I, Daniel

The Institution of Love

You might read this as the introduction to a book that I have not written. This book would have concerned the theme of literary criticism as a kind of testimony; an early version bore the title “Witness, Martyr, Critic: The Epistemology of Testimony and the Literary Institution,” a title that, to date, remains unused. This academic book would have taken, as the moment of its conception, my reading of a passage in The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes:

What relation can there be between the pleasure of the text and the institutions of the text? Very slight. The theory of the text postulates bliss, but it has little institutional future: what it establishes, its precise accomplishment, its assumption, is a practice (that of a writer), not a science, a method, a research, a pedagogy; on these very principles, this theory can produce only theoreticians or practitioners, not specialists (critics, researchers, professors, students). It is not only the inevitably metalinguistic nature of all institutional research which hampers the writing of textual pleasure, it is also that we are today incapable of conceiving a true science of becoming […]: “We are not subtle enough to perceive that probably absolute flow of becoming: the permanent exists only thanks to our coarse organs which reduce and lead things to shared premises of vulgarity, whereas nothing exists in this form. A tree is a new thing at every instant; we affirm the form because we do not seize the subtlety of an absolute moment” ([Friedrich] Nietzsche). The Text too is this tree whose (provisional) nomination we owe to the coarseness of our organs. We are scientific because we lack subtlety.¹

By the time I first read this, I had been navigating academic “institutions of the text” for years. At that time, I felt as though the relation “between the pleasure of the text and the institutions of the text” was indeed “very slight.”² This was not due to any lack of enjoyment of my studies, but because I wondered about the capacity of the discipline of English Literature to nurture the love of literature, or even to produce lovers of literature. Is that what a critic is—a lover of literature? Does (or should) critical writing express the love of literature? And if so, how?

Perhaps I was so struck with Barthes’s assessment of the situation because it spoke to my values as a reader. But I had studied for years without being able to answer the question “W‌hat is reading?” I knew, for instance, that one cannot read the same book twice and have the same experience. The second time one reads a book, one remembers it well enough to distinguish the second reading from the first. Beyond that, there is also the fact that one’s entire reading and indeed, their life, language, and mind (whatever that is) all prepare you to encounter a book—and the conditions of this encounter can never be repeated. Each reading must, therefore, be totally unique, or singular; a kind of miracle, in fact. To faithfully represent the act of reading would be to testify to that miracle.

Miraculous testimony did not quite seem to be the object of literary studies any more than did love. However, to what extent might a testimony to a reading of a literary text coincide with the practice of a “true science of becoming,” as Barthes puts it?

“We Affirm the Form”

One may worry, or at least wonder, about how such a question might square with the aims of academic criticism. Perhaps there is something prophetic in Barthes’s prediction that the “theory of the text,” at least as concerns a “true science of becoming,” has “little institutional future.”³ And indeed, predicting the future of the academic-literary-critical institution has concerned a significant amount of that institution’s past, as it does its present. The bibliography of historical overviews of the state of academic-literary study has arrived at a point at which it may be necessary for someone to provide an overview of the overviews—I will not do that here. If one were to do so, it can be reasonably predicted that its most general vision would be one of constant crisis.⁴ The questions that continue to frame the crisis relate to whether literary study should be, or indeed can properly be, institutionalized, and if so (or since, in fact, it has been so and remains so), to what greater purpose we should direct that effort.

Separately, but perhaps not unrelatedly, from the 1970s on, another tendency has emerged within a number of disciplines, of which literary studies is only one: a tendency to attempt to recognize the personal role of the scholar in the production of knowledge. Over the decades since then, theories of the place of the personal in academic writing have grown to a scale at which they, too, seem to call for an overview, and indeed, various overviews have appeared in different contexts.⁵ Within literary studies in particular, these decades have witnessed a proliferation of theory-informed approaches to the question of how literary criticism and scholarship should account for the personal.⁶ This consideration encompasses not just the place, meaning, and purpose of institutional literary-critical work, but of the relationships that hold between the autobiographical, the imaginative or fictional, and criticism itself, often with reference to academic-institutional context and responsibility. At a formal level, approaches range from radicalizing the claims or domain of the personal essay to deploying every conceivable stratagem of the modernist novel (and beyond).

