| LOUIS ARMAND THE ART OF WAR: DECLARATIONS OF THE OTHER 1. TRANSLATION MACHINES In his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida (referring to Ulysses) describes Joyce’s writing as an attempt “to repeat and take responsibility for all equivocity itself, utilising a language that could equalise the greatest possible synchrony with the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions with each linguistic atom, each vocable, each word, each simple proposition, in all worldly cultures and the most ingenious forms (mythology, religion, sciences, arts, literature, politics, and so forth).” While Derrida’s comments here may just as well be directed at Finnegans Wake, they reveal how what he later comes to term différance is already largely signified as an “equivocity” that functions across all levels of textuality. Derrida goes on to suggest that Joyce’s text (Ulysses): make[s] the structural unity of all empirical culture appear in the generalised equivocity of a writing that, no longer translating one language into another on the basis of their common core of sense, circulates through all languages at once, accumulates their energies, actualises their most secret consonances, discloses their furthermost common horizons, cultivates their associative syntheses instead of avoiding them. In ‘Two Words for Joyce,’ this argument is taken up to further investigate ways in which Finnegans Wake addresses the relationship between language and Being through the question of translation or metaleptic transmission, while at the same time disrupting the attunements of these relations. Focusing on the paronomasian effect of the words “he war” (FW 258.12), Derrida pays attention to what Herman Rapaport refers to as “tonalities of diaspora” (“in deesperation of deispiration at the diasporation of his diesparation” [FW 257.25-6]) or the “transference or translation” of signifying sense in Joyce’s texts. This mechanism of transference or translation is defined by means of an “appropriation and disappropriation” of tonalities which pass or do not pass across linguistic boundaries, as a form of “consonantal” iterability. The phrase “he war” appears in Finnegans Wake towards the end of II.1, in a passage in which the text describes a form of twilight pantomime. Throughout this particular part of the Wake Joyce makes references to events that occur in Genesis, in which the “rhythm of the Bible is mimed.” One example which Rapaport identifies is in the line: “We’ve heard it all since songdom was gemurrmal” (FW 251.36), which suggests Sodom and Gomorrah, but also the Hebrew word “Gemara” (rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, forming the second part of the Talmud, derived from Aramaic gemárâ, “completion”), hence describing a pun between “war” and the doctrine of an “end of history” (eschaton or apocalypt?). There are possible references to Noah’s ark: “O! Amune! Ark!? Noh?!” (FW 244.26) and the fall of “Lignifer” (FW 250.33), and towards the end of the chapter a reference to the “Babel-scene.” This occurs after the pantomime (or “Noh” theatre) comes to an end with the thunder of the “father” H.C.E., in the guise of Thor: Housefather calls enthreateningly. From Brandenborgenthor. At Asa’s arthre. In thundercloud periwig. With lightning bug aflash from afinger. [FW 246.06-8] The sign of thunder also suggests a moment of transition, which Margot Norris has identified with Vico’s theory of social origins in Principi di Scienza Nuova as a complement to Joyce’s use of the Edenic and Oedipal myths in Finnegans Wake. According to Norris, “this myth significantly juxtaposes the origins of society and language,” in which the Babel-scene is re-echoed in the account “of the event when the sky first thundered”: The descendants of Ham and Japheth and the non-Hebraic descendants of the Shem, having wandered through the great forest of the earth for a century or two, had lost all human speech and institutions and had been reduced to bestiality, copulating at sight and inclination. These dumb beasts naturally took the thundering sky to be a great animated body, whose flashes and claps were commands, telling them what they had to do. The thunder surprised some of them in the act of copulation and frightened copulating pairs into nearby caves. This was the beginning of matrimony and settled life. Vico’s myth provides a type of chiasmatic double of the Babel-scene, in which the vocable of YAHWE (thunder) deconstructs language and social structures in the diasporation of the Shem (“Ba be bi bo bum” [FW 284.L3]). In §448 of the Scienza Nuova, Vico also identifies thunder with the birth of language, first as monasyllable: “pa” or “ba.” As Petr Skrabanek has pointed out, Bh?- is the proto-Indo-European root for “to speak.” In both cases thunder marks a transition, an advent and a discontinuity, a pantomime or “Noh!” theatre performed between commandment and interdiction. As such, thunder also marks what Joyce refers to as an “INCIPIT IN- / TERMISSIO” (FW 278.R1). At the end of II.1, this corresponds to the last act of “Feenichts Playhouse” (FW 219.02), which as “Phoenix” and “nichts” suggests a form of recursive terminus and commencement. With the curtain fall and the announcement of the performance’s conclusion, the spectacle shifts from the gods to the groundlings, thus heralding the coming Viconian age of man: Byfall. Upploud! The play thou shouwburgst, Game, here endeth. The curtain drops by deep request. Uplouderamain! Gonn the gawds, Gunnar’s gustspells. When the h, who was hu, how the hue, where the huer? Orbiter onswers: lots lives lost. [FW 257.29-36] For Rapaport, the line “when the h, who was hu, how the hue, where the huer?” likewise marks “not only the falling