Signifying and the Feeling of Differences①

Samuel Weber

Abstract：What does Werner Hamacher’s concept of archiphilology have in common with Saussure’s view of intra-linguistic, differential function in language? Perhaps the way in which the indefinite of language itself “slowly defines itself,” both in response to past acts of appropriations, and appealing for new signifieds the meaning of which can only be seized and unseized over time. Several of Kafka’s short stories illustrate how literary works play out the same tension within what can be called a “progressive and digressive” narrative, warding off any internal principle of closure or conclusiveness while continuing to require endings and answers. Hölderlin’s “Remarks on (Sophocles’) Antigone” offers a new angle to consider the rapport with the (fatherlandic) tradition, not an outright “overturning,” but a poetic, “skewed” point of view that both acknowledges one’s limitations in understanding one’s historical situation and allows feelings for differences of singular lives.

Keywords：Hamacher; Saussure; Kafka; Hölderlin; archiphilology; response and appeal

I

Let me begin by noting a rather curious fact of English linguistic usage. In English, in contrast to certain other Indo-European languages (French and German for instance), the word “language” is rarely used with the definite article. Where this does occur, it stands out as unusual, even a bit bizarre, at least to my ears and eyes. It is as if “language” resisted the kind of definition that would justify use of the definite article. Would it be possible that this more or less spontaneous usage that denies the definite article to “language” itself reflects something essential to language, or more precisely, to its use by English speakers? For we should never lose sight of the fact that we are dealing here not with “language as such” or “in general” but with the experience of a particular language, English, as used by a particular group of speakers, namely with American English. Given this important limitation, it would be both precipitous and presumptuous to want to draw general conclusions. But since such usage is rarely planned out or deliberate, this allows us to consider whether this “spontaneity” might not reveal something significant about languages more generally. In this paper I want to think a bit more about this possibility.

English usage does not seem to have a problem referring to “language” in the singular, nor to “languages” in the plural; but given the absence of the definite article, this plurality of “languages” would have to be composed not of an accumulation of well-defined individual languages, but rather of a series of indefinite ones. In the second thesis of his “95 Theses on Philology”, the German critic and philosopher Werner Hamacher declares that “There is notonelanguage but a multiplicity; not a stable multiplicity but only a perpetual multiplication of languages” (25). This multiplication, he further suggests, does not consist in the accumulation of self-contained languages, but rather in a process that is internal to each language, because it is internal to language as such, if there is such an “as such.” In other words, the “multiplication” that affects language is first of all intralinguistic as well as interlinguistic, even if this calls into question the borders that are required for us to distinguish “intra” from “inter”. This could explain the hesitancy in English usage to employ the definite article in relation to the word “language.” But this is not to say that language in its constitutive multiplicity cannot be described, up to a point at least. That point perhaps is what inspires Hamacher’s concluding remark, in his final thesis, if it really is a thesis: “The enjoyment (German:Genuß) therein: that the indefinite slowly defines itself” (43, translation modified). If “language” as the interrelationship of its elements retains an element of “the indefinite,” while nevertheless “slowly defin[ing] itself,” then this process — which Hamacher calls “archiphilology” (25) — merits further investigation. How does this process of indefinite self-definition take place? Is it limited to discursive language, or can it be seen to operate wherever any kind of articulation operates? And what of theGenuß (the enjoyment) evoked by this unending process of self-definition? These are some of the questions I will try to examine and circumscribe in what follows.

I want to begin by focusing on the tension this process involves in a self-defining itself, but in-definitely. To do this I suggest we look at two very ordinary English words, namely: “response” and “appeal.” As “archiphilology,” language can also be described as a process of responding and appealing: responding to previous attempts at appropriation, and through such responses appealing for further responses. But what exactly do “respond” and “appeal” signify here? To respond, it will be helpful to recall the Saussurean account of signifying, which the Geneva Linguist places at the core of all language. To signify, a signifier must be differentiated from all the other signifiers in the same language that “surround” it, as Saussure puts it in his posthumously compiled and publishedCourseinGeneralLinguistics(120). “Surround” here means belonging to the same linguistic system, and having a certain resemblance to the signifier in question. But where there is similarity there is also dissimilarity. The English word “response” differentiates itself from its Latin origins through the fact that its semantic “surroundings” include a word that seems to have a similar meaning but one that upon reflection turns out to be quite different from it. This word is of Germanic origin that does not exist (unless I am mistaken) in French: the word “answer.” Signifying initially a verbal response — a “counter-affirmation” or a “countering word” (Middle English:answereorandsware) — this word has taken on a more limited meaning when used in response to a question. To “answer” a question is to provide a relatively definitive solution to it. It is held to provide a certain degree of certainty. A similar claim to certainty underlies a quite different use of “answer,” since it relates not to a question but to an act. But here too the use seems informed by a certain knowledge, since to “answer” for one’s acts is to assert that one knows — or thought one knew — what one was doing. In this sense, in English every “answer” is a response, but not every response is an answer, especially if the latter is defined through the degree of certainty it entails. Bartleby, for instance, responds to the questions and demands of his interlocutors, but his response — “I would prefer not to” — is certainly not an “answer”①. Since this distinction is not lexically fixed in French, the word “response” functions in that language both as a signifier of the general reaction to a stimulus or challenge, and as one that signifies more than just a reaction, but that implies a resolution of uncertainty.

