When Derrida’s work started to appear in English translation in the 1970s and early 1980s, it spawned a sizeable brood of essays and books performing “deconstructive literary criticism.” But this did not mean that Derrida’s own readings of literary works were found to be a useful model; as Jonathan Culler explained in his influential On Deconstruction (1982):

Such criticism aimed, in the words of Barbara Johnson, one of the most astute of its practitioners, at “the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text,” following Derrida’s example in his readings of Saussure, Hegel, Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss, and many other writers in philosophical or allied disciplines.Footnote ²

While this critical method resulted in some fine analyses of literary works (and a large quantity of rather less successful criticism), it sidelined that part of Derrida’s writing that reflected the immense importance of literature to him, and thus failed to take on board the full measure of his originality.Footnote ³ And there can be no doubt of that importance. In 1980, for instance, in defending his doctorat d’état – a doctorate based on published work – Derrida explained that he had registered his first thesis topic around 1957 under the title “The Ideality of the Literary Object.” “I have to remind you,” he said to the distinguished jury, “somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest, I would say, if this is possible, was directed toward literature, toward that writing that is called literary.”Footnote ⁴ In an interview conducted in 1989, he stated, no doubt with a smile, that literature is “the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world.”Footnote ⁵ And in 1995, he “confessed” – his word – at a conference in Louvain-la-Neuve,

This continuing fascination gave rise to a stream of essays engaging with the questions of literature and literariness and with particular literary works; these range in time from a 1963 review essay on the literary criticism of Jean RoussetFootnote ⁷ to a preface to Safaa Fathy’s Ordalie et Terreur in the year of his death, 2004.Footnote ⁸ His subjects were predominately French, including Artaud, Mallarmé, Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge, Genet, Valéry, Cixous, Jabès, Baudelaire, Sollers, and La Fontaine, but he also devoted considerable attention to literature in English, notably Joyce and Shakespeare, and in German, especially Celan and Kafka. His preference was for poems and short stories (récits); readings of longer works often focused on short passages or even individual phrases – though always fragments revelatory of issues pertaining to the whole. His particular interest, he noted, was in works that

Before we turn to some examples of Derrida’s close reading of literary works, I want to ask what we can learn from his discussions of the practice itself. If literature remains an endless enigma, how does Derrida see the literary commentator going about his or her business?

We may start by unpacking some comments in the interview, “‘This Strange Institution’”:

This short passage brings together a number of the central ingredients of Derrida’s understanding of literary reading. The literary work is a manifestation of “the other” (a term with strong ethical resonances that Derrida draws from Emmanuel Levinas), and the appeal of the other, in Levinasian thought, makes me responsible for it. In responding to the other, therefore, I have to take account of what its particular needs are; if I don’t appreciate what makes it unique I’m not able to respond responsibly. Hence the importance of singularity in both the general field of ethics and in the particular situation of the reading of a literary work. But for Derrida, singularity is inseparable from iterability; that is to say, the work remains what it is only by being open to alteration in new contexts. Singularity is not a fixed and unchanging set of properties, but an identity (here is the “ideality” that interested Derrida from an early point in his career) that is produced, and produced “each time differently.” And because of this, singularity is never simply “itself”: it is constituted by the conditions that allow it to come into being, and, as Derrida says, “it takes its part in the genre, the type, the context, meaning, the conceptual generality of meaning, etc.”Footnote ¹¹ A responsible reading will entail “giving oneself up to the most idiomatic aspects of the work while also taking account of the historical context.”Footnote ¹²

Tied to the notion of singularity is the notion of the signature, a metaphor that helps to explain the apparent paradox of the former term and its link to iterability. On a given occasion my signature functions as such only if it is both the same as previous examples of my signature and different from them: a rubber stamp producing an identical image won’t do. In discussing the task of the literary reader, Derrida appeals to the concept of the countersignature: the signature that confirms another signature. Those who remember travelers’ checks will recall that you had to sign them once when you bought them and then again when you used them: the two signatures had to match, the second one confirming that the first one was genuine. But once more, the second signature had to be different from the first, not a mechanical copy. (In fact, it is only through repetition, as both same and different, that a written-out name becomes a signature; every time I sign I confirm that this is my signature.) Not only is the literary work singular, then, but it can also be understood as a signature – the writer’s signature in the first place, but also that of her time and place; and the critical reading, attempting a responsible response to the literary work, will confirm that signature by means of the critic’s signature, itself both different (“absolutely new and inaugural”) and yet recognizably the same as other signatures by the same hand. Such a reading, says Derrida, will put the reader’s own singularity “en jeu, et en gage” – staked, we might say, as in a game of cards or a pawnshop.

Derrida’s readings of literary works conform to this model: they are strikingly different, yet they are all recognizably “Derridean,” part of a lifelong enterprise. The former property is why, in contrast to his readings of philosophical works, which display a certain measure of repeatable methodology (although the model of signature and countersignature is not irrelevant), his literary responses have not produced a school of “Derridean criticism.” In responding to what is singular in each work he read, and in doing so in a singular way, he produced a series of readings that operate in very different ways. One feature is constant, however, a suspension of what Derrida calls the “naïve belief in meaning or referent.” (We’ve already noted his interest in works that question the nature of literature itself.)

This conceptualization of literary reading arises, of course, from Derrida’s understanding of the literary work. He makes clear that, for him, literariness is not a property that inheres straightforwardly in some texts and not in others: “There is no text which is literary in itself.”Footnote ¹³ Only when read in a certain way do texts present themselves as literary works, though Derrida acknowledges that even “[i]f one can re-read everything as literature, some textual events lend themselves to this better than others, their potentialities are richer and denser.”Footnote ¹⁴ Poetry, which clearly invites a literary reading, is discussed by Derrida in terms of a curious metaphor: the hedgehog rolled up on the highway, both protected by its spines and vulnerable to being run over.Footnote ¹⁵ The poem, that is, both resists and demands translation and paraphrase (another version of iterability). It’s important, too, that for Derrida “literature” names not some transcendent category but an institution with a history, an institution that is codified in a set of laws and conventions. It is a strange institution, however, because the works it apparently controls are constituted by their ability to unsettle or challenge it – each in its own singular way.

Derrida’s critical practice does not align easily with the major schools of literary criticism. As he observes in “‘This Strange Institution,’” “Literary criticism is very philosophical in its form, even if the professionals in the matter haven’t been trained as philosophers, or if they declare their suspicion of philosophy.” And he adds, “What I am saying here is not necessarily a compliment.”Footnote ¹⁶ His own readings, by contrast, do not follow philosophical principles; they are not necessarily characterized by linear arguments or the weighing up of evidence.

A long footnote in Derrida’s essay “Passions” comes at the question of literature from another angle. Derrida comments as follows:

This is another way of explaining literature’s suspension of the usual move from language to meaning or referent: it isn’t that the language of literature is divorced from that to which it refers, but that the relation is undecidable. Derrida connects this property of literary writing to the question of the secret; literature “always is, says, does something other, something other than itself, an itself which moreover is only that, something other than itself.”Footnote ¹⁸

Turning to Derrida’s practice, there is space to look at only three examples of his responses to literary works, a prose piece, a play, and a poem, each from a different century. To start with, Derrida’s discussion of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Counterfeit Money” will enable us to consider further the question of the secret.Footnote ¹⁹ This text of Baudelaire’s, written in the first person, relates a brief episode involving the narrator and a friend: the friend is seen separating out, with careful scrutiny, a two-franc coin from the rest of his money, and when they encounter a beggar, it is this coin that he gives the man; when the narrator comments on his generosity, the friend replies, “It was the counterfeit coin.” The narrator is shocked to realize that his friend has made a calculated move to gain moral credit at no monetary expense.

Derrida’s discussion of this text forms the larger part of a book dealing with the notion of the gift, a topic that, as he explains in his Foreword, had preoccupied him for a long time. Although there are many pages on Marcel Mauss’s famous sociological study of this issue, it is to literature that Derrida turns to enable him to explore the topic with a depth and subtlety unavailable in the discourse of sociology. There is no sense in which he is trying to “deconstruct” Baudelaire’s work; on the contrary, he is learning from it, following up on its strangenesses, its challenges to conventional, and philosophical, thought.

The first thing to note, perhaps, is the length of Derrida’s commentary. “Counterfeit Money” is one page in length; Derrida’s discussion takes up around ninety pages. And it clearly could have been longer: Derrida says, having raised the subject of tobacco, “If we yielded to temptation, often an irresistible one, of letting this reading expand without limits, we would enter here into a discourse on tobacco.”Footnote ²⁰ Later we read, “But this is not the place to go off into an endless discourse, however necessary it may be, on alms and begging,”Footnote ²¹ and later still, “One could speculate ad infinitum about the narrator’s interrupted ‘reverie’ on this subject, and on the word ‘reverie’ at this point.”Footnote ²² What are we to make of this drive toward longer and longer commentary? We can see it as one aspect of Derrida’s signature as literary reader, especially in the latter part of his career: he is willing to pursue the implications of textual details well beyond the norms of conventional literary criticism, venturing into matters of biographical, historical, linguistic, bibliographic, and philosophical import – though always with a sharp sense of what may be relevant to a responsible reading. (Derrida’s late style is also characterized, it must be admitted, by a fair amount of repetition.) But this is not mere self-indulgence: as the quoted comments suggest, effecting closure in this discourse about the significance of a literary text is always a violent act, enforcing a limit upon what could go on endlessly. This feature of literary commentary stems, of course, from what we have already noted about the literary work’s undecidability: if no final conclusion is possible, if the secrecy of literature is absolute, coming to a halt will always have a certain arbitrariness about it.

