other: there is an image of the United States and there is a text "commenting" it. The relation between the written text and the picture is a relation of exclusion between two heterogeneous spaces. In Bu- tor's Illustrations, on the other hand, there are no photographs. How- ever, on the first page of the section on the Rocky Mountains, one reads: "Captions: 1/Teton Range; 2/Yosemite Valley in the winter; 3/Na- tional Monument of Death Valley; 4/Roclky Chaos with Mount Whit- ney in the background." The first page thus lists the titles of the photographs that were present in Realites. And the written "text" that follows "illustrates" the absent photographs by Adams and Weston. Indeed, although there is no picture or photograph, the organization of this text "illustrating" absent photographs is governed by visual con- siderations: the typographic forms function not only in the system of oppositions of the graphic code of writing but also as elements with a plastic value (determined by the density of the characters, their size, their nature-italics, bold, etc. As Lyotard notes, if one replaced the letters with different intensities of black corresponding to the density, nature, size of the typographic letters and of the blank intervals, one would discover a figure close to a Mondrian painting).

Whereas in Realites the figures (i.e., the photographs) are outside the discourse that comments on them, in Illustrations the figure is now within discourse. Furthermore, the relation between figure and discourse undermines mimesis, representation, and linear discursivity. Indeed, while all the words that constitute the body of the written text in Illustrations belong to the text that appeared in Realites, their organization and distribution on the pages is such that there is no longer any linear discourse. The full sentences of Realites have been cut up in

7. "Representation of the Unites States" is the subtitle of Butor's Mobile (Paris: Gal- limard, 1962); translated as Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States by Richard Howard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963); Realitgs 197, special issue on America (June 1962): 76-83; Michel Butor, Illustrations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 91- 105.



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fragments and are now distributed on several pages; a given fragment is part of a spatial, rather than a syntactic, construction with fragments of other statements. The movement from the figure photograph outside discourse (Realites) to the figure inside discourse (Illustrations) co- incides with the deconstruction of communicative and representa- tional discourse. The lines of a given page do not follow each other but constitute statements that have to be produced simultaneously: as on a musical score, where each instrument's lines are juxtaposed in order to be read and performed simultaneously, in Butor's text the lines on a page must be read synchronically rather than diachronically. In particular, three lines of discourse are juxtaposed: one line that runs at the top of the pages develops the signification of the Rocky Mountains for the first white pioneers who discovered them; a second line that runs in the middle of the pages develops the signification of the Mountains for someone flying over them in an airplane; and the third line that runs at the bottom of the pages develops their signification for someone driv- ing in a car. Because of the parallelism of their distribution on the pages, these three discourses, which bear on three different ages of America, are placed side by side. The effect produced is that of the synchronicity of these three ages and of the collapse of different times. Different times are set in parallel as are different spaces: whereas in Realites each double page featured a given space (the Grand Tetons Range, Yosemite, Death Valley, Mount Whitney), in Illustrations, fragments of text de- scribing each of these places are juxtaposed on a given page. The effect produced is thus not only the parallel juxtaposition of times but also of spaces.

What interests Lyotard in Butor's Illustrations is not simply the visual quality of the textual organization, but also the fact that such visual quality (the figurality of the text, in Lyotard's terminology) results from the destabilization, fragmentation, and deconstruction of linear and communicative discourse. By showing how Butor problematizes the very concept and practice of illustration, Lyotard's analyses "illustrate" the concept of the figural within discourse as precisely the questioning of the concept of "illustration."

LITERATURE AS TESTIMONY

Butor's texts function less as illustrations than as "testimony": they testify to the presence within discourse of the figural, the other of discourse that deconstructs it. Literature "testifies" more than it illus-




trates. Indeed, from Discours, figure to The Differend, the conceptual emphasis shifts from the visual to the question of bearing witness.

