Time after time

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 300-311

  Bennington, Geoffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84898297642     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2001.11007347     Document Type: Note

References (22)

1. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Emma’, in Misere de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 57–95 (p. 68).
2. See my Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester University Press, 1988).
3. Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), p. 159; see Lyotard: Writing the Event, pp. 73–4.
4. Although rarely thematised in Lyotard, it seems clear that this ‘effort of writing’ also entails an inventive ‘effort of reading’, as we shall see.
5. ‘Le Temps aujourd'hui’, in L'inhumain: causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 69–88 (p. 70) (The Inhuman: Talks on Time, tr. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 58–77 (p. 59). I am grateful to Elissa Marder for pointing out the translingual resonance between the use of the German ‘Mal’ in this passage and the later thematic of ‘le mal’ (evil) that we encounter below in the Confession d'Augustin.
6. I cannot here discuss Lyotard's extensive art-writing: in this context, see especially Sur la Constitution du temps par la couleur dans les œuvres récentes d'Albert Ayme (Paris: Edition Traversière, 1980), and Que Peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1987).
7. La phénoménologie (Paris: PUF, 1954), pp. 95–9.
8. Discours, figure, p. 138; see Lyotard: Writing the Event, pp. 71–2.
9. ‘Freud et la scène de l'écriture’, in L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 337.
10. La voix, et le phénomène, (Paris: PUF, 1967), pp. 70–71, also quoting the 9th supplement to Husserl's Lectures on the ‘absurdity’ of a belated ‘becoming conscious of an “unconscious” content’.
11. I give a fuller account of this motif of infancy in ‘Before’, in Afterwards: Essays in Memory of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Robert Harvey, The Occasional Papers of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, No. 1 (2000), pp. 3–28.
12. I have attempted elsewhere to bring out some of the problems and ambiguities involved in Lyotard's various analyses of Judaism: see my ‘Lyotard and “the jews’”, in Brian Cheyette, and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 188–96.
13. Lyotard refers here to Freud's article on ‘Repression’.
14. Compare the very similar description in ‘Emma’, pp. 69–73, which explicitly spells out the difficulty of presenting the temporality of Nachträglichkeit in Husserlian terms.
15. This 1989 text is reprinted in Misère de la philosophie, pp. 57–95, and begins with some general reflections on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and suggests a way of thinking about the not necessarily literary ‘effort of writing’ mentioned above: ‘I attempt here to maintain the philosophical ambition [prétention]: to articulate in intelligible fashion on the subject of something beneath articulation [l'en-deçà de l'articulable], that is a Nihil, which is also what excites this very ambition.’ (p. 60) This is evidently to be read as a version of the earlier ‘présenter qu'il y a de l'imprésentable’ in its specifically philosophical inflection.
16. Lectures d'enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991), p. 64.
17. This 1990 text was originally entitled ‘L'inarticulé ou le différend même’, and is reprinted in Misère de la philosophie, pp. 45–54 as ‘La phrase-affect (D'un supplément au Différend)’. I have discussed this text in some detail in ‘The Same, Even, Itself…’, in Parallax, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2000), 88–98. Editor's Note: this text is also to be found in this issue of the JBSp.
18. ‘Emma’ ends as follows: ‘In the perspective traced out here, the difference between the sexes is shocking, has an effect [fait coup] only secondary to the différend between child-affect and adult affect. The classical thesis is that it is constitutive of the disorder of adult affectivity. There is, of course, an aporia intrinsic to sexual difference, as it is articulated as an adult sentence: the feminine is an object quite different from the masculine, and conversely; and yet, their alterity is supposed to orient their affective destination. Their respective objectivity is supposed to direct their reciprocal objectality. It emerges from what I have suggested that the aporia does not reside in this contradiction of an alterity devoted to complementarity. It resides in the untranslatability of infant passibility into adult articulation. Moreover, if the difference between the sexes can be overcome, or thinks itself overcome, this is only to the extent that one or other of the two parties, or both, has recourse to this undifferentiated passibility. There is love only to the extent that adults accept themselves as children, (pp. 94–5)
19. Cf. La Confession d'Augustin, p. 17. Again, this motif would mark a point of articulation with Derrida's apparently very different reading of the Confessions, for example in ‘Un ver à soie’ (in H., Cixous and J., Derrida, Voiles (Paris: Galilée, 1998), tr. G. Bennington in The Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 18(1996), 3–65.
20. The first part of La confession d'Augustin (which Dolorès Lyotard's note describes as the beginning of what would have been the definitive version of the text) opens with this scene of divine violation. I discuss this motif (and especially its insistence on the figure of a tergo penetration) in more detail in relation to this and other late Lyotard texts in ‘Before’ (see note 14 above), especially pp. 18–23. The second part (an earlier draft which uses some of the same material) is here clearer as to the articulations I am bringing out (see pp. 75–7), at risk, perhaps, of losing some of the ‘performative’ effects of disruption Lyotard's ‘effort of writing’ is attempting to produce.
21. ‘The confession is written posthumously in search of the anthumous, in distentio, then…And distentio repeats its offence at the heart of confessional writing. It cannot catch up on the delay that it tries to fill, to make up by running after you, after the act…The confession aggravates the delaying of the time it takes to write to proclaim the instant of your actuality, the time spent making up the delay…this time wasted gaining time on time’ (p. 48).
22. In ‘Emma’, Lyotard has some allusive remarks about a ‘philosophy of philosophical “reading”. Although the context here is one of an apparently polemical stance against a genèralised concept of ‘text’, Lyotard is again clearly close to a deconstructive understanding of a textual temporality which is disruptive of any ‘history of thought’ model. I have attempted to elaborate something of a ‘philosophy of philosophical reading’ in the section ‘Le fil conducteur (de la lecture philosphique)’ of my Frontières kantiennes (Paris: Galilée, 2000), pp. 109–30. See too Michel Lisse, L'expérience de la lecture, I: La soumission (Paris: Galilée, 1998). It is striking that the second part of La Confession d'Augustin (see previous note) opens precisely on the question of reading. In this context, it would also be necessary to analyse Lyotard's writing itself in the book, and notably the abundant (and all but untranslatable) use of postponed syntactic resolution.