Phrase

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Scott Cutler Shershow, English, University of California, Davis
Henry Sussman, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Samuel Weber, Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Ewa Ziarek, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
 Phrase

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Translated by Leslie Hill
 Cover image: square de l’île-de-France, île de la Cité, Paris, France (October 2017) © Leslie Hill

© 2000 Christian Bourgois Editeur, Phrase by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

Translation © 2018 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, author. | Hill, Leslie, 1949, translator.

Title: Phrase / Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ; translated by Leslie Hill.
Other titles: Phrase. English
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: Suny series,
literature … in theory | Originally published in French, Phrase / Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, by
Christian Bourgois Editeur, 2000. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049449 | ISBN 9781438471082 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471099
(hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471105 (e-book)
Classification: LCC PQ2672.A2417 P4813 2018 | DDC 848/.91407--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049449

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
 CONTENTS
Phrase

Translator’s Notes

Reading Phrase
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BAILLY

Notes
PHRASE
  

“Who else for, if not for you?”

  

Phrase I

… let—let it come (or yield, more likely,

or else well up, though barely so),
that which won’t come and can’t reach where it’s going, if only
for lack of an infallible shoreline
and because it’s clear that in you, somewhere else,
not a place where you get upset, is where it streams
or collapses (I don’t know, I think
of a face exhausted, betrayed, drenched with tears,
etc.—of a gesture, in fact, of supplication),
let, yes, let that which did not take place
grow old in you and wane:
we are held or constrained to it, just as we are to the
things that can’t be undone, which separate us, each forever
beside the other, and bind us, each apart from the other;
for what makes us vulnerable is that the echo within us should be of almost
no voice, and that the things around us
(this garden, for instance, here,
this meadow, ever the same)
bear the trace, of course, of no passage.

And don’t say: it’s dreadful—“don’t implore,”

don’t be frightened either.
It is, admittedly, irrevocable, and we are
indisputably abandoned. But accept, all the same,
“don’t look away,” accept, as when
you hold your head up, shamefaced, knowing nothing
of what is causing your downfall, accept this slow disaster
or exodus, rather, which is more or less all we are.

(July 20, 1976)

  

Phrase II

(A Clarification)

Phrase: what has been speaking within me—far away, elsewhere,

almost outside—for a very long time,
ever since, I believe, I was given the possibility of forgetting,
this I call literature.

It’s—empty of meaning, deprived most of the time of content,

barely organized into words—just
a phrase. Practically
always the same, it seems to me; but I can’t
say anything about it positively.
It, the phrase, is modulated in different ways: as
lament, jubilation, disarray, energy, fatigue.
Adoration too. I’ll say more about this later.

And yet, I don’t have the sense of ever having been given it.
Never entirely. I don’t think that I’m responsible for producing
it either. It is likely that in the language
to which I’m subjected and to which, vaguely, and
with difficulty, I am forever being born and to which I am forever
dying,
in the same way as I am to things, to other people, and to whatever I’m
said to be,
 it reaches far back to some story long ago,
deeply buried, and inaccessible to thought: an ancient scribble beyond
memory,
an old indistinct murmur counting out
the generations.

I rather think, then, that it—the phrase, I mean—is still seeking its
proper form
and has never, in fact, come to an end. Never
in any case have I heard it. On the contrary, I
suspect that if at times I do happen to hear certain words,
a kind of diction or a sort of music, it is because
of this phrase still waiting, indefinitely,
for its conclusion and its closure.

If pressed, that is, at those moments of terrifying oblivion when the

merest winter light falling on a wall, or grass growing sparsely in a garden,
or water flowing in a river, is a pure sign, like a hiatus, that I am going to
die, I might say (and this too would speak, in silence, and be captured in the
phrase): I will have been a phrase.
Or rather: there will have been a phrase, this phrase—which will have
haunted me, and never crossed my lips.

This abortive utterance, this sense of being haunted, this decidedly I call
literature.
  

The tale I should like to tell (or recite: it’s perhaps, unfortunately, a
kind of myth) is thus a tale of renunciation.

To “renounce” originally meant: to announce or enounce. To

“phrase,” in Greek, more or less says the same. Today, however, to
“renounce” means: no longer to want, to accept. As one accepts one’s
destiny or fate: that which has already been spoken.
Let us assume therefore that one has to learn to renounce, slowly; no
longer to want to utter.
Then, there can be a phrase: always the same, never itself; returning
from afar, multiple and halting.
It follows that nobody is a prophet in their own language.

Ten years or so have passed.

At the present time, amid the general devastation, the distress could
not be greater. A simple historical observation: there is nothing new in this.
Or the opposite. Look around you. Above all, listen.
The fact remains that what comes to pass, and passes us by, is still an
enigma.

The beginning always comes too late. And yet all it needed was a hand
placed on the nape of your neck (without the least authority, without the
least submissiveness), a laconic “I’ll explain later,” a whole night spent (till
the pale glimmer of dawn) in approximations, in the sound and silence of
voices, in the limpid tale of what we did not know about each other and still
do not know.
On each occasion, less—much less—may be required. The
approximations are endless, but however vulnerable we are, we are
constrained to admit it.

This infinite paraphrase I also call literature.

  

Ten years ago—somebody remembers, and heard it—it resonated, like

something midway between a prayer and a speech, or like the echo,
for instance, of this
(and that it should be about exile, separation, unacceptable
renunciation, is anything but indifferent, as is the enjambment, the sentence
spilling over from one line to the next):
… how shall we bear,
My Lord, our sundering across so many seas?
Or that the day should begin again and that it should end …
etc.

(Just as later there’ll be: “Andromache, I think of you”; or else “torn

from a husband’s arms.”)

Between a prayer and a speech: what, according to the dictionary,

used to be called an “orison.”
If ever the renunciation could be achieved, it would be as oratio soluta.
This is how prose or interrupted discourse was traditionally defined. What
today we would describe—and I’m deliberately forcing matters here—as
the text of distancing and dissolution. Broken, therefore, or fragmented, to
the same degree as solitude: a solitude without sharing, even were it to be
obstinately shared.

Imagine a body retreating into the “oh, it’s nothing, really” of

suffering or the unanswerable “why?” of misery; imagine it ailing, short of
breath, but speaking—murmuring. That’s what I mean by supplication.
Imagine it also loving, in the grip of something, clinging on, emptied
out—raising itself up to be free of the weight, refusing to be wrenched away.
 Imagine something inexorable.
What then remains is precariousness itself: these few words in the back
of the throat. And what remains is adoration: help me, love me. Or what
remains is imprecation.
In any case: pure, empty address.
It’s possible it may be heard: if not, why would we write at all? But it
changes nothing as far as the distress is concerned. Adoration is unrelated.
That’s why it makes demands, exorbitant demands, not knowing what
it’s demanding or even of whom it’s demanding it.
Which is also the reason it approves nothing.
It releases. Someone knows full well what I’m referring to: the
unprecedented joy of mourning: I am going to die, I am going to die.
Nothing equals its clarity.
  

To that degree, that simple degree, the phrase—literature—is oral.

Voice is essential.

Voice is essential
because the voice, all the voices
that weave their way through us, subjugate us, and distend
our voice, always falter.
Hold back, do not pass.
One could say that the “phrase” is a kind of oratorio on an ancient text,
familiar, repeated, but immemorial,
and consequently without it ever being possible
entirely to make out the words.

I think of the always innate (degenerate) birth

of literature: the diction of children,
prosody, older than our memory
of legends; three women,
in the courtyard of a farm, staring at the earth
beneath their feet and lamenting the things that won’t ever
come again; a conversation in hushed
tones, in a bedroom, as evening falls.

I think of the woman who accompanies each of her gestures with words.

(January 20, 1979)

  

