ANGELAKI

journa l of the the oretical humani tie s

v olum e 5
numbe r 2
augus t 2000

The question is rather what happens in

between?
Deleuze
a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up the
horizon, traits through which, between which,
you can observe without being seen, you can
see between the lines, if you see what I mean:
the law of the inter-view.
Derrida

I the disparate

zsuzsa baross

The gap between the two must remain

open, must let itself be ceaselessly marked and
remarked. This is already a sufficient indication of the necessary heterogeneity of each text
and of the impossibility of summing up the
gap at a single point or under a single name.
Derrida

econstruction, Rhizomatics, Genealogy. An

inheritance, unfinished and unfinishable.
Irreducible to categories or types, the missives
singular and heterogeneous are still arriving, if
in diminishing numbers, from the last of a great
generation, possibly the last great generation.
But perhaps we should already take from this
inheritance a concept capable of instantly dislocating every generational idea of generation
and speak instead of a great rhizome. By so
doing, we would also gesture towards the open
networks of complicity, resistance, debt, and
filiation which inexorably link the three bestknown figures today (of which only Deleuze and
Derrida will concern me here) to a long list of
non-dialecticians, including Nietzsche, Bataille,
Mauss, Heidegger, Blanchot, Nancy, Freud,
Artaud, Althusser, Serres, Kofman, and Torok,
among others, as well as those whose names we
hear less often today Leiris, Caillois,
Klossowski, Barthes, de Certeau, de Man, and
beyond.

DELEUZE AND
DERRIDA, BY WAY
OF BLANCHOT
an interview
The death of ones own contemporaries, we
know, powerfully shifts the temporal horizon,
moving the abstract infinite infinitely closer. And
having already witnessed the death of Foucault,
de Man, Levinas, Deleuze and more recently
Lyotard memorialized one after the other by
Derrida, the solitary eulogist of his own generation (but who will write the Memoirs for Jacques
Derrida?) we know that the prodigious line is
about to reach its end. Indeed, have we not
already been asked to read the text: After
Derrida?
Yet, at this turning point signaling the end of
an epoch, the unhappy consciousness of the
disciple cannot be solely attributed to anxiety
over being left to wander all alone. Nor could
it be reduced to what is a hereditary obstacle:
that the first categories we would reach for in
order to grasp this inheritance inheritance,
legacy, generation, epoch, method,

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/00/020017-25 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250020012179

17

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

corpus, etc. come to us, as signaled by the
inverted marks above, with meanings already
suspended, dislocated, or otherwise deconstructed by this same generation. Nor is the
aporia if a deferred sense of panic may be properly called aporic, despite the steady flow of
words due to the exhaustion of the possibility
of thought by rhizomatics, deconstruction,
genealogy, which would thus leave us, as
heritage, with the discourses they themselves
disparage: discussions, debates, commentary, criticism. I would argue rather that it is
the active discords, the differing strains of
thought, straining against one another and in
themselves productive of prodigious differences,
that exhaust us. And as they test the limit of
our strength, they ought to make us future custodians stutter, if not bring us to paralysis.
Of course, not every differend, divergence or
discord however irreducible or unreconcilable
it may be deserves the much abused epithet
aporic. After all, what distinguishes this
heterogeneous constellation, which I nonetheless
call here a heritage, from other systems,
traditions, paradigms, epistemic formations (another series to which Derridas characterization of dangerous and misleading may
apply) is the (self)awareness that thoughts
domain is made up as much of material substance
as of interstices, fissures, gaps, divergences,
intervals. That the heterogeneous and unfinished
texts of this inheritance form anything but a
proper properly defined or definable, delineated or delineable body. But if one division
is powerful enough to test and contest this intuitive sense of a coherence and sympathy which
prevails despite and across the differing strains,
if one division may fundamentally threaten our
hypothesis of a common legacy and shared differences whose index, but only index, would be
the three neologisms then it would have to be
the divide between the voices and works of
Deleuze and Derrida. Non-classifiable, itself nonnameable either by rhizomatics or by deconstruction, a veritable fault line runs between the
two philosophies, conceptions of philosophy,
unfinished discourses. This one divide is not only
more fundamental and (seemingly at least) more
unbridgeable than any other, it also appears to

restructure the whole domain traversed by

contemporary thought. When, as Nancy
suggests, rhizomatics and deconstructions re-fold
the backcloth of thought against one another,
the incision along the fold cuts through all the
rest of the major and minor folds, fissures,
rhizomatic bifurcations, disjunctions, tensions. It
orders, or so it would appear, all the rest.
(Apparently) tolerating no ambiguity, the cut,
whose sign we will write here as Deleuze/Derrida,
powerfully does away with all resistance, with all
that would remain undivided: the shadow of the
one persisting in the text of the other. By reordering all the rests, the cut also appears to
order the rest of us to one side or the other of
the divide.
But then perhaps the division is only too
powerful for us; it proves too much for us
students, disciples, custodians, successors.
Cutting as far or as deep as the groundless
ground, opening up differences beyond any
common ground, which are thus, in Derridas
happy phrase, sans fond, it is too much for us
to experience and therefore limiting, paralyzing, regressive in its side-effects. Producing
too powerful a seizure, a bad aporia that would
not release its grip, Deleuze/Derrida does not
liberate, let us accede to other figures, relations,
questions. In the face of, or rather, in fear of this
paralysis we retreat to safer grounds: become
Deleuzians or Derrideans; evacuate one side
of the divided field, and gather by preference
away from the tension of the cut; seek safety and
shelter in separate schools, networks, conferences, anthologies, journals, jargons More
than mere behavior, the segregated discourses
give rise to another dangerous regression of
thought: to thinking, or, if I may already borrow
Derridas terms, to manners, gestures, and
strategies of reading and writing that convert
Deleuze and Derrida to leaders of some
schools (Deleuze, N 9), turning deconstruction
and rhizomatics into passwords and slogans
for everything that follows (Derrida, EA 86).
Yet, the affairs of philosophy are never as
peaceful or docile as the orthodoxy promised by
schools would suggest. Starting from
Deleuze/Derrida as turning point a bifurcation
held in reserve, in potentia contemporary

18

baross
philosophy virtually splits into two heterogeneous, non-communicating, non-translatable
trajectories. The one moving swiftly and lightly,
even light-headedly, along lines of flight; the
other turning around, in the same place,
taking a detour, with the deliberate slowness
required of textual labor. Or even graver
perhaps, the typographers slash between the
two proper names is the prophetic sign of a
combat in preparation, a war waiting in the
wings, the likes of which we have not seen or at
least has no witnesses and testimonies of since
the terrible duel with the Sophist.1 In fact,
Socrates fateful victory for metaphysics is still
being reversed precisely by the generation whose
inheritance is in question here. Among them
Nietzsche, whose words calling for wars such as
which we have never known are cited by
Deleuze, himself a warrior (NP 94). But if, as
Foucault says, the reversal of Platonism begins
with Aristotle or better yet with Plato
himself, it is only recently, perhaps only beginning with Nietzsche, that philosophy begins to
side with the Sophists spitefulness, challenging Socrates to prove that he is not the illegitimate usurper (TPH 168). At stake in this new,
potential war between a philosophy of speed
and a philosophy of slowness, of construction and
deconstruction, of forgetting and memory, of
flight and slow textual labor is once again the
very title: philosophy. This time, however, the
protagonists are already on their different war
paths: Derrida pursuing the tactics of a war
economy (D 5), Deleuze the war like play of
difference (NP 191). It is from their respective
paths and wars that deconstructions and
rhizomatics would contest what the future shall
be: a philosophy escaping through the wall,
finding a way through the cracks (Deleuze, N
138, 143) behind the thinkers back, or philosophy writing on the reverse side, or the tain,
of the mirror whose blindness it never ceases to
solicit; whether philosophy will have done away
with all turns, turnings back, returns (to
old problems), or on the contrary, will progress
by tak[ing] a turn around (Blanchot, IC 25),
turning back over its course if only to listen to
the murmur eroding what its words mean to say,
from the Outside. Or yet again, whether travel-

19

ing/forgetting with the speed of light, its

discourse will not turn back to contemplate the
void of the catastrophe from which the other
world it effectuates emerges, literally, as aftermath; or, unable to forget, it must take flight into
flight, flee into what must be fled, taking
refuge in the flight that takes away all refuge
(Blanchot, IC 22).
To the foregoing, I can already imagine two
possible objections. First, what does it mean to
be concerned in this manner with the future of
philosophy? Is the question not caught already in
the (philosophical) paradox that the turns,
detours, interruptions, reversals of the course
and direction of philosophy by philosophy themselves testify to a history and future which are the
product as much of chance and accidents as
speculation? And yet, without already betraying in particular Foucaults and Nietzsches
legacy, could we not still say that how this
turning point gets formulated (as war, a schism,
or as we will try to do here, a disparate) is itself
a turn? That whether the dis-junction rhizomatics/deconstruction is articulated as schism, war,
or as Nancy proposes, a fold the unique and
distinct mark of modern thought contesting
itself, straining against itself while remaining
thought is a matter of thought turning, taking
one turn or another?
A second series of probes would turn to the
very notions of inheritance, heritage,
legacy as problematic again, drawing already
on the same inheritance. But this being the
case, the more productive and faithful question
would be: how to formulate this vertiginous
effect? In what language to give justice to the fact
indeed, to the principal of all missives that
what is being handed down is an overturning, a
ground overturned: the dislocation, the undoing
of tradition, generation, inheritance,
legacy as foundational, as founding or grounding the future? But even before that, one must
answer another, if naive, objection: if division or
disjunction is the operating principle, if a schism
operates at the heart of the inheritance which
is thus without a heart (and here I am paraphrasing Foucault) then by what right can we
still speak of an inheritance: something that is
held or rather holds together? Is the vague sense

