Language, Violence, and History Author(s): Hlne Merlin-Kajman and Roxanne Lapidus Source: SubStance, Vol. 32, No.

1, Celebrating Issue # 100, (2003), pp. 35-38 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685691 Accessed: 31/07/2008 10:59
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H6kne Merlin-Kajman Merlin-Kajman Christie McDonald, Helene

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I want to look more at those who have found choice and agency in places seemingly devoid of them, so that anxiety and failure can serve not only an understanding of personal and culturallimits, but an ability to change them. HarvardUniversity Notes
1. Address of the Presidentof the Czech Republic,His ExcellencyVaclav Havel, on the occasionof the LibertyMedal Ceremony,Philadelphia, July4,1994. andAnxiety.TransJamesStrachey.New York: 2. Sigmund Freud,Inhibitions, Symptoms andIts Discontents. TransJamesStrachey. W.W.Norton,1959, p. 100.See also Civilization W.W.Norton,1961. New York: in 3. See "TheAnxiety of Change, TheAnxietyof Change: Reconfiguring FamilyRelations Modern 55:1 (Spring,1994),47-79;"Wordsof Beaumarchais' Quarterly Trilogy" Language Revolution edited by Sandy Petrey, 1789-1989, Change:August 12,1789."In TheFrench du changement: de Miss TexasTechUniversityPress,1989; 33-47.Lubbock: "Operateurs 70Ed.Nicole Boursier. et critiques Oeuvres XIX,1 (1994), Polly Bakera MurphyBrown." 78; "Changingthe Stakes:Pornography,Privacy,and the Perils of Democracy,"Yale French the Stakes,"conferenceon ReadingEthics, 100 (2001),88-119;"Changing Studies StateUniversityof New Yorkat Buffalo,March29-30. 4. "Civilizational How to Misunderstand Imprisonments: Everybodyin the World,"The New Republic (June10, 2002),pp. 28-33.