The Differend opens with the question of "how to bear witness" to what functions in the book as the paradigmatic situation of differend- the Final Solution and the gas chambers:

To have "really seen with his own eyes" a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to per- suade the unbeliever.... The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber. [D, 3]

Ultimately, and paradoxically, it is thus both impossible and ethically necessary to bear witness to the differend. In the context of this ethical necessity to testify and bear witness to the differend, such is precisely the role conferred by Lyotard upon art and literature. It might seem curious, at first glance, given that the paradigm for the differend is the Fi- nal Solution and the gas chambers, that the literary texts that, in Lyotard's analyses, function to bear witness to a differend are never sur- vival narratives. One finds no mention, in The Differend or elsewhere, of Robert Antelme's The Human Race, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, or Elie Wiesel's Night, to give only a few examples. It might be that such texts are still too narrative for Lyotard. For narratives are a place where differends get neutralized: "The multitude of phrase regimens and of gen- res of discourse finds a way to ... neutralize differends, in narratives" (D, 158). Rather than narrative texts, it is a "nonnarrative" or less narrative literature that serves, in The Differend, the purpose of "bearing witness": Joyce testifies to "the conflict over the mode of linking" (151) and Gertrude Stein tries to link phrases without rules of linkage (67-68).

Lyotard selects a number of assertions from Gertrude Stein's How to write, and more precisely from two chapters: "Sentences and Para- graphs" and "Sentences." The quotes he reproduces-there are about twenty of them-are juxtaposed; on two occasions, in Lyotard's juxtaposition of quotes from Stein, a parenthesis is opened in which the quote is commented upon. The first assertion quoted by Lyotard is: "A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is." In a parenthesis, he then comments: "(Because the feeling or the sentiment is the linkage, the passage. Does this happen to fall, or what? Or nothing, but nothing would be too much: A phrase, and and)" (67). Following the juxtaposition of quotes, is a series of nine remarks introduced by: "No comments. The selection done for the purposes of quoting is already outra-



ANNE TOMICHE 157

geous. Another remark or two" (67). The question raised by Lyotard's "use" of Gertrude Stein's How to write is precisely a question of linkage: How to link the quotes? -By juxtaposing them. And how to link on the quotes? -In two ways: first, by commenting, clarifying, rephras- ing them in the terms used in the argumentation-such is the function of the parentheses, which transform Stein's "A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is" into a discourse on the linkage of phrases ("the feeling or the sentiment is the linkage . . ."); second, by refusing the commentary-after the series of quotes, Lyotard's first sentence, "No comment." Juxtaposing, commenting, or refusing to comment are indeed modes of linkage. So when Lyotard writes: "The differend is reintroduced into the heart of what ought to regulate the litigation, in-between the law and the case under question" (D, 67, my emphasis), this second remark made concerning the very notion of paragraph also holds for the linkage of his own discourse with Stein's. A paragraph is a division: it separates what it unites. At the same time, a paragraph is made of "ands," "n moreovers," and so forth: it unites what it separates. Because of this heterogeneity, the differend is constitutive of the paragraph. In Lyotard's "remarks" about Gertrude Stein's quotes, the differend is also reintroduced between "the law" of the necessary linkage from one phrase to the next and Gertrude Stein's statements as "case under question." The "law" means that "for there to be no phrase is impossible, for there to be And a phrase is necessary. It is necessary to make linkage" (66). Gertrude Stein's statements, on the other hand, are such as to render all comments "outrageous." Linking is "outrageous " and at the same time it is impossible not to link, even saying "no comments" is a way of linking: the differend is indeed reintroduced in the very "conflict" between linking and not commenting. Literary texts such as Gertrude Stein's thus bear witness to the differend not because they try to describe or narrate the paradigmatic experience of the differend (the Shoah) but because in their very writing they question the traditional linkage of one sentence onto the next, based on causality, continuity, and logic.

Ultimately, beyond the status of the literary text within Lyotard's work (an "illustration" or a "testimony" that puts into question the very notions of illustration and testimony), the issue raised by Lyotard's recourse to literature is that of the impact of Lyotard's readings of literature on literary criticism. It seems to me, as a literary critic, that the interest of Lyotard's readings of literature is two-fold: he helps us think the power of negativity at work in certain literary texts; he has opened




a path for thinking the relation between psychoanalysis and literature in terms other than a psychoanalyzing of characters or authors.