The gesture of listing the names of practitioners of these forms of writing, or allied forms, is one that is reproduced by many theorists who seek to name the personal tendency for their various purposes.⁷ Whether in service of the scholarly analysis of a set of tendencies, or to rally a movement, the search for a unifying name for these practices remains tied to the desire for a more coherent theoretical grounding to match an activist stance (however uneasily the “auto” and the “ficto” sit with one another).⁸ What allows me to speak about this disparate group in terms of a “tendency” is their common desire to employ personal material in a scholarly context in a thoughtful, responsible manner. They are also united by a common aim to bear witness to personal experiences that have tended to be deemed extrinsic by the academy. In the absence of a strict definition or name for this tendency, let us note for now that the circus of approaches that have allied themselves with it, or those which share the “autotheoretical impulse,” as Wiegman writes, also share a site of “confession.”⁹ Could that also be understood as a site of testimony?

Abiding Impossibilities

The difficulties that arise in the attempt to reconcile testimony with other kinds of knowledge are an enduring philosophical preoccupation. C. A. J. Coady writes of Plato, in the Theaetetus, writing of “the difference between true belief and knowledge,” that Socrates “points out that a jury may be convinced of certain facts […] merely by the persuasive powers and rhetorical skills of a lawyer and yet they can hardly be said to know these facts though their beliefs are true.”¹⁰ Although we must rely on the stated beliefs and opinions of others in many cases, rather than our own observation, there is a question as to what kind of evidence those represent, and thus what conclusions we may legitimately base on their testimony. In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida writes that

[… A]ny testimony testifies in essence to the miraculous […] from the moment it must, by definition, appeal to an act of faith beyond any proof. When one testifies, even on the subject of the most ordinary […] event, one asks the other to believe one at one’s word as if it were a matter of a miracle.¹¹

As striking as it is, this treatment of the phenomenon of testimony is lodged within a rich context. Philosophy uses accounts of miracles as extreme examples of testimony at least as early as in the eighteenth-century writings of David Hume.¹² We might believe someone who tells us they have witnessed an ordinary event like the ones we see every day, but when someone tells us they have witnessed a miracle, our response is generally to doubt their competence, either as witness or as narrator, or to doubt their sincerity. This negative reaction is prompted, in part, by the notion that a miracle is completely outside common experience and a conventional understanding of the world. In the chapter “Of Miracles” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature,” continuing that “nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature.”¹³ On its face, this appears reasonable—and to be at odds with Derrida’s account. For Derrida, it seems that the miraculous represents that which can only happen once, and what distinguishes his understanding of testimony from other kinds of account concerns the speaker’s plea for their hearer to believe their account when there is no other evidence to support it.¹⁴ In other words, the events to which one testifies might not be extraordinary in terms of their adherence to the laws of nature, as it were, but are miraculous “in essence,” as Derrida writes, by virtue of their singularity, which is the feature that demands the extraordinary faith which in turn makes the account itself testimonial. Hume is “one of the few philosophers who has offered anything like a sustained account of testimony,” as Coady has written, “and if any view has a claim to the title of ‘the received view’ it is his.”¹⁵ In that view, the singularity of an event might be said to be tantamount to its impossibility. It would be a miraculous event indeed that could stand out against the background of natural sameness, and for Hume, the only notion of singularity that could apply to an ordinary event would be its exemplarity—per Coady, Hume’s theory “constitutes a reduction of testimony as a form of evidence […] to the status of a species […] of inductive inference.”¹⁶ That is to say, the only way we should consider another’s testimony is by reference to its conformity with our own general experience.

