Culture Machine, Vol 2 (2000)

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Frontiers: Of Literature and Philosophy

Geoffrey Bennington

This is a frontier. Here and now, here we are crossing it now, something is ending and something else is
beginning. And like all beginnings, it's a moment of risk and chance, fear and anticipation: something new might
happen, something strange might happen, something awful might happen - or nothing at all might happen. Any
lecture starts in this sort of anticipation and anxiety. But what's true of the beginning of any lecture is the more
true of this type of lecture. For, symbolically at least, this type of lecture, which used to be called an 'inaugural'
lecture and is now called a 'professorial' lecture, is duty bound to be something new (and unique - you only get
to give one of these), and to start something new. Where before I merely lectured at the University of Sussex,
now, here and now, crossing this frontier and beginning this, I start, symbolically at least, to profess. A professor
(it's a nice word, 'professor', isn't it, compressing into itself profession as the act of professing (what I'm doing
now, from now) and profession as the career or vocation that here today, symbolically from today, is mine: a
professor is one who professes as a profession, one who professes professionally) - a professor symbolically
starts his professing with a lecture which is essentially a profession, if not quite of faith, then at least of
academic intent. An inaugural lecture announces the shape of things to come: here and now I bring you the
good or bad news of what I hereby promise to profess in years to come, starting..., well, already a couple of
minutes ago.

What does a professor profess? The verb 'to profess', already divided between professors and professionals,
seems to divide again, on the side of the professing that professors do, along an internal frontier: on the one
hand, I profess in the sense that I 'declare or admit [assert or confess, for profession is interestingly, perhaps
perilously, close to confession] openly or freely' or 'acknowledge without constraint' (Webster). I profess my
admiration, for example, for my distinguished predecessors and colleagues as professors of French at the
University of Sussex and elsewhere in the Great British University System (GBUS, pronounced 'Bus'). But, on the
other hand, I can also profess in the sense that I merely profess something, that I 'declare or admit in words or
appearances only'. Here professing implies pretending or purporting, putting up a front behind which I really
think something different: here I might profess, for example, to disapprove of something for which I in fact have
a secret liking or admiration, or else for various reasons I might profess to admire something or someone I do
not in fact hold in very high esteem (Voltaire, Zola, Malraux, Bourdieu, to name but a few... Truffaut. Fellini.
Habermas. Rorty.). How confident can we be of the frontier it seems imperative to draw between these two quite
different and even contradictory sorts of profession? It seems absolutely important to be able to make a clean
distinction, to draw an unambiguous frontier between these two senses of professing, the one the affirmation of
deep and sincere conviction, the other a deceptive ('merely verbal', as they say), façade, afront. But that
importance measures up - like most important things - to an impossibility of achieving certain knowledge: how
can we ever know which kind of professing has been professed? There seems to be a radical uncertainty (what it
has become fashionable in my field to call an 'undecidability') as to the value of a profession, and professors
(professional pro-fessors) ought perhaps to have a keener awareness of this than anyone else. If anyone can tell
us the difference between these two senses of professing, surely a professor can. But who will be able to tell
what sort of professing the professor professes in professing to know, and to profess, the true sense of the
profession of professing? Not even the professor himself, who sits very precisely and rather uncomfortably on or
perhaps in the frontier between these two senses of what he is doing, in the no-man's-land of undecidability. Not
only the old paradox, stated by Kant before Marx, of knowing who will educate the educators, but a tighter
version of it: who, if not the professor, will profess the professor's true profession? I tend to call situations of this
kind, where a formal impossibility lives with, and probably generates, even inaugurates, a practical urgency, by
that rather tired old epithet 'political', and for around 15 years I have been struggling to describe this perhaps
rather Judaic political paradox as the paradox of the legislator, as described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, my first
literary-philosophical hero, or father-figure, this evening, my first point of identification: over the frontier comes
someone who perhaps brings the law, but if he does, we can have no way of recognising it for certain - for the
legislator by definition always speaks a foreign language, or at least a language foreign to the language and law
we understand: and so the supposed legislator is always perhaps only a charlatan. Yet the only chance for what
arrives across the frontier to be the law is that it always might not be the law at all; so the legislator's always
possibly fraudulent identity is a positive condition of the law to come. This undecidability, and especially the fact
that it cannot in principle ever come to an end (so we never know if what we've got is the law or just some
imposture: and if it is the law we never quite understand it) - this undecidability is what I call politics. And let
that be my first, solemn, profession this evening (for professing is a solemn business, of course): wherever there
is a frontier, be it between two countries, be it between literature and philosophy, be it between two senses of
the verb 'to profess', there is something of the order of politics.

But if there is politics in this extended sense wherever there is a frontier, I want to say this evening that the
particular frontiers I have elected to talk about, the frontiers of philosophy and literature, are not just any
frontiers on which or along which this political effect might be observed, but that they have a specificity and a
privilege with respect to understanding frontiers (and therefore politics, and therefore professing) in general. So,
as an extension of my first profession, here's a further equally solemn addition to it, a corollary or a scolium: the
'something of the order of politics' I have just said is to be found wherever there is a frontier, is to be found
more especially or at least more saliently and perspicuously at, on or in the frontiers of philosophy and literature.