LITERATURE AS THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY

Given the emphasis placed on the questioning of representation itself rather than on its content, it is not surprising that, according to Lyotard, what matters in poetic work is not the construction of beautiful forms. Poetic work is a negative power, and all the terms that Lyotard uses to designate the poetic function-with all the differences and shifts they entail throughout his ceuvre-convey, through their prefixes, this emphasis on negativity: in Discours, figure, "poeticity has to do with deconstruction" (this is the title of one of the work's subsections [324- 26]); in The Inhuman, the "inhuman"; and in Lectures d'enfance, the "indubitable," the "inarticulable," the "inappropriable" or the "intractable," all designate "infancy"-that which cannot be spoken but to which writing tries to give voice; in Signed, Malraux and Soundproof Room, the "unheard-of" (inoui) whose "relationship to the audible is merely approximate" (CS, 99).

As early as Discours, figure, Lyotard opposed the structuralists' ap- proach to poeticity conceived in positive terms as an operation of construction. According to Jakobson, "poetry brings out the constructive elements of all linguistic levels, from the network of distinctive traits up to the organization of the entire text."8 The poetic function, defined according to the two axes that construct discourse (the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes), produces meaning through an operation of construction. In particular, the tropes of metaphor and metonymy have to be understood in terms of their functioning along the axes of selection and combination. Contrary to Jakobson's analysis, Lyotard suggests that "what matters to poetry is deconstruction, the presence of a force other than the law of language and of communication in discourse" (DF, 323 -24). This does not mean that poetic work is necessarily a work of deconstruction, that all tropes are transgressive. Rather it means that literature allows Lyotard to define poetic work as the work of forces that deconstruct communicative and articulated discourse.

With The Differend and the "philosophy of phrases" that it sets in place, the emphasis shifts from energy and forces to phrases and their linkage. A phrase is articulate insofar as it presents what Lyotard calls

8. Roman Jakobson, Questions de poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 487, my emphasis and translation.



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a "universe": a referent (the case), a meaning (what is signified about the case), an addressee and an addressor. That a phrase is inarticulate, on the other hand, means that it does not present a universe. It is thus a non-signifying, non-referenced, non-addressing, and non-addressed phrase. However, it points to a meaning that is only of one type: a feeling. The inarticulate phrase thus does not "speak of" anything but "says" without articulating that there is something, without signification, reference, or address. From Discours, figure to Lectures d'enfance, the literature that Lyotard is interested in remains on the side of negativity-inhuman, infans, intractable, and so forth-but it is a negativity conceived less in terms of forces than in terms of a differend between the inarticulate and articulation. Such literature "testifies" to the "presence," within articulated discourse, of the non-articulated, the non-linguistic, indeed to the "presence" of silence, void, and nothingness. Hence, concerning Joyce's Ulysses, Lyotard writes: " Ulysses is one of the greatest works devoted to, consecrated to inoperativity. The Odyssey's framework returns in it only to be deconstructed and leave room for the void of interpellation" (TP, 198). Lyotard is still talk- ing about deconstruction (and he even writes: "The work's construction only serves as a spur for deconstruction," [TP, 1931), but in terms of linkage rather than in terms of forces. The problematic linkage is both between Homer's text and Joyce's, and also within Joyce's text. The effect of Ulysses is to call into question the logic of the book and to render it inoperative: "While the beautiful classical form closes in upon itself, concludes, and thus makes its return, and while it is in itself the return, it is essential that Joycean writing place the cyclical mo- tif under the rule of its disordering and its inconsistency" (TP, 194). Throughout Lectures d'enfance, Joyce, Kafka, and Valery testify, as does Freud, to the differend between articulation and inarticulation. It is the presence within discourse, that is, within a narrative or argumentative text (Ulysses, "The Penal Colony," L'introduction a la poetique, The Ratman), of something "intractable" -be it called "inappropriable" (Joyce), "indubitable" (Kafka), "disorder" (Valery), "ph6ne" (Freud).

