Site and Sound

Tom Conley

Cinephiles who have the pleasure of reading any or all of Jacques

Derridas writings are infallibly reminded of the title of the venerable
British journal, Sight and Sound. As if following the implications of
its title, they recall how the review was built upon the distinction of
the image and sound track of the talkie from the turn of the Great
Depression up to now. The cinephile in us immediately grasps in
Derrida a tracked style that, as in the viewing of film, requires that
utmost attention be paid to the differences and elisions of words; to
where they are uttered; no less, too, to spacings between words seen
and heard and epigraphs or citations that cause the matter to be seen
and felt as if it were moving in a montage. The viewer who reads Derrida takes pain to note how various voices-off seem to inhabit words
when they are seen and spoken. These voices are transcribed in the
written material and subject it to the art of montage.
Derrida has often suggested that the power which cinema brings to
the art and politics of reading and seeing is immense. It is a truism to
say that cinema has entirely changed the way writing is read. The truism holds further if a tradition of cinematic writing is recalled by way
of Andr Malrauxs art of verbal montage that brings to the printed
pages the effects that Eisenstein had championed in his teaching and
theoretical essays. Malrauxs own remarks on the cinema, paired with
the film version of LEspoir, attest to a tradition that reaches back to
Buuel, poet, theorist and cineast in the 1920s, in which the best
images were those which vermiculate as both images and writing.1
1
Del plano fotogenico, La Gaceta Literaria 7 (1927): 17 and Dcoupage o
segmentacin cinegrafica, La Gaceta Literaria 43 (1928): 110, reprinted in Agustin

MLN 121 (2006): 850861 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Godards Histoire(s) du cinema, a work owing much to these directors,

displaces letters belonging to or broken from words into the field of
images from the great films of his imaginary cinmathque. Cinematic
writing of Malrauxs, Buuels, or Godards texture never appears
composedas would a screenplay or a novel written with the ambition
of being turned into a filmto inform, explicate, or be representative
of the seventh art. Rather, it is cinema itself.
Such also, in a broader context of film theory and practice, is the
texture of Derridas writing. For the enthusiast of Derrida the thousands of essays and books that claim to understand the nature of his
concepts tend not to attend (as might students of film theory) to the
surfaces of the writings, to their layerings or stratigraphies, to their
oscillations between sight and sound, and their reiterated ruses or
tactics of skittering and meander. It is a wonderful irony that so many
interpreters have sought to make Derrida mean where the cinematic
drift of his work calls into question both its meaning and its own will
to mean. The poet who is Derrida is also the cinmatographe, the
cinaste of criture, the writer who intransitively and even obsessively
composes his essays along the gaps and overlays of sight and sound.
In the paragraphs that follow I should like to tie the filmic quality
of his writing to some of the concepts or hypothses that we know to
bear uncanny aesthetic and political force.2 For the sake of debate
it will be shown that the yoking of the visual and aural tracks of the
writing has a strategic effect in the early seventies, when the author of
De la grammatologie and LEcriture de la difference invests literature and
aesthetics into philosophical reflection. It is a point that leads Derrida
into the direction of a style that will mark the rest of his career and
a life of writing, a life for which we continue to grieve, for it was cut
too short to continue to accomplish what it endlessly accomplished:
a new and powerful shape of poetry that drew on and brought into a
critical relation the technologies that have changed the ways we think
about communication.
Four elements of Derridas cinematic style and their consequences
will be taken up by way of appeal to cinematic process. One is Derridas
Sanchez Vidal, Luis Buuel: Obra cinematografica (Madrid: Editiones J. C., 1984) 15457
and 17174.
2
Hypothse is underscored because, early in Derridas career the Hegelian paradigm
of thesis/antithesis is altered to lead not to a synthesis but a more cinematic resolution,
a prothse, or a simulation of synthesis. David Wills elaborates on the issue both in his
Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) and Screen/play: Derrida and Film Theory, a work
co-authored with Peter Brunette (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989).