It may be that something about being a professor of French makes these questions - which must somewhere,
sometimes, if only in the small hours when all is dark and quiet, agitate every professor, of whatever subject or
discipline, or should do at least - makes these questions more acute still. Teaching a language and a culture
other than one's native one is an intrinsically rather odd thing to do, and generates a definite unease all round:
teachers of subjects defined by foreign languages typically find themselves on the wrong side of the frontier
wherever they are - in Britain I'm out of place because French is my thing: but in France I'm not quite at home
because I am after all, like it or not - and I haven't always liked it, I don't always like it - British. Professing
French when one is British comes close to being a fraudulent attempt to profess oneself to be French, to pretend
to be French, and in return generates a sense of no longer being quite English, or of being only fraudulently
English. (When I was a student in the mid-70s, it had only just stopped being fashionable for eminent Oxford
French dons to speak French with a strong, confident and unapologetic English accent, no doubt so that no such
fraud could ever be suspected: there was never the slightest doubt as to their nationality.) The obvious
advantages of speaking another language bring with them a definite but persistent sense of always speaking the
wrong language. And this can give people working with language a strong and not always very comfortable
sense of the irreducible plurality of languages even within a supposedly single national language, something I
first consciously became aware of from reading Flaubert (second hero or father-figure), in whom just that
situation is a persistent object of reflection. And if this situation - which I'm suggesting might make a professor
of languages especially sensitive to the paradoxes of professing and professions which must affect all professing
- ought to hold for anyone teaching a language, it may be especially striking for someone working with French,
because it happens that recent thinking which stresses the paradoxes of frontier situations in general has been
to a large extent conducted in French. I doubt if I would have been able to think anything about frontiers without
the help of recent French thought, notably - more heroes - the work of Jean-François Lyotard, but more
especially the thought of Jacques Derrida, with which - with whom - it has been my immense intellectual
privilege to work for over fifteen years. And working with Derrida has always meant working more or less closely
with the frontier, or the frontiers, of philosophy and literature.

***

Frontiers, then. Philosophy traditionally begins by asking the question, 'What is the frontier?', and demanding
something like a definition. Literature - or something we might perhaps call 'literature' for want of a better word,
because, as everything I shall say will be suggesting, we don't know what literature is, where it starts and ends,
where its frontiers are (and this will end up meaning we don't know what philosophy is either) - literature, to
which this question was not even addressed, answers anyway, by putting up to be read something we might call
an experience of the frontier, an experience of life as life on the edge, or even on the edge's edge, 'the edge of
Edge' as a character in a William Gibson short story puts it, in a slightly different context (1995: 135). This
'experience' is not so much what usually goes by that name in the empirical or even phenomenological
traditions, nor the experience from the height of which fathers habitually condescend to their children, the
experience doubted by Eliot in Four Quartets and mocked by Sartre in La Nausée, but rather ex-perience itself,
the new experience that always comes to surprise and defy all my previous accumulated experience, that makes
of fathers always children still, experience in the sense recently retrieved by French thinkers such as Jean-Luc
Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as ex-periri, where we can hear the same root in the -periri as in periculum,
peril or danger: experience is intrinsically perilous in that as such it exposes to something as yet unknown on or
beyond a frontier, and this experience is perhaps none other than what gives rise to the sense of wonder, of
thaumazein revived by Heidegger from Aristotle as the root of all philosophy. (I wonder, for example, if it is by
chance that the first few pages of Montaigne's great essay 'De l'Expérience' find themselves almost immediately
grappling with vertiginous frontier-questions of identity and difference, legality and contingency, invention and
repetitive commentary, institution and transgression? For me, at any rate, Montaigne is a thinker of the frontier,
another of my philosophico-literary heroes this evening, still today on the very edge of Edge.) At the frontier,
says literature, life is on the line, identities tremble, something passes into something else, somewhere new
opens up. 'Experience' in this sense is never quite mine, never a simple accretion of knowledge or wisdom,
because on the frontier, at the edge, I am not quite me, but the opening of identity to an alterity which in
principle has no truck whatsoever with the poor supposed self gathered up against this exposure without which it
would be nothing at all, but because of which it always might be annihilated. This experience, which modern
continental philosophy typically refers, rather too hastily in my opinion, to death as its ultimate horizon of
explanation, can be one of communication in Georges Bataille's very strong and strange sense of that word, a
rending open in which 'I' all but expires, rather than the complacent and confirming sense of communication that
has recently become so popular and influential from the work of Jürgen Habermas. I want today to try to
approach the point of contact (the frontier, for frontiers are always points both of contact and of separation)
between this philosophical question, in all its solemnity and dignity, and this uncalled-for, slightly unseemly or
impertinent literary reply, which can so easily look - to philosophy - so vapid and insubstantial. That point of
contact is itself a frontier, perhaps, between the frontier as question and the frontier as experience. Always
between. And let that be my second solemn profession: a frontier is always between, or, if you prefer, between is
always a frontier. This is less of a truism than it might sound, as I we hope we shall come to see as we go, and it
means among other things that, although we can try to approach the frontier, we can never quite get at it, but
find, as in some of those now familiar fractal images, ever more frontiers lurking in the frontier itself. (And let
that fractal be an image of this lecture this evening, organised in more or less identifiable zones with more or
less unidentifiable frontiers.)