Even Malraux's style is turned into a call to listen to the inaudible, the unheard-of: "style invents forms for capturing the unheard-of (in- ou..).... Style relentlessly works, undoing and reshaping its material in order to snatch it from the spiral of the sensible, to subvert and offer it up to the call of the unheard-of" (CS, 108). While insisting on sub- versions, ruptures, heterogeneities, paratopisms, and parachronisms seems perfectly legitimate in Joyce's case, it is more surprising in Mal-




raux's. For, discussing Malraux's "anti-esthetics," Lyotard privileges a 1920 article on cubist poetry ("Des origines de la poesie cubiste") to overemphasize what Malraux's strategy as a writer owes to deconstruction rather than to construction. He turns Malraux's notion of literary or artistic "fact" into his own concept of a "pure event," that is, into the presentation of a quod without quid, a non-addressed, non-des- tined and non-referenced "it happens": Malraux's writing meditates the enigma of writing. It strives to reveal the wonder of the fact, be it literary, artistic, historical" (CS, 65); "in nothingness, from nothingness, with the indubitable certainty that this nothingness ... exists" (CS, 67). Malraux becomes one among Lyotard's literary canon of writers trying to lend form to a text that would be "freed as much as is pos- sible from linkages, significations, transferences, separated, without message, devoid of ins and outs" (CS, 54). Malraux's texts open up a listening to the inaudible: "the kind of validity. . . that his own poetics aims at . .. corresponds to . .. a listening to the inaudible" (CS, 37).

LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of Lyotard's work on literature lies in the path he opens, from Discours, figure to Lectures d'enfance, for thinking the relation between psychoanalysis and literature. It is not a relation in which psychoanalysis is used to psychoanalyze authors or characters, to locate, label and analyze symptoms in the literary text or to rewrite it according to the various psychoanalytic sce- narios, be it that of Oedipus, of castration, and so forth. Lyotard begins the last section of Discours, figure with a critique of psychoanalysis applied to literature: "the work is a symptom, literature is the exterior- ization in words of deep fantasmatic constructions. Freud himself has not always avoided such a reductive attitude, especially in his studies of given works" (355). Lyotard's targets are studies such as Marie Bona- parte's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Mauron's of Mal- larme-the latter proceeds by examining themes in the ceuvre, the for- mer by examining the author's life.9 If Lyotard brings something to the thinking of the relation between literature and psychoanalysis, it is in-

9. Cf. Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe: sa vie, son ceuvre. Etude psychanalytique (Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1933); translated as The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe by John Rod- ker (New York: Humanities Press, 1971) and Charles Mauron, Introduction a la psych- analyse de Mallarme (Neuchatel: La Bkconniere, 1950); translated as Introduction to the Psycho-Analysis of Mallarmg by Archibald Henderson, Jr. and Will L. McLendon (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1963).



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deed not in such a direction.'0 From Discours, figure to Lectures d'enfance, he draws an analogy between the functioning of the psychic apparatus and the functioning of the work of art. While the analogy between art (and literature) and the unconscious remains throughout Lyotard's work, the shift from forces (energetics, multiplicity, trans- gression) to phrases (phrastics, singularity, interruption) bears on the nature of the analogy.

In energetic terms, the poetic work performed by the figural within the text, a work that undoes discourse without destroying meaning, is also the work of dreams as Freud described it: "at first glance the 'language' of the dream seems to be nothing more nor less than the language of art" (DF, 260). This does not mean that the work of art is a dream. The work of art does not interest Lyotard insofar as it might be the ful- fillment of the artist's desire-that is, in terms of its "content"-but rather in terms of its work: if the "language" of the dream is the same as that of art, it is because what is similar is the work of deconstruction effected by both. Indeed, condensation and displacement in the dream do not construct articulated discourse but "dis-articulate" it: "Take a text written on a sheet of paper and crumple it. The elements of the discourse take on relief, in the literal sense. Imagine that, before the grip of condensation compresses the dream-thoughts, displacement has re- inforced certain zones of the text, so that they resist contraction and remain legible" (DF, 247). Like condensation, displacement is the result of the pressure of a force that, far from constructing articulated discourse along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, deconstructs it, compresses its units and gives them volume. Lyotard agrees with Jakobson that there is an analogy between the poetic work and the dreamwork." I But whereas for the Jakobson the analogy functions in terms of construction, for Lyotard it is in terms of deconstruction.