Postscript

Ever since these pages were first written, I have had a lingering question.
And I cannot make up my mind to republish them here without trying to
articulate that question more precisely or at least to make it clearer.
I don’t, properly speaking, have doubts. I feel of course a certain
awkwardness with regard to them, as is always the case “after” the fact, but
also because they were initially meant to be read aloud, in quite specific
circumstances, and, apart from one or two passages, to just “work” in that
context. Of course I am also concerned that they may be perceived as
“poetical,” and it’s true that I detest everything that in overblown fashion
gets put under the heading of “poetry.” But in neither case is that anything
serious or even very important: it is a (minimal) risk one has to take.
The question itself is more serious. And more difficult, too. At any
event, difficult enough to prevent me from formulating it successfully in one
go, other than in this approximate fashion: why is there any “phrase” at
all? Where does it come from? What attracts it, or dictates it? And who or
what does the giving?
But to say that this is an approximate formulation is only partly true.
Strictly speaking, the question cannot really be formulated at all, for the
simple reason that nothing or nobody (neither a “thing” nor “someone”)
can be the origin of the phrase. I know that it comes—or that it comes to
me, let us say, and I know that it is indeed attracted, but I do not know from
where, and know that I will never know. If there is a gift, and in a sense this
is not wrong, I even feel quite incapable of speaking of it in any other terms,
the source of the giving (whether a person, a thing, or some “donating
agency”) is unknown—and remains inaccessible. It quite simply is not. All
in all what I call “phrase” is what brings me face to face, as it has always
done, with what is not and cannot be. I am forever without relation to it,
and this is the reason it leaves me deeply affected or afflicted, to the point of
slipping or stumbling, losing or abandoning myself, being almost nothing at
the moment when it happens to me—that is, when it is already no longer
happening to me.
At certain moments, which are not necessarily “major moments,” but
on the contrary more like empty stretches of time during which, quite
brutally (when the activity I’m involved in is mediocre or mindless, drab
and uninteresting, or when the task at hand is sordid or obscene, or when
for no particular reason I feel myself physically sagging), the phrase starts
up again or returns, without the slightest prompting on my part—and I can
hear it—there is little doubt it is already no longer me hearing it, but
someone else, before me or after me, unrelated to me, except in the formless
form of a nonrelation: between hatred, stupor, or shame. In any case, what
happens is that, with the overwhelming intrusion of the phrase, something
opens up beneath “me,” something worse, much worse (more repellent,
more base, more alien too) than what we believe we can recognize, in vain,
in the animal state. Worse, too, as far as intolerability goes, than joy. I feel
crippled, lose my bearings, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Indeed, all that is left at those moments is the indistinct or obscure way
I am jolted back into consciousness. This is what always happens. (At least
up till now it has always happened.) If it didn’t, I imagine it would be like
being at death’s door, like letting oneself die. But the more it goes on, the
longer it takes to restore or recompose itself. Whence my increasingly
boundless state of distraction, and the ever more profound detachment with
regard to everything. And the indifference. I have nothing to say: the
phrase, with a kind of consumptive chill, slowly tears me to shreds. Takes
my breath away or prevents me from breathing, suffocates me.
Systematically, methodically, ages me. Messes me up, if not, more grandly,
“assaults me.” Messes me up, because it is a weakening and a worsening.
Having said that, I do not believe it merits being called “passion.” Or
if it can, it is only in so far as it is not viewed as a hindrance preventing
what, in any case, remains perfectly banal. And yet, it is also not unlike the
urge that tirelessly prompts you to attempt to reach the one who, in giving
of herself, can but take refuge (with her eyes shut and face closed upon
itself, such that it’s no longer a face at all, but something unrecognizable),
who is already fading into the distance and is visibly no more able to
restrain herself than to complete this kind of fall or forward flight towards
what she doesn’t know, yet still awaits. And it is not unlike this kind of urge
because in both cases—sometimes it’s impossible to tell them apart—what
is given is only the already given (the body already touched, the phrase
already heard), without whatever is doing the giving itself at any point
being given. But something, though never a thing, withdraws or retracts,
and nothing else happens or is even possible except for the frantic imitation
of this ebbing away: the body bordering on the untouchable, the phrase on
the inaudible. Whence the painstaking and cautious attentiveness, the
ceremonial, the rituals. Whence the fear too: not to falter, to be able at the
very least—as when you’re listening, yes, to a devastating piece of music
you would like to have written and which you know deep down you could
have written because you’ve always heard it resonate as far as possible
from yourself in yourself—to be able at the very least to accompany it to
breaking point, to the point where “it collapses,” the motionless crossing of
this uncrossable distance. A thankless exercise: being faithful.
*
In sum, what I am trying to understand here is this, which I have never
ceased reading and rereading in Hölderlin:

At such a moment, man forgets both himself and the God, and he turns
about, assuredly in all holiness, like a traitor. For at the furthest limit of
passion, nothing else is left standing except the conditions of time and
space.
At that limit, man forgets himself because he is wholly in the moment,
the God because he is nothing but time; and the one and the other are both
unfaithful: time, because in such a moment it turns categorically, and
because beginning and ending, in time, absolutely cannot rhyme; and man,
because at that moment he is obliged to follow the categorical turning and
because, in what follows, he is thereby absolutely incapable of measuring
up to the situation at the beginning.

There. Literature obviously does not have its end in itself. That of
which it speaks, from which it comes, is not. It cannot therefore ever speak
of that of which it speaks. It always says something else, which we more or
less always hear. In no way does that of which it speaks constitute an
ending, or an origin. There is consequently nothing which defines it. But it
is not “idle speech” either, no: there is no such thing as idle speech.
Perhaps it is like one of those Egyptian figures walking with an always even
step, their heads facing backwards and eyes staring, unseeing, from where
they have just come; and of whom it is impossible to tell, drawn forwards as
they are into the opposite direction, where it is they are heading. And what
it is they are refusing—or cannot bear—to approach.
But from “what” or from “whom” are we then turning aside?

(June 1979)
  

Phrase III

(Two Examples)

The child, supposing it to be him, looks. Or else,

perhaps, looked. What he sees, however, or saw,
nobody will ever know, not even him, who will have
forgotten it in advance but will never cease claiming he had kept it
in immemorial memory: the arrival of nothing
on this shoreline without boundary. Sweetness and suffering alike.

Only rarely if at all does the memory

return, for instance, of the dark passage of the light
across the grass. Or else of something different, having no
connection. But who could retain the memory of
being dazzled: this infinitesimal lapse
when the gaze, caught prying, sees what it ought not to see?

As for us, we were simply there, waiting.

The dark passage of the light was the same, or at least seemed to be.
We had to leave one another behind, but without reproach, because
the distance, the passage and the lapse, we knew, more so
than he, the child, did, we knew that there is absolutely no rule against
being subjected to them, and that one can founder
just as much into the light above:
fall into the blue sky, in pure effacement.
  

The ceaseless arrival of separation: three times over

the evening fell, always the same, blue (a limitless
blue) and cold: a bare room and an empty window,
bare branches against the limitless blue. There were
noises in the background, distant and vague: voices probably,
answering one another. What was it someone asked? It is given
to no-one to know, nobody was listening.
They were only distant voices in the limitless blue.

I believe such things are incomprehensible, and no

power over them is granted us. We
are most of the time obliged to say: that’s just how it is. All that
remains then, when night finally comes, potent and cold
as marble, is supplication: voiceless, for its part,
the distant noise’s silent heart.
The limitless blue finally voided.

(1979–1999)
  

Phrase IV

“Not as I wish, but as you command me.”

—Hölderlin

But we can perfectly easily move around in the simplicity

of morning, its sufficient light measuring everything
on all sides, and, with a certain short-lived mobility,
attend to all kinds of elementary tasks
that require relatively little space
(and therefore little strength or attentiveness)
and most of all do not put us under any obligation. That was the case
one whole summer, or almost.

And since then no shadow has ever really fallen

on the incomprehensible and
terrifying transparency there then was in the slightest
of our gestures or in the slightest decision
of ours to rely on one another.

But that time should be in our favor, like

a great reserve of unused memory, or
something trenchant just as much, and left in suspense,
it obviously does not fall to us to draw all
the consequences. Whence, inevitably, our distress:
  

we suffer it, without breathing a word; the strength ebbs away,

and separates us both, several times over. We lose sight of each other.
It is possible, I know, that it’s basically
just a kind of incomparable moment: a singing,
each time a tenuous mode,
but pitched exactly right, of entreaty:
“Why do we have to be abandoned?”
But if that is how it is, I do not believe at all one should
turn away, even less desire it to
cease, since it would be, for us, without reason. But rather
think of it as that which keeps us
here, which after all is where we are meant to be, growing old,
and explains why strangely we become very close to
the things around us, familiar with
their limitless rustling
in the dimly slanting, slow light of evening.

But what of the inaccessible? Dogs, for instance, crossing

the meadow, barking: two of them, each looking the same,
  

black and racing away; disappearing, gobbled up

without any hesitation, without a shudder of fear
apparently, by the darkness
along the edge of the field, at the far end. Chasing what? Trying
to find what other sequence of barks to drag with them
further down the hill, and what anxiety towards what here
they call “the deep livelong path,”
which is a track, also in
darkness, before which, you knew it, inevitably
we would come to hesitate? Are they themselves
a sign? Or might they be,
prompting these complaints, the harsh reminder
that in this place prevails an enduring sadness,
that here, where we might have perhaps admitted
some savagery, was formerly a domain of the dead?

If not, the meadow is empty in that way, and the other

recently turned to ashes,
and the slopes of the cultivated hillsides too, because
  

always forgettable, always, drawn

from the furthest reaches of oblivion, or in secrecy, is the hour when the
interruption has to occur. Light in the storm-filled sky.
Barely a puff of wind. We know, we were told so:
just born, already out of breath, suffocating, given over
to this return of the void within us, to this stalling that is the source
of fear. Then admittedly we listen
to all these sounds as they grow quiet.
We look on as well. Our eyes do not falter. Yet the only
evidence is of graves. Dry
is the earth, the empty limpidity
dazzles us no less than the blackness. And the silence. And such

indeed is limitless being. A joy: only a hair’s breadth away

from our knees suddenly buckling. It is
behind our back that we are most affected, as happens
sometimes, in a given circumstance,
when it is apparent that one of us founders for having glimpsed
what the other told them not to see in order
  

to draw them closer, trembling, and ruin them more infinitely with
sweetness.
But of this relatively slow irruption, though it is
in reality a form of weakness, exceeding
each time our declining strength, I do not believe
one can simply say: it is what I expected;
nor even: I dreaded its coming.
But because it is nothing, so lacking in gravity, and because there seems
to be no proper time for it: let it be so,
I accept. Or else: I am not ashamed, it is what is needed.
The goddess, the dark one, in her finery, I think of her,
the deformed hag of the crossroads, conceding

the embrace. Acrid is her night. I think on it, murmuring to myself,

out of earshot: “Give! Oh! Give!” Moaning, moaning
in the filthy bedroom. Just like you, faceless, one
day: “That just can’t be! That just can’t be!”
Or to ask for pity, but from nobody, in vain. And as
I have often also thought I could detect, meagre,
and exhausted, in certain voices, a kind
  

of prayer. And perhaps

it is never granted us, otherwise,
to respond to that for which
we no longer have a name. Or perhaps the tears.
No, not even that: just us, desolate, in grief
and in penury. Not understanding. Afflicted.
After which all that remains is weariness, and night falls.