You can see, I hope, why it is important to clarify the distinction between response and answer before going any further. To state that language — and indeed, beyond it, all significant events — function both as response and appeal, raises the question of just how much that response tries to operate as an answer, i.e., to eliminate uncertainty, or to what degree it seeks to disclose its possible significance.

Here once again the recourse to the Saussurean account of signifying may help us further. According to Saussure’s view in theCourseinGeneralLinguistics, the representational-referential-denominational extra-linguistic function of language is conditioned by and dependent on its intra-linguistic, differential function. In other words, in order to represent, refer and name, a linguistic (or non-linguistic) element must be associated and disassociated, compared and contrasted, with other elements of the same system. This is what I have tried to do, very briefly, in my discussion of the word “response” by focusing on its relation to “answer.” At the same time, such a process of comparing and contrasting presupposes as its point of departure a certain recognizable stability of the signifying element, here, the words response and answer. This stability consists in the signifier being associated with a signified in its use.Nosignifierwithoutasignified, is the consecrated formula invoked to describe this condition. The principle of the “signified” remains that of a certain self-identity. Something — whether linguistic, mental or physical — is only recognizable over timeasasignifiedto the extent that it istakento be self-identical, stable and self-contained. The grammatical form of the word itself, as a past participle — signified (signifié in French) — suggests a completed action. This action, which is considered to have already taken place, is regarded as containing, comprehending or encompassing its signification within the compass of its own, proper being. Although such an assumption may well be inevitable, at least to certain uses of language, it is not therefore any less unproblematic. Let me try to illustrate the problem with reference to its performance in a literary text.

II

A literary text can open up a space of alternatives to common usage by revealing the established conventions of meaning not as natural or necessary, but as defensive responses to anxieties of losing control, of others as well as of oneself. To see how by resituating established conventions of meaning as a defensive response, a literary text can open a space of alternatives, I turn to a writer who lived during the definitive decline and demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire, reduced by the First World War to a shadow of its former self. Franz Kafka is doubly foreign to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a German-speaking Czech Jew living mainly in Prague. Perhaps it is this double distance that allowed Kafka to situate his narrative texts often far from the locations he actually inhabited. One such story, like so many of Kafka’s tales never completed, is entitled “While Building the Wall of China” (BeimBauderchinesischenMauer). This title stems from Kafka and should be taken as literally as possible, which is why I use the present participle, “building,” since “Beim Bau” (during construction) suggests that the “building” of the wall is as ongoing and as unfinished as the story itself. But this does not prevent its beginning from suggesting the opposite. This beginning of the story thereby appeals and responds to the shared expectations of meaning of readers who insist on being “let into the secret from first to last”②:

The Chinese wall is terminated at its northernmost point. From the southeast and southwest the building was constructed and joined here. This system of partial construction (Teilbaues) was also pursued on a small scale within the two great corps of workmen, the East and the West Corps. This was accomplished through the formation of groups of about twenty workers, which had to execute a wall part of about five hundred meters in length, while a neighboring group built a wall of the same length to meet it. After the unification had taken place, however, the building was not continued (fortgesetzt) at the end of the thousand meters, but rather the work-groups were sent off to completely different regions to work on the wall. Naturally this resulted in many large gaps, which were only filled up slowly and gradually, sometimes even after the wall-building was declared to be completed. (BeimBauderchinesischenMauer... 263, own translation; “Building the Great Wall of China” 113)