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

of sympathy we spoke of earlier justified? How
could it be justified, theoretically? Is it to be,
must it not be justified by concept? Could it be
any other than the disparate: the concept
which, handed down by the same generation
(by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, who themselves
are prompted by dark precursors), inaugurates
in and for and by modern thought a new form of
relation a non-relation? That is, an economy
which is inscribed within an un-economy, or a
negative economy that holds itself together,
maintains itself in and as differing divergence
without either yielding to or reconciling the
forces of division, divergence, dispersion at its
heart. But if such is the case, if the concept
disparate is self-referential, if it is at once
the sign of the non-relations this heterogeneous
thought uniquely maintains with and within
itself and the fabrication which it passes
down as inheritance then the initial question
has been misplaced. Whether or not deconstruction/rhizomatics/genealogy in their nonconfigurable configuration constitute something
that deserves the name heritage, legacy,
inheritance cannot be asked before and outside
the exorbitant field defined by these same
discourses. One cannot assume proper custody
as it were without having assumed it already:
without having taken, as gift, from this same
inheritance one of its defining concepts as selfdefining, as defining the particular relations it
itself maintains with itself. As Derrida says, we
begin where we are: in a text wherever we
believe ourselves to be (G 162). The initial
decision will not be grounded by prior reflection
or calculation. Rather than grounding anything,
it opens a void.
Although the concept, as was said, is introduced by and circulates in numerous texts by
different authors, including those of Foucault,
Deleuze, and Derrida, by preference I turn here
to one of Blanchots formulations of a nonbond. The passage which I cite here and which
does not name the disparate as such comes significantly at a point in the text (The Writing of the
Disaster) where the limit of Levinass concept of
religion as that which holds together is tested.
Blanchot, looking for something other than religion (or tradition?) holding together, asks: then

what of the non-bond which disjoins beyond

unity which escapes the synchrony of holding
together, yet does so without breaking all relations or without ceasing, in this break or in this
absence of relation, to open yet another relation? (emphases added, 64).
Several features in this formulation justify the
privilege just granted to it:
1. Unlike religion predicated on (Gods) presence as origin, Blanchots disparate is without an original, or one original source. An
underivable double without an original, it is
at once maintenance and disjoining, without
any priority: the maintenance of disjoining
cannot be separated or disjoined into the
distinct vectorial components (of resemblance and difference) to be later reunited
in and as the disparate.2
2. Disparity is auto-genetic, without being a
process. It is thus unpredicated on any
other exterior/anterior presence, source,
determination or mediation (agency, force
or action) by a third party, however dark
a precursor. This in contrast with
Deleuzes construction, precisely, which
introduces a third element, the necessarily
prior determination of the heterogeneous
differing as a relation by a dark precursor. For Blanchot, nothing is determined
in advance; he does not assemble the
disparate from composite elements, nor
falls back upon questions regarding the
respective [i.e., distinct] roles of difference, resemblance and identity (DR 119).
In the order of the disparate these are no
longer distinct or distinguishable. From this
subtle but crucial difference open bottomless differences, or in Derridas happier
idiom, diffrences sans fond between
Blanchot and Deleuze. In so far as these
cannot be traced back to any fundament or
common foundation, they themselves would
have to be inscribed in the disparate:
Blanchot/Deleuze.
3. More significantly for us, the maintenance
of non-relation does not foreclose an opening. Rather it itself is one. If above I have
underlined two of Blanchots phrases

20

baross
(without breaking all relations and to
open yet another relation) it is because
together they are determinant. While the
first depicts the disparate as a mobile in
itself (in the sense a Calder installation is
said to be a mobile: always in movement,
maintaining a perpetually differing relation
to itself, and moreover, itself being this relation, without which it would be another,
completely), the second phrase further
opens this already mobile structure to the
future trajectory of opening yet another
relation. This other relation, held in
reserve as an undetermined promise,
nonetheless belongs to the mobile/mobility
of the disparate itself. By virtue of its
openness to the future, the heritage
precisely as a disparate positions us not as
caretakers of dead weight or ventriloquists
of finished and dead texts, but as custodians with a future: task and potentia; obligation and freedom; an Aufgabe to
borrow this word of Benjamin with an
open possibility. (This is how I would read
Derridas no to a future to-come without
heritage and the possibility of repeating
[ and pomegranates, 326].)
l

l l

Before turning to the Aufgabe and for

Benjamin, we recall, the term signifies a task as
much to accomplish as to give up as unaccomplishable let us approach the cut, the division
Deleuze/Derrida as it first appears: an opening to
pure distance. The burgeoning works by a growing number of commentators3 will not concern us
here. Only on rare occasions do they turn to both
figures, and even then, rather than risking dislocation by the heterogeneous forces arriving from
both directions, they set out to measure the
unmeasurable: the difference between (a measure
made bereft of all powers by what it is asked to
measure) differance, the differential, the
differencial. The works themselves, however,
pose difficult questions in a negative manner,
which itself is troubling. The writings rarely and
barely touch. One could even say they avoid
contact (but only in the manner one avoids
love).

21

There is something extraordinary about this

abstinence. As Derrida himself will be forced to
concede but only in the context of the generational question of whose value he furthermore
remains very skeptical the two thinkers of
difference (which is not Derridas idiom) both
participate in and contribute to the exceptional
situation that in a certain moment, in a given
country, a certain number of philosophers who
more or less belong to the same generation, to
neighboring institutions which on the whole are
the same, and who publish more or less at the
same time, say things that resemble (emphasis
by Derrida, NAG 255).4 Yet, uniquely in their
case, the semblances would have to find their
own way across the divide, before they could resemble (in French Derrida uses the reflexive
form and underlines se ressemblent). Uniquely,
if only because iteration and incorporation, the
interlacing of writings traits is a distinguishing
mark of this generation and its method for blazing precisely non-generational, anachronic, dischronic, rhizomatic lines. But the rare asceticism
is the more remarkable in the case of Derrida,
whose passion for writing is barely distinguishable from the passion for the writing of the
other Blanchot, Baudelaire, Rousseau,
Heidegger, Celan, Levinas
The rare contacts that there are resemble brief
but weak collisions, as if indeed between two
slowly moving massifs or tectonic plates
(Nancy, DF 113). I have not made any serious
attempt to compile a list of cross-references
brief points of contact but they are rare.
Difference and Repetition makes one reference
to the other thinker, in a footnote (318); in A
Thousand Plateaus Derridas name is mentioned
only once, briefly. (Others may decide to read
several of Deleuzes quick missives without name
or address attached as oblique arrows aimed at
the others work; as for me, I am not interested
in war.5)
Derridas one direct gesture (Im Going to
Have to Wander All Alone) comes too late, for
Deleuze, posthumously. His other contacts are
mediated by third parties. In Differance (17)
there appears a short citation of Deleuze on
Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy). Decades
later, however, the significance of even this

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

brief iteration is strictly circumscribed. In
response to two conference papers approaching
the question Deleuze/Derrida (albeit only in
relation to the Greeks) Derrida insists on a relation to Nietzsche for his own contact is twice
mediated that remains very heterogeneous,
trs htrogne, to that of Deleuze. (Si,
propos de la diffrentielle de force, je cite en
effet Nietzsche et la Philosophie dans La
diffrance, la modeste lecture de Nietzsche
que jai tente ici ou l reste trs htrogne
celle de Deleuze [emphasis added, NAG
258].)
Even more remarkable are the omissions, the
missed encounters: the lengthy turn by both to
Hamlets famous line remains unmarked in
eithers text;6 the same fate befalls the common
attraction to Artauds language, to Nietzsches
clever words on ears labyrinthine, be they
large or small;7 and whenever Deleuze discusses
hopes for a book of essays critical and clinical,
he neglects to mention Derrida having opened
already in meditations on Artauds parole
souffle, which in turn fail to acknowledge
Deleuzes own confrontation with Artauds schizophrenic language his own dialogue between
critical discourse and clinical discourse questioning their problematic unity (WD 169).
When by chance their texts come to share the
same space, of a book or a conference, the writings themselves do not turn to touch. To Nancys
collection on the subject (WCAS), Deleuze
surprisingly enough contributes a short paper
(which itself has a strange history of errant trajectory8), but his A Philosophical Concept
remains an odd satellite, orbiting rather than
touching on the subject of the volume.
Addressed to no one, it is addressed by no one,
with the empty category also including Derrida,
whose long interview with Nancy (Eating well)
in turn is silent on Deleuzes own contribution
toward ending the history of the concept of the
subject. In similar vein, Deleuze, who does not
attend the Sorbonne colloquium Nos Grecs et
leurs modernes mentioned already, sends a twopage contribution to the publication that follows
it two years later in 1992. While a special session,
which becomes a long section in the book, is
particularly dedicated to La Grce de Gilles

Deleuze et celle de Jacques Derrida, and while

from two contributions (by Alliez and Wolff9)
arrive the strongest possible provocations,
Deleuzes Remarques remains silent on the
question of Derrida. Ignoring the alleged circulation of missives un veritable systme de
renvois between himself and Derrida,10 he
answers instead a minor charge (by Wolff)
regarding his ostensibly naive readings of the
Greeks.
As for Derrida, his once again indirect
response to the same two papers pursues several
strategies all at once. By one, he drives a wedge
between himself and his interlocutors: he hesitates to follow, claims not to recognize himself
in the picture painted of him, politely but firmly
insists on corrections, precisions, reversals (I
not only do not believe but have often insisted,
I never said, I even insisted on the opposite,
etc.11). By another, he disarranges the alleged
configuration DeleuzeDerrida; instituting his
own play of evasions, he opens the dyad to
several simultaneous, sliding series: Deleuze,
Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and still others
(Elle nest pas seulement commune Deleuze et
moi mais aussi Foucault, Lyotard,
dautres encore [258]); then Derrida, Foucault
and Deleuze; then the same in reverse order
(pour moi, comme pour Foucault et Deleuze;
comme Foucault et Deleuze, jai accord un
privilge massif [263, 264]). Then in yet
another countermove, Derrida reverses this very
game of multiple filiations: by way of a series of
indices, key words and proper names, signals
towards des rserves et des carts difficult if
not impossible to integrate into any configuration.12
The first of these moves gives a painful
practical demonstration of the great embarrassment visited upon the disciple should he dare
to usurp the masters voice and speak in his
name. In other words, Derridas first move is to
cut off the route of commentary. Then by way
of the other two together, he moves to undermine the very possibility of con-figuration
whose index we will write here as
DeleuzeDerrida.
Must we then abandon our hypothesis of an
inheritance as unjustified and conclude instead

22

baross
that the gap between rhizomatics and decontructions is non-negotiable and non-traversable?
(Should this not have been plainly visible from
the start in the opposite values each assigns to
inheritance itself?) Is it that rather than being
tested and exhausted by an impossible task, more
prosaically, we are only deprived of speech in the
face of Deleuze/Derrida? A Janus face? But then
again, is it not that the focus on distances, differends, missed encounters cannot but itself miss
precisely the opening that is held in reserve by
Deleuze/Derrida as the promise they maintain
together, in their disparity?
l

l l

To speak of inheritance is to acknowledge

privilege, gift and debt, and unfreedom. Ours it
seems is structured like a predicament. On the
one hand, recent theoretical accomplishments,
not only by rhizomatics and deconstructions,
subtract from the field of our possibilities a
whole series of traditional responses and reflexes
to great works. (The conspiracy of imitators,
cries out Deleuze in one subtitle; they have been
writing my own writing laments, or feigns
to, Derrida.) The exigency of the example
compelling us to think otherwise; the prodigious
construction of concepts; the effective (wirkliche)
history of the history of ideas; the deconstruction
of categories of category, oeuvre, unity,
self-identity, author, generation, epochality, system, paradigm, episteme
impose their own laws (of proper claim and
succession). Individually and collectively, they
especially prohibit critique (reactive thought),
commentary (reiterating the meaning of the
works in other words) and what was just referred
to as con-figuration: searching for and finding
(for there is always finding) common themes,
measuring and explicating, analyzing and
comparing affinities/differences, disagreements/
alliances, relative proximities/distances The
difficulty with commentary on writing, as says
Blanchot, is that commentary signifies and
produces signification. Unable as it is to
sustain an absent meaning (WD 42), it will not
offer refuge from the risk and responsibility of
saying something other than the great words of
the original great work. (Reading the great