We acknowledge defeat: the memory of mud, the damp

trace of the sky upon it, on the earth, that is.
And the lightning illuminates the little that, already, our bodies
will become. Then the wind drops: a beating sound,
never again our breathing, never again
the agitation, exact desire. Nor
serenity: a hand half-open, placed
simply, palm uppermost, towards the darkness. And your body,
at night. And the calm words. As you know,
you were crossing a bridge, it was that spring
when we crisscrossed the whole of Alsace
  

in order to meet up. We had spoken of things

yet to come and of those we thought
would never again see the light of day. Of the bare sufficiency,
too, of our language when it deplores or relentlessly
questions the already said and the still unnamed.
Of the deficiency and rightful place of words. Of the improbable
child, of dust cast in the end
over all things. Too many flowers: waking in the morning,
indeed, amidst the blue, and the noise. And the Stabat mater. Too close

was the blood. Unknowable was

what rose up, there and then, and made you stumble,
bereft of words, submissive. But without the tears, and without fear.
And in the same way, once evening came, the child who figured out
“Let us cross to the other shore” was not frightened. He knew,
without knowing, he could sense,
as I do, at this table, this evening, under the usual
lamp, I know, not knowing, I know
that what traverses us still, and trembles in us, is the abject,
  

and proud tremor of which we are born,

endlessly dislocating us, throwing us to one side
where it is henceforth barely us
who shudder, having foundered well before,
battered and beaten, for having emerged into the clear light
of day.—“And if I’m in pain or afraid, who will look
over me?”—“I will.”—“And who will hear me if
I call out?”—“I will, I will look over you, I will listen out.”
—“And when we will both have taken the decisive step?”
—“Vast is the reserve of what has grown somber. And always
we will have known, always we will have known, that less
we were. So too will be the earth and
so too even the rain which will wash our faces.”

But we can, now, we can

abide, “till our dying day.” And,
in the rightful alternating of the hours, it will once more
be the same care we give to the gestures
of our tasks: the decisive step has been taken.
  

But as for ourselves, in fearing it, we will not have been the bearers
of a truth weaker than anger, nor its victims,
nor an opportunity to be defeated by it, since that truth we will have
loved, against ourselves, demanding that it come and knowing
that it would never come,
but remain forever in the offing,
and everything that will happen in that way, we accept it,
saying yes to this misfortune, yes to indifference,
yes to the things yet to be born, and yes to the dead things, unrelated to us,
in our decline and in the darkness,
we say it, that the time should therefore come,
let it come, when we will be the earth’s own appeasement
and the transparent seasons
of men, we will give without measure of our strength,
of our language without measure and of our thoughts,
we will consent to boundless oblivion,
to the desolate kingdom, we will have this patience, and

the firmness required, we will have it, we will need to have it.

(July 20, 1980)

  

Phrase V

(A State of Turmoil)

For Maurice Blanchot

In der lydischen Tonart

“And it wasn’t a scene?”

“No. At least I don’t believe so. Not entirely. But I’m well aware it’s
probably beyond my power to explain it. If pressed (I’m thinking of what
lies behind the question), I could say: too much, far too much forced it upon
me. Or else, but this certainly doesn’t amount to the same thing: the lapse
was too serious, obviously, and I no longer had the strength. But even if that
is true, it would still not be enough. It would be better to persist in saying
nothing, as I had been happy to do till now, at least as far as I was
concerned. Without second thoughts (it is not really so important and for
other reasons I’ve nothing to lose). But without betraying it either: it is
something that, quite simply, cannot be expressed in narrative.”

“No, it’s perhaps rather what made me say from the outset: there’s
nothing secret about it, but it remains unavowable. In the same way, let me
not leave it in any doubt, it is not a question of memory. I have forgotten
nothing. In any case, the lapse occurred before.”

(…)
 “Yes, if you say so: unnarratable, unavowable, unforgettable. But I’d
also add: the worst thing about it was the infinitesimal worsening of
everything. The deterioration, yes, and the weakening.”

“(…) On the other hand, I have to admit, it was no longer of any

concern to me. It is true that I was talking. (That night, I never stopped
talking, nor did I stop shivering or feeling the cold; I imagine it’s all
connected, the symptoms were quite predictable, fully expected, even caused
on purpose.) But it is quite clear too that I didn’t want to say anything. I
wasn’t speaking to anyone, and didn’t make the slightest sound. I was
talking without talking. Or rather listening. I’d be tempted to say: I was
listening to myself, if that inexhaustible speech (which in any case I had no
way of interrupting and which was even, I think I know why, the most
obvious clue to my helplessness or lack of energy) wasn’t precisely
inaudible, i.e., ‘voiceless,’ and if I’d been able to rid myself at the time—or
could do so today—of the vague and disconcerting impression that deep
down it wasn’t entirely me holding forth. Nor for that matter, I hasten to
add, was it some ‘other.’”

(…)

“In these circumstances, it was not far off being quite unreal. (If I give it
more thought, the whole ordeal strikes me as incomprehensible at times.)
But however much that so-called speech (as you can see, I still want to use
the word) resonated silently, from a great distance, at the very limit of
nowhere in particular or some indeterminate elsewhere (simultaneously
inside myself and outside myself), it nevertheless followed a precise
trajectory, in what I could no longer exactly call my own head or my own
throat, in so far as I have ever had any confidence that these were my own.
It’s a trajectory that, for what it’s worth, I’d willingly identify with the
passage between the back of the neck and the larynx or the movement from
thought to utterance, that is to say, with that ungraspable, most likely
nonexistent moment which doesn’t belong in time, at which, somewhere in
the back of the throat, thought (what other word can one use?) takes on a
kind of intangible consistency—I’d describe it in approximate terms as
being like a taking of breath—and then merges with my breathing out. In
the process, I wouldn’t say it gets lost, but simply that it changes and, in
changing, is articulated or modulated in such a way as to produce a vague
atonal singing that lacks all melody and is, so to speak, ‘bereft’ of
everything else (if not perfectly worthless), while yet having the same
rhythmic inflection as breathing. Or of something even more basic, like a
pulse—I’m not sure.”

“And it was, yes, a sequence of phrases, of coherent but rather

abstract propositions of great generality, which I still found enigmatic: not
obscure, though, really not at all, but without there being any rigorous
connection between them, despite the staggering accumulation of logical
props or the somewhat futile rigidity of their grammatical structure. Let us
just say: spaced out. Pure syntax, pure parataxis. Like the remnants of a
discourse fully extended, but for the most part left unspoken.”

(…)

“Perhaps, indeed, they were by way of being answers, in rough outline

at least. But, though it seemed to me on several occasions that I was being
interrogated in some way, or that at the very least there was something from
which I was meant to be exonerated, the questions themselves were almost
never formulated as such. What was missing, at any event, as I am only too
aware, was the fundamental question around which the whole thing should
normally have been organized. It therefore goes without saying that this
was no dialogue: or, if it forcibly still had to be one, it was a dialogue that
was ill-formed or ruined and, though the leftover debris remained intact,
without speakers or characters. And, most of all, without any ‘me’ and
‘me.’
And without you as well, however surprising that may seem.
This is borne out by the fact that what was at issue was not at all the
initial incident, the episode which in a sense had started things off in the
first place. And unless one takes the word entirely the wrong way, one
cannot reasonably say it had any ‘dramatic’ quality whatsoever. No pain is
dramatic. On the contrary, in my memory, in what I still remember of it, that
muted (‘silent’) incantation—in which I couldn’t however tell who was
lamenting whom—unfurled without end, poured down in bursts, slow,
sustained bursts of rainfall driven in all directions by the swirling wind that
made the heavy foliage shake and which I kept hearing throughout the
night. The noise, a vast rumbling sound: the ravaging and rage of the
outside.”

“No, it’s not an image. Not at all: decay (effusiveness) has no effigy.
That’s the reason why, when morning came, in the sickly light of the
pale dawn, everything seemed to have been washed clean by the rain that
hadn’t fallen nor had soaked through anything. There had been no storm.
(I could, as you now know, put things very differently. Using my deadly
mythic style. However poignant King Marke’s or Golaud’s pain, it’s sung.
Declaimed. And I know those moments off by heart: the declamation I could
do over and over. But the pain, which touches worse than the heart, makes
it impossible.)”

“Having crossed the gravel path which goes all round the house (and
makes the same sound as the storm that never came), I walked to the bottom
of the garden and stopped by the pile of earth and ashes you’re familiar
with, perhaps to look over the fence at the distant hills and the plain. It
wasn’t winter yet, but it was cold, very cold. (It was my first time during this
period of the year in that part of the world, which is no more home to me
than any other, and which, in spite of everything, I still don’t know at all
well.) The animals had not yet stirred. Nothing happened, obviously, but I
knew, as far as I was concerned, that it had already happened; I knew it,
while not knowing it: I could recognize the absolute novelty of it all, this
streaming, this weariness.
No, I was not reduced to silence, but in a state of boundless
indifference: I was ready to die.”

(Summer 1976–Summer 1981)

  

Phrase VI

(Ker)

With a somber air, she takes the decisive step, embraces, unrecognizable.
*
“And you still think no explanation is necessary?”
“I do.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s a declaration.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’m using the word ‘declaration’ in its most common or ordinary
sense: as when you make a declaration to register a birth, or make a
declaration of love, or declare a death.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“The word ‘Ker,’ or rather the name, is one I encountered for the first
time when attempting to translate Antigone, with one eye, so to speak, on
Sophocles’ original, and the other on the translation by Hölderlin. I first of
all thought, rather hastily, that it referred to some kind of demonic creature,
like one of the Erinyes or the Furies, and that in reality there were several
of them, three at least, as in the case of the Fates, the Harpies, the Graeae
or the Gorgons. I even saw somewhere, I forget where, that they were the
daughters of the Night. But it was you who told me, and confirmed it since,
that, no, she was a goddess, not of the underworld (like Hecate or
Persephone), but of death: death as such—in other words, immortality
itself. That is how the phrase came about, almost in that very form
(fortunately, though, and just recently, my most attentive reader made me
‘depoeticize’ it). I noted it down in the margin, without really knowing why,
and put it forward at one stage when I was asked for a one-line poem.”
“But what does all that have to do with a declaration?”
“Oh! Well, there’s just a single letter difference.”
“A single letter?”
“Yes, the letter L, the second in her name.”
“That’s childish, or just morbid.”
“Neither. The additional letter doesn’t only point, in Latin this time, to
the timbre of the voice, that voice I told you I have always heard, or, if you
prefer, have always been waiting for. It therefore doesn’t just allow a
reference to your name. I write the letter L as ‘elle,’ or ‘she’ in the singular,
in order to say that there is only one Ker.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The point wasn’t to explain. I don’t even know if I could.”
“But it’s obscure to say the least.”
“I’m not trying to be cryptic, though, nor simply to give extra work to
readers skilled in hermeneutics. That would be indecent, and pretentious.
But at the same time one ought not to make a mystery of what one is doing
nor refuse to understand how things came about. That there’s only one of
them means: there aren’t three. The trinity is the West’s nightmare. You
know as I do that famous analysis of King Lear; he still has to find three:
the mother, the lover, and death. I would have much preferred him to say:
the third returns, and is once again the first. Or something along those
lines.”
“But if there’s only one of them, why ‘unrecognizable’? I can
understand for death, or even the mother …”
“I know you’re thinking of the second.”
“Obviously.”
“I could bounce a different question back to you: why is death most
frequently represented as a woman? But I don’t want to be evasive. I would
say this though, which is perhaps valid only for ‘me,’ which is that what we
stillborns recognize in the one we do recognize is precisely that she is
unrecognizable. Otherwise we would be unaware of her, she would remain
indifferent to us. We have no other reason to be in love. Except to keep each
other company, since always and for evermore, in our death, in our
unrecognizable immortality.
 The declaration was just that. Not a legendum or legend, as you can
see, but what the dictionary, more humbly, calls a lectio or lection.”
  