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mimicry of the strategies of containment that mark most professional

writing, especially those in which an author seeks to control the object
of his or her concern, to obtain a sense of identity through a complex
play of attribution. A second, that can be called the plot-point or, if
a cartographical idiolect is fitting, words and letters serving as wind
roses in navigational schemes that motivate and guide the work. A
third and no less crucial element might be called the title and its
return or, in other words, the emblematic disposition of writing that
establishes a formal spatial and genealogical relation between its own
mass and the names, keywords, or titles said to make it possible to be
archived and retrieved. A fourth element is that of the art of cutting
verbal and visual takes, citations, or iterable material into configurations that summon the effects of their own consequence. This tactic
especially makes manifest the political resonance of style.
In 1976, in reflections that Derrida launched about speech-act theory
and the debates that followed (if indeed they could have been called
debates) with philosopher of language John R. Searle, the notion of a
frame or a limit of discourse melded with that of imitation. In his play
with the infinitive limiter Derrida caused his reader to see and hear
the presence of limiter, an infinite substantive of the art of simulation.
Imitation was part and parcel of limitation. In drawing attention to
imitation in the ideological frame of limitation Derrida drew attention
to the formes normes, the forms and norms or enormous forms of professional writing: to its prescribed length, to its institutional protocols,
to its destination for its limited groups of readers and judges, and
its modes of argument that guaranteed its effects of truth. Derrida
used speech-act theory to interrogate the rules and regulations that
guided the production of knowledge.
He did so, it will be speculated in the paragraphs that follow,
through appeal to cinematic means. If we recall the clinching essay
at the lower edgeindeed, the marginof Marges de la philosophie,
Derrida deals with the vagaries of communication in a piece of writing
that had originally been read aloud at a conference in Montreal under
the aegis of the theme of communication. An abyssal strategy was
chosen, like that which is used in the reflective mirrors along which
pass the protagonists of Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai. A
placeless, siteless, or infinitely regressive structure, the mise-en-abyme,
reflected in uncanny exactitude the attention the author brought
to the time, place and circumstancein both oral and geographical senses of the termof its delivery. To communicate, whether in
speech or writing, meant avowing the need to produce an absence or

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a void to be overcome. Communication was based on the invention

of a necessary distance between a sender and what could only be an
improbable receiver and site of reception. The so-called contact of a
sender and a receiver could only be sent across a gap or a distance.
And the sender would be the receiver or destinataire if, in most likelihood, communication would be understood to begin not out of itself
but as an inaugural response. It followed that communication is based
on self-projection insofar as it cannot work without salutary narcissism.
From this standpoint successful communication, it was felt, would
amount to the fortuitous contact of two equally charged narcissistic
surfaces. These broad reflections resulted from Derridas affinity for
what J. L. Austin, following the tradition of manuals of rhetoric in the
classical age, saw as a relation with power and strategic positioning of
senders and receivers.
The contents of the work, brutally summarized in the sentences
above, were a function of the cinematic form of the text. In his
concluding remarks, after bringing absence into the concept of
presence and noting how self-projection inheres in most acts of
communication, Derrida undoes the opposition between serious
and facetious exchange, most notably in those instances where the
former term is accorded greater value than its often unsaid opposite.
Derrida printed his signature at the bottom of the article as if his
name were part of an end-credit of a movie. The authenticity of his
signature was both guaranteed by its unique whorl and undone by
its impression that attested to something of a presence in the age
of mechanical reproducibility. He repeatedly described his essay as
a set of dry (sec) remarks about the nature of communication.
It can be affirmed that sec was an ambitious subtlety of the kind
that Montaigne often tipped into his Essais in order to underscore a
point, to put it into an abyssal form, and to turn the aural quality of
his words into a graphic or even hieroglyphic shape. When seen and
heard in the same instance, Derridas oft-repeted sec translated into
est-ce (s) i (e) ci (c). Est-ce ici, that is, is it here? Is presence, the aim
of communication, what you see and read in the same instance? Does
communication take place when an enunciation changes or alters
itself in its graphic and aural instancing?
The so-called presence of the author and his communication
suddenly shifted from the content of its form and from its mode
of representation or signifiers to a sort of anticipation found in the
tracks of the word itself. The first syllable, pr, was read as the field
in which the event of the exchange would occur, and the apparent