What is a frontier? What happens at the frontier?

Frontiers are places of risk, places it always might be difficult or impossible to cross, places where passports and
customs ask difficult questions about identity and legitimacy and rights. Think of John Le Carré, for example, as
Karla finally defects and walks out of the Berlin no-man's land at the end of the Smiley trilogy, or, in The Little
Drummer Girl, as Charlie drives the car packed with explosives across the Austrian frontier. In that odd genre
usually called travel literature, which itself has a complex frontier with fiction, think of how many books begin
with accounts of frontier incidents, the frontier of the book negotiated almost automatically by telling how the
literal frontier of the country in question was crossed.

Or, more dramatically perhaps, think of the figure of the frontier in American literature and culture and all it
stands for - honesty and simplicity and decency, simultaneously with violence and lawlessness, the frontier itself,
the fading line where civilisation and nature meet, always a little further on than the simple dialectic of cowboys
and Indians, bandits and sheriffs I spent my boyhood uneasily aping. Or science fiction, which is famously all
about the final frontier, the absolute opening to an absolute outside called space (which is just a figure of the
future itself) which makes sense to us only insofar as there is the idea of something else to be found outside,
with which to form a frontier. These two last examples (the Wild West frontier and its displaced surrogate, the
final frontier of space) appear different from, and more dramatic than, the sort of frontiers - let's call them
bilateral frontiers - we cross from one country to another. Here civilisation meets its frontier with nature beyond,
the new thing to come always maybe the primitive place from which we originally come (whence the typical
coexistence in science fiction of futurism and prehistory). But this nature (which is always in principle
threatening and even terrifying, the place of Kurtz's horror at the end of Heart of Darkness, the place of the
apocalypse, always now, the revelation of ex-perience itself) - this nature is, or so I shall be suggesting a little
later, just what bilateral frontiers compress into their vanishing line, and just this is why they are dramatic
places. So here's another profession, the third I think: there are no natural frontiers, but frontiers are always the
place of nature.

Frontiers are places for an impressive array of control mechanisms, for the display of national identity and power,
both symbolic and real, somewhere where, for example, we see more more or less legitimately flaunted weapons
than elsewhere, uniforms, dogs, barriers, places where the transfer from one zone of legality, and maybe even of
truth, to another (Pascal's truth this side of the Pyrenees and falsity beyond) leaves that hiatus, however small,
where we all feel guilty of something, that uncomfortable distended moment when the passport is in the official's
hands and he's looking grimly at that ridiculously unconvincing photograph, the hiatus, however short, in which
there's always time to imagine the consequences of an exposure however unreal, the dripping cell of the illegal
immigrant.

Let's look briefly at a slightly more 'noble' example than Le Carré or Star Trek provide, from Stendhal's great
1839 novel La Chartreuse de Parme (I am, after all, starting here and now to be, or to profess to be, a Professor
of French, and Stendhal, who knew a thing or two about confession and profession, and fraudulent identities
('Stendhal' being scarcely more Henri Beyle's real name than it is mine, and of course it is only the best known
of Henri Beyle's many pseudonyms and false identities), Stendhal is another of my heroes this evening, in part
because, while famously saying - more than once - that politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the
middle of a concert,1 he managed to write intensely political fiction, arguably the most consistently political
fiction in French literature. (I should also say that Stendhal, who seems to me to take on the paradox of the
legislator and the charlatan quite explicitly and lucidly, also feels able to claim in his autobiographical writings to
be one of the rare non-charlatans he knows (1983: 87).) The second part of La Chartreuse de Parme is
dominated by a figure of centralised repressive state power in the form of the Tour Farnèse in the centre of
Parma, where Stendhal's hero, Fabrice del Dongo, is imprisoned, in which he experiences the famous peace and
happiness all of Stendhal's heroes' experience in prison, from which he escapes dramatically, and to which he
voluntarily returns. But the first part of the novel, leading up to that imprisonment, is dominated by images, not
of centres and enclosure, but of frontiers and what Deleuze and Guattari would call lines of flight. The novel
opens with a reminder of a violent but liberatory frontier-crossing, that of Napoleon's armies into the city-state
of Milan in 1796, and this opening places the whole novel under the sign of the frontier. Bonaparte, the frontier-
crosser, something like the legislator I invoked earlier, figures in Stendhal (who of course wrote a life of
Napoleon) as a sort of italianate Frenchman whose arrival in Italy liberates the Italians from dour Austrian rule
and, as it were, returns them to their properly Italian nature. (You don't have to be an Italian to be 'Italian' in
Stendhal. Insofar as Stendhal's major value, that of the 'imprévu' (with its various avatars, such as imagination,
or silence, or hilarity, or madness), implies a suspension, however brief, of identity (for the imprévu is just ex-
perience in the sense I was giving that word a moment ago), then Stendhal's tendency to relate it to Italy rather
than France is a complex gesture to say the least - if only because Stendhal's own fiction, which embodies that
value as much as it praises it, is of course written not in Italian, but in French. This can be referred to Stendhal's
(and Stendhal's hero's) own ambiguous identifications with Bonaparte, but tells us too something more general
about how any identity is established (always only provisionally) by a crossing of its own frontiers, a getting
outside itself or beside itself which keeps identity alive by making it different. In Stendhal, to be really Italian,
you may actually have to be French, but if you were really and only French, you'd actually be English, of whom
Stendhal says, 'Les Anglais sont, je crois, le peuple du monde le plus obtus, le plus barbare' (1983: 115).2 It is
not insignificant that Stendhal's hero, though Italian, is always referred to by the French form of his name,
Fabrice: something that is inevitably lost when Scott Moncrieff's English translation puts it systematically back
into Italian as 'Fabrizio'.) Fabrice spends a lot of time in this earlier part of the novel more or less clandestinely
crossing frontiers and encountering danger and violence in those crossings. His movements in his pursuit of
Napoleon, and his eventual uncertain participation in the battle of Waterloo are all about frontiers encountered
and crossed (at one point Stendhal talks about Fabrice going to the 'extreme frontier' (1964: 64), the edge of
Edge again), and about those mobile frontiers called fronts. (Frontiers in the political sense are really just more
or less stabilised fronts in the military sense: however quiescent a frontier may in fact appear, it is always the
standing possibility of confrontation and violence.) A little later, in a famous incident in the frontier zone of the
states of Parma and Austria, Fabrice gets involved in a fight and, in self-defence, kills a certain Giletti (this is the
ostensible cause of his imprisonment later in the book). He decides to flee until the situation is clarified: for
various reasons, Austria is the only plausible place to go, although in Austria Fabrice always runs the risk of
being arrested for his known Bonapartist sympathies.3 So he flees with the two women (mother and daughter,
actresses) Giletti was accompanying and ‘protecting’, burns his own passport and decides to cross the frontier
with Giletti’s:

Indépendamment de la répugnance bien naturelle qu'il avait à confier sa vie au passeport du

malheureux Giletti, ce document présentait des difficultés matérielles: la taille de Fabrice
atteignait tout au plus à cinq pieds cinq pouces, et non pas à cinq pieds dix pouces comme
l'énonçait le passeport; il avait près de vingt-quatre ans et paraissait plus jeune, Giletti en avait
trente-neuf. [...] Il pensa à une terrible objection qu'on pourrait lui faire et à laquelle il ne trouvait
que de mauvaises réponses: il allait dire qu'il s'appelait Giletti et tout son linge était marqué F.D.
Comme on voit, Fabrice était un de ces malheureux tourmentés par leur imagination; c'est assez
le défaut des gens d'esprit en Italie... (1964: 211)

(Quite apart from the very natural repugnance which he felt towards entrusting his life to the
passport of the unfortunate Giletti, this document presented material difficulties. Fabrizio's height
was, at the most, five feet five inches, and not five feet ten inches as was stated on the passport.
He was not quite twenty-four, and looked younger. Gilletti had been thirty-nine. [...] He thought of
a terrible objection which might be raised, and to which he could find no satisfactory answer: he
was going to say that his name was Giletti, and all his linen was marked F.D. As we have seen,
Fabrizio was one of those unfortunates who are tormented by their imagination; it is a
characteristic fault of men of intelligence in Italy... (1964: 231-2))

There follows a wonderful comic scene, beautifully and excruciatingly drawn out by Stendhal over several pages
involving a rare piece of sustained description4 (motivated here only by the dilated time of the frontier as it
preys on Fabrice's imagination, as we have seen, and inspiring in him further imaginations that Stendhal calls
'romans', novels, or 'romances', as Scott Moncrieff has it:5 the characters in Stendhal's novels are often
described as writing novels in their heads, and this is one index of the allegorical nature of Stendhal's fiction,
which constantly figures its own fictionality in this way - the frontiers between characters, narrators and authors
in Stendhal are notoriously complex) - a comic scene in which the official called upon to check Fabrice's passport
immediately recognises that the passport is not Fabrice's but Giletti's (whom he happens to know):

Cet homme était ami de Giletti; on peut juger de sa surprise lorsqu'il vit son passeport entre les
mains d'un autre; son premier mouvement fut de faire arràªter cet autre, puis il songea que Giletti
pouvait bien avoir vendu son passeport à ce beau jeune homme qui apparemment venait de faire
quelque mauvais coup à Parme. Si je l'arràªte, se dit-il, Giletti sera compromis; on découvrira
facilement qu'il a vendu son passeport; d'un autre cà´té, que diront mes chefs si l'on vient à
vérifier que moi, ami de Giletti, j'ai visé son passeport porté par un autre? L'employé se leva en
baà®llant et dit à Fabrice:- Attendez, monsieur; puis, par une habitude de police, il ajouta: il
s'élève une difficulté. Fabrice dit à part soi: Il va s'élever ma fuite.

This man was a friend of Giletti; one may judge of his surprise when he saw his friend's passport
 in the hands of a stranger; his first impulse was to have that stranger arrested, then he reflected
that Giletti might easily have sold his passport to this fine young man who apparently had just
been doing something disgraceful at Parma. 'If I arrest him,' he said to himself, 'Giletti will get into
trouble; they will at once discover that he has sold his passport; on the other hand, what will my
chiefs say if it is proved that I, a friend of Giletti, put a visa on his passport when it was carried by
someone else.' The official got up with a yawn and said to Fabrizio: 'Wait a minute, sir;' then,
adopting a professional formula, added: 'A difficulty has arisen.' On which Fabrizio murmured:
'What is going to arise is my escape.'