Phrase VII

(Material)

1 “It is only when we leave something behind that we give it a name.”

“The star withdraws into its shimmering.”

2 In a strangely self-assured, firm, and almost trenchant voice, even

though he hesitated for a moment, in the end he lost his temper, and made
this imperious declaration: what we consider to be immemorial (being born,
dying; or more precisely: dying, being born) is well and truly unforgettable.
It is the unforgettable as such.
But hardly had he uttered these words than his eyes clouded over, and
he left the hall.

3 And it is not true that lying

persists in us, even when
our shame falters

It’s something else

In no way
is it enough to say

nor even

And as for us, what can we do, if this is the reason

the admission comes so late
4 BETH. Plorans ploravit in nocte et lacrimae ejus in maxillis ejus.
DALETH. … et ipsa oppressa amaritudine.
HETH. … ipsa autem gemens conversa est retrorsum.

5 It was, near enough, during that very same period (the cold had already
set in) that one of those who might perhaps have been able to understand
what was happening, and, most of all, why he was lapsing into such
incoherence, as though under the influence of unprecedented weariness,
did decree:

6 And as for us, what can we do, if this is

the reason we have to
shudder, and if perforce
we must submit to it

7 Incipit lamentatio

8 I suppose he had difficulty explaining himself. Am I wrong? It’s

possible. Having said that, I don’t think he looked like someone who was
sick. Simply, he had become entrenched, and refused to be the object of
other peoples’ looks or injunctions and submit to what governs
relationships in the form of responses.

I’m not at all convinced he looked like someone who was sick. And
yet the first-hand reports, whether made up or not, all concur. He must have
remained silent, yes, being in any case a man of few words, except when he
started declaiming; he presumably lacked the know-how or, in what
amounts to the same thing, displayed it to excess; and, like some ferocious
and hunted prey, he was probably frightened of venturing a word or a
question that at a given point he may have thought necessary.

All the same, terrible, indescribable things went on inside his head.

9 CATH. … et considera quoniam facta sum vilis.

LAMED. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est
dolor sicut dolor meus: quoniam vindemiavit me, ut locutus est
Dominus in die iræ furoris sui.
10 Secondly, I had to tell you that, in spite of everything, he knew, and
had known it earlier. Even had he forgotten, he still knew while no longer
knowing. He kept repeating that nothing could hurt him anymore: “Nothing
can affect me now, nothing can affect me now.” I believe he had become
withdrawn, just withdrawn; and that having given up in that way, it was
granted to him to admit the clear secret: separation.
Do not forget that he had always said so, that he had even spoken of
innocence (“the gray-haired child”) and that, as a result, without ever
wanting to, he could accept and agree to it.
In any case, the epoch was what it always is: an epoch.
Other reports say that he moaned and lamented: “Oh no! Oh no! That
just can’t be!” as though he had just remembered, over and over, some
failing or failings. And as though he had wanted to erase his own existence,
disappear from this world, and shrink from the eyes of mortals (of the
living): “Because it’s arid.”

11 What he had said of the night of lovers: there was no night.

12 NUN … Infirmata est virtus mea.

13 Because the time is measured

for us to end and turn aside.

Because it’s arid.

14 (The scene on the ramparts of Troy, the farewell. But there is the
child.)

(1980)
  

Phrase VIII

(The Meaning of Tears)

Stabat mater dolorosa

lacrimosa

Kneeling, weeping—although

in early representations she is

obviously taller
and stouter; and though she is standing
upright (she’s the third figure from the right, I think,
the one interring the child
and holding him there, watching over him). But mournful, yes,

mournful there, now, because it’s

the evening before the seventh day:

“With heartrending sorrow the separation is complete.”

A light is cast upon her face, on her tears,

but in secret. Night and cold, unrelenting terror
long have reigned, and not one
of the stars is shimmering.
Misery strikes, seals, casts down, into
the ashes or mud. Such is affliction. And yet

her lucid voice resounds as

she parts her hands and bends
her brow towards the ground, kneeling, mournful;
being clarity and light itself, acknowledging the need to submit.
  

Cuius animam gementem

Contristatam et dolentem
Pertransivit gladius

As for us, pierced through and through, touched;

we, once more, diminished, furious
and dispossessed.
Why this fever,
these gusts “of an ill wind”? Why

this prolonged outburst

akin to that of a riot, or a storm?
And why, as it subsides, such fragile silence?

To be this open—that, though, in

uncertain fashion,
is what binds us. In you, it’s more like

a wound; in me, more like an infirmity.

But the scar that divides your
midriff, visible, barely

touchable, hurts me no less than

to be forced in this way,

for want of anything better, into these declarations

and into these almost canticles.

What do you teach? That fear is primary,

and yours in the end this voice that I speak.
That when dead therefore I shall be your silence.
That we are an insult: to the day, and to the earth.
  

O quam tristis et afflicta

fuit

Kneeling, weeping:

shedding bitter tears. Because that child,

not only couldn’t be born
(of this we had clear knowledge),
but the others, the already-born,
were like that character
in King Lear burdened with vengeance and
prophesying death, all born without birthright.

But perhaps she had never

said so before and perhaps had never

wept. Grieving is long, without end,

when there is no death to lament.

Keep, for this very reason, “the memory

of the dates.” And also
of the names, all called out,
one after the other, in the cold,
beside the ashes.
Vulnerable you have
become, knowing that this had lived within you
and divided you, this shudder, this
passion, knowing that it’s a sign:

pity, “the fury of pity.”

  

Quae maerebat et dolebat

dum videbat

Her tears, I lap them up: an exhalation, a mist

rose up from the earth,
“moistening the whole surface of the ground.”

Desire from below. But she, occupying higher ground,

she accepted that it should be the evening, as evening
fell, and that we should stagger on
helplessly, henceforth incapable
of standing upright, or erect.

Oh how sad and distressed she was.

Who in me will have heard it,

who, the call, even before being able to hear it?

I saw the daylight, the noises resounded, her voice

lucid, despite the straitened place, the distant murmur
become a phrase: a commandment, a sort of strict
law, dictated, yet without the slightest
bitterness or slightest hostility,
like the sweetest of injunctions.

The kiss is pure precision.

What could she see? What was
this torment? And for what, for what
did she have to be so sorry?
  

Quis est homo qui non fleret

si videret

The meaning of tears

is first of all that we are a
prey to time. Is, first of all, in this freezing cold,
that we have been driven out. In this weather.
And yet “common to all
is the impenetrable.” But the sky, for its part,

is perfectly open, glistening like

metal, blinding.
The meaning of tears is therefore not

that pain should cease, nor desolation; nor

that we should regret the pulsing of old
(though still there lingered on, as always, what had never been felt).
But that, with eyes wide open, in the end
sight should be denied us: there, only there,
is given us “the extreme tension of pain
and joy.” Given us, too, to hear,
in the narrowness of our gullet, is the sound of the
sweet voice we know not to be our own.

Avoid saying: it’s a disgrace.

But, in this destitution, this elocution
  

Quis non posset contristari

Matrem contemplari
Dolentem

that is so great and terrible, admit that what speaks to us

in such silence, overwhelms us, strikes us down and ruins us,
is something we cannot know, and which remains

(since this says nothing)

unrelated to what we seem

to be responsible for. Like blood. Your blood.

To weep means this

effusiveness, this pure empty
transport: beginning and ending no longer rhyme
since dying is what made us be born.
We, in oblivion; we,
in the most faithful infidelity. Is there
one who would not weep?

But look, look at the face

(the high forehead, the eyelids almost closed)
scarred, betrayed in the stone or the bone:
those marks are tears;
this stoop, passion; bent double, these shoulders.
To weep, the meaning of tears
(Oh the clear face, the enigma)
is what comes to her who grieves.