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sense of the term was riddled by the attention drawn to the dry
characters inhabiting the second syllable. In other words, is presence
where you see and read it in the same instance? Sec was seen no less
as an acronym of the title of the essay,
signature vnement contexte
(printed in lower case and without commas): the doubt about presence
ever being here in est-ce ici? became the force of the form of the
writing of the essay. It was an element that could not be recovered in
the regime of a speech-act. The writing-act that comprised the essay
was grasped, it appeared to alert readers, in a quasi-cinematic montage
of sounds and graphs.
In the exchange that followed between Derrida and Austins acolyte
the latter took Derrida to task for misunderstanding the tenor of his
masters theory. In an article that Searle had put under copyright
when delivering it to Glyph, the journal printing the dialogue, Derrida responded with a voluminous manuscript written under the title
Limited Inc, in which he exploited the ruses of chicane.3 Derrida
argued over every sentence of Searles article in order, in the end, in
flagrant violation of copyright laws, to cite the text in its entirety. In
a psychoanalytical sense Searle was less incorporated (or indelibly
repressed) than introjected in the space and volume of Derridas
text. Searle was held in the palatal region of the writers mouth, in an
area where it could, following Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, be
semiotized and negotiated.4 But in a broader contextone of dispute
and power in the world of rhetoric and speech-act theorySearle was
contained. Derridas had been a facetious strategy of containment
that broke the copyright law which Searle had erected defensively and
for limited ends. The reader (and clearly it was not Searle because
he never saw what Derrida had done to him) needed to see how the
verbal instances were engulfing Searles projection of himself as selfsufficient and self-identical when he felt it necessary to immortalize
himself and his wisdom under exclusive copyright. Derridas was a
visible strategy of containment. He literally encircled and laid siege
to his critic by means of ruse and legal process.
3
Le Dictionnaire Robert: 1 Difficult incident quon suscite dans un process, sur
une vtille, pour embrouiller laffaire [. . .] 2 Objection captieuse, contradiction o
lon est de mauvaise foi. V. Argutie, artifice, contestation, equivoque, ergoterie, subtilit. 3 Par ext. Toute espce de querelle [. . .] 4 Passage en zigzag quon est oblige
demprunter [. . .]
4
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, LEcorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).

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What comes forward from the exchange of almost thirty years ago
is not only the sense of ruse or artful obliquity in Derridas style, what
he had even earlier called bricole (understood in a logistical sense
as ricochet, zigzag, tromperie in the sixteenth century) but also
a mode that requires language to be seen and heard at once and,
in that process, to translate or move from one linguistic border to
another. The result was that many of Derridas pieces could be read
as spatial poemsand Derridas earliest work was on Mallarmin
which tensions were evinced from the plotting of discourse.5 As a title
Limited Inc suggested that Searles pen contained a limited charge of
fluid where Derridas did not; that correct (or corps recte) meaning
is always a function of imposed limits somewhat comparable to what
psychoanalysts (Guy Rosolato for one) call signifiers of demarcation, that is, instances of expression that distinguish the space of
speakers from their locators.6 Herein the sight and situation of the
title became especially resonant in Derridas writing. In a concurrent
publication of an article titled Le titrier (later reprinted in the aptly
titled Parages), Derrida alluded to his affinities for Maurice Blanchot
by way of his Pas. Working through Le Pas au-del, he initially argued
that no work can go without a title. The subtitle of the piece, Titre
prciser (Title to be specified), referred to the practice of deferment or difference by which authors or speakers agree to hold forth
on topics whose titles, later to be specified, generally indicate that
they have not decided about what they will deliver.
When it was read the paper made clear the conditions and protocol
that determined the site of the event of titling: Derrida had no title
to send and therefore let the protocol of organization fill the blank
with Titre prciser. The formula of a title, later to be specified,
became Le titrier, a substantive invoking the medieval sense of a
confectioner of titles that would be both authentic and counterfeit.
Le titrier caused the reader to hear the homonym le titre y est: in other
words, if turned in English, the titrier would be the titleer and the
title here. In movement between its visual and aural tracks the title
bears (or becomes the vehicle of) the tenor of its meaning. Derrida
added that in all events there exists between the title and the text over
which it stands the presence of legal protocol. A discourse must in
5
Christophe Wall-Romana, in Mallarms Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the
Cinmatographe, 189398, PMLA 120.1 (2005) 12847, draws attention to the cinematic
foundation of the material with which Derrida had always been affiliated.
6
Guy Rosolato, Pour une psychanalyse exploratrice dans la culture (Paris: PUF, 1993), and
Elments de linterprtation (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