Derrida begins his full discussion of “Counterfeit Money” by announcing, “We will take it at its word and I would say almost word for word,” and he does just that.Footnote ²³ It’s striking that, although the reason for the text’s inclusion is the centrality of gift-giving to its narrative, Derrida has no hesitation in following the implications of Baudelaire’s words wherever they take him. Thus we are quickly deep in a discussion of titles and their double reference, to the verbal text that follows the title and to its subject. But the title “Counterfeit Money” has a further reference: it describes the story itself, which, being fiction, is counterfeit (“fausse” in the original). This is only the beginning of the dizzying path Derrida invites us to follow him on. Let me give one example:

Now, Derrida knows that Baudelaire is not to be found in the guise of the “friend”; he himself is presenting a fiction, and doing so tentatively: “It is a little as if … ” This too can be thought of as an aspect of Derrida’s signature as a literary reader: as a response to literature’s unsettling of the modes of rational accounting, he is prepared to advance readings that, if they work, do so more as thought experiments than as arguments. The narrator’s uncertainties about his friend’s motivation are rather like our own uncertainties about Baudelaire’s intentions – and like Baudelaire’s intentions, they remain unknowable.

This takes us back to the secret. There is no space here to describe the many other paths Derrida pursues as he tracks the implications of Baudelaire’s words – tobacco (in spite of the claim to be refusing the possible discourse on this subject), writing as giving, the gift and narrative, masculine bonding, confession, the event, nature and naturalization, fortune, begging (another topic he lets us know he is holding back on), dogs, and much more – in a discourse that weaves it way backward and forward through the story as well as bringing in evidence from Baudelaire’s other writings. At an early part in the discussion, Derrida asks a question he says he will come back to: “Ought one, as the narrator still seems to do, take [the friend] at his word when he says ‘It was the counterfeit coin’? What if he were an even greater counterfeiter than the narrator thinks? What if, with the simulacrum of a confession, he were passing off true money as false?”Footnote ²⁵ This suggestion probably strikes most readers as unwarranted; after all, there is nothing in the narrator’s statements to suggest that he suspects his friend’s veracity, and having nothing else to go on, we simply accept his view. But this is Derrida’s point: our acceptance is based on an assumption, no more. “It is,” he says, “and always will be possible that the friend is lying.”Footnote ²⁶ The literary text preserves its absolute secrecy on this matter.

Literature’s secrecy, it must be stressed, is not a matter of a concealed truth; it is a structural secrecy, and it pertains to all fiction. As Derrida says:

And it is not a matter of a secret known to the author:

Bringing the discussion back to the theme of the story, Derrida observes that literature is like money in this respect: as long as counterfeit money passes for genuine money, “it is simply not different from the money that, perhaps, it counterfeits.”Footnote ²⁹

Derrida’s reading of “Counterfeit Money,” ostensibly part of his exploration of the gift, thus exemplifies his interest in literary texts that “put to work” the question “What is literature?” Baudelaire’s prose poem, with its investigation of the difference between counterfeit and genuine and its highlighting of the inaccessibility of others’ intentions, allows him to demonstrate the complexity of these questions and to offer, through the notion of the secret, a fruitful way of thinking about it.

As a contrast to the expansive commentary of Given Time, we may turn to Derrida’s reading of Romeo and Juliet in the essay “Aphorism Countertime” (“L’aphorisme à contretemps”) for another example of his singular response to literature.Footnote ³⁰ Here Derrida has imposed on himself a formal constraint that makes for a very different reading experience: the essay is presented in the form of thirty-nine aphorisms, ranging from single short sentences to paragraphs more than a page in length. Derrida wrote this piece at the request of Daniel Mesguich, who was directing a production of Shakespeare’s play, but as he notes in “‘This Strange Institution,’” it was a work that he had already wanted to “countersign.”Footnote ³¹

It has become something of a cliché about “deconstructive reading” that it latches onto a hitherto unnoticed detail and uses it to overturn the dominant logic of the piece being read. Whatever validity this characterization may have for Derrida’s reading of philosophical texts, it’s far from true of his literary readings. Any highlighting of peripheral details – such as his disquisition on tobacco in “Counterfeit Money,” which is based solely on the brief opening statement that the two men have left a tobacconist’s – is balanced by an interest in what is in the foreground. Examples include the “thing” in Ponge, the “yes” in Joyce’s Ulysses, mimesis in Mallarmé’s “Mimique,” and the law in Kafka’s “Before the Law.” In Romeo and Juliet, Derrida is concerned with questions of desire, death, the name, and unhappy coincidences, among other things; the passage he focuses on is the most famous of all: the balcony scene.

Derrida quotes the well-known exchange about names between the two main characters, and follows this with several paragraphs unpacking the (paradoxical) logic that it exposes. Romeo is and is not “Romeo”; he will die because he is not detachable from his name, and yet his name will live on after him and thus can be said to have carried the inevitability of his death within it. Derrida quotes and comments on the famous line:

But, as Derrida points out, “for a while, Juliet makes out as if Romeo would lose nothing in losing his name: like the rose.”Footnote ³³ However, the name “Montague” condemns him, and she knows this:

There is much more to Derrida’s analysis of this scene, but this will be sufficient to show how closely Derrida traces the logic worked out between the lovers.

The fateful mismatch of names and therefore of persons played out in the balcony scene is, as Derrida shows, a concentrated version of the plot of mischance and bad timing that constitutes the drama. Contretemps in French can convey a similar meaning to that which it carries in English, but it is also a technical term in music referring to a non-coincidence between metrical position and stress. Thus Derrida can say, aphoristically, “Non-coincidence between my name and me, between the experience according to which I am named or hear myself named and my ‘living present.’ Rendezvous with my name. Untimely, bad timing, at the wrong moment.”Footnote ³⁵ Romeo and Juliet both fall in love with another who bears the wrong name; Juliet’s letter to Romeo fails to reach him in time; Romeo dies before Juliet wakes up. But Derrida emphasizes that the desire of the lovers is born in the heart of the possibility of contretemps, as is the play: “There would have been no love, the pledge would not have taken place, nor time, nor its theater, without discordance.”Footnote ³⁶

Why does Derrida present this reading as a series of aphorisms? We recall his insistence on the singularity of the response to a singular work: rather than follow any prescribed pattern of critical analysis, he produces a unique text as his counter-signature to Shakespeare’s signature. Struck by the role of the proper name as divided and dividing in the play, he eschews the traditional continuous discourse of the critic and conveys something of the connections and disconnections through his choice of form.

It’s not difficult to see what drew Derrida to Francis Ponge’s short poem “Fable” in an essay on invention: from its first line it challenges the norms whereby language and logic are usually taken to operate:

One thing Derrida doesn’t do is convert this mystifying little set of lines into a comprehensible sequence: the poem’s singularity lies in part in its refusal of straightforward meaning. What he does do is tease out exactly how its challenge to logical thought works.

As often in his reading of literary works, Derrida starts with the title; as with “Counterfeit Money,” “Fable” has a triple reference: it refers to an entity – a genre of storytelling – in the world that the poem is about, to the verbal text that succeeds it, and to the nature of that text, since it is itself a fable. But it’s the first line in which the poem’s inventiveness is most marked; it is, observes Derrida, both constative and performative at once. In particular, it is the “and” in that statement that needs to be explored:

What this demonstrates is the paradoxical status of all language: it can and it cannot speak of itself. Putting it differently, there is no metalanguage, but there is only metalanguage.Footnote ³⁹ In other words, when it attempts to speak of itself, language succeeds only in producing more speech; on the other hand, it never speaks without presenting itself as a medium that can be inspected as such.

Derrida’s interpretation of the rest of the poem includes telling us that the “silvering” or tain of the mirror – the unreflective underside that is required to make it reflect – is language, and suggesting that we give the name “Psyche” (the title of his essay and the name for a kind of mirror) to “She” in the last line; one might complain that these are impositions on the poem, but equally one might take Derrida to be offering a fable of his own.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then, in a gesture we have seen is characteristic, he says, “The analysis of this fable would be endless. I abandon it here.”Footnote ⁴¹ What he goes on to do instead is to examine the notion of invention that the poem instantiates, pointing out that the same act that brings into being something unprecedented compromises that uniqueness: it makes possible the creation of imitations and variations (such as “At the word at this poem commences”). Just like the inventive singularity of the literary response, it is divided and shared out as soon as it appears – or, more accurately, self-division is a condition of its appearing at all.

Invention is always the invention of the other (a phrase that can be understood in two ways), and as we’ve seen, for Derrida ethics is a matter of responding responsibly to the other. Ponge’s “Fable,” then, as invention, calls for an inventive response, which is also a responsible response.

Each of these readings has operated in a different way, each demonstrating the literary work’s staging of large issues that extend beyond its explicit thematic concerns. All Derrida’s responses to literary works function in this manner. His discussion of Mallarmé’s short prose piece “Mimique” allows him to demonstrate the complexity of the notion of mimesis (and much more);Footnote ⁴² his account of Kafka’s “Before the Law” allows the tale to unfold its profound investigation of the relation between the singularity of the individual (including the individual literary work) and the generality of the law;Footnote ⁴³ and “The Law of Genre” finds in Blanchot’s récit, “The Madness of the Day,” an exploration of what it means to belong to a genre – and, more generally, to belong. Derrida wrote two essays on Joyce (as well as referring to his work in several other places), “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” on Ulysses and “Two Words for Joyce” on Finnegans Wake;Footnote ⁴⁴ these essays bear witness to the considerable importance to him of Joyce’s writing. The long piece on Ulysses, in particular, is extraordinarily rich, weaving together an account of its own composition, a meditation on the fact of Derrida’s addressing an audience of Joyce “experts,” and an analysis of the occurrences of the word “yes” in the novel. The result is a series of insights into – among other things – the operations of coincidence, the implications of recording, the dividedness of the self, and the modalities of laughter.