of the curtain and the dissolution of the biblical stories into a kind of babble,” but also “a disintegration of language under the recognition that the gods are gone.” This repetition of terms for “who?” is echoed at the end of the chapter, in which the question of identity is arrived at through a substitution of vowel sounds in the line: “Ha he hi ho hu. Mummum.” (FW 259.09-10). Elsewhere the question of identity is more explicitly in regards to the figure of H.C.E., through a similar repetition of H-sounds: is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? How much is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? And what the decans is there about him anyway, the decemt man? [FW 261.27-262.01] The hesitating strategies with which the Wake’s discourse disperses its subjects, through the continual operations of textual difference, will afford no “solution” to these questions, other than a return to the continual displacements and deferrals of Joyce’s logomachia itself: “war’s, end so, und all, ga, ga” (FW 270.31). Rapaport’s contention that this is evidence of a “disintegration of language under the recognition that the gods are gone,” suggests that decipherment of the various codes affirming identity must take place in the absence of any scriptural authority. This in turn points towards an unavailing literality in the mechanism of decoding or “translation,” suggestive of a failure of transmission or of an overredundancy in which the “message” is desimplified through a movement of reduction: Gwds with gurs are gttrdmmrng. Hlls vlls. [FW 258.01-02] As a possible reference to the final part of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Götterdämmerung, this “Twilight of the Gods” also calls to mind Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung), suggesting that we might also read II.1 as a possible reference in 1939 to the approaching storm from Bayreuth and the eclipse of the romantic age in the veniality of “modern” technological man. The “reduction” of language to a technics of redundancy, however, also situates the sense of divine logos as a form of deus ex machina. In this way the “mythical” content of the transcoded text gives way to the mythomorphology of the coding and decoding process itself. In the question “when the h, who was hu, how the hue, where the huer?” the answer, which is posed obiter dictum as “lots lives lost,” not only describes a form of “Catastrophe and / Anabasis” (FW 304.L2) but also a series of topical and tropic reversions in which identity (h, hu, hue, huer) is multiplied and dissipated as a performative index of the anagrammatical shift between “lots” and “lost.” Consequently, Joyce’s paronomasia may be seen not only as a kind of histrionic re-enactment, metaleptically unfolding itself, but as describing a process of autopoiesis, in which the noun and verb form of the word “lives” likewise suggests a type of production situated as the object of its own process. Elsewhere in ‘Two Words for Joyce,’ Derrida argues that Joyce’s strategy of “disarticulation” not only culminates in a very “violent reading of these relationships” with respect to history as cata-strophe, but that this tropic violence is inherent in a reading of the question of language and Being, as evidenced in the book of Genesis. Discussing the words “he war,” Derrida writes: I spell them out: HEWAR, and sketch a first translation: HE WAR—he wages war, he declares or makes war, he is war, which can also be pronounced by babelising a bit (it is in a particularly Babelian scene of the book that these words rise up), by Germanising, then, in Anglo-Saxon, He war: he was—he who was (“I am he who is who am,” says YAHWE). Where it was, he was, declaring war, and it is true. Pushing things a bit, taking time to draw on the vowel and lend an ear, it will have been true, wahr, that’s what can be kept [garder] or looked at [regarder] in truth. Derrida subsequently attempts to establish a link between writing, the masculine singular pronoun, the creator-god YAHWE, and a form of temporalising, egotic warfare: He, is “He,” the “him,” the one who says I in the masculine, “He,” war declaring, he who was war declared, declaring war, by declaring war, was he who was, and he who was true, the truth, he who by declaring war verified the truth that he was, he verified himself, he verified the truth of his truth by war declared, by the act of declaring, and declaring is an act of war, he declared war in language and on language and by language, which gave languages, that’s the truth of Babel when YAHWE pronounced its vocable, difficult to say if it was a name. Derrida’s reading of Joyce here is itself largely paronomasian, particularly in terms of the repetition of the pronoun, in which its antecedence is seen to undergo subtle shifts in orientation between subject and object. The words “he war” take on significance as a transmission of a declaration of Being and of truth (HE WAR, he was). Which is to say, the declaration of the truth of Being in whose transmission this truth is verified as the “war,” that modality of Being “in whose contemplation language itself is pluralised and pulverised.” The “war” declared “in language, on language, and by language,” the “war” that gives languages. In Rapaport’s view, the giving of the coded name or declaration of “he war” echoes the es gibt Sein of Heidegger, as a declaration concerning the time of Being. The time of Being is expressed, in this context, as a time declared from within the metalepsis of language—that is to say, the confusions inherent in the translation or transliteration of the word “war” between German and English. In this sense HE WAR also describes a declaration of the time of language as translated