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some way respond to or account for the title, like a lawyer (or even a
devils advocate) that represents it. If it does not, it is in errancy; if it
seems not to do so, the reader can always invent a relation that will
make sense in binding or limiting the title to what follows. The text,
in a traditionally emblematic relation to the superscriptive title, must
indeed subscribe to or underwrite what is above it. Or else, in the
case of a poem, it must defer its presence or attend to its meaning
in the strange and circuitous course taken from the titular point of
departure to a destination. Quite often the title is scripted so as to
return in the text and thus come back as if it were a specter or a ghost.
Through two patient readings of Ponge and Blanchot, Derrida brought
forward what seems to be an axiom concerning the perception and
creation of events in writing. Between a title and a text (or a painting,
a movie, or whatever is appended to the title) is opened a space that
can be analyzed through the filter of psychoanalysis, social relations,
economic theory, or politics in general. In the relation one seesas
Derrida later makes clear in Spectres de Marxthe stakes of meaning
in a spatial register that is both abstract and graphically immediate.
The point is refined further in a long and difficult reflection on
Blanchot, Heidegger, and Meyer Schapiro in the final chapter of La
Vrit en peinture (1978), a book-quadrant of four essays on painting
and philosophy that he calls painting acts (in English in the original)
that expand on as many essays published earlier in shorter form: in
Digraphe, on le beau and the sublime; in Derrire le miroir, for a show
of Valerio Adamis paintings and drawings, two of which were titled
Etudes pour un dessin daprs Glas; an article for the catalogue
of Grard Titus-Carmels exposition called The Pocket Size Tlinget
Coffin et les 61 premiers dessins qui sensuivirent; finally, Restitutions: de la vrit en peinture, in Macula, what becomes in this volume a longer polylogue that carries an algebraic subtitle ( n + 1
voixfminine). As in Limited Inc the expansion and dilation of the
writing beg the reader to see how the art of chicane and bricole inform its
style. New volumes, new spaces are opened, and therein are deployed
graphic strategies that bring painting to bear on printed writing. As
usual, inverted commas, titles, subtitles, headings and subheadings,
dashes, numbers in algebraic equations, dates in epigraph, sentences
without periods, and masses of text are isolated as blocks or even as
islands in a greater and often secret cartography.
With respect to the title Derrida remarks that it is sign Czanne
(signed Czanne), and that as an author he must acknowledge the
debt of the attribution to his friend, Hubert Damisch, who had cited

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the formula at an earlier moment in their collaborations. But Czanne

had already promised to acquit himself of any debt in a formula that
Derrida spatializes with striking concision:
Czanne avait promis de sacquitter: JE VOUS DOIS LA VERITE EN
PEINTURE, ET JE VOUS LA DIRAI ( Emile Mle, 23 octobre 1905).
Etrange nonc. Celui qui parle est un peintre. Il parle, il crit plutt, cest
une lettre et ce bon mot scrit plus facilement quil ne se dit. Il crit,
dun langage qui ne montre rien. Il ne donne rien voir, ne dcrit rien,
reprsente encore moins.7