23

work of Borges, Deleuze and Blanchot themselves show us that the most faithful reader of
the great work of Cervantes produces a new
and much richer work. In repetition, the same
heterogenizes itself, comes to differ from itself, in
the same place; moreover, this very difference is
itself traced differently/differingly by Freud
and all those following him: Lacan, Deleuze,
Blanchot, Derrida I cite here only Derrida,
who himself will iterate Jabess words: once the
volume rolls itself up, once the book is repeated,
its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously,
rigorously, that is, discreetly, to exit from closure
One then furtively escapes from it, between
two passageways through the same book, the
same line, along the same ring, vigil of writing
in the interval of limits [emphasis by Derrida,
WD 295].) As to protocols of reading and writing
that would con-figure the unfinished and in
themselves heterogeneous works of Deleuze and
Derrida, the obstacles are innumerable. But
perhaps the gravest one is the already mentioned
problem of ground or territory, as no ground
will have been left unturned, ungrounded by
contemporary thought, even if the different
strains effectuate the overturning differently.
This is perhaps one of their shared differences.
Given the radical deterritorialization of all
terrain, from what neutral, undisturbed, undeconstructed, (un)deterritorialized ground
would such protocols proceed? What strategy,
measure or method could re-territorialize their
ground? What strategy or move would be powerful enough to reclaim the ungrounded ground
from deconstruction or rhizomatics for the
edifice DeleuzeDerrida to stand on?
Yet, on the other hand, co-forming the other
side of our predicament are the distances, discontinuities, tensions, the open discords, the unspoken differends, the heterogeneous trajectories
that traverse to divide this difficult inheritance
on the inside. As we have seen, in the face of
their fundamental, but also and more importantly, their happier differences, neither
rhizomatics nor deconstruction offers much guidance. They bring us to the edge of the abyss
dividing their respective limits; together they
posit us (for without this common action there

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

would not be a predicament, only a choice to
make, freely) before their abyssal differences.
There, exposed to the formidable forces of their
differing, differenciating forces, we are left to
wander all alone. For although separately and
together they place us there, by definition they
cannot follow us there. There, solicited in
simul by both at once, we are not only expected
to expose ourselves to the full force of their
heterogeneous and heterogenizing effects, but
also to write or to make philosophy. For even in
this respect/aspect there are differends: whether
philosophy is for doing (fabricating concepts) or
eminently/inescapably writing.
We thus return to the Aufgabe, but poorly
armed, with one question: who would dare or
hope to be capable of such a response?
Something neither Deleuze nor Derrida dared?
Or to be precise, Derrida alone dares, but only
obliquely, approaching the question by a light,
tangential touch. Already the reply to the
Sorbonne presentations of Wolff and Alliez
contains a gentle invitation to redirect attention
away from the somber fundamental differences
(diffrences au fond) to happier differences
that are at once incalculable, abyssal and vertiginous mobile. (Les plus heureuses diffrences
sont peut-tre sans fond [NAG 259].) The same
is voiced again in the brief adieu to Deleuze, Im
Going to Have to Wander All Alone. At once a
confession and remerciment, the short text
risks coming close to formulating a relation. The
relation of a non-relation, a disparate: from the
very beginning, all his books have been for me
the flustering, really flustering, experience of
closeness or of a near total affinity, concerning
the theses, if we can use this word, across very
obvious distances, in what I would call lacking
any better term the gesture, the strategy, the
manner of writing, of speaking, of reading
perhaps (3).
The unhappy disciple may be forgiven for
halting in her tracks here to ask: but is this not
everything? What remains once we are done with
manners, strategies, gestures of reading, speaking
and writing? But if she decides to go on, she
may read Derridas belated confession as an invitation, or even stronger, as passing down an
obligation as part and parcel of the inheritance

itself: an obligation to respond to the non-configurable Deleuze/Derrida in a manner of reading

and writing that is open to that which opens up
in the non-place of their abyssal differences as
friendship. In the sense Blanchot understands
this difficult word. That the resonances of friendship a flustering closeness and dizzying proximity would have to be and could be heard only
across obvious distances is a measure of the task
at hand. An almost impossible undertaking. For
proximity and closeness must be heard without
either effacing the heterogeneity that remains
irreducible, non-configurable, or converting the
same heterogeneity into the hostile opposition of
war or sectarian schism.
But then what method: manner, gesture, strategy of reading and writing would accomplish this
task? Could it be or must it be neither deconstruction nor rhizomatics? In other words, what
form should the interview promised in the subtitle take? What path should it forge for itself?
First, it was never meant to follow the path ordinarily traced by the term as one-sided interrogation. From the beginning there are two sides, two
trajectories. Nor has it ever been the intention or
ambition to conduct or simulate the interview for
which we too had to wait for too long. (Derrida
recalls Deleuze agreeing to publish at some
point a long improvised talk between us on this
problem and then we had to wait, wait too long.)
Such an undertaking would not only be improperly audacious, but also improper, not audacious
enough. Ventriloquy. Initially, I have set out to
write instead an inter-view in the hyphenated
sense: a discourse which would at once take place
in between and would try to exhibit or put on
view that which takes place in between; or a
narrative that at the same time as it tries to
glimpse at, divine or entre-voir, something
would also solicit something new an event
perhaps? to take place in the gap, in between
the different manners, gestures, strategies of
writing.
But even after such short and preliminary
deliberations as these have been, I can see how
and that such writing in between deconstruction and rhizomatics is impossible. Or at least
not within the powers of this writing. The interview thus will have to take place elsewhere, not

24

baross
in the writing but in between its lines, its trajectories; in other words, the inter-view will not be
written but will have to be solicited and made to
appear in between the tangential and indirect
approaches the writing itself will make as it
proceeds tentatively, touching upon the works
however lightly yet without ever losing sight of
either of the two figures in the periphery of its
vision.
The trajectories will be traced by four excursions (of which the first has just been completed),
with the direction of each being guided by a
concept taken from the inheritance: the
disparate, the interval, lines of flight, and
(what) remains. It is hoped for regarding an
apparition one can only hope but not count or
calculate that in between the lines there will
appear that which in the words of Derrida resists
being summed up and summoned up at a single
point and under a single name.
To keep in view all the works at once would be
both impossible and unnecessary. As I have
already privileged vision, I will limit myself
here to a small set of texts regarding the image.
But even so, the task would be still too much for
me all alone. Therefore I turn indeed, I have
done so already to Blanchot. My strategy, my
guide, my choice of representative and delegate
for deconstruction, will be Blanchot, who, in
Batailles whimsical words spoken shortly before
his death, carried wisdom further than anyone.
It is he that I summon here as muse, as inspiration for this difficult journey. It is his Virgilian
services that I solicit in order to set up the stage
for writing to encounter the image as itself an
encounter: fatal, fated, as Narcissus taught us
long ago with the Outside.

II the interval
Il est vident quon peut difficilement aller
plus loin dans la sagesse que Blanchot.
Bataille
l Mais, quest-ce que limage? But what is
the image? asks Blanchot (DVI 348, TVI 254).
His answer which holds for only one of the
two versions of the imaginary, whose trajectory
alone we will follow here is at once unexpected
and extraordinary: the image is not resemblance;

25

nonetheless, it resembles not an absent object

located elsewhere, whether real or imaginary, but
the cadaver. The image, at first sight, does not
resemble the corpse but the cadavers strangeness
is also that of the image (256). Limage,
premire vue, ne ressemble pas au cadavre, mais
il se pourrait que ltranget cadavrique ft
aussie celle de limage (348). (I will continue to
cite from the French original, for excellent as it
may be, Anne Smocks translation cannot but
frequently leave behind traces of an often otherwise silent communication with other texts. Just
now, for example, the cadavers strangeness
loses contact with ltranget, which in the
original inevitably links up with Freuds
uncanny, translated from German to French as
inquitante tranget.)
l The fact that this resemblance (of the image
to the cadaver) does not strike us at first sight;
that, despite being eminently of the order of the
visible, it is not given to unmediated optical
perception in the phenomenological field
should disassociate it right away from the effects
of the performance of Platos apparatus, the cave.
(One might be tempted to say that Blanchot
assigns this last to the order of the other version
of the imaginary: the grasping of the object in its
ideality; to yield to this temptation, however,
would be an error as the division or redoubling
of the imaginary into two ambiguous/duplicitous
versions cannot leave intact in its enclosure the
metaphysical game and its closure.) The corpse,
in fact, bears no resemblance either to Platos
copy or his ghostly phantasma. Nor is cadaverous
resemblance the images own autogenetic illusory
effect or the calculated performance of any other
apparatus or dispositif. On the contrary, rather
than an apparition, the cadaver is: is present,
as it were, in person; and it is all that there is.
The remains.
l Neither a representation, nor a simulacrum,
neither a copy nor a phantasma of the mourned
one, the corpse resembles nothing, nothing other
than itself. Redoubling over itself, the cadaver
becomes its own image: If the cadaver is so similar, it is because it is, at a certain moment similarity par excellence: altogether similarity, and
also nothing more. It is the likeness, like to an
absolute degree But what is it like? Nothing

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

(258). Positioning itself across us for in relation
to the corpse, we do not have the initiative that
characterizes relations in the real this double,
without an original, dislocates, or better still,
from its place unworks everything of the
order, logic and discourse of the cave: mimesis,
mimetology, mimeontology, the whole economy of presence and absence and the order of
priority and hierarchy it maintains on the basis
of the image as secondary, as coming after
(some original) as its metaphysically weak copy.
From here on, the image points not in the direction of any thing, an original but absent object as
its model. If it could be said to model itself after
anything, it would only be the cadavers
unworking of its relation to its model,
through which the cadaver itself becomes a
model the exemplary example for the desoeuvrement of modality as such.
l When Blanchot
says that the cadaver
belongs to a special class of objects that escape
common categories, he means to say that something remains in excess of every category,
common concept or name, even the proper name:
something (the remains) is certainly before us
and yet, it is not a living person, not the same
person with the name who was alive, nor its copy,
nor a mannequin like him, resembling him, nor
another (person), nor any other As we stand
before it, our language and its conceptual apparatus both too much of this world falter.
This uncanny situation itself bears a certain
resemblance to the uncanny whose thought
comes to Freud but is it a thought that comes
to Freud? from the Outside, wearing the mask
of his own image. Reflected in the swinging glass
door of the train, the image of a strange old man
advancing towards him shatters his composure
(the shattering surprise of the Outside itself,
Blanchot, F 163). It sets off the madly excessive
linguistic excursion in the Uncanny, the text,
wherein Freud finds that in every language he
reads the uncanny has, as we would say today,
a deconstructive dimension; it unhinges every
dialectical opposition including linguistic ones
between the canny and the uncanny, the
heimlich and unheimlich, the familiar and
unfamiliar. In other words, looking already
ahead to the problem of concept and event, the

concept uncanny does not speak the event.