Responses to Celan’s staging of the encounter,Footnote ⁴⁵ Ponge’s signature-effects,Footnote ⁴⁶ Blanchot’s problematization of the “instant” and of testimony,Footnote ⁴⁷ and many other singular counter-signatures to literary works issued from Derrida’s pen. Many were the result of invitations, but others made their demands on him unbidden; he says of “Before the Law,” “In truth, it was Kafka’s story which laid siege to my attempt at a discourse on moral law” while preparing his seminar on Kant.Footnote ⁴⁸ To follow Derrida as literary reader is not to mimic any of these essays or books; it is to emulate – if this is possible – the inventiveness with which he exercises his responsibility in responding to what is singular and inventive about the works he reads, alert always to the manifold ways in which these works test the limits of thinking. If most literary criticism “is very philosophical in its form,” Derrida’s readings, by contrast, are designed to bring out literature’s capacity to enter realms barred to philosophy – except when it operates like literature.

There is no systematic poetics in Derrida’s work, no attempt at a total elaboration of the historical features and classifications of the mechanics of literary discourse. There is also no systematic philosophy proposed by Derrida, no attempt at elucidating the totality of the thinkable, and no definitive approach to his thought that can be codified in advance as an overarching method. Yet there might have been a moment in his early thinking when Derrida was tempted to offer systematic means for reading any text. As Catherine Malabou points out, Derrida’s first major work, Of Grammatology, seemed to proclaim a general philosophy and interpretive method based on the study of all forms of writing as caught up in “arche-writing,” subject to the trace structure, the logic of the supplement, and the dictum that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” there is nothing outside the text.Footnote ¹

Malabou remarks that Derrida did not cleave to the term “grammatology” for very long, nor did he elaborate on the systematic and general semiology that he proposed encompassed every kind of textuality. Instead of establishing a new general logic or system by which to interpret all texts, by the early 1970s Derrida’s philosophical analyses focused on grappling with anti-systematic concepts, or on claims that are impossible to systematize, which can be found in the most prominent system-builders of Western philosophy such as Kant and Hegel. Also in this early period, Derrida’s literary analyses never tried to establish a methodical means of reading literature or a structuralist poetics. Rather than codifying his thoughts or reading method in advance, Derrida stressed that each piece of literary or philosophical criticism must be seen as its own singular event, even as each work belongs to the general conditions of meaning-making available in literature and language. Derrida called this kind of interpretation an attention to the “play of iterability in the singularity of the idiom.”Footnote ² This means no predetermined philosophical axioms (unlike, for example, with Alain Badiou), no elaboration of a theory ahead of time that fixes meaning, and no claim to ever having a finished reading. Philosophical and literary readings are without guarantees, before and after the act. If no reading can be either established in advance or definitively settled, then each reading must develop a way of knowing that also always makes room for further iterations, surprises, interruptions, unknowns, and new ways of reading in the future.

The study of philosophical and literary singularity – its idioms, conditions, and after-effects – in large part became the guiding challenge for Derrida. This motive inspired some of the best readers of Derrida to construct a poetics from this sense of singularity, especially in the versions developed by Derek Attridge and Jonathan Culler. Both Attridge and Culler attend carefully to the double practice of respecting and responding to an individual literary work while also recognizing that no work is genre-less or wholly distinct from a history of literary practices and a formalized system of signification. Both theorists recognize that, strictly speaking, singularity is unreadable. If a work remained wholly singular, it would not be thinkable or readable since there would be no way for thought to have any access to the singular. The singular concept or literary work is only known because it is comparable. It is only readable because it is breakable: in Derrida’s words, “There is no pure singularity which affirms itself as such without instantly dividing itself, and so exiling itself.”Footnote ³ But, at the same time, every literary work entails a unique and singular world. Thus the singular must still remain singular, although to be read it must be broken. Every literary work must both retain and forfeit its singularity in order to be read. As Attridge remarks, “Singularity is not pure: it is constitutively impure, always open to contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualization.”Footnote ⁴

In this chapter, I want to reflect a little further on what the cultivation and care of literary singularity have meant for Derrida and readers after. There has been certainly an immense amount written on the application of Derridean ideas to literary study, but I still think that several important aspects of singularity have been under-examined. First, the literary singular has profound effects both on the way we read and on the literary object itself. Just as there are no guarantees that any reading will have the final word or stabilize meaning, there are no guarantees that a specific work of literature or even the concept of the literary should retain its coherency. The implications of Derrida’s turn to singularity deserves the utmost emphasis: it is not that Derrida elaborated a methodical poetics that first detected irony, error, play, trace, and difference and then treated these elements as the enabling and disabling features of a literary work (this was more Paul de Man’s project); rather, for Derrida the pursuit of singularity involved a series of open-ended questions and entanglements that profoundly implicated both the work and the reader. How is a singular work made? How can one have a singular response to a singular work? In what ways can a singular work be broken yet retain a sense of singularity? How does its singularity endure? What happens to a work before and after it is read, and how are these issues of the comings and goings of a work built into its singularity?

For Derrida, one consequence of singularity – a concept or literary work without guarantees – is that there is always the possibility for the concept to no longer be effectual or for the literary work to not signify or be read again. The condition for literature to be without guarantees stands in sharp contrast to a certain tradition of philosophy according to which assertions of truth are bonded to a guarantee of universal applicability. Plato assumed that a truthful philosophical claim would be valid for eternity and certify itself in perpetuity. In The Republic, Plato in part dismisses poetry for its lack of guarantees, accusing poetry of being unreliable. As a secondary and mimetic knowledge filled with emotional instability, poetry confuses truth and opinion. Plato’s polis allowed for only a thin sliver of poetry whose meaning could be fixed to the unambiguous praise of noble feelings and representations of good character. By contrast, Aristotle’s Poetics makes an argument for the value of poetry largely contingent on its educational value for an audience because, since poems could not categorically fix their meanings or values, Aristotle envisioned a time when poetry could be abandoned.

The insecurity of address, interpretation, and readership of literature leaves it only to watch and wonder at philosophy’s claims to universal relevance. Derrida sought a literary theory of singularity – and more broadly a commitment to reading the singularity of any text – specially attuned to issues of what it means to read along with these insecurities, rather than against them and toward a secured horizon of systematized interpretation. Thus, instead of systematically pointing out trace structures and arche-writing as features of constancy across texts, Derrida found himself more pressed to consider how these very properties of language led to the insight that literature is never sure of its archive and its structure, that what makes literature readable might also make it unreadable or unread. To follow a singular poetics after Derrida, then, would involve studying the path a literary work takes without a sense of its destiny or guarantee of interpretability. Specifically, I have in mind here a singular poetics that would not only emphasize the instabilities of signifiers and genres but would study, for example, how a poem could be involved in figuring its own unique paths of persistence, resistance, recitation, refiguration, and deterioration. Instead of concentrating on locating and pointing to the meaning of a poem with a formalist reading, or being content to point out the undoing of meaning-making in a poem, this poetics looks at the dramatization of meaning that happens when a poem is set adrift or “disseminated.”

A singular poetics, a poetics without guarantees, is the inverse of the romantic notion of a literary absolute.Footnote ⁵ This poetics reflects on how the uncertainty of the future is built into texts and into readings, into modes of literary address, to the extent that the very address of literary works is that they have no fixed address. In this view, to be a poem is to continually be asking: how long will I be read, and what happens to my singularity with each reading? Derrida, in his idiomatic essay “Che cos’è la poesia?” does not offer an analysis of anthropomorphism as a supremely poetic device (unlike de Man) but fully anthropomorphizes the poem itself, in order to have the poem speak of its own desire to be read while it worries that it will be forgotten: “I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me.”Footnote ⁶ On an uncertain journey of dispersion, the poem keeps calling out to be remembered. Shifting to an address of the second-person “you” as reader, Derrida writes, “You will call poem from now on a certain passion of the singular mark, the signature that repeats its dispersion, each time beyond the logos, ahuman, barely domestic, not reappropriable into the family of the subject.”Footnote ⁷

While Derrida sought to avoid turning deconstruction into a preprogrammed method, he also did not want to elevate singularity into a dictum by which a literary work would be placed on a pedestal for its uniquely expressive or existential qualities. Although many have accused Derrida of foregoing philosophical argumentation for poetic allusions in his writings, it bears mentioning that Derrida did not treat poetry in the grandiose way that Heidegger had advocated. Heidegger saw the non-rationalist, indirect yet intuitive, emotional powers of “the poem” as a necessary guide for thinking the truth of being in an age disposed to treating the entire planet as an instrumental object. Derrida does not choose to laud poetry for its expressive or existential superiority. Rather it can be said that Derrida pursues the existential issues concerning how a poem is made, read, and unread. This existentialism of the literary device appears when Derrida claims his reading is in “excess” of any formalism or hermeneutic method and instead follows “the trace of the poetic work, its abandonment or survival, beyond any signatory and any specific reader.”Footnote ⁸ In using the term “existential,” I am not referring to any school of thought initiated by Heidegger or Sartre. Rather I use the term to indicate how the properties of a poem have become ontological problems, in that many poems question whether they will continue to exist. Thus the poetics I am emphasizing after Derrida attends to the existential drama (“abandonment or survival”) of the devices, tropes, and forms of poems as they circulate among writers and readers and inquires into the breakability and durability of singularities that comprise a poetic work. This approach builds on recent theorizations of singularity in poetics, but accentuates the ontological questions that are raised by the formal and material properties of poems in addition to the literary and ethical uniqueness promoted by previous readers of Derrida.