The painter is he who speaks in writing and who first tells a joke about
truth in painting and with an idiomatic term and with a concurrent
sense of revulsion (. . . en peinture) insofar as Czanne indeed, like
anyone worth his or her salt, cannot stand truth. Here the title of the
book becomes a duplicitous mechanism of a quasi-infinitely recurring
citation that moves across all of the essays, but especially the last, the
keystone piece on Van Gogh and Heidegger, on the poet and the philosopher, that bears the name, RESTITUTIONS de la vrit en peinture
(291436).8 The double instance of restoring and shattering truth and
painting come to a surface in the formula that resituates (as it encloses)
the field of view in the writing. The essay is crucial to the volume for the
reason that it returns to the issue of the protocol of the responsibilities
accorded to the title and the text in the decisive statement, a shard of
dialogue, that both floats and locates its own origin:
Posons en axiome que le dsir dattribution est un dsir dappropriation.
En matire dart comme partout ailleurs. (297)

At the beginning of the second section of the piece, that begins when
the text in Macula suddenly ends, he returns to the issue of attribution
as if it were a musical refrain in a serial symphony (302). Thus the
desire to title, to bear or wear a title, to bear an attribution in a political
and a professional sense alike, engages a will to appropriate or even
to arrogate. Yet Derrida, in order to make manifest the double bind
in which he places himself in titling the work that he wantsor may
not wantto attribute to himself, has recourse to the former strategy
of the reiterated signature, the tailpiece or coda that had crystallized
La Vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) 67.
Comparison with the first version shows that the text is considerably amplified in
its later stage. In Macula 3/4 (1978), it is written in small typeface (pointure) and occupies pages 1137; without any noticeable alteration, it occupies pages 291362 of
La Vrit en peinture. Derrida adds 74 pages of polylogue to the essay in its final form
(pages 362436).
7
8

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the limits of communication at the end of Marges de la philosophie. So

as not to have the title bear witness to the desire to appropriatethat
would be evinced in Czannes piece of writing or in the words printed
in bold letters on the cover of the bookDerrida makes a deliberate
and even flagrant misattribution when he cites, between parentheses,
the origin of the painters statement. It was not sent to Emile Mle,
23 octobre 1905, but to Emile Bernard. What is the nature of the
misappropriation? Does reference to the great art historian, author
of peerless works on the iconography of gothic art and of studies of
the shift from reason to affect in religious representation from the
twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, also allude to the fact that Proust
and Emile Mle were in correspondence when the author of A la
recherche du temps perdu was considering structuring his novel according to the design of a gothic cathedral? If so, then do La vrit en
peinture and its affiliated pieces bear comparison to Prousts style of
writing that uses a quasi-cinematic process of inscription, difference,
return and reiteration to fashion its own reflections? Is it a slip of the
unconscious that disqualifies Derridas power of attribution?
An answer to all of the questions can be found in the autograph
the author inked in the editions, following the ritual signings of books
at the service de presse, that he sent to colleagues and friends. On the
bottom of page 18 (in blue ink) he puts his own will to attribution
under erasure in correcting his misattribution: he marks a cross
over Mle and draws an arrow in the direction of Bernard, adding, (Restitution, encore, de la fiction la vriten peinture). The
restitution penned in the book reiterates broader issues, shown elsewhere, concerning naming and appropriating, spacing, and limiting.
The words can be both read as titles and as the formulas that inspire
them. Reste flakes off restitution in the shape of a productive, vital, and
paradoxically originary remainder that Derrida repeatsto which he
returnsin both the same essay and the three others.9
The shoes in question in the fourth essay also recur as leftover: Le
reste: ces chaussures nues, ces choses lusage incertain, retournes
leur dlaissement de chose ne rien faire (343); Quoi du reste,
des pieds ou des chaussures, voil une question trop ouverte (348
and passim). The reader senses that Derrida, in addition to playing
on the relation of fetishism (lacing heard in laisser and dlaissement)
9
A remainder of speech inaugurates Cartouches, under the date in the epigraph,
November 30, 1977: et ainsi du reste, sans prcdent precedes si jcris maintenant cela sera reste sans exemple, ils ne liront pas (213).