(March 1–6, 1980)

  

Phrase IX

(A Transcription)

While reading an article in Le Monde newspaper about Hofmannsthal, I

noted down two quotations. One is from Mauthner: “As soon as we have
something to say, we should remain silent.” The other is from Wittgenstein:
“The inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly—in the expressed.” The first
of the two strikes me as trivial. The second affects me even before I’ve had
time to be suspicious. It was, admittedly, the very same Wittgenstein who
wrote that other sentence which, however famous it is, is just as trivial as
Mauthner’s: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” To
which Adorno retorted—I also read this recently and copied it down—that
“Wittgenstein’s maxim, in which the extreme of positivism spills over into
the gesture of reverent authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reason
exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If
philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot
speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that
expressing it identifies it at the same time.” And Adorno adds, perhaps
rightly, “Hegel attempts to do this.” But I also recall Benjamin’s phrase
about Hölderlin—I’m quoting now from memory—where he talks about
“the inexpressible coming forth to the limit of what can be grasped in the
work of art.”
*

If most of the time I don’t speak and say nothing—and tell you nothing—it’s
not because I’ve nothing to say, nor because I want to remain silent, but
because if I were to say what I do have to say, it would be unbearable. The
difficulty, which is very simple, is knowing how to survive day after day. It’s
therefore impossible for me to tell you when it hits me like a bolt of
lightning, and leaves me beside myself (when I no longer know who I am,
when it’s not me anymore, but something—or someone—that, in
abandoning me, props me up or keeps me hanging on like “someone who’s
going to die” or “someone who never stops dying”). It’s impossible for me
to say too how terrifyingly soft your body is at night, or how the blood
pulsing through your veins is so much more alive than my mere surviving.
It’s impossible to tell you about the waterlogged meadow glistening in the
morning light (or in the clarity of your gaze, which amounts to the same
thing). And impossible to tell you how a single moment of the most
elementary and ordinary kind can be as potent as that obscene purity by
which, in joining together, we are disjoined from one another, transported to
where we know what to pass away is all about. None of this can be spoken
—and only barely, with great difficulty, can it be written. (And if it can be
written, it needs a decision to come from afar, one has to wait, one has to
undergo the ordeal of waiting: perhaps only the rhythm of a phrase is
capable of conveying or giving a sense of the wrenching involved.)
The difficulty is also in taking the risk, even when we’re face to face. I
say “even when we’re face to face” because you know me well—as nobody
else has ever known me—and because I don’t find it difficult in fact to speak
to you. The difficulty, since that’s what I’m referring to, is of a different
order. Basically, you are the only one with whom I can, even dimly,
implicate myself and think: yes, it’s true, we do know each other. We know
each other better than I know myself. (Perhaps in that way you’ll
understand I can never talk to myself, even less look at myself. I live
everything blindly. But with you this strange blindness reaches a limit. But
this additional clarity, like reaching another level, is precisely what
condemns me to silence. Or, at least, to few words. Speaking always says
more than we can ever say—or are ever capable of hearing said.)
*
I have long been aware that the only way I can really address you is in
prayer.
The few lines of verse I do remember, apart from Racine and
Baudelaire, are these from Rimbaud’s “Memory”:
 Madame holds herself too upright in the nearby
meadow where the threads of labor fall like snow …

Or:

The plaything of this dismal eye of water, I cannot reach,

Oh motionless boat! Oh arms too short! either this
or the other flower: neither the yellow one that annoys me,
there; nor the blue, this friend in the ash-colored water.

That is my childhood, that which is over, absolutely over.

Yet this morning, when you were beside the pond—but neither “too
upright” nor “holding yourself,” though “in the meadow” (at the foot of
the tree, downcast, and weeping)—that still was, was no longer, was my
childhood. I was speechless: infans. Sometimes, it’s comprehending that
takes our breath away and cuts us short.
*
“May I, may I dedicate these things to you
at which I am so clumsy?”

(c. 1985–1986)
  

Phrase X

(“The Dead”)

Those are the ones, without identifiable faces, but

those are the ones who came,
they took their places around the lamp, they
said they were passing through but
asked why we were practically
refusing to let
go. They spoke
in rather hushed tones, with restraint, and
without anger. Both he and she were
weary and most anxious;
they thought from now on nothing more
would happen that might give a semblance
of veridiction to the vast, distant murmur, to
this stony echo (to the ashes, they said).
They were not complaining, they were simply
asking to be believed, he with his hat
on his head, and busying himself with his hands, and she,
prickly (or just proud), beautiful no doubt,
who from the depths of her age, with her graying eyes, and tears
—whereas he dared say nothing—appealed
not for reparation, but simply
for justice, that the laws
familiar to all be applied, the laws
that govern our insignificance, evil in the world,
and our infirmity. It is not credible,
no, she said, what has happened to us,
not credible: you know
this, you know we hadn’t done anything,
and you never mention it, never, never.
And he, barely audible: we
are the witnesses that out of shame you’re challenging.

(December 17, 1988–February 29, 1996)

  

Phrase XI

(A Paraphrase)

From all three sides comes a light, rather

dark blue in color, cast from a distance, or perhaps
from somewhere else, down below. In the same way that from below
she threatens and watches over our death, the fierce one who,
dark blue as well, was no doubt venerated in those parts.

There are in reality only two lives, without my

ever being able to tell which is the extension of the other: the one
that used to be called new (I fear it, a memory without mention);
and the deep one whence we come, like wild animals
being hunted down. An inexhaustible supply of water traverses them
and the breath of disaster that rises in the woods
does not assuage in vain our anger, it’s what
every time disjoins us and binds us, leaving us unburdened
by the blue crossing, the distraught gaze, and the tears.
There is something there which is clear-cut; that’s all that can be said.

(May 28–30, 1995)

  

Phrase XII

(Ekphrasis)

Huddled up, huddled up together—that they are, but

without the weapons of example; he is trying
to make himself understood: he says he has to leave, that he has
to give way; she, who refutes and refutes his phrases one by one
with her intrepid voice (even when angry
or distressed), demonstrates that what he says would be true perhaps
if only he were willing not to become so entrenched,
just like when in a storm, as she described it, with the din
of water, the dark descends and sounds become muffled,
there, now, endlessly. But he is not unaware of himself either,
having been decreed a child and been ruled in assured fashion
by an all too old, too dull stupor, and by bitterness.

“I believed, since you announced the fact,” she said, “I believed

that I was meant to be immortal. Accept however that,
even were that torment to exist, it is only the hand
that is shaking you, only the mouth that wants, and only this hulking body
(“take it”) whose passion belongs to a time before you came.
And pride, you’re the one who told me, accept once more, accept
that it is just these curls, just these two Greek words
that are probably my most precious heart and the subject of my
declamation.
Agree that I caught unawares whoever it is who’s lying low and on the
lookout
in the crudest, most odious, and ill-fated aspects of your admission.”

I will sing Quidquid latet apparebit like nobody

has sung it before, in vain. And nobody, believe me, nobody
will have the rectitude needed to hear it, ever.

(1988–July 20, 1995)

  

Phrase XIII

(Menin Aeide)

Of him I know only the act and the death.

The second to the first gives no authority,
and neither it, though it be laid down in advance, nor
the other, the first (or perhaps now the second),
which bears no epitaph, provides a clue
that he knew the tumult of punishment to be close.
Had he indeed not always said as much?

(May 1995)
  

Phrase XIV

For Jean-Luc
Muss es sein?—Es muss sein

If memory serves, but to be honest

I really can’t be sure, it was on the corner of Sutter
and Mason, or Taylor, perhaps, I’d have to check.
But I won’t be going back there again, that’s for sure,
and I can see that I’ll have to get used to the idea
that, on the contrary, then was the last time. (But what did
the final street sign say, before that infernal bridge?
Embarcadero, I think, Main Street, but no doubt also
Last Exit to SF, I really can’t remember.
Though it’s not for want of having crossed over, the bridge, I mean.)
The wind was tremendous, and was blowing litter
and dust in all directions to the tops of the highest buildings,

with their sharply defined shadows: Men and bits of paper,

whirled by the cold wind. That I could understand,
just as I understood, in this language I will never
know, that this was what he calls a place
of disaffection. (Afterwards he refers, I think,
or perhaps it’s just before, to a darkness
fit to purify the soul, cleansing affection
from the temporal, and as for us he says
we are empty of meaning.) However, “beware the
self-satisfied thought that believes itself to be thinking.”

The fact remains that from there, I remember, it was

possible to see the dazzling reflection of the bay,
shimmering in the sun like a sheet of metal or corrugated iron. And in
the distance, the dry hills. Internal darkness, deep lane, the
unprayable prayer: I read it over and over,
like the beginning of “The Dry Salvages”:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god. I imagined it possible
to make the link with Ovid or Hölderlin—Baudelaire
especially, since, driving me in the car (with me feeling sick at heart)
the day before my departure, she had said
this was the line she’d always had in mind:
“Andromache, torn from a husband’s arms.”
What grim determination, what insane desire to put an end…

I was on the sidewalk, as by the edge of a roaring river overflowing

its banks (the noise of engines in that part of the world, and of crowds, is
entirely different),
and I was blinded, in the blue shade, by too much brightness.
It seemed to me the uproar, like a clamor,
was what you get from the immemorial annihilation
of ourselves in so far as, generation upon generation,
without respite we founder, and without cease. And I waited,
fearful that the signal should enjoin me to attempt
the crossing: Walk! the word was suddenly written; and one has
to pass over, however loath one may be to subject oneself,
impotent with rage, to the most scandalous
injustice of all, betrayal itself, the worst—and most pure.
  

II

At the intersection, then, around the corner, she, on the other

side of the crossing, was reading, I imagine, a letter.
She was crying, too, displaying her distress
with the kind of demonstrative gestures they often go in for
in that part of the world, like the way they have of dramatizing
everything as if they were reciting Shakespeare and as if, at first,
they could feel nothing, but wanted at all costs
to feel that of which they know precisely
how by others it was felt, so many others
they take to be their ancestors—but it isn’t
true. I watched her reading and crying, and when
she raised her head to murmur something
like: “Oh no! Oh no!,” it was as if she was addressing her invective
to the heavens and demanding that a thunderbolt come crashing down.

I crossed, at the signal. When our eyes

met, in the normal way, she stopped crying.
I heard the lament: “I am told she is
become like a wasteland” (blasphemy, he called it).
Partial horror. I knew it had happened to me before
to know that I had died. Twice over. About the first time
there is nothing I can say. As for the second I think
it is not something of which I am prevented from speaking: it was
only that untroubled step beyond life’s path,
neither so deep nor very broad, a coming and going just
between two shores of which one is in fact endlessly
out of reach. But in the gaze that appeared

and was returned, there was, yes, “the sense of my frail existence.”