It is rather the event or apparition that undoes,
brings out of the balance of their opposition the
concepts: canny/uncanny. Freuds unheimlich
is this disequilibrium, displacement: not a thing,
nor the question of any thing but of place: the
familiar appearing outside its proper place.
Similarly, the corpse has no Heim, no proper
dwelling (did Foucault not nominate the cemetery as the heterotopia par excellence?); displacement, the condition (rather than place) of being
outside every place, is its proper place: ce qui
est l, dans le calme absolu de ce qui a trouv
son lieu, ne ralise pourtant pas la vrit dtre
pleinement ici. La mort suspend la relation avec
le lieu, bien que le mort sy appuie pesamment
comme la seul base qui lui reste (348). In the
face of this perpetual dislocation of location without any real movement the apparatus of
language and something with it breaks down:
O est-il? Il nest pas ici et pourtant il nest pas
ailleurs; nulle part? mais cest qualors nulle
part est ici (348).
l What is it? Where is it? These questions lead
us back to our place before the image. Standing
this time in front of the photographic image, very
similar questions vex Bazin, Barthes to some
extent, but certainly Cavell as they try to think
the being of photography: A photograph does
not present us with the likeness of things; it
presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us
ontologically restless. Photographs present us
with things themselves sounds, and ought to
sound, false and paradoxical. Such troubles in
notating [I underline here the reference to
language] so obvious a fact suggest that we do not
know [how to say] what a photograph is; we do
not know how to place it ontologically. We might
say that we do not know how to think of the
connection between a photograph and what it is
a photograph of.13
Cavell is at a loss to name the connection
between the being of photograph and the original
object. But then he still turns toward being
and seeking it in the same (being), in their
being of (sharing in) the same being, he cannot
but become ontologically restless. Passing
through the cadaverous region, Blanchot turns

26

baross
around.14 He traces (the choice of words is difficult here, as words inevitably tend to implicate
writing in this passage, turning it in advance of
any questioning into an affair of writing), or let
us say provisionally so that we might stay neutral
in this affair as long as possible, his writing
observes the dissolution of precisely this
connection: the incessant unworking of all
traces of a connection that would enable us to
find our way back from the cadaverous, the
image, to the presence of an original object. For
when things founder in their own image, they
themselves change: The thing was there; we
grasped it in the vital movement of a comprehensive action and lo, having become image,
instantly it has become that which no one can
grasp It is not the same thing at a distance,
but the thing as distance (emphasis added,
TVI 25556).
I need to pause here to observe parenthetically
the difficulty we have been experiencing in maintaining the distinction or separation between the
cadaverous as presence and certain effects in the
order of the signifier which, as deconstruction
has taught us, are but ghosts giving off vaporous
illusions of presence. From Freud to Cavell, but
also in our discourse, we find that language is
implicated in the affairs of the image. The different trajectories now intersect, now diverge and
then again appear to move in tandem. But more
significantly and beyond this general and abstract
law, there is evidence here of a certain relation
which for obvious reasons I hesitate to call
resemblance a certain rapport or affinity
(perhaps even collaboration or duplicity) between
the cadaverous effect in the realm of the visible
and, on the other hand, the deconstructive effects
of such eminently graphic and semiotic operations and operators as the pharamkon, the
trace, dissemination, diffrance, breaching, cendre, supplement in writings
domain. Into the system of their respective
domains, each brings a heterogeneous element
and a war economy, to borrow this term from
Derrida and from writings domain thus bringing system and domain in relation with a radical
otherness or what again Derrida calls the
absolute exteriority of an Outside, irreversibly
transforming relations on the inside, including

27

that of inside/outside.15 The underivable duplicity of the cadaver, a double before being one,
appears to be such an operator; its presence
the presence of absence, or rather of the infinite movement of the disappearance of presence,
itself maintained in the present effects something in the order of a heterological breaching
or frayage16 of the visible itself. (If, in speaking of the images action, I continue to borrow
Derridas language pertaining to writings
graphic operations, it is because there is none
other; but then, this is the very point of this
parenthetical demonstration, whose evidence is
precisely this troublesome contamination.)
l A while ago I said that foundering in their
image, things themselves change, but now this
reference to objects alone seems insufficient. We
should rather say that the world itself changes,
irreversibly: when the presence we designated as
cadaverous brings nowhere in relation to
here, it changes here everything: the image
intimately designates the level where personal
intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in this
movement the menacing proximity of a vague
and empty outside, the deep, the sordid basis
upon which it continues to affirm things in their
disappearance (254).
l The outside is not (on) the exterior. We
cannot, as the saying goes, step outside.
Paradoxically, the outside is on the inside: a relation from which we cannot extricate ourselves:
The cadaverous resemblance haunts us. But its
haunting presence is not the unreal visitation of
the ideal. It is that which cannot be found and
therefore cannot be avoided. What no one can
grasp is the inescapable (259). Is the Outside
then a relation radically other on the inside?
Of the inside to itself? Redoubling over itself, the
world itself founders as it becomes its own image
and gives itself over to the infinite movement of
its own de-familiarization, de-realization, deconstitution, desoeuvrement as the ground of presence, as the dwelling of presence: The fixed
image knows no repose Its fixity [is] like that
of the corpse. The place which it occupies is
drawn by it, sinks with it, and in this dissolution
attacks the possibility of a dwelling place
(emphasis by Blanchot) even for us who remain
(emphasis added, 259). Even for those of us who

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

remain, the world, before or just now held at a
distance, changes: now it is distance [that] holds
us. And this change in our habitus is itself not
a free initiative; instead of taking part freely and
decisively, we are taken (261).
l

l l

A picture held us captive, writes

Wittgenstein;
and
standing
before
Caravaggios Death of the Virgin, Nancy
writes: We are on the threshold.17
l

l l

l And yet, while everything founders, nothing

moves; or else, all movement takes place in the
same place. (If I may risk an analogy with
another domain for the Outside is not one but
multiple, non-identical, non-homogeneous, noncontinuous with itself in the register of blind
time and discourse, the disaster that changes
everything does not touch anything; the catastrophe undoes not the world but time, the order of
time, which alone can maintain the disaster
suspended in the future, yet to come. But the
disaster, Blanchot writes, has always already
taken place passed over this same place, right
here and now. But in this absolute disaster, or as
we should rather say, in and by this writing of
the disaster, which undoes time, robs the world
of its star both nothing and everything
changes.18 No detail has moved, or been
removed, yet everything has changed; while each
thing remains in the same place, the world itself
has become, in an instant, disastrous: after the
end of time, at once timeless and beyond the
order of time, without a future or a past. In
another reminder, Tarkovskys last film Sacrifice
comes to mind: two silent flashes across the
evening sky, a slight tremor that spills the milk
from its jar but almost instantly stops, they alone
indicate that the nuclear holocaust, feared as
coming, threatening from an indefinite future,
has already taken place. Next morning, sunshine
breaks to another day and finds the same garden
table, the same forest, all untouched. No one has
memory of the catastrophe. Except a single man
who appears to have saved the world by sorcery
and later on we will recall that Deleuze and
Guattari ask if writing is a sorcery? By a

madness great enough, a single man reversed the

linear order of time. Just as Blanchot has done,
in the writing.)
l l

l The cadaver becomes its own image / the

image itself is cadaverous but what does it
mean to say or to write these phrases? And when
we say the cadaverous resemblance takes us
outside every order of mimesis, representation,
speleology, resemblance by analogy, copy, similitude, phantasma, simulacrum what agency or
force is the referent of this phrase, responsible
for this action of transport? By answering the
image, do we not reduce writing to the passive
function of a re-presentation that is secondary,
coming after the action of the image? Yet, by
saying writing, do we not grant this last an
unearned mastery over the image? And yet again,
does not the double mark (for we cannot do without the marks) inscribe the phrase in the structure of its own double, a repetition without
identity, installing the gap of the interval (where
the double science of deconstruction makes
rather than finds its home)? As language folds
upon itself (in the same place) it opens a critical
gap, a dangerous zone in-between: between two
meanings, the original and the displaced, without
and with the mark; between two of its registers,
the constative and the performative; between
what it says and what it gives to be read But
two mirrors, Borges tells us, construct a
labyrinth; in this case as well, the redoubling by
way of the inverted marks brings about a minor
but vertiginous effect: the phrase at once speaks
toward that which it cannot name and in whose
direction it can only point and re-marks this very
opening to the outside (of writing) as itself a writing effect. It preserves the memory of a writing
operation in other words, cadaverous resemblance as something not seen at first sight.
This writing question becomes more complicated once we recognize that the image takes off.
Deconstruction may well write the phrase cadaverous presence as if it were on the tain, that
is, outside the vision of every representation,
system of mirrors and their reflections, but
movement does not end there. Starting from
there, the image opens (us) to the attraction of

28

baross
an Outside: The image speaks to us, and seems
to speak intimately of ourselves, writes
Blanchot, it speaks to us, propos of each thing,
of less than this thing, but of us. But in what
language? And is it (a) language, or rather,
more than any language (plus dun langue)? A
song, of the sirens perhaps, promising to deliver
us (as we also learn from Blanchot19), in an inhuman voice, to the inhuman? For rather than
delivering us to the Outside, the intimacy of the
image takes us outside ourselves and there delivers us to/from ourselves: it makes of our intimacy an exterior power which we suffer
passively. Outside us, in the ebb of the world
which it causes, there trails, like a glistening
debris, the outmost depth of our passions (262).
l We are taken; distance holds us. And thus
the image once more appears as a veritable apparatus of capture: this time neither the organon
of delusion and error; nor a dispositif of subjectification (facilality or the mirror stage), but
rather the inverse. In an infinite, unending movement without progress or advance, it sets into
motion the subjects dissolution, destitution,
deconstitution: from the moment we are outside
ourselves in that ecstasy which is the image
the real enters an equivocal realm where there
is no longer any limit or interval, where there are
no more successive moments, and where each
thing, absorbed in the void of its reflection, nears
consciousness, while consciousness allows itself to
become filled with an anonymous plenitude ;
and there where all belonging to the world is
dissipated, the outside becomes a presence
where I does not recognize itself (262). (Ce
qui arrive nous saisit, comme nous saisirait
limage, cest--dire nous dessaisit, de lui et de
nous, nous tient au dehors, fait de ce dehors une
prsence o Je ne se reconnat pas [357].)
l Yet, the movement of the subjects release
(dessaisissement) implies infinite degrees.
Not the end but the unending is how Foucault
cites Deleuze, himself citing Blanchot (TPH
174). The movement does not carry itself, or
rather, writing does not carry it beyond the limit,
over the threshold to the Outside. Outside, there
is no more writing. The outside cannot offer
itself as a positive presence; one is irremediably outside the outside this is again Foucault,