event of origin and of an origin in translation: “nat language at any sinse of the world” (FW 13.12). This recalls what Blanchot, in Le pas au-delà, refers to as “the step/not [pas] beyond which is (not) achieved in time, which would lead beyond time, without this beyond being atemporal.” In Joyce this “beyond/not-beyond” is the war or was of the aporia of cata-strophe: the heroticism, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past. [FW 612.35-615.01] For Rapaport, “the indetermination, the secrecy, and dreaded violence of the ‘he war,’ then, functions in Derrida as an allegory of reading for the es gibt in Heidegger.” In “he war,” Derrida observes the inflationary mechanism of a potlatch, which elsewhere Bataille relates to sacrifice, religious warfare and to the “gratuitous” violence of what he terms expenditure without reserve. The Hebrew god’s reverse “gift” to the Shem of a saying (Sagen) that is untranslatable, inaugurates an interminable event of disclosure which is also a closing-off of the language of Being from the operations of divine logos—a “saying […] whose origin seems to lose itself in the anonymity of time immemorial.” This concept of disclosure, like Heidegger’s es gibt Sein, stresses in the giving of Being an opposite withdrawal or retraction, which Derrida calls the retrait or cancelling-out of the gift as “consumed (consummate) art of the secret,” a “gift” that effaces itself in the act of giving. This expropriation from within the “event” (Ereignis) of Being’s involvement with language is treated by Heidegger often as an occlusion, concealment or revealing. Yet in Derrida’s reading of Joyce, one motive for the interpretation of “he war” concerns the violence inherent to the mechanics of concealment or expropriation. In “he war” it is as though “the presence of the present were itself being expropriated, retracted, demolished.” And as a consequence, the Shem, “the name,” are made to suffer by way of a “terrible linguistic catastrophe” which nevertheless can be said to belong to the destiny of language, as though the tower itself (tour, turn, stroph?) were addressed to a point of translation between the possibility of signification and the withdrawn promise of a transcendental signified. 2. LOGOMACHIA Concluding a limerick addressed to Eugène Jolas in 1933, Joyce affected a pun on one of the few insightful statements attributed to Louis XVI: “Après mot, le déluge.” As an epigraph to a deconstruction of what Derrida calls the “ontotheology of the logos,” Joyce’s pun can also be read as a solicitation of the figure of Babel (as babelisation of the word) encoded in “he war,” in whose wake language may be conceived of as a type of logomachia. Elsewhere in the Wake Joyce links this to the seemingly contradictory statement in Genesis that “in the beginning was the word”: In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy. [FW 378.29-31] The play between “in the beginning was the word” and “the beginning was the void,” with “in the muddle is the sounddance,” not only suggests the cyclical departures of Finnegans Wake itself (beginning with the word “riverrun,” as a deluge coming from the void, flowing back upon “the,” unbewußed, and so on), but also the ambiguity of origins as such, and of the origin in logos in particular. Similarly, Derrida’s reading of “he war” stresses a particular disclosure of Being in terms of a concept of phonology or phenomenology, as “phonemanon” (FW 258.22): For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken in tumbuldum tambaldam to his tembledim tombaldoom worrild and, moguphonoised by that phonemanon, the unhappitents of the earth have terrerumbled from fimament unto fundament and from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees. [FW 258.20-24] According to Rapaport, Derrida is interested in “phonemanon” as a phenomenon of the vocative and the vocative of the phenomenon, echoing the question raised in Speech and Phenomena about Husserl’s concept of the sign as individuated ideality. By situating the “war” of HE WAR “between two languages—English and German—the revelation of Being is always already described within the war of language—its Wahrheit, past, and violence which comprises its Being as language.” Similarly, this logomachia is seen to come about “by way of a violent slippage of the vocative,” which, as an effect of paronomasia, also implies a mechanics of iterability and what Lacan, referring to Saussure, terms glissage: the slippage of signification along the interstice dividing signifier from signified. As with the Cartesian speech act of self-affirmed Being, the phrase “he war” assumes the tenor of a declaration, which in the above quotation from Finnegans Wake is supplied in the line “the clearer of the air from on high” (which echoes the Latin decl?r?re, to make clear). At the same time, this declaration is associated with the encoding of YAHWE as HE WAR, whose vocable is thunder. This vocable, which is described onomatopoeically, takes the form of graphological rebus (in the lapsus of so-called phonetic writing) in which the material significations of its “codes” suggest significations on syntactic and semantic levels, exemplified by the syllabifications of Joyce’s portmanteaux, and in particular the various hundred-letter “thunder words”: Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortan sporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk. [FW 257. 