It is a great thing to have this right

to go, simply to go—as close as possible, not far.
*
Later on, I once more reread the words:

“I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds,

and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed
somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense
darkness.”

I asked myself, and ask myself still, in

what language, if not the language of the dead,
this had gone through his mind and written itself.
A language, I’m convinced, just as
foreign, to be translated and translated, without respite,
as the one I take to be mine.
  

III

In the margin, as towards the end of his life he had

adopted the strange habit of doing, he therefore wrote, in
his own language (as though to protest against the convention requiring
tempi to be marked in Italian: molto
adagio, in this case, for instance, since in
spite of all he kept the notation): in der
lydischen Tonart, in the Lydian mode. It is said
that this is the ancient mode of ecclesiastical chant, and no
doubt he had this in mind when he insisted on translating
into German the indication: canzone di
ringraziamento, at the beginning, by a sort of
paraphrase in which indeed a deity is named:

Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen

an die Gottheit (and, as it happens, she of course is the one
he addresses, shortly after, neue Kraft fühlend,
by way of thanksgiving: Doch du gabst mir wieder
Kräfte mich des Abends zu finden—the words are like those
of a chorale or an enigmatic promise of salvation
despite the end of the day and the vast impending night
into which we go and are lost). And yet,
since Plato at least, as far as I am aware,
the Lydian mode, whether Mixolydian or Hypolydian, accompanies
songs of lamentation, elegies or threnodies, it’s a mode
for the reprovable expression of grief. Of mourning,

since this is now the appropriate word

when I think of that day in September in nineteen
eighty-three when I heard it again,
the singing, always the same, which seems to pass on, if
one can use the word this way, beyond all memory.
I’ve been listening to it now for about thirty years,
always the same recording, in which the difficult
breathing of one of the performers, almost
at breaking point, causes me to hold my breath myself when,
an octave higher, the initial motif returns
at the precise point when he noted once
more in the margin: Mit innigster Empfindung,

using words you’d think he had first read in Hölderlin.

At times the sky too is what moves us,
by being so empty, and lit with such intensity,
even at dusk, that to our abandonment, yes,
the fever consigns us, and tears are no help at all.
But no is the word: no to the unacceptable
calm, no to the dizziness; and the slowness dying away
before the crossing, there’s no doubt
the suspense is finely calculated, on the very threshold
of the ultimate declaration that returns from afar
like an unexpected squall or storm, unexpected, that is,
were it not precisely for the silence, you know, the silence.
  

IV

The difficult thing about a day that reaches its end is

to consent to its incompletion; no
heroism is up to the task, that’s clear; but
one can (suddenly last summer), if not return to
oneself—which isn’t possible or would be pointless—at least
pick things up from where they were left off.

Was it the same year, or later, that I was returning

beneath the roar of aircraft, from the Armenian service
at San Jose cemetery, on the hill?
He had been cremated. He was the one who made me a present
of the facsimile edition of the manuscript of The Waste
Land, I: The Burial of the Dead … and I remembered
we had talked about it while listening to Gundula
Janowitz—o welch’ein Glück—between Santa Monica and
Irvine. But prosody was something to be learnt in
Oakland, from the man who has blood
in his name. At One Hundred and Fifteen Central, we said,
jokingly, to one another: Mehr Licht!, and I insisted on translating:
too much light, even when the ground shook.
So time, in its underhand way, became dissociated
into this pit in which nobody ever sees to the bottom, as
you are the first to realize, and this end
which never ends, and which must be perpetuated

a little more, just a little, as is given to us only.

(1993–March 3, 1996)
  

Phrase XV

He enters, visibly annoyed, with

worry also in his eyes, takes his seat, and
observes a few minutes silence.
Then, speaking clearly, yet with a muted
voice (dull would be more accurate, or just deflated),
he sets about explaining what the following words,
in his opinion, on condition one be guided by
“the old undomesticated sense,”
might therefore mean: first of all: “When you
landed… on this shoreline without boundary”;
then, second, “A disarray of the soul, a riot of the heart”;
and, finally, third, and his delivery suddenly turned
into the most self-evident of lessons: “Could we not say
A savage Spirit casts light on this matter?
No, no, Oh holy light of the gods,
I do not wish to see this day, but rather to disappear
From the eyes of men.” The horror, he notes, which
is deepest within me, and the most unspeakable of all, is not
at all my own: it is not within me,
it is the pure outside of a time wrested from time,
a caesura, an emptying out, a suspension into which one collapses. That’s
all.

He falls silent, as though in a daydream, dissatisfied and disoriented.

It could be described in terms of prosody. That
would be true to the facts. But just
think, he says, just think of the whole sky
distracted into the slightest watercourse, at the bottom of a
valley; think too of the rustling sound
of evening which with his usual extreme precision he called
“chaos”: a yawning gap, a rift.
Such is that to which one can but yield.
It’s the impossible, in the face of which comes blindness.
No knowledge can beat out its measure.

(1998)
  

Phrase XVI

For Georges Bloch

When he says that the ear is the organ of fear, it is not to refer to the fear
Of wild animals (he is only speaking of the vast terrorized night
Of early cave-dwellers), nor is it to refer to the birth
Of that most ancient of incantations, no, it is just to point out
The affinity between hymns and the night: that is, the dark. The other,
however, that
Viennese disciple haunted by Mahler, holds that music emerged
As the echo of the deathbed lament of whoever first was killed,
Almost a god (or our most extreme intimacy). Nothing but elegy, then. But,
And this is no objection, it has been pointed out to me that all the same
There are different tones: figures, scansions, body and soul together, and
admirable
Syncopation, this infinite chance of our breathing and holding to one
another, perhaps.
Perhaps: but only so long as they too can be heard,

Those who were slaves, roused in anger or downcast in misery (and

Those—don’t claim ignorance—who are forever wandering and dispersed).
Now,
In truth, nothing resonates in us except for that
Which it is not given to us to hear and thus cannot be heard. Certainly not
Some still small voice nor the muted background rumble of the void.
But quite simply, that which is unheard-of, from before we were thrown
headlong
Into things, from even before our immortal effacement, and of which no
memory
Has the measure. And yet we recognize it:
Joy, distress, that terribly prior quiescence.
Nothing, in any register, overwhelms us this much,
Nothing, except for this caesura in time in the depths of the gaze
Of whoever has already departed. Of each one. Yes, that’s what leaves us
deafened.

(September 1998–September 1999)

(Mannheim, December 6, 1999)
  

Phrase XVII

(A Scene)

For Jean-Christophe

(He is ten years old, eleven at most. From a distance, he walks slowly
towards the audience, and without moving stands as close to them as
possible, at the very edge of the stage. He doesn’t take his eyes off them.
There is something serious and solemn in his stance, and a kind of
awkwardness: yet one has the impression that he is doing it on purpose, or
making more of it than he might. He is violently lit, with an even, stark,
glaring light, like the light in a factory or on a building site.
From his pocket he takes out one or two sheets of paper which he
unfolds and glances at. (From time to time, he will consult these notes in the
same manner, as though to be sure of what he has to say. But he won’t ever
read them.)
He carefully checks his breathing.)

I don’t represent anything, or anybody …

(He stumbles, falls silent, glances at his piece of paper, and starts
again.)

I don’t represent anything, or anybody. The person who told me what I

am going to try to tell you is someone I barely know and I know next to
nothing about him. I don’t even know his name which, in any case, would
be of little relevance here.
He’s a character, I believe, with no particular features.
He is aged. He has on occasion said things to me, evasive and brief,
which were always a bit overdone. It’s as though he was trying to cover up
something quite precise. But we have had numerous telephone
conversations: he speaks with a lot of gentleness, with extreme
attentiveness in his choice of words, he seems breathless, his voice is
exhausted. One can sense his absent, far-off gaze, and its sadness, probably.
Though he would sometimes suddenly appear cheerful. I’ve never heard
such laughter, and no doubt never will. It was admittedly restrained, and
almost silent, but there was such mad gaiety in it, such …

(He hesitates.)

…  innocence, yes, innocence. Like the laugh of a child, since that is

what it’s about.

(He suddenly seems pensive.)

Don’t forget that I am not speaking for myself. What I am saying is

what he has told me to say. I would never have been capable of doing this
on my own. And as it happens I was always careful to avoid asking the
slightest question. He on the other hand sometimes asked me what I
thought. I replied cautiously, but owned up to being confused, and he would
listen very attentively. Often, to my great surprise, he would even take up
some of the words I’d used, or would refer to things in life which he had
encouraged me to talk about.

(He consults his notes.)

I should normally know it off by heart. But I would not want to give a
misleading impression of his thinking. Here, though, is precisely what I
noted on the topic: thinking, he would say, belongs to nobody, it arises
suddenly without anyone expecting it or asking for it. It’s a kind of violent
tension, which you have to abandon yourself to. It may seem like losing
control, but one should not be afraid of allowing what is said through us to
be said, barely modulated, or of giving voice to what opens us up and runs
through us like a breath from elsewhere: because it does have to be said.
Then, to make proper sense of it, one will have to work at it relentlessly and
at length.

(He looks around, embarrassed to be standing there, visibly looking

for somewhere to sit down. He seems helpless. It is as though he has
suddenly grown older, and is certainly no longer the child he appeared to be
at the start. His face becomes more serious.
Is he making a decision? He walks over to stage right, stops, makes a
gesture, and returns to the front of the stage, to the exact spot where he was
standing earlier. Two stagehands, with a mischievous or mocking air,
staggering about, or just clumsy, bring a table and chair on stage: “How’s
that?” they ask. Then, without even turning round while leaving the stage,
one of them says: “We’ll dim the lighting at the back, and just leave the
footlights on.” And indeed the lighting changes.
He, the child from earlier, checks that the table is not unsteady, puts
the chair alongside it, and sits down. He carefully spreads out the sheets of
paper in front of him. He holds his forehead in his two hands in a gesture
that seems habitual. He says nothing.
During all this time, in the shadows behind him, three women take
their places, standing, a certain distance away. It’s possible to make out
that they are of three different ages. They will stay there without moving
throughout all the time he is speaking.
He raises his head, clears his throat, then, in a confidential tone of
voice, but as though he also wanted to explain something as clearly as
possible, he resumes speaking.)