10. Except in the first two chapters of Signed, Malraux, which read as psychobiogra- phy or applied psychoanalysis. When "dread" and "horror" function, in Soundproof Room, in a very general way-Malraux's "dread is within us" is cited (CS, 25)-as the condition of possibility for writing at the same time as that which writing fights against, the reader familiar with Lyotard's work hears there an echo of other "concepts" already put forth concerning Bataille, Artaud, or Joyce to name the power of negativity. More surprising to the same reader is when, in Signed, Malraux, the same quote continues and is used to psychoanalyze Andre's relation to his mother Berthe-"a peculiar terror was brewing.... That dread was hatched in Bondy while he lay snagged in the web woven by Berthe's beautiful hands. That dread as well as a terror of penetrability, of being a woman's womb and remaining, like them, hostage of that womb" (SM, 5).

11. In his essay "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances,"




From the angle of his "philosophy of phrases," Lyotard "rephrases" the analogical relation between the "language" of the unconscious and that of art, which he had elaborated in Discours, figure. This relation no longer relies on their work as transgressive force, but rather on their status as inarticulate phrases. The conception of the unconscious as an apparatus functioning according to the rules not of articulated discourse but of a mechanics gives way to a conception of the unconscious as a phrase not an articulated phrase but a phrase-occurrence, a phrase-"it happens," a phrase-quod (the fact that something happens) before all quid (the determination of what happens). With the unconscious conceived in terms of a phrase, the question of linkage arises, and it is a temporal question. Hence Lyotard's shift of focus in his readings of Freud from an analysis of the dreamwork (in Discours, figure) to an analysis of Nachtraglichkeit after The Differend (in particular in Heidegger and "the jews, " The Inhuman, and "Emma"). Rephrased in "phrastic" terms, the Freudian scenario becomes: something-an "affect-phrase"-shatters the psychic apparatus but cannot be registered and linked onto the previous and following phrases, hence cannot be presented to the mind. This failure of presentation constitutes a "first shock," which is the clash-the differend-between the non-articulated, non-addressed, and non-referenced affect phrase, on the one hand, and articulation, on the other. The "deferred effect," which constitutes the "aftershock" (apre's-coup) effect, is the presentation of the affect-phrase followed by its re-presentation each time the affect re- peats itself, but without the affect-phrase representing anything.

In that sense, the task of literature is a remembrance of things past and lost, not insofar as the time lost would be represented, nor even presented, but insofar as literature ensures a passage toward the "essence" of time lost, toward the quod of the inarticulate phrase: "writing as passage or anamnesis" (Inh, 56 *) can be compared to the analytic working- through (which consists of "pricking up one's third ear" [Inh, 56], of abandoning established syntheses to let the signifier work in a floating way) because it "offers to inscription the white of the paper, blank like the neutrality of the analytic ear" (Inh, 56). No more than the figural

Jakobson notes that there is a relation between the poetic function and the structure of the unconscious. Indeed, he extends his analyses of metaphor and metonymy to the structure of dreams, and he associates the operations of the dream with the same operations of construction of meaning as the operations of substitution on the paradigmatic axis and of combination on the syntagmatic axis (Selected Writings, vol. 2 [The Hague: Mouton, 1971], 258).



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could be identified with the dream from the point of view of "content" (yet could from the point of view of work) can writing as anamnesis be identified with analytic treatment from the point of view of "content"-stakes, ends, purposes. The comparison bears on the nature of the work-the working-through-which consists, in both cases, in opening a listening for the ineffable, the inarticulate, the inaudible.



lyotard and on literature

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