27-28] This “sound of the lound” (FW 257.29) describes what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “an open-ended polyvocal formation” of signifying chains. These chains, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are not made up of signifying signs, but of linguistic particles and vectors whose organisation is determined by material or structural functions, rather than nominally semantic ones. In ‘The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins,’ Derrida similarly investigates the mimetic aspect of the relationship between linguistic materiality and semantics in terms of phonetic writing and “graphology.” For Derrida, the graphic “code” of the rebus should be considered “not from the point of view of the intention of signification or of denotation, but of style and of connotation.” The cyclicality of creation and destruction theologised in the Bible and parodied in the Wake suggests a type of recursive apparatus whose antithetical organisation is symbolised in the figure of Babel. Through a series of metaphoric and metonymic displacements, Babel stands for both a “deterritorialised” or confused topos and radical tropos of confusion: a reduction of technics and a poetic architectonics. In the deluge after the word, the tower of Babel thus provides a technological analogy to the aporia or retrait inscribed in the impossibility of translation (meta-phora) as the condition and “origin” of translation. But this analogy is also a metaphor of the untranslatable itself: “an apotropaic against destinerrance, translation against translation, Babel against Babel.” As Derrida suggests: “Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal [propre] meaning does not exist, its “appearance” is a necessary function—and must be analysed as such—in the system of differences and metaphors.” In this sense the “solicitations” of Babel also describe an “impossible” reduction. In the tropic organisation of this metaphor, the tower acquires a structural centre of gravity, which in the solicitation of structure itself is no longer a centre. The exemplum of Babel consists in its irremediable generalisation: the antinomasia of Babel, as a mark of an impossible literality beyond the appearance of a rhetorical apparatus. “In this sense,” says Derrida, “it would be the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation, and so on.” Similarly, the words “he war” can be said to give rise to questions of translation and translatability as ontological “phenomena,” whose literality equally belies the incongruous relation of the proper to what persists under the authority of the proper name of logos. For Derrida, this incongruity “occurs through the paronomasia of the event or phenomenon of declaration or donation,” authorised under the proper name YAHWE: In the landscape immediately surrounding the “he war,” we are, if such a present is possible, and this place, at Babel: at the moment when YAHWE declares war, HE WAR (exchange of the final R and the central H in the anagram’s throat), and punishes the Shem, those who, according to Genesis, declare their intention of building the tower in order to make a name for themselves. Now they bear the name “name” (Shem). And the Lord, the Most High, be he blessed (Lord, loud, laud [...]), declares war on them by interrupting the construction of the tower, he deconstructs by speaking the vocable of his choice, the name of confusion, which in the hearing, could be confused with a word indeed signifying “confusion.” Once this war is declared, he was it (war) by being himself this act of war which consisted in declaring, as he did, that he was the one he was (war). The God of fire assigns to the Shem the necessary, fatal and improbable translation of his name, of the vocable with which he signs this act of war, of himself. Reading HE WAR as a virtual anagrammatical encoding of the proper name YAHWE (“Yawhawaw” [FW 619.34]), Derrida points to the normative relation underwriting the “literality” of the proper and of the logos of identity. Elsewhere in the Wake Joyce parodies the notion of divine authorisation and semantic reduction as “The code’s proof” (FW 364.01), which, in the anagrammatical realignment of the letters HE WAR is consequently given subject to “Gramm’s laws” (FW 378.27). In a parody of the Platonic pharmakon of mim?sis, “Gramm,” as a kind of Thoth figure or god of writing, thus programmes YAHWE, god of confusion and, paradoxically, mnemotechnic of the babelised commemoration of Babel, HE WAR. Hence YAHWE also connotes a signifying substitutability, a deus ex machina in the general translational apparatus: “Blankdeblank, god of all machineries” (FW 253.33). This point is further elaborated in regards to the phrase in Finnegans Wake immediately preceding that in which the words “he war” appear: And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. [FW 258.11-12] The metathesis of Babel-Lebab not only signals the violent destruction, the overthrowing of the tower, but, as Derrida points out, literalises “the meaning of the letter”: the meaning of being and the letters of being, of “being,” BE,EB (baBEl/lEBab), as it does with the meaning and the letter of the name of God, EL,LE. But “Lebab” is not only a metathesis of “Babel,” but also a palindrome incorporating the Hebrew word for “heart” (lebhabh), as well as a derivative of the Irish word leabhar, meaning “book.” This triad—Babel, heart, book (biblos)—draws together concepts of decentred structure, the disarticulation of coding and decoding (“decorded”), and the totalising fiction of the book and of architectonics, as what Derrida calls: “the whole Babelian adventure of the book, or rather its underside.” Moreover, following Hegel’s assertion late in the Aesthetics that it symbolises the “origin” of architecture, we might consider the tower of Babel as standing for an “originary” or arch?-textual apparatus, in which the genesis of the book is seen to be contemporaneous with the first allegory of technological proliferation. (c) Louis Armand, 2001 |