I am therefore only a messenger, a spokesman. Let us say a “medium.”

The day he decided on this word, he was in the process of telling me about
the gods, who, on their own submission, had always been names and been
the stories engendered by those names: wonderful stories, but hardly happy,
rather cruelly arrogant ones. But however much he struggled against
himself, at times with ferocious lucidity, he couldn’t prevent himself from
reciting the myths over and over, or even creating others for himself, in the
hope of drawing lessons from them or inventing new ones. And there was
always this antiquated desire to exculpate himself and to find refuge in
some religion without religion.
It was possible, he added, to meet the gods; but it was most of the time
when one least expected it, because nothing differentiated them from the
most ordinary people, except perhaps their gaze. There too they were like
circumstances or events: like the inflection of a voice, a loving gesture, a
kindness, a moment of rage, a look of hate. But one still had to be aware of
them, and many were those who in the course of their lives had encountered
something divine, in the form of a person or some demonic moment, but
without realizing it: through lack of attention, precisely, indifference to
people and things, or inadvertently. Through tiredness.
(I kept my objections to myself, and didn’t dare say anything, for
instance, about their permanent, asphyxiating presence (without presence),
the constant rituals, the perpetual surveillance much worse than the worst
kinds of modern police surveillance, the fear of making mistakes or being
found wanting, the compromises and deals, the hopes placed in dubious
oracles, the trade in sanctuaries, the complexity of things not permitted, the
monotonous obligation to make sacrifices, and the cruelty too: in a nutshell,
faithless, joyless credulity, superstition, and terror, and the omnipotence of
an already uncontrollable technology. Not to mention the inextricable
confusion between the religious and the political, this forever festering
wound. He would not have understood, I think, my tenacious hatred, he
would have judged it shortsighted, “atheistic,” in Enlightenment style at
best, whereas I was thinking more, in the words of Lucretius, of “crushed
humanity”; and that, above all, the divine, if such a thing exists, seemed to
me to belong to a very different discourse, of which Christianity and the
other major monotheisms, as the phrase goes, had not even been capable. I
therefore said nothing.)

Such gods—this was really what he wanted to say—had disappeared.

They had withdrawn, or “turned aside.” Perhaps the names had lost their
power; and in fact, today, what names might we still be able to invoke?
Perhaps the inattentiveness or the indifference had become more serious?
Perhaps the “self,” including its gaping emptiness or what makes it
inaccessible, in spite of all the techniques (that was his word) designed as a
remedy, had practically confiscated everything?
 But perhaps the gods, just as much, had themselves been forced to
wrench themselves aside from time, which served to redeem their
immortality, and thereby fall brutally subject to the law of time belonging to
a time that was not simply eternity’s absence. It was a huge innovation,
already, to declare them mortal. Another innovation, no doubt
contemporary with the first, was to endow them with a contradictory nature:
benevolent-malevolent, healer-killer, man-god (or the reverse), virgin-
mother, and so on. But the decisive part was that they became—or that He
became—time itself. Then there was that phrase uttered at the dawn of
Modern Times, which subsequently became modulated in so many different
ways, though still as an aftereffect of the same revelation: “Gott selbst ist
tot.”
Our logic is still dependent on this. Unless of course one thinks that
God, or the God, being “nothing but time,” means that dead is what we
always already are, immemorially, without which we might never come into
the light, into neither the joy nor the pain of the day—this interminable
darkening.
(Here too, I preferred to say nothing: as for being dead, this is
something the gods had always been, whether engraved or chiseled out, on
simple stones or barely cut wood, sculpted, chanted, or declaimed. And
with their tomb-like monuments. Delos is one of their most impressive
graveyards, but there are so many others. We were left speechless by the
mausoleums in South Korea.)
No, he assured us, it is not the case that traces of their desertion
remain, and that we are “restored to the earth”; nor is it that some divine
element, in times long past, had departed the bodies of men. What is
however true is that the worst caesuras in our existence, starting with
madness, attest to the fact that we have abstracted ourselves from the body
of the divine. No other god will come, there will be no “last god,” not even
one passing, imperceptibly, like a thief in the night.
(I thought “Adieu”; and remembered: “The Gospel’s a thing of the
past! The Gospel’s a thing of the past!”)

(His aging has become more pronounced. A voice in the control booth
asks through a microphone: “Shall we put the music on. You wanted the
first few bars. Just a moment: ‘Lento assai e cantante tranquillo,’ is that it?
Where you’ve added, I can’t quite make it out it, something like ‘Kol
Nidre’?” With an irritated gesture, he says not. “No music! Not now!”)

Let me finish. I don’t have much left to say. What used to be called the
soul, he also told me, was the trace of this abstraction or extraction. A scar,
in other words, never closed nor sutured.
A little later, without me really grasping the connection, he murmured
weakly: we have become sad; our joy is this grief. I think it was a loose
quotation.

(He stands up, takes a few steps backwards, without turning round,
then returns, resting his two hands on the back of the chair. His face has
become emaciated, he is trembling slightly, he seems at the end of his tether.
He nods towards the back of the stage.)

I know you’re all still there, and that one of you at least will help me in
my disappearance.

(Then, speaking to the invisible production engineer: “You can put the
music on now; just the double exposition of the opening theme; and then
you cut it off, sharply. No effect, no pathos. Grief and joy, that’s ample.”)

I’m coming to the end, I have to end here. I can feel a nameless rage
coming on, and would much prefer to spare you the spectacle. But I know
that violence is inevitable. There is never any peace of mind.
Basically, there was nothing more to announce than this: it happened,
what has to happen has happened, has always already happened. The wound
that we are, our native infirmity, graspable in every look and every
inflexion, all this preceded us, absolutely. We are already dead, we know
this. Even children know this, and in any case weep over it. There’s no
secret here, and what he told me to tell you is not a secret. Nothing is
unavowable.
I cannot however, despite the best of intentions, prevent myself from
feeling overcome with an immense feeling of revolt. This secret without
secrecy is of an intolerable clarity, and reveals a major injustice. Why were
we given death, and these derisory viatica, to make us vaguely forget that
we shall never have any knowledge of it?
 But you can see, I’m losing my temper. Please forgive me.

(He falls silent, and there is a lengthy pause. He then draws himself up
a little.)

In a word, I refuse to say “Amen.” Or else: “it’s nothing, it is what I

was expecting, I’m happy with it.”
There, that’s all. I hope that I have fulfilled my task more or less
correctly. I can’t be at all certain. It was both too simple and too difficult.
Too untimely as well. But one is what one is.

(The lights go down.)

(1995–1999)
  

Phrase XVIII

(The Curse)

Just days, not even that, just hours before

she died, distraught but lucid, from what I was
told, with that icy fury which for so very long
had been her usual attitude but which she was so good at dissembling,
she uttered three lapidary and peremptory phrases
for each of her three sons. The first, since I
am the eldest, announced my imminent destitution, my
collapse into that title of Apollinaire’s. It’s
heredity, she prophesied, in her role of false maenad,
the mourning of old left unspoken, all the fault of the other
family. In any case, I was unstable, ungrateful,
evasive; deficiencies had been hidden from me,
but with exaggerated indulgence, as if
I had been normal, when the weight of dead
generations weighed down upon my incapacity quite simply to live. I would
not even
make the gesture that from childhood
she had demanded of me: Peer Gynt’s return to the bedside of
his dying mother. As for the other two, my brothers, I don’t know
what on earth she may have said, nor what contempt she may
have shown towards the pitiful one she had enslaved.

She was obviously right. Madness is not only

this terrifying lucidity. It is
not merely oracular either. It’s a self-fulfilling
prophecy. It is its pure act,
malevolence itself. The decline seemed
irreversible: apathy, absence, confusion;
stupidity and rage, melancholia
without end; tricks and lies; disinterest
and not the slightest joy any more. A body voided of all.

The most worrying thing, when my father deteriorated,

was the aggravated resemblance: with barely twenty-four years difference
I too had become unrecognizable. He
haunted me exactly, even in his vague gestures
and his distant gaze. He seemed to be saying to me:
“There you are, stop blinding yourself.” I was at last
the victim of the prohibition whom they had desired
so much. I suddenly had the clear intuition
of the hell for which I was responsible, these ravages as close
to me as possible that exceeded all measure. All that remained
were the last dying moments, effacement without protest.

But it sometimes turns out that hatred transforms itself into pure love.
(Hatred here stands for disappointment, neglect, abandonment, even
betrayal.)
Whoever knows this will understand. There is something indestructible,
and never is a decision entirely without consequence:
clarity suddenly regained.
“To hold on to what has been achieved.” It’s almost impossibility
itself, but hold on, we must: that means yielding,
giving up only supposedly being oneself, walled in.
No character amounts to destiny,
every curse is vulnerable.
It is the role of catastrophe to be necessary.

(March 6, 2000)
  

Phrase XIX

(Prose)

Prose is what I call diction that is just and, because it is

just, virtually unutterable. But indestructible, too.
Some months ago, I read these words of Eliot’s:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead.”
Such indeed is diction.

The word “just” should be understood in the sense of justice and

consequently of rectitude. Prose should at no point
lie or cause humiliation or
distress without recourse. But that is not
enough: what is just is the dictation of what is true.
In other words, prose has to utter a truth
that the dead, if they are just, would allow us to affirm.
It is never a foregone conclusion. Only the dead who were unable to say
anything
possess any authority whatsoever.