In Derrida’s numerous writings on Paul Celan, the existential poetics of the device, combined with an assiduous heed for singularities, becomes a key issue. Derrida most certainly did not want to approach writing on Celan, with whom he had a brief friendship, as a mere demonstration of Derrida’s own preestablished poetic theories. With regard to Celan, Derrida repeatedly emphasizes humility and uncertainty as a reading practice, which rejects any sense of theoretical mastery over the poems: “The certainty of a guaranteed reading would be the first inanity or the worst betrayal. This poem remains for me the place of a unique experience.”Footnote ⁹ Derrida’s first major essay on Celan, based on a lecture Derrida delivered in 1984, offers a series of reflections on figurations of singularity in Celan’s work, including references to circumcision, unique memorial dates, and the untranslatable utterance of a shibboleth (an arbitrary phonetical mark that only a certain community of people can pronounce). These are treated as exemplary instances of being “the one-and-only time” of an event.Footnote ¹⁰

Derrida discusses the careful entangling of these singular figurations in several Celan poems, often fixating on lines where Celan inscribes the word “shibboleth,” such as the poem “In Eins” (“In One”), published in 1963. The poem begins: “Dreizehnter Feber. Im Herzmund / erwachtes Schibboleth. Mit dir, / Peuple / de Paris. No Pasarán” (“Thirteenth of February. Shibboleth / roused in the heart’s mouth. With you, / peuple / de Paris. No Pasarán”).Footnote ¹¹ This poem carries its date on its sleeve, although as Derrida notes, the year is not given, and the immediate importance of this date is not explained in the poem. Celan’s “No Pasarán,” a slogan used by Popular Front fighters against fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, suggests the open-ended date is in solidarity with the tradition of leftist resistance. The figure of the shibboleth here gathers several languages that are left untranslated in the poem: German, Hebrew, French, and Spanish. Derrida points to the date as a kind of shibboleth as well, since it both marks the poem as highly specific and conceals the exact significance of this date. Derrida goes on to argue that the effect of the shibboleth can be seen across Celan’s work, as a recurrent trope or figuration in which “a ciphered singularity … gathers a multiplicity.”Footnote ¹² Derrida treats the shibboleth as a figure of linguistic and poetic singularity, yet that also recirculates with and among other Celan poems, including his poem titled “Schibboleth” written in 1953–54. These poems tie together acts of solidarity, remembrance, various European geographies and languages, and attention to linguistic difference and poetic accent.

However, as both Celan and Derrida well know, the power of the term “shibboleth” comes from its brief mention in Judges 12:6 as the word used by the Gileadites to identify Ephraimites, who were defeated in their raid into Gilead territory. The Gileadites caught a number of fleeing Ephraimites, who were forced to identify themselves by trying to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (which refers to the part of a plant containing grains). The Ephraimites could not pronounce the “sh” phoneme. Once they were discerned, they were killed. The term “shibboleth” has since circulated as a term that refers to the separateness and otherness of the Jewish people. The shibboleth is a linguistic marker of community that internally binds a people yet also externally distinguishes it as other.Footnote ¹³ In Derrida’s reflections on shibboleth, he expands the term to be a signifier for poetry itself, which is comprised of marks that are singular and untranslatable, although they must be cited and recited to remain meaningful. “In a language, in the poetic writing of a language, there is nothing but shibboleth,” asserts Derrida.Footnote ¹⁴ This statement echoes Celan’s own declaration that “Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language.”Footnote ¹⁵

Yet, bearing in mind the claims I made previously for considering the existential implications of poetic tropes, the shibboleth is also a mark whose utterance might unleash lethal violence. The shibboleth borders the different speech patterns of communities and necessitates acts of translation, but it also can end up being the distinction of otherness that condemns a community. A shibboleth is a sign of solidarity but also threatening difference, inaccessibility, and isolation. Celan’s shibboleths participate in this solidarity with its linguistic, poetic, and political alterity and resistance, but at the same time these shibboleths can lead to the utmost dangers and military violence. Celan’s poem “In One” ends with a phrase taken from Georg Büchner – “Peace to the cottages!” – but leaves out the other half of Büchner’s phrase: “War on the Palaces!”

The “ciphered singularity” that Derrida points to also resonates with the notion of broken singularities – concepts and terms that register both uniqueness and destructibility. Derrida finds repeatedly that Celan’s poetics is pitched carefully toward both these concerns. The poem “Psalm,” one of Celan’s most widely cited works, begins: “No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, / no one conjures our dust. / No one.”Footnote ¹⁶ Borrowing from, but slightly altering, the tradition of negative theology that invokes an absent God, this poem is a prayer sent specifically to no one: “Praised be your name, no one. / For your sake / we shall flower.”Footnote ¹⁷ The blessing of the poem is also offered to no one, placing the poem between utter abandonment and an appeal to any listener in particular. And yet, in the midst of this half-abandoned address, a “we” blooms. Derrida provides a poignant reflection on this appeal to no one:

Prayers must be open-ended speech acts, which address an other but are never sure of reaching any audience at all. Just like there is no guarantee for a poem, there is no guarantee for a blessing. Again we see Derrida’s attention to the impact of an address without assurances on the ontology of the poem. By speaking to “no one,” “Psalm” points itself beyond any specific reader or any ultimate listener, but there may be no reader at all in that beyond. Yet, as Derrida points out, the poem still insists that an address be made: “Even if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it. Address takes place.”Footnote ¹⁹ It is possible, then, to read this poem as also an address to the function of poetic allusion, which itself is barely functioning. The poem’s address to “no one” occurs because the act of address is being pushed to its limit. The address of the poem is situated between no one and no address at all. Celan put so much pressure on the function of address in his poems that, as Gadamer wrote, reading his lines forces one to ask, “[W]ho am I and who are you?”Footnote ²⁰

Celan’s poem addressed to no one resonates with a later poem where Celan creates the word “das Genicht,” or the “noem.” Celan writes between the poem and the noem, between address and the dissolution of address:

The “noem” is a hollowed out poem, negated from within, yet still one hears the echo of a poetic utterance. The translation of “Mein-gedicht” is much thornier, as it could be either “my-poem” or, if “mein” is used as in the word “Meineid” (a false oath or perjury), a falsified or untrue poem. The “noem,” not exactly a non-poem, suggests a poetic undoing of the poem.

Celan’s poem teeters between the erosion of speech cast into the wind and the chattering of a hundred tongues. At the end of the poem, Celan locates what he calls a “breathcrystal” lodged “Deep / in the timecrevasse.”Footnote ²² The “breathcrystal” could be frozen and likely archaic, but still has the potential to signify. There is a sense that breath must travel through the “noem,” through the oblivion of ice and snow, and be dug out from the depths of time, and only then might it stand as “your unalterable / testimony.”Footnote ²³

These poems by Celan and readings by Derrida are examples of what it means to attend to the formal existentiality of the poem itself. Such reading involves questions about the durability and longevity of singularities without guarantees and considers how a device or trope might maintain or fail to retain its functionality. This does not mean exactly that one correlates the poem to the existential drama of the human, which might imply that one would anthropomorphize every trope and the poem itself. To understand the existential conditions of how poems are constructed for different short and long terms, one need not assume that “the poem” has a special role in the fate of humanity. Rather, reading the existentiality of devices as they appear in the poem emphasizes how, in the longer history of the lyric as a genre, lyric poems can register the significance of such speech acts without guarantees and possibly without any readers. As we see in Celan and in Derrida’s reading, the lyric as a genre must always grapple with being between poem and “noem.” To be between poem/noem is the existential condition of the poem and requires readers to inquire at the same time into the meaning or “aboutness” of the poem and how long that aboutness can endure. I think this insight implies to the genre of poetry generally: it is the condition of the poem to be aware that there may a condition of no more poems.

Derrida’s writings on Celan pursue the varieties of singularity in his poem and also what happens when those singularities are exposed to demands of repeatability and the transience of the archive. A singularity must lose itself, break itself, alienate itself in order to be knowable, but there are no assurances at all that this broken and lost figure will retain its sense of singularity or remain legible. Lyric poems are formally different in terms of the function of address from the epic, whose readership historically is tied to the fate of a specific people and a political institution, and the dramatic, which is constituted by its live performance for an audience. The structure of the lyric poem requires it to be open-ended, to always be in search of reader, to risk itself in the openness of an encounter, and thus to risk its own death, as Derrida realizes:

When does indecipherability enable the existence of the poem, and when does it annul it? Because poems retain some indecipherability or illegibility, they call for reading and interpretation in the first place. And because a poem cannot be exhausted in one reading or with one meaning, a poem always is marked by the question of when it will be read again. Writing that is completely legible and interpretable, if such a thing could exist, would present itself as instantly functional information and direct command. Yet even information must be moved, transferred, and stored, and none of these processes or archives can be said to be immune to error, perishing, or wasting away. Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing” thus does not affirm that everything textual is retraceable according to the logic of the trace, but rather that the ontological condition of writing always takes on an existential risk, such that the interpretability and durability of any form or instance of writing will always be in question.