29

thinking with Blanchot (TO 28, 27). The writing

of the Outside is writing on the limit, fracturing
it, splitting it open, multiplying it without
crossing it. There is no line of flight leading to
the Outside. Again, Foucaults exemplary text
serving as model and inspiration for many
thinkers of the thought of the outside, is very
clear on this point: This thought stands
outside all subjectivity in order to make appear
[pour en fair surgir] as if from the exterior
[comme de lextrieur] its limits ; and which
[thought] at the same time remains [se tien] at
the threshold of all positivity, not in order to
grasp its foundation or justification but in order
to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site [translation altered, emphasis
added, TO 1516; PD 521].)
l l

Before turning to this apparatus of capture, I

need to put into circulation a few more writing
questions, probing/forcing the relation between
the graphic mark also of this writing and the
image on the outside. As this has been a writing
operation from the start, it cannot end (even if it
must remain unfinished) without bending the
reflection of light and speculation, toward
language: such curvature, non-symmetrical,
irreversible, never direct, as Blanchot says, is
the proper form of relation to the unknown and
thus no solution would suffice in which
language itself would not be at stake.20
The direction of the bending is both motivated
and justified (adjusted) by another distinction
again, also made by Foucault, Deleuze and
Derrida, who, respectively, draw their dividing
lines between the visible and the sayable;
what we see and what we say; and the blind
murmurs of discourse and sight (these pairs of
categories, however, do not name the same division but proceed to draw up non-identical
domains along different lines). Blanchots own
distinction between seeing and speaking sets
up neither a dichotomy nor an opposition
between the senses, even though he claims no
amalgam would mend the split. (For sight,
speech is war and madness. The terrifying word
passes over every limit it transgresses laws,
breaks away from orientation, it disorients.21)

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

Turned away from the visible, but without turning back to the invisible, speech is motivated by
an infinite passion for disorientation, for wandering, precisely. Of course, Blanchot does not
speak here of any speech, of wandering as the
fate, fatality of speech as such, but of differing
speech, one that carries itself here and there,
without being lost in the non-orientation of error
that errs grievously: ruins in advance the power
of the encounter. He has no respect for speech
that acts as if it were sight: pretending to see
everything from all sides. As does the novelist
who lifts the rooftops and gives his characters
over to a penetrating gaze (IC 29). In short,
Blanchot knows that there are several ways of
speaking, but has time only for the speech of
detour. Seeing, on the other hand, presupposes
distance: to see is to apprehend immediately
from a distance while making use of separation
not as mediating but as a means of immediation
(IC 28). Even though we are still at work here to
heterogenize precisely this metaphysical vision
of vision (which celebrates the sun), and are
yet to insert the discontinuity of a gap or interval in the visible we can already see how
Blanchot could speak of the image as intimate. It
immediates.
l The original title of Blanchots text Parler,
cest ne pas voir (EI) posits us far more forcefully and decisively than does the English translation before the disjunction. Transposing the
French as Speaking is not Seeing, the latter
places the line of division on the exterior, bringing it as it were to a halt outside the subject. As
something to observe precisely by a subject
from a distance. To speak is not to see on the
other hand brings the split right home to the
subject, making the split traverse the being of the
being who must forget to speak in order to see
and conversely, must close his eyes before he
could speak. The two are separated by a temporal interval.
l Writing his Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida
thus closes his eyes; in fact, in a spectacular writing operation (taken also in the sense of
surgery), he puts out all eyes: writes in the
dark, the memoirs of the blind, which are not
memories/images but drawings of the blind the
self-portrait of drawing, itself blind. And thus

blinding us or at least throwing sand into our

eyes by this spectacular performance, the writing
follows the blind murmurs of a discourse that
wanders from place to place; it steals and turns
away, provides its own path Deleuze, on the
other hand, following a much more radical path,
will do away with the image as such (albeit not
without recourse to visual ruse: camouflage,
mimicry). Appearing as, or wearing the mask of
the painter, he will block the paints passage to
the dimension of the cadaverous. In a writing
operation or gesture that is quite different
from Derridas and which will remain unacknowledged (in a writing that is uncurved), he
will turn the eye into an organ of touch. Or at
least contaminate sight with the blindness of
touch.
l l

l But what is the meaning and significance of

all this?
First, the cadaverous is for sight alone. The
visible is its dwelling place; visibility is its condition of possibility. The cadaverous, if it is to
appear, must appear. Close your eyes, reach out
by the hand and the interval immeasurable,
incommensurate with any measure and
distance crumbles. Touch has reduced it to
mere distance. Your hands reach out for an
image but they contact an object, the naked
canvas and paint, or if you are in the cinema
the surface of an empty, blind screen. But to
speak of the visible in this general and
common sense is once again insufficient; the
general once again fails to capture the
profound: the discontinuity (or interval)
between that which is simply purely visible (light
itself or color, or the glint in your eyes) and the
cadaverous. Although dead eyes, or rather, the
difference between the unsettling gaze of the
corpse whose eyes are yet to be shut by gentle
hands and your eyes looking at me begins to
capture the profound schism of the visible as
precisely the divergence between the simply or
phenomenologically visibles (which are, however,
also invisible for the blind), on one side of
another schism, and that radically other visible,
the cadaverous presence, which the corpse gives
to sight.

30

baross
But to whose sight?
The question suggests the non-isomorphity of
the visible, that its fault lines are not uniformly
distributed in the phenomenological field, not
visible to all eyes. We sense that something like
an optics would be required here, capable of
apprehending the cadaverous in its difference, in
its continuous differing from mere visible objects
which it draws into its own ontological hole,
draining them of their presence.
At first sight, Merleau-Pontys critique of the
Cartesian promises to aid our thinking here.22 As
we recall, the Cartesian cannot recognize itself in
the mirror; instead, he sees another sort of
object, a mannequin that looks like him.
Merleau-Ponty places the blame for the misrecognition on what Lacan will call geometral optics
substituting line for light. We seem to have a
similar problem here, as we know that eyes alone
not even 1000 eyes could provide or account
for the vision that instead (in the place of)
apprehending an inert and lifeless object, is itself
apprehended, undone, held captive as a fugitive
prisoner on the threshold.
If the famous case of Zeuxiss birds can teach
us a lesson here, it is that what the birds (or bird
eyes) fail to see is not the absence of the grapes,
which are not where they seem to be. What
escapes rather bird-like vision is the presence of
their absence, or their infinite withdrawal from
presence. And if this is so (if that is, as Lacan
reminds us, we can say anything at all of what or
how birds see in the world), the presence of
absence is not immediate data (this last is
Deleuzes rather than Lacans term).
Furthermore, following a little longer this
cadaverous logic which is not entirely analogous with the optical game the grapes put in play,
for birds alone is it not that the corpse as such,
or rather, the corpseness of the corpse is for a
subject to see? By subject one means neither
man, nor first person, nor subjectum, nor
position. The referent rather is the index of a
name for a being open (Batailles cracked
being perhaps), or simply being open to the
attraction of the outside, which is not a speaking
position (as the structuralists define it: as relative, in de-potentialized space), but a limit condition and position: on the threshold. As Nancy,

31

standing in the Louvre before the tall, dark

canvas of Caravaggio, writes: So, we have
entered there where we will never enter. We
are there without leaving the threshold, on the
threshold, neither inside nor outside and
perhaps we are, ourselves, the threshold.23 This
last, in turn, itself constitutes a crack, the interruption of the continuity of sight, due to a
profound and indissoluble ambiguity.
Ambigere: (potential) movement of wandering,
driving (us) in simul in both directions. For
although ambiguity alone can make choosing
possible, says Blanchot, it always remains
present in the choice itself (261). The duplicity
itself will not be mastered or lifted by a slash or
cut, the choice of eitheror which ambiguity
makes possible; rather this duplicity, says
Blanchot, refers us to a still more primal double
meaning.
Deleuze asks if art would exist in the absence
of man. But is not the cadaverous that to which
the absence of man itself is owed? Or rather, its
withdrawal from the world, together with the
dissipation of all belonging to the world, both in
movement by infinite degrees? Is it not the
cadaverous image that brings the subject not to
the outside but outside itself? To the threshold
where some force (writings force?) maintains it
in the infinite movement of its disappearance?
(No one could say [emphasis added], without
being inconsistent: man is what steals away [last
emphasis by Blanchot, IC 23].) And is not the
interval the groundless ground on which the
subject is constituted as (a) being always already
in the state of deconstitution that is without end?
(In the ebb of the world which it causes, there
trails, like a glistening debris, the outmost depth
of our passions [emphasis added, TVI 262].)
l In order to speak of the cadaverous we must
first close our eyes, and yet, being strictly for the
eyes, neither speech nor concept would apprehend it. The cadaverous is the outside of speech
and writing toward which and outside of which
discourse speaks. Moving on the reverse side,
outside the space toward which it speaks, the
writing of the Outside traces a trajectory of
curvature. Curved, it incessantly unworks the
opposition: inside/outside. So that its discourse
may advance, advance incessantly, toward that

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

whose light has never received language
(Foucault, TO 25).
l If a minute ago the image was spoken of as
an apparatus of capture, then we have just found
another bind: writing on the limit, toward the
limit, writing incessantly tracing the infinite
movement of an approach, of a surrender to idleness, to the reign of passivity. For the absence
of work only calls for more writing, which itself
would only approach the end, never crossing over
to the region where, tired of the game of the
double meaning would escape not into another
meaning, but into the other of all meaning
(emphasis by Blanchot, TVI 263).