Kafka’s uncompleted story can be read in multiple ways, but for our purposes the most important involves a reflection on language. Like the Chinese Wall, which “was declared to be completed” — by whom we are not told — linguistic events also require a similar decision, which can be explicit but more often is implicitly presupposed, in order to be considered to be complete. However, such a decision can never entirely compensate for what language as a signifying process imposes — namely, the irreducible possibility of inconclusiveness. This possibility can be ignored, denied, disparaged or repressed, but never simply eliminated. And yet the conflict between the desire for completion (or the anxiety of lacking it) and the structural incompletion of a signifying process that is always in excess or in deficiency of its actual manifestations, (this conflict) is never entirely arbitrary or aleatory. This tension is even at the core of what is called “reading.” The difference between “reading” and “non-reading” is generally experienced in terms of the ability to distinguish meaningful utterances from non-meaningful ones. And yet the basis for this distinction is undermined by language as a differential interplay of signifiers that allows for no purely internal and definitive principle of closure. Closure to a degree there must always be, but from the point of view of linguistic signifying its status is always more or less problematic.③

With the figure of the Chinese Wall, Kafka’s story suggests that its “building” is not only an ongoing and perhaps never to be completed process, but also one that is essentially defensive.④What it is defending against is a demand for a certain sense of self-identity, one that may well be more European and Western than Chinese, the result in part of what I have elsewhere discussed as the “monotheological identity paradigm”⑤. This paradigm, which initially is theological, today lives on in so far as it informs a notion of the Self as in principle complete, self-determining and integrated. It is a self in which homogeneity and continuity take precedence over heterogeneity and incompleteness. It is this sense of self that underlies the discourse of the narrator inWhileBuildingtheChineseWall. By being projected onto a distant if “legendary” people and empire, China, it can be made more easily legible and accessible to readers, who for Kafka were far removed from that empire, since they were initially primarily “western” and “European”. The travails that the Austro-Hungarian empire was undergoing at the time — its date of decomposition is generally given as March of 1917, five years after the end of the Qing dynasty and with it over 2000 years of imperial rule in China, and one year before the defeat of the Axis Powers and the definitive dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The German, Ottoman and Romanov empires similarly ended at about the same time.

Thus, Kafka’s story can be read as operating at different levels simultaneously. On the one hand as an historical allegory of the vulnerability of global empires, particularly in and around Western Europe, and on the other as an allegory of a more general linguistic tendency. The attempt to construct a wall to keep out the “nomads” — the uncontrolled, highly mobile wanderers from the north — can thus be understood as a figuration of the inevitable tension that makes reading a highly volatile and unstable process. For on the one hand, it is dependent upon conventionally fixed meanings of words and phrases, in order to allow readers to move from written signs to intellectually conceived meanings; but on the other hand, the very fixity of these meanings is intrinsically dependent on a plurality of possibilities that can never be reduced to a unified, coherent meaning. In times of historical and cultural “stability,” these centrifugal tendencies of language qua a signifying process can be kept under control and may be rendered less prominent. But in times of growing instability, which of course is never just linguistic, these tendencies emerge with renewed force, often provoking violent actions, reactions and denials. Since the process of signifying, whether linguistic or other, consists in a differential interplay of signifiers that excludes any definitiveinternalprinciple of closure while still requiring ends and endings, its inconclusive aspect becomes more difficult to ignore, or, to defend against. Reading can thus oscillate between essentially reproducing the propositional content of words and phrases in the text, as with Borges’ fictional translator, Pierre Menard, who “translates” Cervantes by merely copying the text ofDonQuixote⑥, and a reading that brings something not fully recognized previously by indicating concretely, textually, how such content can be read otherwise than as simply reproducing conventional meanings. This latter form of reading responds not only to the allegedly transparent “content” of words and phrases but also to the effort to represent this content as natural and self-evident: it thereby renders propositional content significant as an effort to defend against fears and challenges that are all the more powerful for being left unsaid. This is how many of Kafka’s texts work, and this is also what Benjamin, in the epigraph of my first lecture, refers to in his letter to Martin Buber.