This argument for attending to the existential formalism in the poetics of Derrida dovetails with recent debates in poetics over what has been called “New Formalism.”Footnote ²⁵ There is no one single argument for a return to formalist thinking, but a number of scholars have been attracted to issues of structuralist poetics, genre theory, and even New Critical close reading techniques in order to reinvent reading methods that have seemed devalued by literary critical methods that favored diagnosing a politics of the (human) subject or deferred literary context to historical context. Within arguments for New Formalism, a split has emerged between theorists of poetry who seek a historically specific and detailed account of poems and poetic models and theorists who seek a broader, transhistorical understanding of what poems are and can do. These different agendas have most often centered on whether to treat the specific genre of lyric poetry as fairly consistent in structure across more than 2,000 years of its usage. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, in The Lyric Theory Reader, insist that the concept of the lyric elaborated in the twentieth century does not apply to how poets and readers in previous periods made and circulated poems. The task of a New Formalist, then, is to trace “the history of lyric reading,”Footnote ²⁶ which primarily involves tracing the history of the usage of the term “lyric” and its implication in poems. However, from the opposite spectrum, Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric seeks to elaborate “the long tradition of lyric,” by which “lyric forms are not confined to one historical period but remain available as possibilities in different eras.”Footnote ²⁷ Both of these arguments for New Formalism remain committed to new scrutiny of how poetic devices and tropes work, and both seek to attend to what Susan Stewart calls the “cultural work of lyric,” although they differ in thinking how historically specific and delimited such study should be.Footnote ²⁸

What I have sought to develop here, through attending to Derrida’s poetics of broken singularities in conversation with Celan, are some initial outlines for conceptualizing the transhistorical structures of lyric poetry along with an awareness of how lyric poems are maintained or abandoned in historical time. Jackson and Prins certainly are correct to see in a theorist like Derrida a tendency to “lyricize” poetry, treating all poems according to a certain modern, twentieth-century view of the lyric. However, questions of lyric address, temporality, durability, and legibility are perennial in the lyric tradition, although the historical context and periodization of these recurrent lyric formal properties need careful articulation. Perhaps the more pressing problem for Derrida concerns the ontologization of the lyric, which becomes paramount for Heidegger, but figures significantly into the works of Adorno, Blanchot, de Man, Kristeva, and Lacoue-Labarthe, among other thinkers of the fate of the category of the poetic who intersect with Derrida’s philosophy. Although Derrida at times elevates the power of the poetic into a special kind of transcendent speech act, pointing to, for example, the “hyper-majesty of poetry” and its capacity to perform as witness in a constitutively different way from the juridical witness, he generally does not follow many of his contemporaries in seeing the fate of poetry as indicative of the fate of all literature or of all human experience.Footnote ²⁹ Yet poems do have ontological fates of their own. And certainly what happens to poems can provide a profound window for reflecting on the fate of the human, though in doing so we need not grant the abstract category of “the poem,” usually assumed to be lyric poems, as ultimate barometers of being.

My argument for attending to the existentialism of the devices in poetics follows Derrida’s work to think the ontological conditions of poems without granting them any special destiny for humans, while also welcoming new formalist considerations of genre and history. A study of the existential conditions for lyric poetic singularity takes up, for example, not just a consideration of how the address of “I” and “you” has been emphasized variously in the lyric tradition, but also how the longevity and destructibility of address haunts poems that are designed to appeal to momentary epiphanies or long-developing emotions recollected in tranquility. Arguments for New Formalism, while debating the relative importance of either historical context or transhistorical consistencies, also need to grasp the urgency of their own historical presence. We live in troubling times for much of the life on Earth, with global warming, increasing extinction rates, fossil fuel addictions, and massive inequalities of wealth and health. These are times of tremendous existential risk across the planet. Claims for the reading methods of poetry cannot take place in a vacuum; these methods need to incorporate self-reflexively an awareness of how a sense of the planet impacts a sense of the poetic. Combining New Formalist reading methods with formalist existentialism foregrounds how the study of poetic devices and structures participates in and reflects on their own lack of guarantees on an exposed and precarious planet. And if concepts of the lyric are historically bound to specific periods, such an inquiry perhaps even can give us a glimpse into what a post-lyric poetry might be, one touched by the “noem.”

These reflections can help us to better attend to some of Derrida’s and Celan’s statements on poetics as “ciphered singularity.” In Derrida’s meditation on dates in Celan’s poems, he states that “Every hour is unique” but also “Every hour counts its holocaust.”Footnote ³⁰ The phrasing here is intense and dark, and it risks over-generalizing the historical event of the Holocaust to the irreversible process of temporality. Yet Derrida’s statements specifically are directed toward trying to grapple with how “poetic writing offers itself up, through and through, to dating.”Footnote ³¹ The concern for the double condition of singularity and destructibility in poetry is one that Celan shared. In his “Meridian” speech given upon receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960, Celan states, “there can be no doubt that the poem – the poem today – shows a strong inclination toward falling silent … [T]he poem takes its position at the edge of itself; in order to be able to exist, it without interruption calls and fetches itself from its now-no-longer back into its as-always.”Footnote ³² Celan also had stated in earlier remarks that he thought that poems were like handshakes and a message sent in a bottle. The poem reaches out, extends itself, is set afloat in search of a reader, but it may not know who the reader will end up being, or if indeed the poem will reach any shore at all. The “Meridian” is the arc or line that a poem might take in search of a reader: “The poem wants to reach the Other, it needs this Other, it needs a vis á vis. It searches it out and addresses it.”Footnote ³³

Derrida came to see his own philosophical writings as susceptible to the same anxiety over readership as he saw in Celan’s poetics. Each work, Derrida believed, needed to attend to the singularities of a text or argument, and also create a singular event for the reader.

Philosophical concepts and arguments are also events beholden to the vicissitudes of dates. Derrida felt that philosophy too had to take it upon itself the act of leaving messages, as if in a bottle, for unknown readers. This did not mean one should collapse poetry and philosophy together, but rather one had keep sending bottled messages, to multiply exchanges between the two modes of thinking and writing to learn from each other’s condition. Derrida saw the philosophical text as reaching out to readers while hoping to survive the author, a text taking leave of death while searching for life.

Deconstruction’s singularity remains both legible and still ciphered, that is, re-readable and perishable. Derrida did not tie his thinking to the task of how to systematize thought or provide a transcendental analytic for being. Rather, here thinking begins when being and meaning are not guaranteed, when the given is not always assumed to be given. Such broken singulars do not need fixing exactly, but they do need to be attended to by some reader somewhere.

Derrida has written extensively on the works of poets such as Antonin Artaud, Edmond Jabès, Francis Ponge, Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Paul Celan, but never would he have ventured to address the essence of poetry, had he not been invited to sing a duo with a ghost, and in a language other than his own. In 1988, in response to an invitation by the Italian poetry journal Poesia to define, in a few lines, “what thing poetry is,” Derrida published a short piece entitled “Che cos’è la poesia?” in the journal’s November issue. The following year, the article was republished in its original French in the renowned French poetry journal Po&sie, preceded by the following note:

“Che cos’è la poesia?,” Derrida’s rare attempt at grasping poetry frontally, is also his only endeavor of writing a poem, the act of which is consistently compared to a hedgehog thrown onto the highway, “absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball,” exposing itself to death and at the same time protecting itself (Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 223, 229). In order to live up to the theatricality launched by the ontological question “What is … ” (“Who dares to ask me that?”), Derrida stages a surprising performance that both accepts seriously to respond to the query and turns the question on its head. Nicholas Royle is right to call “Che cos’è la poesia?” one of Derrida’s “most lapidary performatives or perverformatives” (2003, 136). Performative because in one dashing rendering Derrida unites two efforts, abolishing, as Peggy Kamuf writes in her introduction to the English translation of the article, “the distance between what he is writing about (poetry, the poem, the poetic, or as he will finally call it: the poematic) and what his writing is doing” (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 221). Perverformative in the sense given by Derrida in “Envois”: an epistle to you which I sign on the top left to reassure my identity may in reality be received by many others; every time I do not sign but write the pronoun “you” may, on the other hand, signify the authenticity of my signature. In every “envoi” flickers a degree of perversion or non-seriousness. In very performance lies the necessary possibility that a promise can fail (Reference Derrida and Bass1987, 136; Royle, Reference Royle2003, 28–29). The answer to the philosophical question “what is … ?” is eventually given in the brief performance of the article, but like an istrice crossing the road, it risks being run over by the animal’s name in another language (hérisson in French, hedgehog in English, Igel in German) hence losing its meaning and relevance in a different temporal and spatial setting. The fable of the hedgehog translates the contingency and the fragility of the answer. You ask me tí estí, I say the story (istoria) lies in the istrice: it is here and not here; it is exposed to all of you and it is ready to be sacrificed.

In order to pin down “in two words” the essence of poetry, Derrida claims, one must first learn to “disable memory, disarm culture, know how to forget knowledge, set fire to the library of poetics” (Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 233). Poetry begins when it breaks with literature as a social institution.Footnote ¹ This view of poetry as a site of destruction and catastrophe but at the same time propitious to its own rebirth brings us in close proximity with Georges Bataille’s notion of poetry as sacrifice. In a 1947 article on poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Bataille writes that poetry is “literature which is no longer literary” (1946, 138). Poetry becomes poetry when it departs radically from the social-economic circulation and from all desire for greatness, recognition and permanence, effecting harshly, “within itself,” the “ruin of poetry” (152).

