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).