III lines of flight

How do you get out from a black hole?
Deleuze

But how do you exit from a double apparatus of

capture? Is there a concept, an operator, powerful enough to interrupt it or bring war to it? If
writing were sorcery, (how) would it take you
outside this double bind? For the subjects
discourse before the image neither mirrors nor in
some other way represents the interminable
movement of desubjectification set in motion by
its imaginary. Rather it conjugates with the
cadaverous logic.
Two escape routes have been promised. In
truth, however, Derrida does not attempt to
escape. Although he promises war (stratagem,
strategy this meant war [MB 37]), he chooses
flight into flight, follows, as he has always done,
the path of the graphic trait to the limit. There,
the difference between the marks of drawing and
writing becomes indistinguishable (or imperceptible) as they both plunge into a blindness that is
at once more originary than anything visible,
than the visible/invisible itself, and older than
any origin. In the sacrificial move, drawing, or
rather, drawing as image also vanishes from
sight: is turned into memory/memoirs, the stuff
of discourse, which itself is blind. (Of course no
escape is ever that simple. And all the while that
eyes are being violently gouged on the paper, or
blinded by jealousy, or veiled by tears the
cadaverous double returns to haunt the scene of
writing: the self-portrait of drawing, blind, will

be mirrored/repeated both in the drawings of the

draftsmens self-portraits and in the text. This
last, as the books subtitle The Self-portrait and
Other Ruins indicates, is itself a self-portrait. But
whose? The narrators? Derridas? Serving as
models for its design (dessin as well as
dessein) are other self-portraits; the visage it
presents reflects by design the self-portraits of
others, Rousseaus for example, which itself is
drawn after and resembles by design
Augustines self-portrait And so, as Borges
predicted, a veritable labyrinth opens in the place
where the writing hand plants face-to-face these
reflections.)
The other route followed by Deleuze is at once
opaque and imperceptible: the writing does not
bend to reflect itself; crossing the void with the
aid of a faint (TP 268), it conserves no memory
of its passage. Better still, in the good tradition
of white sorcery or theurgy, it brings oblivion,
makes one forget, it wills itself to forget, actively,
the catastrophe that has passed and of which it is
literally the aftermath. Tracking a line of flight
by definition imperceptible, camouflaging the
path of its passage requires patience and vigilance. Something, a movement, to betray it. But
to detect the catastrophe that has always already
passed and is inexperiencable in the present, is
(almost) impossible. The collapse of the coordinates that invisibly hold up the cadaverous takes
place in the blink of an eye, and will only be
recuperated after the fact. As an (after) effect: the
abolition of the interval and thereby the destitution of the being whose being it maintains as
ungrounded, as undone at the limit and on
whose vision or look the apparatus of capture
turns as invisible pivot.
Now Deleuze might say that the move of this
destitution is effectuated by concept (one gets
out of philosophy by way of philosophy), that to
get outside the cadaverous is to fabricate a
concept or concepts percept, affect,
blocks of sensation, for example which would
either do away with its presence altogether,
eliminating it from the phenomenal field, or
would situate it on the side of but of what?
The object, the corpse itself? The cadaverous as
a sort of Epicurean phantasma rising to the
surface of the corpse, soliciting the subject? But

32

baross
such distinctions/divisions as subject/object
have long since ceased to apply. After the catastrophe, we are not in the world, we become
with the world (WIP 169). Following the logic
of sensation one could speak of the cadaverous
as a pure being of sensation (but then the
cadaverous is the impure par excellence), or as
being independent of any subjectivity,
consciousness and any other relation (emphasis
added, LS 24). (But then again, the cadaverous
we said is not any one composite or compound
block or thing or becoming, located here or elsewhere, but rather a relation between here and
nowhere: an economy of war, a haunting presence, haunting, soliciting presence from the
outside, that is, without itself being fully
present.)
The concept, however, does not take you
outside. For obvious reasons, apparatus of
capture, the concept, already operates on the
outside, it itself captures the mechanism from its
reverse side. The move takes place elsewhere
(which does not surprise us since to hide, to
camouflage oneself, is a warrior function [TP
277]). But to track down a move is not to be
confused with explicating the inexplicable or
calculating after the fact the incalculable: the
blink, the turn, the faint. (How to make a
move? [N 138], is not a question waiting for an
answer but the sorcererphilosophers prayer.) In
tracing a move, one pursues not the hiatus of a
faint, but what follows it. An operation and a new
domain.
The writing as we said will not trace its passage
(through disaster), it does not specularize itself,
turn to reflect (on) itself in its own mirror. On
the contrary, it takes flight from self-reflection
(which creates the surface effect, precisely, that
will lead some commentators to mistake
Deleuzes concepts for descriptions of states of
affairs). Yet, the literary asceticism is not a question of style, but a strategy for making a move.
(For he who knows how to cross the limit
accedes to new figures [ECC 20].) In a purely
graphic operation (which will not be acknowledged or reflected [on] in the text, and thus
must be reconstructed from its aftereffect) the
writing moves against the curvature that has been
brought to its line by modern literature, but espe-

33

cially by deconstruction. (For what is subjectification about but bringing a curve to the line
[N 113]? Thus even in deconstruction, the
subject is traced in the state of destitution,
deconstitution, deconstruction.) Moving without
turning around, unbending the line of reflection,
the graphic trait dispels the cadaverous presence
but also the uncanny, the specter, the double
from writings domain; closing up the deconstructive dimension, it eliminates the gap in
which and that which the cadaverous (but also
the trace, differance, the pharmakon, the supplement) performs, also in the linguistic sense. In
the wake of the traits passage as if in a disaster the hollowing out of time and space, the
vertiginous depths of language itself are made to
withdraw to the surface of the plane. Hugging
closely to the surface of the plane, philosophy
itself becomes a general dermatology or art of
surfaces (N 87). As Nancy observes, Deleuzes is
a philosophy of nomination and not of
discourse (DF 111). In other words, the writing
itself moves: to the periphery of language, close
to the asemantic limit of the semantic gesture
so that it may arrest the irresistible movement of
its own graphic mark toward becoming sign,
semeia, signification. A double, and therefore
spectral, specular open to the force of dissemination, to the logic of supplementarity, of differance 24
A veritable anamorphosis this planeology is
or appears to be: the interval seems to extenuate into zones of indiscernability; the underivable double into a multiplicity without the
unity of an ancestor (TP 241); the uncanny
into the anomalous, the threshold to a
borderline line. Yet, deformations, especially
catastrophic ones, are irreversible. The new terms
designate not analogous, i.e., similarly anomalous phenomena, but are concepts, without a
deconstructive dimension. The plane is
absolutely heterogeneous and radically discontinuous with the cadaverous. It is another
universe. (The language of nomination, Nancy
says, effectuates a universe rather than a world
[DF 111].) As universe, it has no memory of
other worlds. A milieu of events, it is without
an interval: even the void is sensation (WIP
165). In zones of indeterminacy, in movements of

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

becoming, a-subjective, impersonal intensities,
compounds of sensations couple, transform,
vibrate, migrate, intersect, split apart, diverge,
pass from one being/body/surface/flesh to
another without memory.
And yet, the shadow of a double is about to
pass over this scene. From the outside, a
semblance already solicits this landscape without
man: the universe after the disappearance of
man re-sembles precisely a world (of
Blanchot) where there is no longer limit or
interval, where all belonging to the world is
dissipated (emphases added, TVI 262).
But before allowing this shadow to pass
through, let us first ask what catastrophe befalls
paintings image? What happens to what
Malevich calls its visage once canvas and paint
become subject to the logic and its principal
agent, the blind hand? In Logique de la sensation, the text this time (where, significantly, the
writing hand is camouflaged and perhaps even
manipulates the other hand which paints the
catastrophe that collapses the visual coordinates
of the canvas), we read: Sensation is what is
painted. What is painted on the canvas is the
body in so far as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation (23). Then in What Is
Philosophy? where the presence of the writer is
no longer dissimulated or feigned to be, the same
radical independence of sensation of any
subjectivity, consciousness and any other relation is once again affirmed:
The young girl maintains the pose that she has
had for five thousand years The air still has
the turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light
that it had that day last year, and it no longer
depends on whoever was breathing it that
morning The thing became independent of
its model from the start, but it is also independent of other possible personae who are
themselves artists-things, personae of painting
breathing this air of painting. And it is no less
independent on the viewer or hearer, who only
experience it after, if they have the strength for
it What is preserved the thing or the work
of art is a bloc of sensations, that is to say
a compound of percepts and affects
Sensations, percepts and affects are beings
whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds
any lived. (Emphasis by Deleuze 16364)

Let us remain with the picture of the young girl,

which, as we are inclined to forget, is offered (or
shall we say painted?) by the philosophernarrator. This time appearing in person, it is he who
gives us this picture to look at, which we have no
trouble recognizing as familiar. (But then what is
familiar? The content of the representation? Or
precisely the picture? Its haunting, as haunting?) Readers of Foucaults meditations on painting (TNP) will perhaps also recognize the
mise-en-scene of Foucaults philosophernarrator, appearing as it were in the theater of his own
thought, before a trompe-loeil. (Again, whether
the picture is a copy or a phantasma, whether
Foucault is an image maker or only a copyist,
is strictly undecidable.) Deleuze, however, does
not borrow Foucaults rhetorical figure of
prosopopoeia, which, in a double ventriloquy,
turns to address its maker: What you see on the
walls surface is not an aggregate of lines and
colors. It is depth, sky, clouds that have shaded
your house a stairway that continues the steps
you have begun to climb (TNP 43).
Differing from his model, itself an eminently
painterly move, Deleuze shows his hands: eliminates from the scene the subject on Foucaults
stage still solicited, brought to the threshold by
the very figures, whose smile (at your astonishment) draws life from the gaze they themselves
astonish.
Deleuzes young girl still maintains her pose,
but everything else has changed. The pivot or
to call it by its other names: the subject, the gaze,
the look is absent. Its place the threshold,
precisely has closed up like a wound. (The
very word [look] itself doesnt once appear in
your book. Is this deliberate? asks with a
naivete that is perhaps feigned by the interlocutor (N 54). Deleuzes answer is as simple as
it is instructive: I was writing philosophy
books [N 137].) The absence of the gaze does
not result from an operation of exclusion, which
leaves a scar, a trace; instead, its very place falls
away, radically. Of the interval nothing remains.
There are no remains. Not even a trace of its
memory. For both trace and memory are cadaverous intimate with death, they haunt presence.
In the place of the image, an image has been
liberated: free from any relation; anonymous,

34

baross
impersonal, indefinite a woman, a child, a
smile, a yellow patch of wall. Floating outside
space, it will have left its support: frame, architecture, or face; it stands apart and outside space.
An image neither is, nor has a relation, nor
brings anything (here and nowhere) in relation; on the contrary, it stands apart: is
anywhere, anywhere-what-so-ever in depotentialized space. No longer holding us at a
distance, it itself is distant, distance. An image
no longer makes us submit passively to our own
intimacy as if to another, exterior power; it has
no powers to deliver us to ourselves, or, by dislocating us, to make us encounter as floating
outside, in the ebb of the world it provokes the
depth of our own passions. Itself floating outside
(a floating close-up, ECC 168), it is just an
image without any originary or proprietary
relation to us, to model, to painter. (Not a
just image just an image, Deleuze likes to quote
Godard [N 38].)
With an image new and different possibilities
open up: previous orders of hierarchy, absolute
heterogeneity, discontinuity crumble: blocks
of sensation take the place of language (WIP
176); painting speaks the language of sensation;
an image passes from sound to vision (something seen or heard is called Image [ECC 158]).
Now writing itself pursues the difficult and rarely
successful task of making an image. Exhausted
on his death bed, the writer may say Ive made
an image.25
l

l l

Another world looms up, says the Logic of

Sensation, the text. Have we been brought at
last to the Outside?