Derrida’s hérisson runs away, in a similar manner, from the family of the Romantics and philosophers. Neither a phoenix nor an eagle, it is an animal “very low,” “close to the earth,” part of the earth, but does not open to the “truth” of the earth (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 235; Reference 142Derrida, Kamuf, Hamacher and Wellbery1990, 325). In an interview with Maurizio Ferraris two years after the publication of “Che cos’è la poesia?,” entitled “Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier,” Derrida is eager to distinguish his humble poematicFootnote ² hedgehog from two German poetic Igel; one from Schlegel’s Athemaeum Fragments, interpreted by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their important introduction to German Romantic literary theory, The Literary Absolute,Footnote ³ and the other toward the end of Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, when Grimm’s hedgehog resurfaces from each bend in the road to tell the Hare who can’t win, “I am already here” [Ich bünn all hier]!”Footnote ⁴ Derrida disavows any kinship with the romantic “genre” and with the Heideggerian “presence of Being.” A solitary animal, “deprived of family,” his hérisson came into being “via a letter” on the French and Italian soil. Neither a concept nor a thing, it remains “profoundly estranged from the work and from the setting-to-work of truth” (Reference 142Derrida, Kamuf, Hamacher and Wellbery1990, 302–03). Derrida rejects the romantic “poetic” lineage not only for its monumentalization of Work and for its divinization of the Subject-artist, but also for its “totalizing individuality”: If his hérisson had any “relation to itself,” it would only expose itself even more to chance, to death and to being-torn-apart (Reference 142Derrida, Kamuf, Hamacher and Wellbery1990, 303). As for Heidegger’s hedgehog, which “has always-already-arrived,” Derrida replies his istrice can barely say “Ich,” and certainly not “bünn,” still less “hier” and “da”; it is not yet an animal of language and it especially refuses to be led back to the “menagerie of poiesis” (Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 233). A second level of resistance to Heidegger’s hedgehog has to do with the anthropic appropriation of the animal. “In Heidegger,” writes Derrida, “the being-for-death, as strange as this may seem, is not the being of a living creature … Being-for-death is reserved for a Dasein whose phenomenon as such does not essentially belong to being-alive” (Reference 142Derrida, Kamuf, Hamacher and Wellbery1990, 311). If there is a being-for-death, it is for the death of an animal, but the Dasein is not an animal. Heidegger’s hedgehog, for example, cannot see death coming. The catachresis of the hérisson, on the other hand, “in the very aleatoriness of the letter and of its name for [its author], is the figure of a being-for-death as living creature” (Reference 142Derrida, Kamuf, Hamacher and Wellbery1990, 311).

The most memorable and enigmatic statement in “Che cos’è la poesia?” involves Derrida’s definition of poetry: it is a text that requires to be “learnt by heart.” To define poetry’s essence, Derrida calls for two necessary conditions: the “economy of memory” (the poem must be “brief,” “elliptical by vocation”) and “the heart.” When the two conditions are combined, the “poetic” would be “that which what you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under dictation, by heart; imparare a memoria” (Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 227). To a French ear, the expression “apprendre par cœur” (learn by heart) can only resonate with the boring, if not painful scholarly exercise of learning poetry by constraint. The poetry to be memorized in the French (and its colonial) system would also more likely involve traditional verses drawn from the classic or lyrical canon, and not the works of modernists upon which Derrida has commented. Is Derrida’s use of “apprendre par cœur” another perverformative, intended to deconstruct the common expression?

A good starting point might be to highlight the evasiveness of the subject speaking and an aporia that underlies “Che cos’è la poesia?” On the one hand, the author/speaker shows a noticeable passivity and uneasiness in pronouncing whatever truth on poetry; on the other hand, the poem–hérisson displays a remarkable vulnerability in being fabricated. Who speaks? The answer to the nature of poetry “sees itself (as) dictated,” and “poetry” takes over almost immediately to speak for herself: “I am a dictation, … learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me” (Reference Derrida, Kamuf and Kamuf1988, 223). It is not until halfway through the text that the “that which to be learnt by heart” becomes explicitly a “dream,” or an “impossibility”:

This passage marks a key moment because of its double shift in register: the speaker assumes the first person pronoun “I,” and the definition of poetry is overturned from “that which to be learnt by heart” to the “heart that learns” (le cœur qui apprend). Up until this point, “poetry” had repeatedly pleaded with the speaker to take it into pieces: “Eat, drink, swallow my letter, carry it, transport it in you” (229). It desires to be made unlocatable and unrecognizable to the outside world, becoming the meaningless “literality of the vocable” to be kept deep inside the body (223). Here, however, the heart is beset by its own lack, having broken all the words into letters and absorbed all letters into silence. By means of a paradoxical movement of “keep-it-all-in” (similar to the rolled-up in a ball of the hérisson) – which Derrida also calls a “double restraint” – the heart liberates itself. It is no longer a “pure interiority,” but also a “certain exteriority” that welcomes the arrival of other letters and meaning (229, 231).

In The Meridian, the speech he delivered in acceptance of the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in 1960, Paul Celan defines poetry as a “counterword” (Gegenwort) or the “word that cuts the string” (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005Footnote ⁵, 116; Celan, Reference Celan and Waldrop2003, 40). Poetry is not a pictorial expression of things, wrapped up in all the tropes and metaphors that make it charming and extravagant; it is a means of gaining access to a particular perception of things, to a realm where the “Medusa’s head,” “the monkey and the automatons” look into the same directions (Celan, Reference Celan and Waldrop2003, 43, 47). “Poetry is perhaps this,” writes Celan, “an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way – the way of art – for the sake of just such a turn?” (47). Derrida understands the breath both as a sign of living and as the last sign of life, which points to the impossibility of speaking (Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 110). The poetry of Celan speaks an inorganic language, that of “the dead speaking, of stones and stars,” says Adorno (Reference Adorno and Hullot-Kentor1998, 322); “mineral language of pain,” writes Martine Broda, the known French translator of Die Niemandsrose, “of which mutism is the slope, the natural outcome” (Reference Broda2002, 97). Poetry, according to Celan, always speaks on behalf of the uncanny for it has stepped outside what is human, entering a realm that is turned toward the “other face” of the human (Reference Celan and Waldrop2003, 42–43).Footnote ⁶ However, the obstinate hope remains that its singular attention to the world, through “tremors and hints” and also through silences and ellipses, will reach the heart of others. In his 1958 Bremen address, Celan’s hit-or-miss definition of poetry is conveyed by the famous image of a bottle thrown out at the sea:

Derrida has surely been writing the “what is” of poetry under the dictation of Celan’s “breathturn,” or the “shibboleth,” that inviting and cryptic message, which does not contain a real secret, addressing to no one in particular, but at the same time to an intimate “you” (tu), to follow its traces, its dates, its singular irreducible experience at different thresholds (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 21–43). Years later, in his seminar on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” Derrida returned to Celan’s Meridian and develops this “you” into the notion of the “secret of the encounter”: “In German ‘secret’ is Geheimnis (the intimate, the withheld, the withdrawn into retreat, the concealed interior of one’s home, of the house), and this secret of the encounter is at the inner most heart of what which is present and presence (Gegenwart und Präsenz) in the poem” (Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 125).

Commenting on “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” Derrida’s reading of Celan’s poem “Aschenglorie,” Marc Crépon points out that, as in all of Derrida’s writings on poetry, “Heidegger’s shadow is never far away” (2006, 29). It is, “as if, in the end, Derrida read and met Celan, in the opposite way of how Heidegger read and met Hölderlin, but without ever admitting it, because he was anxious, perhaps, to obfuscate, or above all, to encrypt this radical displacement” (29). The radical displacement would be something like the following: For Heidegger, Hölderlin is “the poet of the poet,” the one who states the essence of poetry by naming the gods and the essence of all things (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger and Brock1949, 295, 304). “Hölderlin is the only one,” writes Paul de Man, “whom Heidegger cites as a believer cites Holy Writ,” for the poet has visited Being, can describe its presence and its movement whereas the metaphysician himself has nothing more to say beyond the fact that Being conceals itself (de Man, Reference De Man1983, 250–53). In an asymmetrical way, Derrida seems to have found the “essence” of poetry in Celan’s evocation of “majesty” in The Meridian, but this majesty is not grounded on the presence of Being but on the “glory of ashes” (Aschenglorie) (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 108, 68–72). For Heidegger, poetry is “the establishing of being by means of the word”: the poet’s speech intercepts the signs of the Gods, establishing them as beings, then passes them on to his own people, and it is in this sense that poetry is “the primitive language of a historical people” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger and Brock1949, 304, 307). For Derrida, poetry is the “letting go” of language, the Tower of Babel of the untranslatable. It stands near an abyss (Abgrund) instead of an original ground (Urgrund). The majesty of poetry has to do with the brief moment when the Medusa’s head shrivels and the automatons cease to function (Celan, Reference Celan and Waldrop2003, 47). It is the “majesty of the absurd” that asserts itself in the present, by bearing witness to what remains human (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 111, 117, 130). For one and for the other, poetry circumscribes the sacred, but while according to Heidegger this occurs at a more “original” time, anterior to “those times measured to men, nations and people” (cited in Crépon, Reference Crépon2006, 35), for Derrida it takes place in the present and in the irreducible time that the “I,” a living present, grant to another living present (Reference Derrida, Dutoit and Pasanen2005, 131).