Questions about the nature of both miracles and testimony might appear very differently against the backdrop of Barthes’s quixotic “true science of becoming.” Barthes’s use of Nietzsche’s letter radicalizes and transforms Hume’s doubt by evoking more powerful doubts—first, whether the witness is “subtle” enough to perceive, for example, a tree as “a new thing at every instant”—and next, whether the scientific witness compromises their account of this “absolute moment” when they instead “affirm the form.” That latter affirmation would represent only the failure to provide a faithful account of the always-new thing, instead offering an account that is “reduce[d]‌” and in turn “reduce[s]” that “probably absolute flow of becoming” to a mere “vulgarity,” perhaps like that of an article of common sense. In other words, if a tree is “a new thing at every instant,” it is actually the laws of nature that are unknown, and possibly unknowable. The conventional idea of science would no longer be understood as a true account of the laws of nature, but as a layered mass of approximations that amount, in the end, to a useful fiction: an imprecise generality that is true enough to be commonly acceptable, but powerless to “seize the subtlety of an absolute moment.”¹⁷

In the quoted passage from The Pleasure of the Text, neither Barthes nor Nietzsche mentions the miraculous, but there is considerable resonance between the “absolute moment” invoked by Nietzsche via Barthes and how Derrida narrates the singularity of the testimonial moment:

A witness and a testimony must […] first be singular, whence the necessity of the instant: I am the only one to have seen this unique thing […] at a determinate, indivisible instant; and you must believe me because you must believe me—this is the difference, essential to testimony, between belief and proof—you must believe me because [… w]hen I testify, I am unique and irreplaceable.¹⁸

The irreplaceability of the witness consists in the unprovable nature of their experience. This can be due to the experience being unrepeatable, or because it defies any common understanding of the bounds of experience. A singular occurrence for a singular witness might seem to give rise to a singular account, but this is not exactly the case, because of the necessity that all accounts be, in principle, repeatable. While a testimony is singular at the moment it is given, reproducibility is ineliminable from language as such, which must turn a testimony away from the moment of its singular utterance to a kind of generality. “When I commit myself to speaking the truth,” Derrida writes, “I commit myself to repeating the same thing, an instant later, two instants later, the next day, and for eternity, in a certain way. But this repetition carries the instant outside of itself.”¹⁹ This repeatable generality divides the moment in which a testimony is reproduced, looking back to the very body of the witness, now locating two irreplaceable moments—that of the occurrence and that of testimony—that correspond to two witnesses, in the minimal sense that the body itself has changed between the first instance (that of the event) and the second (that of the testimony). Singularity appears to be compelled to undo itself, but it proceeds by creating more singularities, each of which threatens to become indistinguishable from one another.

The Miracle of Fiction and Testimony

These multiplying witnesses evoke another important aspect of Derrida’s view of testimony in Demeure, which is that testimony is constituted and structured by the possibility of fiction. Derrida writes that “where the witness must be irreplaceably alone, […] testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie.”²⁰ The faith-beyond-proof that the testimonial moment requires is always vulnerable to the possibility of betrayal, but it is also only possible under such conditions, because otherwise, the testimony would be an argument—something that could be proven, and thus no longer testimonial. The very phenomenon of testimony is, therefore, “haunted,” according to Derrida, “by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility, at least, of literature.”²¹ And this is tied to the instant, which is tied in turn, as we have seen, to the body of the witness.

In Demeure, Derrida offers a close reading of Maurice Blanchot’s short prose piece The Instant of My Death.²² This reading circles the question of whether that story is an example of a testimony within fiction. Derrida has occasion to cite a personal letter of Blanchot’s addressed to Derrida himself, which he takes as extratextual evidence of the narrative’s veracity. Briefly, the story regards an execution that almost takes place during the Second World War. The narrator is about to be shot by enemy soldiers, but in the chaos, manages not to be, although they take his manuscript. Was it Blanchot himself, with his famously complicated relationship to the Vichy government and the French resistance, who was almost killed that day? Derrida seems to think so. To what extent, then, is the fictional narrative a factual one? And why does Blanchot choose to share that testimony in a literary form, rather than through a memoir?