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and shoes, is building an imaginary museum that might be called an

institution of remainders, perhaps of the eerie kind that Christian
Boltanski and other artists would soon build from scraps and shards of
objects long since detached from the owners that brought them into
the exposition. The scope of the book is heldindeed, introjectedin
the word, but as soon as a greater vision is seen and felt, the same word,
like a photogram, becomes a flicker in a general semantic movement.
The rest of the clause signals another recurring turn of the titrier and
his titles. De la fiction la vriten peinture can be read as an
analogue to a book that Derrida announced he would write (during a
visit to the University of California-Berkeley in autumn of 1978) under
the title, Du droit la littrature, in which he announced that he
would play on both a historical parabola (from law to literature) along
which literature could be shown to be born of legal writing from the
Middle Ages up to now (scholars of French announcing proudly that,
among others, Montaigne and Corneille were bona fide lawyers who
turned to the essay and tragicomedy or that Bodin and Montesquieu
could be appreciated in the same vein) and on the cause of literature:
[Quon accorde] du droit la littrature: let literature be given the
right to exist, that is, a droit de cit, let it own a copyright so that its
own quality can allow it to be cited and have permanent residence in
the world it which it is otherwise held under suspicion.
Transmogrified into Du droit la philosophie (Paris: Galile, 1990), in
its new form the title carried the same inflexion of historical transmission and that of an appeal to open a social space which law, philosophy,
and literature would inhabit without restriction or sovereign control.
Earlier on, in La Vrit en peinture, the formula, redounding as it does
from the cover of the book, maps a similar trajectory and seeks a
milieu for communication and for aesthetics that would have no basis
in either truth or falsehood: de la fiction, encore, la vriten
peinture. Going from left to right, the reader moves from fiction to
truth, but no sooner than truth is scripted the dash () announces
the presence of another voice, one like those in the graphic design
of Restitutions, in which the line signals the intervention of a voice
other than or possibly the same as the one that has just spoken. The
response to the shard or remainder is that vrit is en peinture, thus
summoning any unilateral itinerary that would go from fiction to truth.
Every piece of the inscriptionthe semantic play, the double entendre,
the miniature title, even the dashfigures as a plot point or a locus
on a greater textual map that has no assignable borders.
One essay flows into and away from the others, and each essay builds

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its force from its continued reiteration. It can be inferred that where
other philosophers write of difference, repetition, and variation, it is
Derrida who makes their principles operative in the writing itself. A
fitting conclusion would, in obedience to the laws and protocol of titles
and the arguments that sustain them, return to cinema. The projection
room would be the privileged site for all the twists and turns of the
style that becomes visible in the 1970s. It has a common trait in what
Derrida discerns in Freuds writing, in what the founder of psychoanalysis called Bilderschriften, picture-writings that require the reader to
see and hear the written text along and across at least two tracks. His
own words are likened to what Eisenstein called montage, the word
that Derrida once borrowed to translate Zusammensetzungen.10 Yet the
operation could not stop or be arrested in the name of a concept or
any closure. It could not be said, either, that when informed by the
cinematic process, the reader is better able to discern the political
force of the later works, like Voyous, that weave philosophy and reflection on the state of the world after September 11, 2001.11
It might be more appropriate (without there being a will to appropriate Derrida and his work) to return to the inspired and inspiring
dialogue that Hlne Cixous led with Derrida, a dialogue in which
the issues taken up in the paragraphs above are treated in view of
friendship. In Insister Cixous dreams of returning to the first turns,
to the first scenes of reading of Derrida, to their first encounters
that were already written in them, long before they met, as if they
were avatars of Montaigne and La Botie:
Tout oui Toute oue, voil ce que nous sommes, moi deux fois oue, oue
toi et oue de toi, le premier jour, avant tout voir, avant tout visage, avant
le tout premier, avant, devant, ds linstant avant tout premier o sans
savoir ni vouloir, ne de la part, sans part donc, la parole sempare de mon
oue sans que jaie dit non ni ni oui une adresse, ta parole, cest--dire
ton crit, la parole de ton crit, de ton crire.12