One may thus ask why Derrida never overtly rejects Heidegger’s approach to poetry nor challenges his reading of Hölderlin. Every time the “counter-heideggerian” impulse comes through, it always expresses itself as a difference rather than a disagreement, and, in the case of Hölderlin, it is always via Paul de Man’s more direct confrontation, which Derrida deems “trenchant” and “courageous.” In his chapter on Heidegger and Hölderlin in Blindness and Insight, de Man states firmly, “Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say” (Reference De Man1983, 254–55). Derrida cites this sentence of his dear colleague and friend with awe and dedicates a whole conference to the debate between Heidegger and de Man without committing himself to either side (Reference Derrida1986, 7, 91–153). The reason, I would like to suggest, is that in Heidegger’s approach to poetry, there is an aspect that is dear and near to Derrida’s heart and that has to do with the Heideggerian notion of Gemüt, the original foyer that lodges the soul, animates the spirit and gathers thought and memory (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Bennington and Bowlby1989, 22, 78). The exchanges with Paul de Man on the “three madmen of the West” (Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hölderlin) (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Lindsay, Culler and Cadava1986a, 128) during Derrida’s years at Yale (1975–83) fundamentally challenged the latter’s view on memory as pure interiority for the “recollection of the past.” But if poetry is now primarily associated with an exterior memory that is linked to technical and mechanical hypomnesis, would it still look back at the psyché, the “sprit-in-flames” (84)?

* * * * * * * * *

In chapters IV and V of Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau postulates that at the birth of languages sounds issue naturally from the throat. When the tongue and palate are trained to adjust the emission of the sounds, the liveliest exclamations become unarticulated; cries and groans become simple voices. The invention of writing entails a “drying up” of the original “passion”: voices turn monotone, consonants multiply; the language becomes more exact and clear, but also more drawn out and cold, and it ceases to speak to the heart. In his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, Derrida pinpoints an inconsistency at the core of Rousseau’s “theory of writing” and his experience as a writer: “Rousseau must at once denounce mimesis and art as supplements … and recognize in them man’s good fortune, the expression of passion, the emergence from the inanimate” (1976, 203–04). Rousseau is “blind,” Derrida argues, to a paradox inherent in his approach to languages, because he does not see that the “substitution” of signs has always already taken place, “imitation, principle of art, have always already interrupted natural plenitude”(215). Writing, the dangerous supplement, in Derrida’s view, did not corrupt the voice. It constitutes the very origin of the human language.

Paradoxically, Derrida’s understanding of poetry is fundamentally linked to a return to this original silence impregnated with warmth and energy (which he calls the “point zero,” or the point “South”), within language (1976, 251). Derrida compares this prelinguistic state to what in church music one terms a “neume”: “pure vocalization, form of an inarticulate song without speech, whose name means breath, which is inspired in us by God and may address only Him” (249). “To speak before knowing how to speak” (infans), or “not to be able either to be silent or to speak” (writing), points perhaps to the most exhilarating “limit” experience humanity could dream for itself. “The poet,” states Derrida, “has a relationship of truth and literalness (propriété) with that which he expresses, he keeps himself as close as possible to his passion” (277).

Does this then mean poetry would no longer need to be articulated through voice, that it could skip its own orality and performality? Is Derrida proposing a radical view of poetry, what Timothy Clark has called a “dream of a total interiorization” (Reference Clark1997, 263)? Derrida’s expression “to be learnt by heart” seems to acquiesce to this term:

The “ideality,” Derrida tells us, in separable from the “body of the letter,” and this is precisely what he means by “truth” and “literalness” in the previous quotation. But what does it mean, the “propriété” of language, and what is so great about the letter? The answer to this question can be found not so much in the exclusion of voice by poetry as in the dream of a perpetual return to the nascent state of poetry itself. In Of Grammatology, Derrida has in fact attempted a correction of what he thinks is Rousseau’s view on poetry. Drawing from Rousseau’s statements that the first human songs “painted” passions and that the first language “had to be figurative,” Derrida concludes imitation and metaphor are the two characteristics that relate language to its origin, and “Poetry, the first literary form,” is thus “metaphorical in essence” for Rousseau (1976, 203, 271). But poetry, argues Derrida, does not have to show such a servitude to mimesis; nothing binds it from the metaphor. If there is literary originality, it must “free itself if not from the metaphor,” at least from “the savage spontaneity of the figure as it appears in nonliterary language” (272). This revolution in poetic language has already taken place in literary modernity; the most triumphant moment arrives with Kafka’s lucidity on the very helplessness and despair of writing itself:

All of Derrida’s poets share this despair of attempting to rekindle the passion of natural voices through the loneliness of the fabrication of the letter. All of them struggle to keep the language “absolutely univocal and literal [propre],” that is, “nonmetaphorical” (271).

Before examining three twentieth-century poets on whom Derrida wrote (Valéry, Ponge, Celan), I would like to turn to Paul de Man to briefly discuss three aspects of his thought that have proved decisive in shaping Derrida’s shift from an interior, Heideggerian understanding of poetry to a more exterior, allegorical and mechanical perception of poetry as disjunctive and based on proper names.

The first is Paul de Man’s distinction between Erinnerung (recollection) and Gedächtnis (memory). In an article called “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s ‘Aesthetics’” (1982), de Man deconstructs the Romantic aesthetic ideal of “inwardness” by showing that Hegel himself has already placed the highest thinking intellect on the side of Gedächtnis, the exterior, “voluntary” memory that involves the mnemotechnics, and not that of Erinnerung, the interior, “involuntary” memory that resembles intuition.Footnote ⁷ In a series of three conferences delivered on the occasion of de Man’s death in 1983, later published under the title Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida lingers over these two types of memories as a way to mourn and to pay tribute to his friend. What interests de Man in the notion of Gedächtnis, writes Derrida (but he might be speaking for himself), “is this strange collusion … between the thinking thought (la pensée pensante) and the tekhnè at its most external, which is a kind of most abstract and spatial inscription” (Reference Derrida, Lindsay, Culler and Cadava1986a, 51, translation modified). By deconstructing Hegel’s distinction between sign and symbol, de Man has also dismantled the hierarchy that Heidegger establishes between thinking as memory/recollection on the one hand, and science (technics, writing and literature) on the other. The de Manian interpretation “delineates a gesture quite different from that of Heidegger,” concludes Derrida, “by recalling that the relation of Gedächtnis to technique, artifice, writing, the sign, etc., could not be one of exteriority or heterogeneity. This amounts to saying that the exteriority or the division, the dis-junction, is the relation” (109).

This brings us to the second aspect, which involves the figure of allegory. De Man’s development on allegory in “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s ‘Aesthetics’” and elsewhereFootnote ⁸ has eliminated once and for all the dialectical passage from the symbol to the sign, and places art, as well as thought and memory on the side of the sign. Allegory, according to de Man, can consequently not “be reduced to a metaphor, to a symbol, nor even to a metonymy of a synecdoche which would designate ‘the totality of which they are a part’” (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Lindsay, Culler and Cadava1986a, 77). Allegory is disjunctive, and this disjunction will never rejoin itself or re-collect itself into a Versammlung in which a thinking of being could collect itself. In doing so, it bids farewell to an “originarism” and to an “unreachable anteriority” (141, 82). At the same time, it holds itself as dissociation by promising a memory for the future. It communicates not through resemblance to the same, but “by the voice or way of the other” (81).

The third de Manian contribution that might be relevant to our discussion of “learn by heart” is de Man’s presentation of Gedächtnis as a materiality associated with names:

Here “materiality” is the materiality of the “pure” sign, or of the sign at its own limit. Neither isolated letters nor words, names are the most elliptical and the most abstract form of signs that does not rely on an “idea” to exist. Memory here works by what Hegel calls an “empty link [das leere Band]” between name and meaning (de Man, Reference De Man1982, 773; cite in Derrida, Reference Derrida1986, 55), which echoes Derrida’s own conception of poetry as an ever-striving return to the emerging state of language: that is, its literalness, or propriété, before signification.

Among the poets read by Derrida, it is Paul Valéry who best prepares the ground for a farewell to auto-affection and to “origin.” Standing somewhere in between himself and Heidegger, Valéry is for Derrida a half-poet, half-philosopher figure who suffers from the non-presence of the “pure-I.” In an early essay called “Qual Quelle, Valéry’s Sources,” Derrida presents Valéry as a lucid soul who surpasses the task of the philosopher by literarily going “tracking down” the “sources,” in this case his own fractured “moi” (ego), in front of an unresponsive fountain, in several poems on water and Narcissus.Footnote ⁹ The source of the “I” is often described as a glance, but Valéry’s “I” has “no relation with a face” (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Spivak1972, 283). Its first relation to origin is that of a displacement, from the “voice of the springs (sources)” to the shout “to the echoes” (286). Contrary to philosophers who wear themselves out over vain questions of origin, and who create “ciphers” (such as Ideas, Being or Noumenon) to interiorize a presence which they know they have lost, Valéry encircles and exteriorizes his own “hearing one speak” (s’entendre parler) by staging an impossible mastery of various hallucinatory “I’s.” Derrida compares this snare and expulsion of the “source” to that of a snake biting its own tail. In order to succeed the act of “auto-fellatio,” the “I” must compulsively come back to the fountain/mirror to let itself “be multiplied or divided by the difference of the other” (289, 277).

Challenging the traditional interpretation of Valéry’s work as a metaphysical and aesthetic query for a “pure poetry,” Derrida emphasizes the “verbal materialism” underlying the author’s “formalism.” Valéry’s infinite spread of his mental menagerie in various genres and styles (poems, prose-poems, notebooks, essays, metaphysical stories) indicates that only writing, in its multiplicity and continuity, provides the “graphic” space that allows the murmuring of the interior speech to be heard. These self-generated echoes raise also the important question of poetry as “gift.” If the power I give to myself to hear what I desire to hear comes primarily from my own hallucinations, does it mean that poetry has separated itself once and for all from the divine power and inspiration?