Their point of departure, as inWhileBuildingtheWallofChina, consists in a silent appeal to the reader’s desire for orientation. This desire is addressed through the manner in which the construction of the wall is described: the first and most important statement is that the wall “was terminated” — something that this particular story will never be (and this despite, as the manuscript variations demonstrate, Kafka’s persistent effort to write a convincing conclusion). Thus, immediately following the narrator’s opening assertion that the wall “was terminated”, this statement is qualified and thereby put into question: the wall “was terminated” but only “atitsnorthernmostpoint,” i.e., at one place but not over all. On the orientation of a map, this “northernmost place” would be the highest, most elevated point, one which, we continue to read, had been approached from below (south-east and south-west). This grid in turn lends visual support to the unusual modular form of construction that seeks to build the wall by assembling its components in a continuous and homogeneous structure. Instead, however, of the assemblage composing an integral “whole,” what results are holes or gaps: “Naturally, with this method many large gaps arose, which were filled in only gradually and slowly...” (BeimBauderchinesischenMauer... 263, own translation; “Building the Great Wall of China” 113). And even this gradual accomplishment is then called into question as “merely an assertion,” and indeed one “which probably belongs among the manylegendswhich have arisen about the structure ...” (Ibid).

The German word,Legende, is derived from the middle-Latinlegenda, which was originally the neuter plural designating “pieces to be read” (“diezulesendenStücke”) (Duden 512). It refers thus both to fragments and to reading. The wordStücke(pieces), a term often used by Kafka to designate his writings⑦, on the other hand, will have to take into account the fragmentary structure of Kafka’s most powerful “stories,” insofar as they reflect among other things the incompletable character of language as signifying process. At the same time, in the Christian tradition the wordlegendis also associated with the reading of saintly lives, suggesting the promise of a fulfilled life beyond death, but then also in the 16thcentury, perhaps as a response to the weakening of belief in an afterlife, giving way to the significance of “an unsubstantiated report or an implausible story” (Duden 512).

Thus, the division of labor reflected in the modular construction of the Great Wall does not suffice to overcome the fragmentary character of the components with which it is working — elements of the Wall required to protectmeaningfrom the centrifugal — nomadic — pull ofsignifiers. And yet this effort is not simply arbitrary or misguided: the emphasis placed on its military component, which has not ceased to determine political developments since Kafka wrote his story, suggests the extent to which social, political and institutional stability requires forceful imposition in order to be maintained. The conflicts that provoke instability are projected outward onto an enemy which is then taken to constitute an external threat, rather than one arising from the unequal relation of society to its members. This kind of externalizing projection seeks thus to protect the homeland through the building of walls, semantic and syntactic as well as geographic.

However, where the rift and danger are internal, walls meant to protect the inside from the outside are of limited efficacy, and this leads Kafka’s narrator to pose the following question: If, he wonders,

the wall ... was conceived as a protection against the people of the north ... how can protection be provided by a wall which is not built continuously? Not only can such a wall not protect, but the structure itself is in constant danger ... Worried about the building of the wall [the nomads] changed their place of residence with incredible speed, like grasshoppers, and thus perhaps had an even better overall view of ... the construction ... (BeimBauderchinesischenMauer... 263-264, own translation; “Building the Great Wall of China” 113)

It should have become obvious that the narration here, as in many other of Kafka’s texts, proceeds through a series of assertions that are almost immediately qualified if not revoked by a train of thought, which, far from resolving or dissolving the question, turns it back upon the previous enunciation, with a speed often attributed to non-human animals or to insects, grasshoppers for instance. Due to their ability to displace themselves rapidly, such non-human living beings can, surprisingly perhaps, obtain “an even better view” of the wall than those who are building it. But that view might also enable them to defeat its human purpose of self-protection.

Occasionally one encounters figures in Kafka’s writing that seem to make visible, or at least legible, the characteristic twists and turns of the narrative in general. One such about whom much has been written, is Odradek, which is first interrogated as a foreign word, then as an inanimate object and finally as an animate being that responds to the narrator’s questions ultimately with something like voiceless laughter, recalling the “rustling of fallen leaves” (Odradek 29). But there is a less remarked figure that perhaps even more manifestly embodies the convoluted movement of the narrative here and elsewhere, whenever the narrative seems torespondto the desire for meaningful sense but without providing any kind ofanswer. I am thinking here of the strange marten-like animal that lives “In Our Synagogue,” another posthumously published unfinished Kafka story. This timorous creature is as shy as it is curious — curious to be seen as well as to see: “It’s only when we start to pray that it appears; alarmed by the noise, it wants to see what’s going on ... Fear causes it to emerge, fear causes it to perform its somersaults” (NachgelasseneSchriftenundFragmenteVol.II409, own translation; “In our Synagogue” 142). The brief description of those somersaults, which capture and condense the sudden changes of pace that give Kafka’s narrative their distinctive rhythm, have their origin significantly not with the thing that is moving, but with the space in which it moves, described quite precisely or incisively as part of the inside of the synagogue:

Above on the opposite wall, there is a very narrow protruding ledge, barely two fingers’ breadth; it runs across three sides of the synagogue; on this ledge the animal sometimes rushes back and forth; usually however it sits quietly in a particular spot overlooking the women. It’s almost inconceivable how it can use this narrow path so easily, and the way, high above, having reached the end (of the ledge), it turns around, is quite remarkable; it is already an old animal, but it does not shrink from taking the boldest leap through the air (Luftsprung), which never fails;whileintheairithasturneditselfaroundandalreadyisretracingitspathback. To be sure, after you have seen that once, you have had enough and have no desire to keep watching. (NachgelasseneSchriftenundFragmenteVol.II, 408, own translation and italics; “In our Synagogue” 141-142)

This animal can sit quietly and observe. In Kafka’s text it observes mainly the women in the synagogue, but sometimes also the men. It moves mainly out of fearfulness (Furchtsamkeit) — fear of the very audience it seeks. But when it does move, it moves spectacularly, on a tiny ledge, only two-fingers wide, that runs the length of the synagogue, almost but not quite framing the place where a dwindling religious community comes together, a place of convention and of communion. But communion with the animal is more visual than verbal. The animal, moved out of fear, rushes along the narrow ledge and despite its age (or because of it?), does not hesitate to take the most audacious leaps, spinning around while in the air in order to retrace its path back to where it started. No picture, but only a video, could begin to depict this movement, which recalls that of the Kafkian narrative, doubling-back abruptly upon itself in a display of virtuosity that defies imagination. It defies images while appealing to them, because the narrow “protruding ledge” (Mauervorsprung) that charts its course, in German, already contains a dynamic element, a leap ahead —vorsprung— that the English “ledge” cannot convey. If the ledge is the outer edge, a potential jumping-off point, the protrudingMauer-Vorsprungleaps ahead of the wall. And if it is just “two fingers wide” — which compares it to a human hand (and hence to that part of the body that writes) — it is still wide enough to allow the kind of sudden reversals traced by its audacious leaps: one finger moving forward, the other back, somewhat like the “progressive-digressive” movement that the narrator of Sterne’sTristramShandyuses to describe his non-linear, meandering but never simply arbitrary manner of recounting his life-story.⑧

What binds Kafka toTristramShandyis the way these sudden turn-abouts reveal the partially hidden defensive side of conventional expectations of a linear-causal unfolding of meaning. Such expectations seek to attenuate anxieties that are more than just individual, but rather endemic to the cultures in which they arise. It is the reader’s feeling of being “ill-at-ease” described by Sterne’ narrator that compels readers to want to be “let in on the whole secret” from beginning to end of the novel — a desire that Tristram Shandy both evokes and mocks.

InWhileBuildingtheWallofChina, the nature of this defensive expectation to language is made explicit when the narrator recalls a memory from his childhood, when an unnamed scholar dared to compare the construction of the Chinese Wall to the Tower of Babel, in order thereby to advance the provocative thesis that the tower was vulnerable to destruction precisely because it lacked such a protective wall:

He [the scholar] maintained that only the great wall could for the first time in the history of mankind provide a secure foundation for the new tower of Babel. Thus, first the wall and then the tower. His book was at that time in everyone’s hands, but I have to admit that even today I do not precisely understand how he conceived the building of the tower. The wall that was not even a circle but formed only a kind of quarter or semi-circle, was supposed to provide the foundation of a tower? That could only have been intended in a spiritual sense. But why bother then with the wall, which was something factual, the product of the effort and of the life of hundreds of thousands? (BeimBauderchinesischenMauer... 267, own translation; “Building the Great Wall of China” 116)

First the narrator recalls the thesis of his book that was a best-seller at the time; then he confesses that he does not “precisely understand” how a wall could provide such a foundation, especially one that “was not even a circle.” The conventions that stabilize semantic meanings of language, and of the extra-linguistic “realities” on which those meanings are said to depend, are like a wall that does not come full-circle: open and lacking the closure it is called upon to establish. Continuing the narrative leaps and turns, the narrator speculates that this “could only have been intended in a spiritual sense,” in order then to wonder why anyone should bother to construct such a sense at all, given that the wall “was something factual.” It was factual not simply as a material object but as a project that absorbed and drained the life-forces of those whose lives it was intended to protect and secure. Why indeed bother with such a self-defeating project, except to reveal the necessity and limitations of specific linguistic-semantic conventions seeking to reign in the infinitely finite interplay of signification?