The scene continues to lengths I cannot quote, before Fabrice is safely across. Let's keep from this passage a
tightening of all our themes: the frontier is a place of violence and the risk of death, of negotiations around
doubtful and always possibly fraudulent identity, of imagination and fictionalising, a place of extreme danger that
also provides a possible escape route from worse danger, and a place that communicates both with what is
beyond and, more or less directly and immediately, with the political centre and its symbolically dominant prison-
tower.

***

In spite of Stendhal's refined comedy, it's hard not to think of frontiers as Bad Things. Frontiers, even if they are
not always the place of experiences as dramatic as the ones I've been talking about, still separate us from
others, inhibit or discourage the free exchange of ideas and knowledge and goods, retard the development of a
truly fulfilled global humanity, the re-uniting of the supposed family of mankind, they mark the persistence of
unfortunate suspicions, unnecessary violences and repressions. There's a confident and optimistic
internationalism which, in spite of all the evidence, looks forward to the inevitable removal of frontiers and the
establishment of a world-citizenry unfettered by merely local customs and prejudices, an internationalism that
typically appeals to peace as the value guiding it forward, and probably gets excited about the globally
democratising potentialities of the Internet. This admirable but incurably naive humanist and cosmopolitan
impulse, which comes to us most obviously from eighteenth-century thinkers, is currently fashionable and
attractive, and indeed the name of Immanuel Kant, who provided perhaps the most rigorous philosophical
account of this type of cosmopolitanism in the 1780s and 1790s, was to be seen in pieces by the more serious
newspaper columnists in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Kant's arguments, which are
explicitly and consistently about the question of frontiers, are in fact more ambiguous than has always been
noticed. (Incidentally, in one of his many autobiographical sketches, Stendhal, writing about himself in the third
person, tells of studying the German language and philosophy as a young man in Brunswick, and says that he
'conceived a fair degree of scorn for Kant and Fichte, those superior men who succeeded only in building learned
houses of cards' (1983: 167). Although this is a typically 'literary' and really rather crass way to talk about Kant,
the epitome of a certain literary snobbery about philosophical thought that is quite widespread in literary circles
and the last thing I would want to espouse or profess, the opposition of Stendhal and Kant has become a
commonplace since Nietzsche at least - on the frontier of literature and philosophy, I want to argue, rather, for a
more stendhalien Kant (who was as aware as Stendhal of the power of the imagination) than Nietzsche, or
Stendhal himself, would have cared to recognise, and certainly a more stendhalien Kant than Habermas would
even dream of. I don't imagine Kant would much have liked it either, come to that, but let's use this now as a
way of slipping across the frontier into a more philosophical zone.)

Kant's political writings tell a story about mankind emerging from a state of nature (which is in principle a violent
state just because no law is there to prevent the violence that always might break out, however peaceful things
seem in fact: nature, says Kant in a decisive and far-reaching argument, may, empirically, happen to be
peaceful, but transcendentally speaking it is intrinsically violent: this is the nature of the American frontier) - a
story about mankind emerging from a state of nature into political groupings where constitutions, however
imperfect, seek to limit that violence. But these groupings of individuals then clash again amongst themselves,
and a new, supposedly secondary state of nature emerges just where a frontier between them forms. It seems
reasonably clear that this supposedly secondary state of nature is in fact primary, that no state of nature really
precedes this one - which means, among other things I won't be able to go into here, that what we often call
'culture' in fact logically comes before what we often call 'nature', which complicates some of the most traditional
and influential thought-patterns we have, and motivates my earlier claim that the apparently open frontier of the
wild west of or space is not essentially different from the bilateral frontiers of nation-states, and would give
support to an argument that nature itself is essentially a political concept. Fleeing this frontier violence provides
a temporary respite, and even, in Kant's providentialist view, has the beneficial effect of obliging mankind to
scatter far enough to occupy the whole surface of the globe. But eventually those fleeing violence West
encounter those fleeing East, and frontiers, with the violence they entail, become an inevitable problem.
Frontiers subsisting between lawfully constituted groupings are evidence that the relations between those
groupings are still in a state of nature, and therefore in principle of violence. This persistence of frontiers as
places of violence and lawlessness is a scandal for rationality, and indeed, in his religious writings, Kant is
prepared to see in frontiers the clearest sign of the persistence in man of a principle of what he calls radical evil.
In his 1784 essay on Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant looks forward to the eminently
rationalistic solution of this problem of violence through the creation of a frontierless world state of lawfulness
and therefore peace (peace naturally being the only rational end for mankind to aim at); but by the time of his
essay on Perpetual Peace ten years later, there's a strong sense that that sort of peace could only ever in fact be
the peace of the cemetery, the peace in which we may hope, eternally but not very interestingly, to rest, and
there's a new insight that the only rational view is that some maintenance of frontiers (and therefore violence,
for frontiers are violence) is the only hope for a peace which, to the extent that frontiers subsist and that they
are places of violence, will never be perpetual in the desired cosmopolitan sense from which Kant began. The
insight informing Kant's change of mind is that the only way a frontierless world state could possibly emerge
would be under the dominance of one existing state which would in fact simply have subsumed all others under
it (in the late twentieth-century we might use the words Pax americana as shorthand for this, and maybe
translate it as 'MacDonald's in Moscow'). I can't here begin to show how Hegel's solution to this problem
bequeathed by Kant (which solution broadly consists in justifying the dominance of any one given state at a
given time in history by appealing to the movement of Spirit in a broader dialectic of world-history, which could
still at a pinch accommodate America as an extension of what at Sussex we still call the Modern European Mind)
- I can't begin to show how this solution relies on a dogmatic presumption about how the difference-as-
dispersion of states has to be thought of as difference-as-opposition and contradiction which can then be
sublated. What I can profess here, though, is the thought that if Kant is right to draw back, in the name of
rationality itself, from the apparently fully rational solution to the problem of frontiers6 (i.e. their abolition in a
frontierless cosmopolitan state) to a mitigated defence of frontiers - and therefore to an affirmation of a certain
irreduciblity of politics, violence and states of nature, and if Hegel's dialectic breaks on his attempt to sublate the
question of frontiers into the dialectic of World-History, then this resistance of the frontier to rationalistic
dissolution ought to have profound implications for the philosophies of Kant and Hegel as a whole, and even
implications for what more grandiloquent times called 'the fate of reason'. Fourth, increasingly solemn,
profession: frontiers are the non-rational condition of reason.