The formulation we know is extremely dangerous, risks reconverting the Outside into the
positive presence of exteriority, of another
imaginary. Wary of such regression, we have
seen the thinkers of the outside warning against
any such move. Reading Foucault, Deleuze
himself formulates the inside as the operation of
the outside. Nancy and Derrida both resist the
leap that would amount to throwing oneself
elsewhere [emphasis by Nancy] (as if another
world would open up) (emphasis added, Nancy,

35

DF 109), or would claim to do away immediately with previous marks and to cross over by
a single leap, into the outside (emphasis added,
Derrida, D 5). Foucault, as if following up on
Derridas remarks on marks, introduces the
whole question of language: the extreme difficulty of giving a language to the outside. (This
ought to make us pause before writing after the
disappearance of man, as well as before the
meaning of writing after the disappearance of
man.)
There is no time to do justice here to any
of these concerns, nor to develop a formulation
of the move that itself would do justice to
the promise of the disparate opening yet
another relation, and thereby taking us outside
every opposition, symmetry, dialectics of
inside/outside. But perhaps it is still possible to
say without reducing or effacing the radical
heterogeneity of the Outside that we have been
brought outside, or rather, writing has brought
us outside the Lure of the Image: the concept
and the discourse; the image, the imagery, the
imaginary; theories and phantasmas of the image;
icons, iconologies and iconographies; philosophical, metaphysical, critical, aesthetic traditions
with long and richly diverse histories; textual,
pictorial, cinematographic and photographic
hermeneutics, representations, speculations and
theories of the image. In short, writing
Logique de la sensation has delivered us from
the image of thought which imagines (in the
sense Philostratus uses the word imagines) and
itself is a prodigious producer of images of the
image as apparatus of capture and lure (while also
being the fertile soil for the infinite possibilities
of having illicit relations and dangerous consorts
with the image which begin with a word as old
as the Word and an image as old as the reflection
of Narcissus).
And yet, once again we are brought to asking:
What does all this mean? Has the affair of the
image just been done with? Is writings
protracted and vexatious affair with the cadaverous finished, terminated, brought to an end at
last, in and by writing? Without reversion, resistance, restance, or remains? Did not Blanchot
tell us that to speak of the cadaverous is to close
the eyes? That being strictly for the eyes, speech

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

or concept could not apprehend it? That the
cadaverous was outside the reach of speech and
writing the Outside toward which and outside
of which our discourse speaks?

IV (what) remains
The resistance we shall call it the
restance
Derrida
Closing his meditations on the second and cadaverous version of the imaginary, Blanchot
proposes a double articulation between image
and magic. First, the cadaverous mimics a
mode of action that properly belongs to magic
and its domain: in a performance that is itself
double, it arouses things as reflections at the
same time as it makes consciousness dissipate
(seppaissir) into a thing. Then magie noir,
the only serious magic, itself takes from the
images powers as it turns by preference to the
strangeness of the cadaver (ltranget
cadavrique) (TVI 262/ DVI 357).
Turning to philosophy, should we not expect
its discourse to avail itself of the effects of the
power of this magic? Should we not suspect it of
sorcery, especially when it comes to the vexatious
and oldest of problems whose specter has been
haunting its discourse ever since Plato failed to
shut out the semblances clamoring at the door?
Would logos not be forced to summon the
powers of the image at the very moment that it
begins to wage war against the image the
pretender, specter, apparition, phantasma, delusion, false copy ? (But then
these designations already bear the marks of
philosophys moves against the image.) For
evidence, we need not look further than the cave
metaphor: itself a magnificent image, itself
imaging and imagining the cinema, even if only
to turn it off, as a perfect apparatus of capture.
Should we then suspect a sleight of hand every
time the writing hand performs one of its operations on the face of the image? And at the same
time a ruse on the part of the image, traversing
surreptitiously the path of its disappearance, in
reverse, in order to stage its reappearance?
Answers to these questions will have to be
deferred until after a close reading of the texts.26

For now, the briefest of references will have to

suffice to what is a long history of complicity
between philosophy and the image, or between
making philosophy and making images (of which
we have just
seen two instances).
Not by accident, the camouflage philosophy
throws over the evidence of a relation that it
itself interdicts is made visible in works by the
same generation whose inheritance prompted
these meditations. But besides secret, repressed,
and illicit relations, there is ample prima facie
evidence of a philosophy openly consorting with
the image, of the philosopher himself soliciting
paint and color, even today. Standing next to the
painter, Deleuze himself trembles with terror
before color; and as we know, relations with the
image have been neither renounced nor
suspended either by rhizomatics or genealogy or
deconstruction. (Foucaults Las Meninas,
Deleuzes own attraction to Godard and Bacon
are in keeping with a long tradition: Heideggers
turn to van Goghs Pair of Peasant Boots,
Merleau-Pontys long affair with Czanne, or the
brief encounters between Lyotard and Newman,
de Certeau and The Garden of Earthly
Delights, Nancy and Caravaggio, Kristeva and
Giotto are only the first examples that come
quickly to mind. If Derridas name is missing
from this list of colorists, it is because he
prudently avoids color and, while leaving the
medusant gaze also in the shadows, remains
fidel to the line: the borderline of the frame or
the graphic line of drawing.) But even this, or
rather, especially this open relation which is
exhibited, as it were, on the face of the page,
should be read together with the testimonies
of deconstruction. Among them, Nancys
critical studies of mimesis, of the mimetology
and mimontology of Plato and Descartes
provide shining examples for showing up the
philosopher as himself an image maker: at once
illusionist, ventriloquist, and poetic demiurge.27
The creator of masks, the painter of idols, he
hides behind self-portraits,
semblances;
camouflaged, in hiding, imperceptible by design,
he performs his most secret philosophical
prestidigitations out of sight, behind the
screens or mask of images that he himself would
paint.

36

baross
We have only glimpsed at traces of the signs
of such sorcery in the writings of Deleuze and
Derrida. Still, perhaps we have seen enough to be
able to pronounce a paradox: in these more
recent philosophical thaumaturgies (for as
Deleuze tells us, he writes philosophy books)
what is effectuated, with the aid of the image, is
the disappearance of the cadaverous image itself.
(If it is to be sorcery, writing must both conjure
and conjure away.) If more time was spent here
on Deleuzes case, it is only because his prestidigitations behind the screen plunge us not into
a darkness and blindness without exit. They
conjure an image. This last, we have seen,
neither resembles, nor represents nor imitates;
instead, it instantiates the nonhuman becomings of man, which itself is a landscape in
the absence of man, after the disappearance of
man.
And yet, as was said a while ago, this landscape bears a certain resemblance. The act of
instantiation bears something other, transports
something in excess of the instance. A
semblance. The re-semblance is not to an original
or model, but to another other world: where
there are no ends (TVI 262), in other words, the
end of the ends of man. The landscape from
which man is absent re-sembles with
Blanchots neutral: the realm of indifference, without an interval or the curvature of
(self)reflection. But more significantly than the
bare fact of a resemblance which nonetheless
cannot but reintroduce the dimension of spectrality this end of man is but the projection
(in every sense of the word) of the cadaverous
image itself, promising to deliver the subject
from itself.
This resonance or sympathy greatly complicates matters. A relation appears to have been
established between two discontinuous and
heterogeneous domains and trajectories: a
world and the universe; the discourses of the
curvature and of the plane. Is the relation a
disparate? Or is it rather a spectral connection,
one in which the specter infects the universe
with its memory? Does not the desire to surrender subjectivity originate with the image? (One
image offered by Deleuze is Virginia Woolfs
Mrs. Dalloway pass[ing] into the town like a

37

knife through everything and becom[ing] imperceptible herself [WIP 169].) Is not the image
the source of the desire? (And here we recall that
source also translates the Italian la fonte or
the spring by which the very first encounter takes
place, and which source, according to Alberti,
also gives birth to the invention of painting.) Is
not the perversion of the sacrifice of the
subject (of being subject, or what amounts to the
same thing, of being visible) the suggestion of the
image itself? Or in Foucaults language, its
implentation? Was this not demonstrated for
the very first time to Narcissus bending,
precisely, over the source? Indifferent to the
voice calling him but captive of an image (I
know my image!), Narcissus dissipates into a
thing or rather himself becomes an image: a
flower (Monets lilies?) floating on the waters
surface. For Blanchot, this dissipation is the very
meaning of the phrase of living an event as
image: To live an event as an image is not to
have an image of this event, nor to give it the
gratuity of the imaginary What arrives takes
hold of us as we would take hold of the image.
That is, it releases us, from it and from ourselves.
It holds us outside, makes of this outside a presence where the I does not recognize itself
(translation altered, TVI 262). Vivre un vnement en image, ce nest pas avoir de cet vnement une image, ni non plus lui donner la
gratuit de limaginaire Ce qui arrive nous
saisit, comme nous saisirait limage, cest--dire
nous dessaisit, de lui et de nous, nous tient au
dehors, fait de ce dehors une prsence o Je ne
se reconnat pas (DVI 357).
Is it then that the catastrophe is not a
destruction, pure and simple? Not even thoughts
flight from the image? But on the contrary, the
event that delivers the cadaverous promise, and
terminates in an instant precisely behind the
thinkers back the images interminable movement by infinite degrees?
l l

One last question remains, on the side of writing:

what remains of writing after the end of man,
after the disappearance of man? If some commentators lament that Deleuzes writing is often
misread as descriptions of states of affairs, then

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

this misreading points us again in the writings
direction.28 Neither following a turn nor executing a return (to old problems) nor, as description
would have it, writing mistaking itself for vision
and opening the rooftops directly to the gaze
the graphic trait moves to efface itself as writing.
And yet, despite the resistance, Nancy
succeeds in prying open a path to the text as
such:
It is a philosophy of nomination not of
discourse. It is a matter of naming the forces,
the moments and the configurations, not
unravelling the meaning or following it back.
Naming, in itself, is not a semantic operation:
the point is not to signify things but rather to
index by means of proper names the elements
of the virtual universe. The proper name is
the asemantic limit of the semantic gesture.
To bring to language does not here mean to
translate into language but it means to have
language bear the weight of what it is not.
(Emphasis by Nancy, DF 111)