None of these considerations, doubts and questions, however, prevent the animal in the synagogue from performing (and exhibiting) its “audacious” pirouettes, its leaps and bounds, on a ledge barely two fingers wide: just wide enough for those fingers to write forward and back. In its audacious self-revocation, such writing approaches the form of the Jewish joke, which, as Freud makes clear in his book on theWitz, is always also a joke on the very joke-form itself, playing to and with the expectation of an integral meaning that can neither be provided nor simply rejected.⑨

III

Towards the end of his “Remarks on (Sophocles’)Antigone,” Friedrich Hölderlin describes the limits of a different kind of “overturning” of conventions, which he names “VaterländischeUmkehr,” which means fatherlandic reversal, and which he sees exemplified inAntigone:

Fatherlandic reversal is the overturning of all kinds of representation and of forms. A total overturning in these (things) is, however, just as with total overturning overall, without anything to hold onto (ohneallenHalt), not granted humans as cognitive beings (erkennend). (“Bemerkungen zu Antigonä” 789, own translation;Hölderlin’sSophocles, 117-118)

Here, Hölderlin is approaching the question of the disruption of conventional values and meanings by literature and by tragedy in particular, from the opposite side from which we have been viewing it. He stresses the limits of such overturning and the relative need to maintain certain conventions. This limit is rooted in the nature of human being insofar as it is “cognitive” (erkennend). But his example here is not the Biblical one that leads Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Rather it is the Greek tragedy written by Sophocles. This explains Hölderlin’s insistence on the need for poets and critics, not to hastily generalize, but rather to learn how to discriminate between the differing needs and situations of ever-singular historical and cultural contexts: their own and the traditions with which they are engaged. These different contexts can and must be related to one another, separate but not isolated, since they encompass the work and its readers, separated often by a vast spatial-temporal divide. But the comparison must not level the decisive differences. Hölderlin thus grants to Sophocles something he would not advise for his contemporaries, namely to have forged his tragedy out of aformofreason(Vernunftform) that “is political, and namely republican”:

Sophocles is right (hatRecht). This is the destiny of his time and the form of his fatherland. (...) For us such a form is still useful (geradetauglich) because the unending (dasUnendliche) things such as the spirit of states and of the world, can in any event (ohnehin) not be grasped otherwise than from a skewed point of view (auslinkischemGesichtspunkt). (“Bemerkungen zu Antigonä” 790, own translation;Hölderlin’sSophocles118)

Whatever one may think of Hölderlin’s conclusion that Sophocles’Antigoneis “republican,” i.e., in portraying “the equilibrium between Creon and. Antigone, formal and counterformal (as) too equal (zugleich),the argument he uses to support this conclusion emphasizes the historical and cultural specificity that every poet has to contend with, which Hölderlin here calls “fatherlandic,” and which I take to designate the political and familial dimension of what I have been calling “convention.” Sophocles could composeAntigoneas a republican drama out of respect for “the destiny of his time and the form of his fatherland,” i.e., out of respect for an Athenian democracy that was on the verge of collapse due to its imperial ambitions. Although the form of Hölderlin’s very different fatherland was anything but republican, the example of Sophocles is also “for us ... still (if barely) useful: (geradetauglich).” Hölderlin’s use of the German word “gerade” — which usually means “straight” — to qualify the way the republican structure of Sophocles’ drama relates to the German situation around 1800, is here anything but straightforward. Its ambiguity splits it into a divergent curve. For in addition to signifying straight, “gerade” can also mean “barely.” In other words, Sophocles’ political framework is both “still” valid and yet “barely” workable in the historical situation in which Hölderlin is translating. “Barely” can refer to both the specific political situation of a Germany where republican sympathies were punishable by prison or worse. But if it is nevertheless “still” usable or workable (tauglich), despite the immense political differences and dangers involved, then perhaps because of a meta-historical continuum that consists in the fact that however “cognitive” (erkennend) human beings may be, their knowledgestillremains subject to the limitations of their respective situations. But this transhistorical condition also constitutes the limit of the historically specific anti-republican monarchical — and I would add,monotheological— type of sovereignty that Hölderlin had to contend with.