In “Psyché: Invention of the Other,” Derrida takes up this question in his analysis of Francis Ponge’s “Fable.”Footnote ¹⁰ Like Valéry’s poems on the sources, “Fable” also stages a poetic act around the reflection of the mirror. At the center of the poem, one finds an impasse. To escape specularity, the mirror must first be broken, but the moment of the breaking of the mirror is inscribed in the text, which can only announce itself as an event by addressing to an other outside the mirror, the reader. “Fable” is, of course, a poem of the poetic origin, or its non-origin. “Ponge’s ‘Fable’ creates in fact nothing,” writes Derrida, “in the theological sense of the word”; “it invents only by having recourse to a lexicon and to syntactical rules, to a prevailing code, to conventions to which in a certain fashion it submits itself” (Reference Derrida, Kamut and Rottenberg2007, 24). What Derrida introduces here is the idea of invention as mechanical (strange) production, not only as a laborious fabrication of letters, but also as a “placement in abyss” (mise en abyme) of work itself (Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 102). Ponge’s work is known for exhibiting to the public its work-in-progress “interiors”: drafts, deletions, outlines, circumstances, and correspondence; it folds itself out excessively to display its perpetual uncertainty and incompleteness.Footnote ¹¹ Derrida calls this aesthetic of procedural display the “science of the interminability” (la science de l’alea) (Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 116).

In Signéponge, melding together Ponge’s “exasperated appropriation of the proper” (Derrida, 2005b, 72) and his own fascination with names, Derrida forges the portmanteau word “signéponge” that does not refer to anything other than its own différance. Depending on where we separate the letters and put the accent, “signéponge” can mean “signer Ponge” (to sign as Ponge), “signé Ponge” (signed as Ponge), or “sign(e) éponge” (sign sponge), this last one being a perfect “fable” of Ponge’s poematic practice. Ponge’s work is indeed preoccupied with the question of the “proper,” in the sense of proper to oneself, “to the always singular thing,” and in the sense that it is the opposite of being dirty and disgusting (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 30). Writing, for Ponge, consists of purifying the corrupted societal language by “tak[ing] up the challenge of things to language” (cited in Derrida, Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 46). The two worlds, that of the humans and that of the mute things, however, are “watertight,” “without passage from one to the other” (Ponge, 1999–2002, I, 678). How can one return the speech to things, or restore their primal mutism and cleanness (propreté), with signs that had become stained? His decision to write against this very impossibility is what Ponge calls his “stubbornness” (opiniâtreté), and Derrida endorses this gesture by calling it “signing.”

In several prose poems of Ponge, the “ignoble” objects sponge (éponge), sponge-cloth (tissu-éponge) or the towel-sponge (serviette-éponge) come to silently and obstinately mark their presence, manifesting a secret and implicit law of things. In “Orange,” it is the sponge, and not the beautiful and flavorful orange, which “succeeds always” (Ponge, 1999–2002, I, 20). In “The Form of the World,” a towel-sponge is simply there, seen with a hole and a key in it, but it is the “here and now,” in my bathroom, that constitutes its very singularity (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 90). The towel-sponge, the thing of “low extraction,” is both worthless and “without price”; it fills itself with dirt and cleans itself anew. This interchangeability between the proper and the improper, however, allows it to acquire a “natural” nobility in the poet’s eyes, ascending to the “exemplary place for poetry and even for truth” (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Rand1984b, 92). In the “yes” to things, Derrida sees an implicit “renunciation,” the agreement to let things slip away from man’s gaze and words. To “sign” “is to affirm proudly and triumphantly, that something is already mourned” (2005b, 54).

The fascination with names has also accompanied Derrida’s interest in poets like Celan. When reading Celan, Derrida pays attention to the weight of names that move beyond the game of self-preferentiality and circulate on a tragic ring of survival and promises. In her excellent book In the Hands of No One, Martine Broda describes Celan’s language as “a language of names,” and quotes a poem that evokes Osip Mandelstam.Footnote ¹² The name is taken as a pledge, passing from Mandelstam’s On the Interlocutor to Celan’s Bremen Speech (Broda: Reference Broda2002, 132). In the key passage of the poem in question,Footnote ¹³ what connects the young poet deeply to the “Osip” father figure is what separates them: their names. Separated by time, landscapes and languages, their bodies are in the end “joined up again” by winds, breaths and nominal words. What is first lived as a dream and an impossibility is discretely and silently transformed into a future promise, for the name of Osip is nothing but the calling for and the promise of poetry itself.

Celan’s poetry offers a perfect example of the figure of allegory thematized by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in which allegory is presented as the dominant stylistic device of high baroque, against the classic and romantic symbol. Benjamin calls allegory an ambiguous sign of the “facies hippocratica of history” (Reference Celan and Waldrop2003, 166). In Celan’s poetry, the memory of the sufferings of world is further removed from imageries: not only the Benjaminian petrified “death’s head” disappears into minerals, but also death is “what gives meaning” (Broda, Reference Broda2002, 135, note 13). However, allegory shares with poetry this melancholy and this perpetual waiting for the miracle by looking at its own ruins (Benjamin, 2003, 178).

The origin of poetry as both interior and exterior is made possible by two types of memories, one folding in, associated with passion and exempt from language and the other one folding out. That it should be associated with writings and inscriptions is the core of Derrida’s paradoxical approach to poetry. I have argued for a “shift to the exterior,” or the critique of interiority in Derrida’s readings of his poets, but now wonder whether Derrida ever completely abandoned the soul (Gemüt), the spirit (der muot), the heart (das Herz), what Heidegger has synthesized into the old German word Gedanc/thanc: “the innermost essence of man,” “the gathering of all that concerns us” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger and Gray1968, 144; Derrida, Reference Derrida, Lindsay, Culler and Cadava1986a, 92).

In the interview “Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier,” Derrida explains that there are two undissociable experiences of the heart in his use of “learn by heart.” One involves the Heideggerian understanding of poem, “very close to thinking – to the gift, to the coming or the event, to memory or gratitude,” and the other the mechanic faculty of memorization (1990, 324). Heidegger, he adds, would “have more difficulty” including the latter in his definition of poetry (Dichtung) because he would associate it with a fallen state of automaticity or technicity, or at least of “animality” (314). In his approach to poetry, Derrida has largely surpassed Heidegger in placing the figure of animal and the mechanic at the core of the “essence” of poetry, especially in his last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign.

One question, however, remains: does poetry need inscriptions? In What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger points out an “abysmal difference” between Occidental poetry and European literature: “ these poems are not properly literature. Literature is literally that which is written down and rewritten (couché par écrit et reproduit), and whose destination is to be accessible to the public for reading” (cited in Derrida, Reference Derrida, Lindsay, Culler and Cadava1986a, 151). What about poetry? Does poetry, in its essence, need to by lain down by words? It is perhaps here that we encounter the ultimate undecidable for Derrida. In his earliest writings on the subject, dedicated to one of the most opaque and important poets, Antonin Artaud,Footnote ¹⁴ Derrida is already interested in the “parole soufflée,” words “stolen” (volée, dérobée) twice: dictated by the prompter (souffleur) and heard by the audience, having “fallen from the [actor’s] body” (1978, 175). Poetry, or what Artaud calls the “theater of cruelty,” should emancipate the utterance from the linguistic order and extract itself from the written form of poetry. Derrida shares with Artaud this quest for a language without meaning and without representation, crying in syllables at the level of the throat, but he also acknowledges with Artaud that the “heart” of poetry consists of “having nothing to say” (ne rien avoir à dire), so the passion has always already been moved to the scene of writing, which is to say, “staging” (Derrida, Reference Derrida2004, 35).

I begin with an anecdote from February 1967, Derrida’s own annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of his first three books: La Voix et le phénomène, L’Écriture et la différence and De la grammatologie. Consulted by Jean Piel on one of the earliest texts sent by Alain Badiou, an article on French Marxist critic Louis Althusser submitted to Critique, Derrida replied that he found it “at least irritating in its tone” and pompous, objecting to “the ‘marks’ [Badiou] hands out to everyone as if it were prize-giving or the Last Judgment.” However, Derrida was also prepared to acknowledge its undeniable importance, let alone since he felt “far from … ‘philosophically’ ready to follow [Badiou] in his arguments or his conclusions.”Footnote ¹ Soon before the turbulent May ’68 “events,” which ushered in so many ideological realignments in the contemporary French intellectual panorama, the stage seemed set for what would crystallize, in the next three decades or so, as an opposition of style and politics, between the “philosophers of difference,” to use François Laruelle’s label in his 1986 study,Footnote ² and a younger Turk, whose philosophical system was to gather momentum abroad around the turn of the millennium, spawning an alternative to what had been called by then “post-structuralist” thinking.

However suggestive Laruelle’s denomination lumping together philosophies of alterity and difference was thirty years ago, it fails to register the work of Alain Badiou within what could be a larger, more flexible and still topical construction of contemporary French thought over the past fifty years. This chapter proposes such a reframing via an encounter between the most seemingly antithetical protagonists. I see a possible convergence in what I call more inclusively the “philosophies of the event.”Footnote ³ An essential reference in the emergence of nouvelle critique since Maurice Blanchot’s seminal postwar essaysFootnote ⁴ and a bridge between incompatible intellectual trends, the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé serves as a convenient fulcrum throughout this confrontation.