What this means is at the very least that frontiers are always duplicitous. In an apparently quite different
context, Kant - searching for a way of thinking through the sense that human understanding, and therefore
objective knowledge, is limited to certain objects or certain sorts of objects, but that human reason constantly
strives to cross those limits and achieve knowledge in whatever lies beyond the limits of knowledge - points out
that what he calls 'limits' (Grenze) partake duplicitously of what is on both sides of them: the limit of knowledge
is still on the side of knowledge and can therefore be known, but it is also already on the other side, on the side
of what is out of reach of knowledge, or what can merely be thought, and so gives a glimpse of the great
beyond. This intrinsic duplicity of frontiers, the place where, as I said at the start, identities tremble, means that
it is impossible to identify the frontier as one thing, or even as the thing that it is. At which point it evades the
philosophical question as to what it is, and becomes a political issue in the wider sense I invoked earlier. The
frontier, making identities tremble, itself has no identity (and so strictly speaking we can't say the frontier). The
frontier slips out of definitional, and even ontological grasp: on the one hand it is nothing, the mere gap between
two things (as I said earlier, 'a frontier is always between'); on the other, it is double, a bit of this and a bit of
that.7 'Less than one and double', as Jacques Derrida puts it in a different context, meaning that the frontier is
never one, never simple, but an originary complexity of the sort philosophy finds difficult to think, and of which
the curious shapes of fractal geometry give us, perhaps, an analogical representation. But we cannot deal with
this feature of frontiers by thinking of them as strange 'things' among less strange things, because this strange
'thing', which is no thing at all, is the only 'thing' that gives anything any identity. All things are identified by or
from their frontiers, but at those frontiers their identities tremble because the frontier itself has no identity. As
Frege famously demands: concepts must have sharp frontiers; but as he perhaps less famously admits, the
concept of 'frontier' (and therefore the concept of 'concept' itself) cannot be given sharp frontiers, so concepts
never quite get determined the way philosophy requires if they are genuinely to be concepts. Insofar as they
have frontiers, and they must have, concepts never quite get to be themselves, and the demand that they be
sharply defined immediately falls foul of the first concept that demand would require us to define: the concept of
concept itself.

Which is another reason why all I've been saying directly about frontiers entails another zone of this lecture, that
of fraudulent identity, which is perhaps the frontier zone itself. Now I begin to understand why there was always
an arriving foreign legislator who always might be a charlatan. The more general argument now says that
frontiers are necessary for anything like identity, but because of the duplicitous nature of frontiers, identity is
always more or less fraudulent - so here's another solemn profession: there's nothing like identity. Two of my
'heroes' or fathers tonight, Rousseau and Stendhal, stand at apparently opposite ends of the scale of this
problem: the one, Rousseau, insisting endlessly on the virtues of achieved identity only to find that the very
process of self-identification leads to the crumbling of identity and eventually, in his case, to a state it is difficult
not to call madness; the other, Stendhal, celebrating a multiplication of identities, pseudonyms and mobile
fronts, and indeed something he is quite happy to call madness. Let Rousseau and Stendhal stand for the two
senses of professing I began with: the one drawn to profession as confession (remember that Rousseau wrote
both a great 'Profession de foi' (interestingly enough, for once, under the assumed - fraudulent - identity of the
Vicaire Savoyard8), and of course, most famously, a monumental, inaugural book of Confessions), the other,
Stendhal, drawn to profession as feint and façade and strategy.
Let me conclude with two brief sets of observations of quite different types.