Hölderlin’s conclusion, as we have seen, is that any such monarchical perspective has necessarily to ignore the fact that the “unending” (my rendition of the German “Unendliche”, which can also be translated as “infinite” or “endless”) process that renders “the spirit (Geist) of states and of the world” can be grasped only from a “skewed” (linkische) point of view. This point of view is as finite as the “spirit of states and the world” is in-finite: not eternal, but the ending of which necessarily exceeds the limits of a human intelligence that is necessarily conditioned by its limited and singular “point of view.” The consequence of this recognition is toacknowledgewhatknowledgeitself cannot directly grasp or control. Such acknowledgement is different from knowledge, and this is why the “form of reason” that is “politically republican” remains a necessary possibility. It is a possibility that I would translate into English as one that accepts its own limitations by striving to be “adroitly gauche” (or skillfully awkward) — a phrase that tries to render the ambiguity embedded in the German word, “linkisch.” Every “point of view” qua point is “linkisch,” (i.e., skewed), when faced with the unending process of the history of “states and the world.” The refusal to acknowledge such a self-limitation leads to what Hölderlin surmises to constitute the end of the play,Antigone:

The form of reason that takes tragic form here is political, namely republican, because between Creon and Antigone, formal and counterformal, the equilibrium (Gleichgewicht) is kept too equal (zugleichgehalten). This shows itself particularly at the end, when Creon is almost mishandled by his servants. (“Bemerkungen zu Antigonä” 790, own translation;Hölderlin’sSophocles118)

How can aGleichgewicht(English: balance, equilibrium) be “too equal”? Does equality (Gleichheit) admit of degrees? Can it be exceeded? Both Antigone and Creon are subjected to the scorn of the crowd: therein they suffer a similar disgrace. But they suffer it in vastly different ways. Like always involves an element of unlike, and it is the denial of this difference — the difference between Creon and Antigone — that argues for the necessity of a non-monarchical, “republican” form of reason — and not just of the state. Such a form would be one that privileges differences over sameness, while never neglecting their mutual interdependence.

The power of the State affirmed so totally by Creon in his first speech thus should acknowledge its enabling limit in the vulnerability and mortality of the living. To forbid a sister to mourn the death of an irreplaceably singularbrother, no matter what his political actions may have been, is precisely to treat the dead as “too equal” with the living, and thus to deny what is shared both by the living and the dead, namely the radical difference of being unequal (ungleich). Antigone does not propose to celebrate her dead brother’s political deeds, but only to cover his mortal remains, a corpse that embodies the finitude he shares with all other living animals, and that cannot simply be treated as food to perpetuate the living, in this case foraging dogs.

After having validated, as it were, Sophocles’ “republican” staging ofAntigoneas a means of preserving both historical difference and social commonality, Hölderlin concludes that respect for the tradition is still required:

The fatherlandic forms of our poets, where such exist, are however still to be preferred, because such (forms) are there to teach the spirit of the time not just to understand, but alsotoretainandtofeel(festzuhaltenundzufühlen) once it has been taught and understood. (“Bemerkungen zu Antigonä” 790, own translation and italics;Hölderlin’sSophocles118)

Operating from a point of view that must be “adroitly gauche” (linkisch), the spirit of the time must try to do something that depends more on acknowledging what cannot be fully understood, than on the traditional sense of knowledge. By retaining and feeling “the fatherlandic forms of our poets,” it must acknowledge what can be felt but never entirely understood, namely the unfathomable relation of difference, the dimension of theUngleich(unequal) thatzugleich(at once) constitutes a genuinely historical relationship as significant, but not necessarily meaningful. Such a feeling for difference holds sameness fast as an always necessary point of departure, while opening it to a future significance that can never be exhaustively grasped and known.

Reading, writing, listening all presuppose a minimal understanding, a minimal meaning, a minimal sameness, which is fixed or “held fast” by convention, “fatherlandic” or other — but one that is widely shared. At the same time, the process that drives such coming-together (Latin:con-venio), is one that as a movement of differential signifying strains every stable pairing of signifier with signified. The signifier points away from its immediate appearance, at first in direction of a signified. But the movement does not stop there. The signified, being always already itself a signifier, can never conclude the circle of pointing. It points to itself, and yet always at once (zugleich), simultaneously towards theungleich:towardsthat which is not the same as itself. Representation thereby emerges not as a fixed structure but as a dynamic process of pointing elsewhere, as a signifying that is never entirelygleich(the same), never definitively self-enclosed. It is the interruption of this movement ofGleichheit(equality), of representational equating — by signifying that reveals the process to be a temporal and historical one of disjunctive repetition.