Language, Violence, and History

Helene Merlin-Kajman
The questions that fascinate me are also the ones over which I agonize the most-those that seem quasi-insoluble,which one never ceases to ponder, which one never finishes traversing: the living together of mankind, the difference between the sexes, physical violence and its causes, generations and history, the body itself, language, the abyss-like difference between each of us, which is sometimes glaring, sometimes invisible... On no matter what subject, these are the questions I ask myself, and it is own anguish, my own aporias, that I mobilize in order to think and my If write. not, what's the point? But I'm not sure that I want to knowanything. No, in fact, I don't believe that there is anything to know. I even think that we should renounce the idea of knowing.
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This is by no means a declaration of irrationalism. I find nothing reassuringin the renewed prestige of the religious, of the sacred, of mysticism, of the silent sharing of a certain communal ecstasy in, for example, sports or a shared identity. Rather, it's that in a way, there is nothing new under the sun, and in this sense, nothing more to know than what is already known, except in the sciences. But the progress in the sciences does not ask any new ethical questions; it "only" asks them in new terms. On the other hand, everything has to be done differently; we must unceasingly undertake this if we want to sustain a certain humanity. And my skepticism is not a relativism; I do not believe that all the ideas of humanity, all the ideas of the collective are equally valid, even if I also don't believe that we will ever realize an idea of Humanity. Thus we must endlessly begin again to re-work things that go badly, and the only really new thing, in my view, is that things can go very badly on a truly unheard-of scale... So it is not a desire to know that animates me; practice alone interests me-or, more accurately, calls out to me. For I cannot envision thinking or writing outside of a certain urgent rapport with the present-that is, outside of a political horizon. And lately, in view of recent historic events, this is what I imagine: planes are passing over our heads-us, Europeans-planes that carry spectacular violence. The Empire-imperium and studium-has passed to the other side of the Atlantic; this can be seen for example in the successive episodes of Star Wars, which incorporate our children in a new political body and create new subjectivities by borrowing features from very old modes of subjectification. And this Empire inculcates in us a univocal language that for the moment seems incapable of being subverted, except by using its own impoverished grammar-one of power and its visible evidence (a near-pleonasm), one of Good and Evil, of God. In the face of this, all traces of political inventiveness, of patience in deeds, and of modesty in forms, seems to have disappeared. So, pursued by this urgency, I wonder how to sustain language and signs in the face of terrifying power or the scorn of the half-educated. Our era, seen from the point of view of civilized countries during a time of peace-in France, at least-is passively indignant or laughsa lot, and for nothing. I wonder what this laughter is about-from what cruelty it is born, what venomous vows and unconscious memories of death it conveys? I wonder how the historic passions that have been the most catastrophic for peace pass through human language, often without our knowing it. I wonder
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how laughter and terror mirror the words of a flexion, often long unperceived, that reactivates, several generations later (two? three?) what the preceding generation/s had sworn never to let happen again. Is it precisely because of this obsessive fear,because of their vow that is impossible to keep, that the worst is perpetuated? I wonder about the circulation of that subterranean meaning that is not the silence of madness studied by Foucault, but that inhabits the interior of discourses and bodies, and haunts the unconscious-all unconsciousnessesand ends by resurfacing in the form of inappropriate awareness, inadequate for its historical present among the next generation of children or grandchildren. I also wonder how long this involuntary transmission may last, while the living simultaneously convince themselves that they do everything betterthan their parents. So I wonder how the deaths and atrocities of history render us unfit to think about the present. And how to avoid always missing the "case" in which we are embarked. How can we maintain enough theoretical flexibility and enough psychic resources to avoid always being condemned to repeat things-since we only have a discourse that knows approximately (at best) how to take charge of the past, but not of the present, which is always unmarked terrain?I wonder how we can avoid being paralyzed by questions that are precisely not those of our own situation, immobilized by catastrophically outdated systems of seeing things, while underground, the forces of death transmitted by past horrors circulate via laughter, anger and terror... I am currently working on language, the body, and signs. In France, modernity's rejection of civility and classical language arose out of scorn for their historical meaning. The function of classical civility was to resolve community violence-the violence of identification seen in civil wars of religion-by establishing a universe of gestures and linguistic precautions that could differentiate bodies from bodies, inserting between subjects a world of common but not communal forms. I am not saying that this civility is a model that can be re-imported as is. I'm saying that to have rejectedit out of scorn for its function risks activating the return of that same communal violence, clothed with a publicity signifier, a logo, and a "Halloween-style" neo-gothism. These, in simplified form, are the questions that plague me, and this is the sketch of what preoccupies me. I seek to understand what has immobilized us in modernity so that we are led to this historic scorn. And how to untangle this scorn, as well as so many other blunders of the same
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H6lne Merlin-Kajman, Helene Merlin-Kajman, Warren Motte

involuntary nature, how to better recognize the dangers that threaten us without confusing them with those that threatened our parents or our grandparents, but which perhaps are analogous to those that threatened our most distant ancestors... Universitede ParisIII-Sorbonne Nouvelle translated Roxanne Lapidus by

Perfect Books
Warren Motte
Having accepted SubStance's kind invitation to contribute to its hundredth issue, I found myself more and more troubled by the questions I had been asked to address, "What are the questions that fascinate you?" and "What do you want to know?" Not that they are unreasonable ones; quite to the contrary in fact. I realized nonetheless that, while there are a great many questions that fascinate me, the ones that fascinate me the most are the ones I find most difficult to articulate. Moreover, as fascinating as those questions may be to me, they are undoubtedly far less interesting to the readers of SubStance.I came to that sad recognition much less calmly than my account here may suggest, gnashing my teeth and wailing like any good academic will when confronted with an ugly truth. In the end, with iron in the soul, I accepted it. Somewhat later it occurred to me that there might be another avenue of approach. Since after all I profess literature, and since many of SubStance's readers likewise profess literature,why not recast those questions in literary terms, changing their shape but remaining relatively faithful to their original spirit? Faced with questions of this new ilk-"What are the books that fascinateyou?" "Whatdo you want to read?"I could begin to see my way. The verbs are far too weak however: allow me to substitute "obsess" for "fascinate," and "ache" for "want." Here, then, are my short answers: I am obsessed by perfect books. I ache to read perfect books. Let me explain. Throughout my whole career as a reader, for reasons that I will not attempt to elucidate here, I have been convinced of the existence of perfect books. By "perfect book" I mean neither the Talmudic ideal nor the Mallarmean one, but something that shares aspects of both of those, closer perhaps to what Edmond Jabes calls "the Book." Nor do I mean what we habitually refer to when we invoke the term "classic."Allow me to recall
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