The writing carries the flow of Derridas reiterations and repetitions

at a greater velocity. It also bodies forth an unconscious: sans que
jaie dit ni oui une adresse could be the voice of Derrida, jaie dit
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Le Texte divis (Paris: PUF, 1982) 6465.
Were a treatment of Derrida and cinema to be undertaken it would need to include
the essays on Freud, from La Scne de lcriture to the work on Beyond the Pleasure
Perinciple (in an essay on Nicolas Abraham, redone in the last chapter of La Carte
postale: De Platon Freud et au del (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), the title of which bears
resemblance to Du droit la philosophie.
12
Insister: A Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galile, 2006) 26.
10
11

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being the secret inscription of the letters of Derridas name as they

are read in English. Cixous follows the tracks of writing as graphic
matter and as voice that is never entirely transcribed into printed
matter. Further, the rhythm of her phrasing opens the closed form of
the Alexandrine that Montaigne wrote to describe perfect friendship,
a line that Derrida had taken up in Politiques de lamiti, that echoes
through the relation they share: Parce que cestoit luy, parce que
cestoit moy. The marriage of voices, places, and worlds comes forward in the simple Tout oui tout oue, in which an either/or and a
where/wherefore are scripted into the repetition of ou that ties all,
yes, and the art of listening to that of seeing. [V]oil ce que nous
sommes convokes other titles in the confusion of a veil and a deictic
act that veils what it indicates in its act of indication.
The paragraph that follows reflects on which has just been written
at the same time it returns to the scene of titles and titling that had
been reprised in Parages. She puts ds le premier jour between
inverted commas so as to make the formula so abyssal that the original moment of the meeting reaches further beyond a chronological
date; le secret premier jour le sacr premier jour le fichu premier
jour (27) is cast with such speed that each of the first days, each a
point of originary separation, gets confused with others. Where they
ask each other to split (divisons) they hold one another in an infinite
dialogue and play of language that they share (devisons). She recalls
their first meeting in the name of a title:
Nous la titrons aussi. Le titre, encore un de ces mots, si petitre, et tu en tires
tout en titrier, dans Le titrier, le titre dans lequel est le titre, le titre dans
lequel il y a du titre, le titrant, le titreur. (27)

Much of what follows in this first chapter of Cixouss poem (Insistre: comment traduire cela?, 1154) returns to the art of ruse and
bricolecombine tu aimes la puissance des mots petits ou dans ces
petits tres la condensation, la ruse (27). It recalls Derridas style
of the middle 1970s, but it projects it forward, too, into his more
recent reading of Manhattan, in which both share the public secret
of a common love of literature (32). The literature they love is one
of polyphony. They share their passions for its multiple voices and
rhythms and together they create a writing of many sensuous sights
and sounds. In any assessment of Derrida it would be wrong not to
recognize the creative power of a love shared in the modulations and
differences of the writing and in its incredible twists and turns.
Harvard University

Contributors
Saddek Aouadi is Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Annaba, Algeria. His fields of interest include comparative literature,
literary theory, and North African literature in French.
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner is a Professor of French at Boston College, whose
work focuses primarily on the fields of medieval French romance and troubadour lyric. Her publications include Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century
French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (11601200), Shaping Romance:
Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions, and (with
co-authors Laurie Shepard and Sarah White), an edition and translation of
Songs of the Women Troubadours.
David Carroll is Professor of French at the University of California, Irvine.
His books include French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the
Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998) and Albert Camus, The
Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia UP, forthcoming
April, 2007).
Hlne Cixouss many works include LExil de Joyce ou lart du remplacement
(Paris: Grasset, 1968), La Jeune Ne (with Catherine Clment, [Paris: Union
gnrale dditions, 1975]), LHeure de Clarisse Lispector (Paris: Des femmes,
1989), and Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galile, 2001)
along with a great number of plays and works of fiction. With Jacques Derrida, she is the author of Voiles (Paris: Galile, 1998).
Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures at Harvard University. His major publications include A Map in
a Movie: A Study of Cartography and Cinema (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
forthcoming 2006), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern
France (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), The Graphic Unconscious in Early
Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992). He is also the co-editor of Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in
Twentieth-Century France (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996).
Christian Delacampagne is a professor in the Department of German and
Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, teaching
MLN 121 (2006): 10381040 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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