Although in his discussion of the caesura that interrupts the dramatic progress in bothOedipustyrannosandAntigone, Hölderlin locates the decisive tragic interruption in the dialogues of Tiresias with Oedipus and with Creon, what Hölderlin calls “the pure word” (Hölderlin’sSophocles63) cannot be identified exclusively with the dialogical form or even with any particular word or speech. The “pure word” is one that signifies beyond its meaning; but it can only do this through a certain silence, which involves not the absence of speech but that in speech which gestures significantly beyond what any one voice can mean to say. It is the silence thatzugleich(at once) signifies, through the two-fingered space that separates every movement, every expression from itself, splitting it in a double movement that allows the space in-between to emerge.

It is perhaps this space in-between that constitutes the defining and delimiting “object” of philology, if we are to take seriously Hamacher’s description of it in his Fourth Thesis as “transcending without transcendence” (German:TranszendierenohneTranszendenz) (25). Transcending here, as with Hölderlin, implies neither a simple overcoming of conventionally determined meanings, nor their simple endorsement, but rather an exposure of them as irreducibly ambiguous —zugleich— more and other than simple propositions or statements. For now they are exposed as responses and appeals, calling not just for further confirmation but for future responses, interruptions, and finally, for questions and “curious conclusions.” It is these curious conclusions that allow for a future to be something different from the past.

Notes

① This lecture, delivered online on January 18, 2023, is the second of a tripartite lecture series that Prefesser Samuel Weber gave at Shanghai University. This text is edited by Yue Zhuo.

② Bartleby is the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). A copyist in a law office on Wall Street, Bartleby is famous for his line, “I would prefer not do,” to every request made to him, and his “dead-wall reveries”: long periods of doing nothing but standing behind his window looking out at the “dead brick wall.” — note by the editor.

③ This is a reference to the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s famous novel,TheLifeandOpinionofTristramShandy,Gentleman(1759), who, early on in the novel, writes: “I KNOW there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all, —who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns you” (Volume 1: Chapter IV). The narrator then goes on to say that what he will do in this novel will both deceive these readers and comply with their “humour.” — note by the editor.

④ I note in passing that it is this tension that motivates many of the polemics against considering language to be an irreducible dimension of “reality,” rather than something simply opposed or subordinate to it.

⑤ What Freud will learn to call, “defense mechanisms,” such as repression and isolation are similarly never one-off events but on-going processes that must be constantly renewed and thus are subject to continual modification. Asmechanismsthey generally function independently of self-conscious control. This is one indication of why Derrida suspects that the traditional attribution of mechanistic behavior to animals is in reality the symptom of a projection that seeks to distance human behavior from its own mechanistic tendencies.

⑥ Samuel Weber,Singularity:PoliticsandPoetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

⑦ Pierre Menard is the fictional writer/translator and the protagonist of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939). In addition to a list of heterogenous works that are “visible” and can be enumerated, he is known for a strange unfinished work that consists of three chapters ofDonQuixote(the nineth and the thirty-eight chapters of Part I and a fragment of Chapter XXII). Menard’s ambition is neither to copy out the original by Cervantes, nor to write another version of it; he wanted torewritepart ofDonQuixote(or to “translate” the work into its own language, Spanish), to produce a number of pages which coincided — word for word and line for line—with those of Cervantes. Borges’s story is the object of vast literary criticism and interpretations, involving translation theory, the incompleteness and the origin of literary works, and reflection on the ambiguous relation between language and history. — note by the editor.

⑧ As noted by Roger Hermes in his “Afterword” (Nachbemerkung)to his excellent one-volume edition of Kafka’s stories:FranzKafka,DieErzählungen(Originalfasssung), edited by Roger Hermes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Klassik, 2022),539.Stückein German also signifies theatrical “plays”.

⑨ For a detailed discussion on the “progressive-digressive” movement inTristramShandy, pleasesee Weber,Singularity:PoliticsandPoetics, 49-56,355-362. — note by the editor.

⑩ See my discussion of Freud’s book onWitz,JokesandTheirRelationtotheUnconscious, in: Samuel Weber,LegendofFreud(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),121-138.

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