First conclusion. An obvious way of reading my insistence on heroes and identifications this evening is to refer all
these heroes and identifications in psychoanalytical style to the figure of the father. Montaigne, Rousseau, Kant,
Stendhal, Flaubert, Derrida and all the rest (Proust, Beckett... ) would form a series in that they are what Freud
calls 'ego-ideals', objects for my more or less ambivalent admiration and identification. On this sort of reading,
the ultimate explanatory point of reference for this series of ego-ideals would be the Father, in this case my
father (sitting here this evening listening to me, for the first time in an academic context). On this view, after a
more or less tidy resolution of the Oedipus complex - and it was reasonably tidy, I suppose, I think, I hope -
here I am, finally able to address myself to a father now more or less comfortably integrated as part of my own
achieved identity, the original of the superego that has driven me more or less relentlessly this far, to this
moment of symbolic professional and professorial arrival.

There are a number of reasons why this compelling type of reading - which I apologise for simplifying a bit -
seems to me to be flawed, and if it's true that I have been talking about nothing but my father this evening, then
it's also true that managing to talk about nothing but my father while equally obviously talking about anything
but my father already militates against the powerful reductions the Oedipal scenario entails. 'It's a wise child
that knows his own father', as Telemachus says to the disguised Athene early in the Odyssey, and as Freud and
Joyce pick it up 3000 years later. And if this is so, it is because although everyone may indeed have only one
male engenderer (one 'biological father' as they say, but 'father' already means something more than
'biological'), everyone also has multiple fathers if, as Derrida argues in a reading of Plato's Phaedrus, paternity
entails logos: reason or language. Here is my father, but here too are my many other fathers (Montaigne,
Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Stendhal, Derrida, to name only a few). And if the father is multiplied in this way,
dispersed across the reason and language to which I have access (or the reasons and languages in the plural, for
reason and language are no more singular and identifiable than fathers, and for the same reason), then the
concept of 'father' itself begins to disperse, losing its explanatory authority as it does so, probably aghast at its
inability to control its offspring and how that offspring turns out, but inheriting in return just the problem of
fraudulent identity it is supposed to guard against, for a father who cannot quite identify his offspring is
something less than, or other than, a father. A rapid (perhaps rather too literary) characterisation of philosophy
is that it just is this paternally anxious attempt to identify itself and therefore rigorously to control its offspring,
and it is almost irresistible to balance this with the thought that 'literature', what we call literature, not knowing
what it is, literature which always implies a certain abandonment of paternal responsibility for meaning in the
interests of the imagination and the imprévu, a promise of unconditional love of offspring whatever it may
become in the contingent scattered future of its readings, is on the side of the mother. Maybe it's no accident
that Rousseau, Stendhal and Derrida all write a lot about mothers. Here too, then, also for the first time, is my
mother.

***

Second and final conclusion. Everything I have said this evening implies that the ungraspable and uncrossable
frontier differently figured in philosophy and literature and their family relationships is a pre-requisite for
anything like thought or experience. To the extent that the frontier cannot be successfully subjected to the
philosophical question 'What is it?', the question of theory and the prelude to positive knowledge, then it is
troublesome for any institution whatsoever, including the institution of the University. Institutions require for
their existence an inaugural temporal frontier which is their foundation - their institution, the instituting moment
of the institution - and which they cannot comprehend within themselves, and they also require a quasi-spatial
frontier or delimitation to define themselves against other institutions of all sorts. Of all institutions, the
University is, traditionally speaking, unique in that its mission is one of rigorous self-understanding. The mission
of the University - although what we now have to call its mission statement understandably enough makes no
mention of this - is to understand the institutionality of institutions in general, including itself. Everything I have
said suggests that this mission is an impossible one, but that just that constitutes its dignity and importance,
and makes it a political one in the sense I outlined at the start. Although Universities may have many useful
functions, they cannot in principle be understood, nor begin to understand themselves, if they are thought to
exist primarily for the sake of providing someone with a qualified labour-force. Nor even (although this is a more
subtle error, and one nowadays eagerly perpetrated by many Universities themselves - just look at the job-
adverts in the paper) is it their purpose to pursue what is now so often - and rather meaninglessly - called
'excellence'. Rather, Universities have a raison d'àªtre (if at all) on the frontier of anything currently identifiable
as 'knowledge', on the edge, on the edge of Edge, in just the sense William Gibson in fact gives to that
expression. This situation can be described in a variety of ways (rolling back the frontiers of knowledge, being at
the cutting edge of research, and so on), but such descriptions are already tending to forget the moment of
radical non-knowledge implied by the frontier, the moment of risk and danger, the inaugural instant when
anything or nothing might happen and a thought - be it legislator or charlatan - might arrive. One of the most
epistemologically and politically insufferable forms of sedentarism is the one that claims to be securely installed
at the cutting edge. This is not at all to argue for a traditional other-worldly ivory-towerism (the frontier is
neither another world - rather it's the most indubitable sign there is that we are still always in this world - nor
anything as stable and confident as a tower, as La Chartreuse de Parme showed us), but to insist that the
commitment and responsibility of those professing this profession - be they on the side of what we still call 'arts'
or 'sciences' - cannot be to any value of utility or calculable return.