Still, how are we to engage this language which

flees, takes flight from language itself?
Anachronic, at once most archaic and most
contemporary, that is, post-contemporary. It
emulates the oldest of language functions:
creation, the production of worlds not their
representation. (Language I: words must no
longer give a realization to the possible, but must
themselves give the possible a reality that is
proper to it [ECC 156].) As language, it assembles at once with prophecy (which Foucault says
neither predicts nor forecasts but brings about
the truth) and with the oldest of narratives: songs
which sing the world into existence and whose
lines (song-lines) need only be followed to
traverse the world afterwards, along well-traveled, that is, intelligible, sensible, paths. At the
same time, this writing is also most contemporary: breaks with or folds against, without opposing, the writing of the fold par excellence:
deconstructive writing which, opening the gap,
exposes itself to the disastrous forces of the
Outside, unworking its meaning, its meaning to
say.
But could we still force (i.e., solicit) the writing by forcing it to bend toward itself, against

itself? Effacing itself (as writing), itself becoming

imperceptible, the writing moves to close up the
gap between its mark and its referent. It says
the concept speaks the event (WIP 21). But
how does it speak it? Without remains? Of
course, no such totalizing claim will be made.
(The relation of the transcendental field to
consciousness is only de jure: not by fact but by
right, thinkings right [I 3]; then in a similarly
elliptic move, the plane of immanence is neither
a concept nor the concept of all concepts [WIP
35].) The field the ground/background
against which thought thinks is recognized as
always already in excess of that which can be
thought, beyond the grasp of concepts, of recognition, of conceptual language as such.
Nonetheless, while this oblique reference to a
remainder sets off unspoken resonances with
Derridas meditations on the irremediably
metaphoric language of philosophy, the difference of gestures remains, as he would say sans
fond. But our problem is not that of the limit:
writing announcing, naming the limit. (Still,
how could the limit of naming itself be named?)
Our question how does the concept speak the
event? concerns rather the aftermath. What
aftermath follows from the event of the
concept of disaster, or even better, the
concept from which everything follows: the
concept of the concept having been spoken?
What is the graphic marks relation to that which
it (only) liberates to what it can do? As
neither writing nor concept can supervise, oversee, the aftermath of the event of its own enunciation. It cannot re-appropriate its sayings to its
saying.
But let us open another gap by way of curvature, or restate the same gap in another way. The
true event, by necessity rather than right, is
non-operational; falling outside the realm of
every operation, work, calculation, the event is
inoperative: desoeuvrement, the suspension of
operation, of work which it idles. Instead of
referring to thinkings right, the law this time
stipulates the condition for there to be an event:
the suspension of operations. To encounter an
event is to suspend every operation. (One may
ask, of course, but what about this concept of the
event as desoeuvrement as such? What about its

38

baross
work? Indeed, what this concept does is to
suspend its own operations and situate event
beyond the limit of any work and performance
as that which must be awaited, for it will take
place, if it takes place, by grace or chance. But
rather than speaking the event, the concept
would only speak toward it, its coming; and yet,
speaking this way, it itself would be a response
to its coming, by waiting, by suspending operations .)
Hence, the question is not what remains of
writing, but what remains after, or better still,
what resists writing after the disappearance of
man? What it bears in excess of the constative
(of absence)? This last question is not of the same
order as asking what it means to write after or
even for, that is, in the place of the disappearance of man. What the question asks about is the
aftereffect of writing, of writing itself effectuating
a landscape in the absence of man or a landscape after man. Granted, it is man that disappears in the place of enunciation. And yet, this
writing is both transitive and reflexive, in
simul. Its proper form thus ought to be
scrire. It bears something, in excess of what
it speaks, of the landscape without man it
effectuates. This something is no longer man
or a subject, not even a grammatical one. So
what is it? As both Deleuze and Nancy may say,
a haecceitas: at once the thisness and hereness of and that something (the absence of man)
has been announced. A singular difference has
been effectuated. Even if, or
rather especially as the writing
of no one, this last at once
bears and exposes us to something entirely other than us
(IC 14).

notes
1 The notion of a war being waged by the acolytes
I owe to conversations with Stephen Ross.
2 When we speak of communication between
heterogeneous systems, of coupling and resonance, does this not imply a minimum of resemblance between the series? Would not too
much difference render any such operation
impossible? Are we not condemned to rediscover
a privileged point at which difference can be

39

understood only by virtue of a resemblance

between things which differ and the identity of a
third party? Thunderbolts explode between
different intensities, but they are preceded by an
invisible, imperceptible dark precursor [emphasis by
Deleuze] which determines their path in advance
(last emphasis added, DR 119).
3 The biographical information that accompanied
the recent telecasting of Derrida live online from
Sydney speaks of 14,000 citations, 400 books
about his work, and one book with his name in the
title being published every week somewhere in
the world. ABC special August 12, 1999, live
broadcast from Sydney Town Hall. Biography by
Jose Borghiro.
4 Translations of Derridas text are mine throughout this essay.
5 The two examples that come quickly to mind
remain equivocal and in their interpretation tenuous: in 1962, Deleuze, who is using at the time the
voice of Nietzsche, announces the end of the the
ends of man as problematic, as a question: the
aim of critique is not the ends of man but the
Overman [Superman] (NP 94); in wholly
Derridean fashion, one could read this
untimely/dis-chronic missive as having been sent
to intercept Derridas own essay, which arrives six
years later in 1968, still not having done with the
question; or alternatively, one may find a
semblance that fails to be remarked or resemble, this time in Derridas The Ends of Man.
While the closing remarks there observe the
greatest proximity in Nietzsche between the
superior man (hhere Mensch) and the superman
(bermensch), they leave unremarked, in the last
picture they paint of the Superman, dancing, the
strange resemblance and an ultimate complicity
between a Superman (who leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind him and burns
his text and erases the traces of his steps) and
Deleuzes philosophy/philosopher in flight.
Another equivocal missive, now in the proper
order of time, may have been sent by Deleuze,
thinking genesis with structure. This time
himself ignoring Derridas last question in The
Ends of Man But who, we? (WM 136)
Deleuze writes, one imagines in response to
Derridas Genesis and Structure: we see no
difficulty in reconciling genesis and structure
structuralism seems to us the only means by
which a genetic method can achieve its ambitions
(emphasis added, DR 183).

deleuze, derrida, blanchot

6 See Derridas Specters of Marx and Deleuzes
On Four Poetic Formulas (ECC 2735).
7 You have little ears, you have my ears: put a
shrewd word there, cites Deleuze Nietzsches
whisper to Ariadnes tiny ear. Then continues:
The ear is labyrinthine, the ear is the labyrinth of
becoming or the maze of affirmation (NP 188).
While Derrida, who is reading Nietzsches An
ear! An ear as big as a man! in The Ear of the Other
(3), speaks of all the affiliated threads of the
name leading to a labyrinth which is, of course,
the labyrinth of the ear (11).
8 The original text had been lost and in fact had
never been seen or read. The French version,
which appeared after the publication of the English
translation, is in fact a translation back to French
of the English translation, which was first read at
another conference.
9 ric Alliez, Ontologie et logographie: La pharmacie, Platon et le simulacre, and Francis Wolff,
Trios: Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, historiens du
Platonisme, both in Nos grecs et leur modernes, ed.
Barbara Cassin.
10 Un vritable systme de renvois (latents et
manifestes) entre Deleuze et Derrida [emphasis
added, 215]; en fait, crit Derrida dune vein toute
deleuzienne [emphasis added, 215]; lchange de
ces lettres platoniciennes circul[e] entre Jaqcues
Derrida et Gilles Deleuze [emphasis added, 219];
une profondeur plus profonde que tout fond cest
la rponse [emphasis added] profondment
ontologique de Deleuze la question formule par
Derrida (217); Rptant [emphasis added] que la
diffrence est la seule origine, cest la diffrance de
Derrida que va renvoyer Deleuze (emphasis by
Alliez, 223).
11 Cest l que jhsiterai le plus (emphasis added)
suivre Wolff: en particulier (emphasis added)
quand il mattribue le thme dune fin de la mtaphysique. Non seulement je ny crois pas, mais jai
souvent insist sur une diffrence dterminant
entre fin et clture (emphasis by Derrida 272);
and again, Aussi nai-je jamais dit que les Grecs ne
disaient pas le vrai. Jai mme insist sur le contraire
(264); then again: Wolff dit eux, jai du mal
lentendre alors (262). Certes, mais cela ne se fait
pas seulement [emphasis by Derrida] comme le
dit encore Alliez (emphasis added, 261).
12 A la diffrence de Foucault et de Deleuze, jai
sans cesse d thmatiser une explication avec

Heidegger (et depuis le dbut une explication dconstructrice portant en particulier sur sa mise en
perspective pochale sa manire de situer le Grec
et la langue greque voil qui marque au moins en
puissance des rserves ou des carts difficiles integrer dans une configuration (emphasis added, 256).
13 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1979) 1718.
14 We read in The Infinite Conversation:
Remember that the verb to find [trouver] does
not first of all mean to find, in the sense of a practical scientific result. To find is to turn, to take a
turn about, to go around (25); and One who
goes astray, who has left the protection of the
center, turns about (26).
15 My discussion here and elsewhere in this paper
of a breakthrough breaching or frayage
draws on Derridas Outwork in Dissemination,
1981, 364.
16 Again, the terms are Derridas, Dissemination,
33, n 32.
17 On the Threshold, Paragraph, 111.
18 Radical change might be conveyed if it were
specified in the following manner: from what
comes to pass, the present is excluded. Radical
change would itself come in the mode of the unpresent, which it causes to come, without thereby
either consigning itself to the future (foreseeable
or not), or withdrawing into a past (transmitted or
not). The Writing of the Disaster, 114.
19 See Blanchots The Song of the Sirens, The
Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill, 1981).
20 Thought and the Exigency of Discontinuity,
The Infinite Conversation, 6.
21 Speaking is
Conversation, 28.

not

Seeing,

The

Infinite

22 Merleau-Ponty, LOeil et lEsprit (Paris:

Gallimard, 1964) 3839. For a discussion of
Merleau-Pontys critique of geometral optics,
see Lacans What is a Picture in Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).
23 On the Threshold, Paragraph, 111 (emphasis
added).
24 Still acting as my guide, Blanchot of course
would question nomination act, writing, language

40

baross
effacing itself in this way. He writes: Of course
my language does not kill anyone. And yet: when I
say This woman a real death has been announced
and is already present in my language; my language
means that this person can be detached from
herself and suddenly plunged into a nothingness
; my language essentially signifies the possibility
of this destruction. [Literature and the Right to
Death, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis
(Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981) 42.]
25 But here another image instantly intrudes:
Prousts Bergotte standing on the threshold of
death and, what for him will be the same thing, on
the threshold of Vermeers patch of yellow wall:
He fixed his eyes like a child on a yellow butterfly on the precious little patch of wall This
is how I ought to have written, he said. He
repeated to himself: little patch of yellow wall
while doing so he sank upon the circular divan
he was dead [The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott
Moncrief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929)
24950]. If Proust here succeeds in making an
image, does not the success depend upon writing,
whispering, confessing its jealousy of the image,
in full color? In a celestial balance there appeared
to him upon one of its scales, his own life, while
the other contained the little patch of wall so
beautifully painted in yellow. Does not the
ekphrasis borrow its force from the image with
which it so deftly allies itself coming dangerously
close to it, as if a satellite in a gravitational
bypass taking velocity from the planet whose
dangerous pull it also must avoid?
26 See my forthcoming Deleuze and Derrida:
Thaumaturgy and Self-portrait.
27 See Nancys Le ventriloque, in S. Agacinski,
Mimesis des articulations and Larvatus Pro Deo,
Glyph.
28 Comment by Paul Patton at the International
Conference, Genealogy Deconstruction Rhizomatics,
Trent University, May 2426, 1999.

Zsuzsa Baross
Cultural Studies Program
Trent University
Peterborough
Ontario K9J 7B8
Canada
E-mail: zbaross@trentu.ca