As Fred Kroon and Alberto Voltolini write, “the problem of saying how fiction differs from non-fiction is just one of the hard problems faced by the philosophical study of fiction.”²³ The difference between fiction and non-fiction is rarely as simple as the difference between the truth and a lie, and this is not only because one is not “subtle” enough, per Barthes, or because one might make a mistake in the moment in which one witnesses an event or in the moment when one recounts it. The faith that fiction asks of the reader seems, in some way, to be different from that asked by testimony. However, per Derrida, if fiction (at least as a possibility) is ineliminable from testimony, then “the miracle is the essential line of union between testimony and fiction.”²⁴

To return to the question that began my search: what space in academia might there be for literary criticism as testimony to the miraculous? Imagined through Barthes’s account, when a critic attempts to render singular literary experience within an institutionally-recognized mode of knowledge, that attempt might surrender the more profound intimacies of their account—its subtlety, its singularity, its relation to love—and all that would be gained would be the legitimacy of the academic institutions that authorize the work. If we understand the experience of reading as essentially unrepeatable, a personal singularity, and thus, a kind of miracle, then the form in which it is conveyed (as by a critic) is bound to be a testimonial one. And testimony itself is structured by the possibility of fiction, as a matter of abiding necessity. I remain intrigued by the connection between the subtlety of an absolute moment and a testimony that could meet the impossible demand of fidelity to that moment. I am tempted to dream that a “true science of becoming” could be realized in a miraculous (or, perhaps, bastard) child of literature and criticism.

Witness, Martyr, Critic

I applied to a doctoral research program in the department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University with a proposal roughly to this effect and, miraculously enough, was accepted. And when I started my Ph.D. work, I attempted to write on this theme. Early on, though—perhaps in my first supervision—Professor John Schad asked me if I had ever read Jacques Derrida’s “Envois,” the first section of the four in his 1987 book The Post Card (the English translation of his 1980 book La carte postale). The truth is, dear reader, I had not. But, on the spot, I waffled and said I had read at it, which was somewhat true. I had read Schad’s Someone Called Derrida, which is interspersed with quotations from “Envois,” and I had read Derrida’s Cinders, which also contains pieces of “Envois.” But there was yet another miracle at work: just the day before that meeting, I had visited Pulpfiction Books, my favorite bookstore in Vancouver, which carried both new and used books. I had been browsing the philosophy section, and I had found books on Hume and Reid regarding empiricism and miracles. The clerk at the till asked me about them, and I told him about my Ph.D. research, and mentioned an interest in French philosophy. The clerk directed me to some books that had arrived that very morning, one of which was The Post Card. Having not read it, I did not know that “Envois” was its first section. Further, I had no idea that the next day I would be asked what I was asked. But I did like the book’s name: The Post Card. Why not The Postcard? Was this book, somehow, after the fact? The Post Card was an expensive book, to my mind, but in the moment of decision, I decided to buy it, without quite knowing why. The clerk had done his job well. So, when Professor Schad asked me if I had read “Envois,” I said I had just bought a copy the day before and would read it immediately. Which I did.

Was there something prophetic about my choice to buy The Post Card? Or was it just a lucky coincidence, given that I would be asked about it by my supervisor the very next day? Was I also simply lucky that the clerk had thought to mention it to me, even though I had not mentioned that I was looking for Derrida? Was it luck that someone had brought it to Pulpfiction Books that very morning, and just as lucky that the clerk had seen it, and then remembered it when I talked to him at the till, since it was not yet placed on a shelf in the store, and had only just been priced? Or was it all determined in advance somehow?