I've said a little, and hinted a lot, at questions of disciplinary frontiers. The University of Sussex, to which I owe
a great deal, and for which I'd like this lecture also to have been a plea, a plaidoyer, a defence and illustration,
made its name in the name of 'interdisciplinarity'. Much of that spirit remains here, so that it seems perhaps less
incongruous here than it might elsewhere for a Professor of French to give an inaugural lecture which is to a
large extent informed by philosophy, and German philosophy at that. I have never taken interdisciplinarity to
mean a situation where established disciplines, firm within their frontiers, are invited to have dialogues or
debates, those more or less polite academic conversations over their garden fences, but rather one in which
disciplines are rigorously - politically - exposed at their frontiers to the risk of skirmishes, invasions, violence,
change, and death, with no horizon of quiescent 'knowledge' in view. If interdisciplinarity means anything, it is
that academics, however much knowledge they may more or less incidentally produce, are not defined by the
production of knowledge. All the recent government prescribed exercises in teaching and research assessment
act against this strong sense of interdisciplinarity and enforce safe enclosures, hierarchies and quiescence. The
logic of these exercises, and the perfectly vacuous concept of 'excellence' that informs them, is to condemn
thinking to mere scholarship, disciplines to mere disciplinarity, professing to a mere professionalism, and the
University to a mere bureaucracy or management of established learning, a delivery-system for a commodity
called knowledge to the 'customers' we used, once, to call students. There is some, I must admit rather cold,
comfort to be had in the thought that in principle this is impossible (frontiers are irreducible, but they are also
irreducibly unstable and undecidable), but a good deal of disquiet in the thought that the ex-perience of
suspension on the frontier that thinking is, is made so much the harder and rarer thereby. If all professing
promises and confesses something, and professors hold out a promise of thinking without being able even to
guess at what will be thought, let that be my concluding confession or profession this evening: professing is
promising, and I promise, malgré tout, here and now, on this frontier, to continue to profess.

(Professorial Lecture delivered 4 June 1996, University of Sussex)

Endnotes

1. 'La politique dans une oeuvre littéraire, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert, quelque chose de
grossier et auquel pourtant il n'est pas possible de refuser son attention' (Stendhal, 1964: 419). This is a
knowing quotation of the more famous statement in Chapter XXIII of the second book of Le Rouge et le noir: 'La
politique au milieu des intéràªts d'imagination, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert. Ce bruit est
déchirant sans àªtre énergique. Il ne s'accorde avec le son d'aucun instrument'. The passage from La Chartreuse
de Parme goes on to say, 'Nous allons parler de fort vilaines choses, et que, pour plus d'une raison, nous
voudrions taire; mais nous sommes forcés d'en venir à des événements qui sont de notre domaine, puisqu'ils ont
pour théà¢tre le coeur des personnages' (Stendhal, 1964: 419). This introduction of 'politics' into the heart is
just what Stendhal does throughout his fiction. For example, Fabrice's calculations with respect to Clélia when he
knows she might think he has eaten the poisoned food in the prison are indicative of a politics of passion entirely
characteristic of Stendhal's heroes (1964: 452); this is also true of Julien Sorel's dealings with both Mathilde de
la Mà´le and Mme de Ràªnal in Le Rouge et le noir, and makes of De l'amour a much more political than
psychological treatise.

2. He goes on, 'Cela est au point que je leur pardonne les infamies de Sainte-Hélène' (Stendhal, 1983: 115).

3. Just like Parma in the second part of the book, Austria in Stendhal is dominated by a symbol of absolute
centralised power in the form of a prison, the Spielberg (referring to Austria, Stendhal writes, 'ce pays, dont la
capitale à ses yeux [de Fabrice] était le Spielberg'. States are thus defined on the one hand by a central -
elevated - point of power which gathers the space of the state to its identity, and on the other by a frontier
where that identity is intrinsically at risk and therefore symbolically to be confirmed.

4. In the Souvenirs d'égotisme, Stendhal says 'moi, j'abhorre la description matérielle. L'ennui de la faire
m'empàªche de faire des romans' (1983: 76).

5. 'La présence du danger donne du génie à l'homme raisonnable, elle le met, pour ainsi dire, au-dessus de lui-
màªme; à l'homme d'imagination elle inspire des romans, hardis il est vrai, mais souvent absurdes' (1964: 213).

6. On this view, rationality more generally would constitutively involve this type of pulling back from its own
apparent end-point: reason (as Kant also knew) must be self-restraining if it is to remain rational. Left to its own
devices, reason rapidly runs off into irrationality.

7. If the occasion lent itself to a more technical exposition, I would try to show how that most enigmatic part of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the chapter on the 'schematism', which tries to formulate the frontier as point of
junction between concept and object, answers exactly to this set-up: the schema in Kant is always both nothing
and double.
8. The complications of Rousseau's attempts to profess and confess, and the fraudulent identities this implies are
the subject of my book Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée, 1991). For the specific question of the
'author' of the 'Profession de foi', the publication of which got Rousseau into deep legal trouble, and led to years
of exile and persecution, see especially pp.114ff.

References

Gibson, W. (1995) 'New Rose Hotel', Burning Chrome. Harper Collins.

Stendhal (1964) La Chartreuse de Parme. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.

Stendhal (1983) Souvenirs d'égotisme. Paris: Gallimard.

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