by and not skilled in the making of advertisements, and in this text too perhaps that shows. What peculiar power this passage in Wordsworth’s “Essay” ascribes to a kind of writing: the power to determine what sort of feelings the writer should have: hegemonic power. And not from Gramsci’s jail did “hegemony” appear more insidious or more important. But is such power, read—Is such power, when designated, explained, as it is in Wordsworth’s text—or even when exercised (say this passage is “merely an exercise”); is such power, through such a text, being established, or being unraveled? There isn’t an answer, but outcomes that change as one listens for them by silently deciding and redeciding how to segment the text’s semantic and syntactic structures. “‘In’ Wordsworth’s text,” we have to concede, then, is a no-place; in what time we read those words, what time we see those words, is crucial. How much time do you have; what time do you take it to be. This seems to me a way to describe the practical difficulty of trying to practice ideology critiques and or deconstructions.
It’s something Jacques Derrida said, I think. It could also be under his aegis that one would move from a rhetorical analysis of the Wordsworth passage to a meditation upon politics and grief, starting off from the text’s oracular and circular definition of “liberation,” of being “liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice.” The circular or suspended judgment implied by the restrictive clause—“which is in nature transitory”— empties out and mitigates the brutality as well as the rigor that could inhere in that next phrase, “instinctive decency.” (And nevertheless, whether or not they can spot restrictive clauses, and whether or not it’s “there” “in the original,” writing students tend to get the message: “the thoughts and feelings expressed should not be those that anyone with any decency instinctively suppresses.” The sheer laboriousness of language that signifies through its syntax—not just the reading teacher—inhibits, stills.) In “other” cultures, including Greek (modern and ancient), anguish of sorrow does not “with instinctive decency retire from notice” but makes itself heard in laments—women’s laments in particular.4 They are en route, no doubt, to silence, or to writing. Or at least Wordsworth’s language could have the effect, the power, of making us believe that the kind of mourning and the kind of day and the kind of literature his lines evoke has all the prestige, power, and inevitability of death.
Wordsworth’s lines have the signal virtue, I’d argue, of noting that connection; of noting that a certain kind of writing, the kind we value, the “permanent” kind, takes its authority from a certain—very particular and peculiar—way of handling death: handling it via the word “grave” and the idea of monuments and of inscriptions. And in this the Wordsworth passage marks a line of thought recently taken up in Derrida’s reflections on death, particularly at the point at which they move between Being and Time and its countering in texts of Levinas that suggest that not one’s ownmost, my own death, but the other’s death, has priority among our conditions of existence. Where is mourning addressed, how is grief redressed, in Sein und Zeit, was more than a passing question, in Derrida’s conférence for the second Derrida symposium at Cérisy. How might one go between Wordsworth, Derrida, and de Man on mourning, and Heidegger on “mood?” I’m not competent to pursue or really even pose these questions, so I will return to the connection of death and literature again in another way.
I want to go on with an important idea in the “Autobiography as De-facement” passage, that an epitaph, that literature, does not “leave us in quiet” (to quote Wordsworth again) but repositions text and reader and pushes you to the ground. (Albeit “marble.” Keats, in “The Fall,” anyway (“life to Milton would be death to me”), knew that even on a marble stair one could moulder away.) De Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay on “translation” generates another lurid figure of writing or reading. It is some sentences that come back at me like the inscribed letters of a badly written epitaph, a permanent reproach—first because these lines have already been written about repeatedly, and second because they reproach one for the failure and the wish to understand the reproach they make and the threat they bespeak. The reproach and the threat are understood, I should say, in Neil Hertz’s essay “Lurid Figures.” But here they are again. The lines are of Paul de Man, from the 1983 Messenger Lecture at Cornell University entitled “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” and the antecedent of the “they” that is the subject of these lines is “translations.” A previous sentence links translation with other “activities” that are “intralinguistic,” namely “critical philosophy, literary theory, history.” “They are all intralinguistic,” writes de Man, “they relate to what in the original belongs to language, and not to meaning as an extralinguistic correlate susceptible of paraphrase and imitation.” Then this:
They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original [as the engraving in stone of the epitaph is secondary in relation to its writing, its composition], reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original.
In the original feelings—”Felt,” as we say, only if they were suitable for a stone. Here now is the sentence I come back to: They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead.
We are so used to violent imagery and “negativity” that it’s easy to pass by on the other side (the meaning side) of these words even after, or all the more after, they were seen and read by Neil Hertz as a remarkable instance of the lurid figures in de Man’s writing, and interpreted in terms of the “pathos of uncertain agency” that their oxymoron or equivocation—“kill,” “discover dead”—summons up. So I want to broach again the question of what it could mean to “find already dead” a text, a work, a figure.
Instinctive knowledge that I’ll be saved by our time limits leaving me only a few more minutes alone enables me to take up this text. For I don’t want to think about its figures. I want only to spell out not a certain set of alternatives, but a sort of equivocal outcome that the figures may mean. “That two-handed engine at the door,” says “Lycidas.” Translation is such an engine, which, perhaps, “stands ready to smite once and smite no more,” but, so I’d translate, never once
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