The clinic I’m in is clean, tidy, hygienic. The staff do not concern
themselves
too much with me. I’m in a room at the end of a corridor, a room that is
almost bare, and light.
I take my meals with the other residents but I
practically never say a word to them. They chat about everything and
nothing,
observe one another, establish different kinds of ties
between each other (hardly of desire, certainly not friendship
or love, but rather of jealousy), they say uncomplimentary things about one
another, but in reality
they speak only of themselves and feel sorry for themselves.
Only some of them, staring into space, their eyes vacant and
infinitely pained, don’t utter a single word,
except to beg for a cigarette or money for a cup of coffee.
Those, so close by, are already
dead. Their barely audible elocution
is what I call veridiction. The reason I chose to come here,
against my wishes, on the brink of being threatened or destroyed,
in this loathsome solitude, amid the tables
in the cafeteria, and the trees in the park,
was to learn this mumbling,
not to take control of myself or to renounce eloquence,
but to try to say as nearly as possible
what I must renounce:
this bitter falsification, this evasive
discourse, these residues (or this excess) of “poetry”
which have ruined our most just prose.
(I do mean our prose, not that of the ages:
it’s you I’m speaking to, as you know.)

A diction could return to us, no reason

to despair, if I strive no longer
to trust in the fury of words
and so long as we are capable of respecting the unutterable.

(December 1999–March 2000)

  

Phrase XX

(Stanzas)

There are those, of mine, who have

disappeared. It wasn’t a real loss.
In any case, when they did leave me, I perfectly well knew
who they were, and recognized them as familiar people
I had allowed to take advantage of me with far too much
unsatisfied indulgence. They were the ones
from whom in fact I wanted to keep my distance.
Decidedly without regret.
Others, however, have remained, I can’t say
where, lurking insidiously, in any case
more like things, not people (I wouldn’t be able to
recognize them), like forces hollowed out, eating away at me and
devouring me, but impossible to place: that part of me which
haunts me and which I find lacking, from the nape of my neck
to my abdomen and my crotch, to the point of affecting my breathing.
There is no kind of pain involved,
no, but there’s a sense of baleful
horror, without name, which I find disturbing
as though it wasn’t something on the outside,
such that I end up being absent, distant,
no longer belonging to myself at all.
There’s something other inside me, concealing me from myself.
I have become an unavowable lie,
the entirely passive prey to disgust and shame.
And it’s terrible because I live on
and continue to act as though it was nothing.
Without even closing my eyes.
  

He was speaking to himself—to nobody else, or barely.

He was not speaking. He was not the one this protest
was addressed to. And he wasn’t the one who uttered it.
In his humiliation, he was pure anger;
and the anger marked out his days, all his waking moments, his periods
of distress, the sleep in which he would have liked to die.
He was beside himself.
He acknowledged with stupefying precision the gestures
he had not caught unawares, the words he had not heard being exchanged
(“We loved each other so much”), the looks of which
he couldn’t ever be the object, so much did his ugliness
make it impossible for him.
But since it was a sharp, stabbing pain,
at least he wanted to run away and disappear, he still
had that energy which later,
when everything had calmed down, suddenly left him,
allowing the unnamable to take over, in fallacious meditation,
with shame assured and that strange unfaithful fidelity. Perhaps
it was better to be wounded than to have one’s soul laid waste.
  

Your tongue can be sharp, severe, commanding,

what you say outrageous, often simply reflecting your anxiety,
lack of intelligence, mistakes, falsity, or
injustices you view as unacceptable,
the self-assurance too of whoever has just spoken with
a self-assurance you believe to be lacking in yourself.
You ask, sovereign though you are, to be allowed
to speak. Faced with real but intractable
questions—I never underestimate them,
I’m too aware of my own shortcomings—you would like
firm, definite answers, as nearly as possible.
(Just as you did, memorably, on the autostrada between
Livorno and Alessandria.)
Another voice dwells within you, though, or you give it shelter, musical,
vulnerable, almost childlike, the one
that makes one suspect that you are no longer afraid
nor hurt, nor have any kind of opaque apprehensiveness.
It’s the loving voice of intelligence or
gratitude, of the gift consented,
eternity glimpsed, or touched: of calm.
Then, your greenish-blue eyes have a radiance that makes you superhuman,
and your movements, the way you walk, only animals could do as much.
  

They’re sorts of notes, written for the most part

on tiny scraps of paper, at different periods of time,
outlines of phrases, but not even that, skeletons
of possible utterances, without purpose, or having so little, and without the
slightest
concern with signifying anything. Disjointed schemas,
connecting with nothing. A lacunary idiom, “bereft
of meaning,” as though they belonged to a lost language.

I don’t however know why I even kept them

or even why they’ve turned up here, in this blue
solitude in the Cévennes. I’m more often in the habit of destroying things,
and not wanting to hear any more about them.
Forgetting is what I prefer or shame is what assails me.
But here, since they’re there and because it would be pointless
once again to pretend or trick my way out:

“You know that’s how it is, you

know.
Keep it to
yourself.
Pay attention. It’s how
malice arises.”

“But you,
you who were namable
with such a reputable name,
why did you let
it happen …”

“One has to forgive

one asks
that this, for instance, should be,
or this

Or else that it should come, the time, that it come

One rules out lamentation, one has to.”

“We,
we are all
we, we are all the ones who ask,
not
but …”

“I’ve crossed over, but not towards any place

where we had been before nor
where we will ever meet again.

This motionless
step
belongs to no time.

It was—but also wasn’t—such an

incandescent light that it
obscured everything
and such that we foundered for having
been, if only once,
transparent to one another,

visible in the darkness that we are.”

“In the end we were reminded of all these things, the

main events were mentioned, all in all
everything that had happened
was carefully summed up.
It was devastating.

She answered:”

“He spoke with his ultimately hard-won precision

of the starlings ‘above the meadows of the Charente,’
or something like that …
He thought of journeys, of migrations.
He never stopped wanting away.

Did he know?
Certainly not.

Starlings have the strange gift

of making their song, if that’s what it is, resemble the noises
around them. In towns, they imitate pneumatic drills,
engines revving up, police
sirens, doors slamming, children
shouting in school playgrounds.

They no doubt do more, much more, than

what they expect of themselves. They are not
like themselves, but something like artists,
except, it seems, if one can take Lautréamont’s
word for it, for the way they fly in dense flocks,
quite astonishing it is,
so ‘uniform and regular.’

You will see, I imagine, the point I want to make.

Or else

But it is not so important.

The fact is that if
we

Some other time I’ll tell you about the dogs which, no sooner
than they feel loved, are on the brink of speaking,
and who no doubt understood you.”

“We are going to live a few more years

without measure, none at all, with no concessions

either, none, none at all

A proud power to speak;

but by then, it’s the only reason
for these words, we

The gravity, at times, with which one has to

It is possible to be free of an episode, of

vicissitudes. Every ten years, roughly
speaking, a change occurred.
Aristotle called them upheavals.

Euripides is said to have written: life is death,

and death also a life. That is
what he was quoting.

I did not tell you this in vain,

but

You’re right to think Medea is maternal love

and that Jocasta obviously knew this.
‘Acts of barbaric cruelty,’
the graves in Mycenae.”

(1990–2000)
  

Phrase XXI

(A Clarification)

Whenever I set about writing, writing something like this, whenever

I can no longer speak and, whatever the noises outside, leave
to the dread of silence the tribute it tirelessly
demands as though it were some inalienable right,
whenever I remain silent, without for all that wanting
to say anything, then, I listen and can hear it, barely audible,
not knowing where it comes from, from no voice distinctly
articulated, this unknown tongue, no word of which, nor any structure,
nor any sound, is identifiable as such, but
which has all the appearance of a possible language:
delivery, rhythm, differences in pitch, prosody,
caesuras and spasms, diverse intonations (exclamations,
interrogatives, monotony), something melodic
too, but which doesn’t amount to anything one might sing
and, in the absence of recognizable stress patterns, hardly lends itself to
song.

The difficult thing, once it’s not so much grasped as sensed,

on this shifting shoreline at low tide, neither water nor sand,
in this faint, imperceptible backwash, is that
there is an imperious need to translate it.
But everything is missing: words, grammar, agreements,
anything that might be transposed.
It is well known that a phrase ought to well up.
It is almost there, imminent, and all
that seems necessary is the patience needed for
it to spurt forth and impose itself. But in what language
one might call one’s own, if the other, the one that came before,
absolutely, in which nothing was said,
makes each of them, even the solitary tongue from which
each of us comes, almost definitively foreign?
It is an illusion to place one’s trust in one’s own

voice, which is no more our own than our

way of moving or looking. It is
well known that we fail to recognize it, this voice, and that only
another at a pinch is accessible to us—I mean,
to some degree at least (I am thinking of yours, which flows of itself,
that I can’t deny). Written things go through us too,
provided one has a predisposition, which is another riddle.

We therefore translate—but this is an endless task—a vague, inchoate

music, bereft of meaning, into a song
that at rare moments it is perhaps given to us to hear
but which nothing would have allowed us to produce:
it comes from too far off, too many passions have composed and
decomposed it, too many throats have intoned or screamed it,
it was too much the murmur of the ages or too much our origin.
Language is this torment: joy and fury alike. No cry.

(March 12, 2000)

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
  

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s published text (2000) comprises no references,

no footnotes, no editorial matter of any kind. Phrase, in other words,
presents itself entirely without commentary. Readers may therefore prefer to
disregard the following translator’s notes. I include them, however, in order
to assist readers in recognizing at least some of the source texts to which
Lacoue-Labarthe refers, or which he quotes, reworks, or mentions in the
expectation that his audience will have some familiarity with the material
deployed. These notes make of course no claim to exhaustivity. As far as
the translation itself is concerned, I should like here to express my thanks
for their support and kind assistance to Jean-Christophe Bailly, Jeff Fort,
Christopher Fynsk, Susie Hill, David E. Johnson, and Claire Nancy.

DEDICATION

“Who else for, if not for you?”: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)
inscribed much the same words (“Wem sonst als Dir!”) in the copy of the
second volume of his novel Hyperion, which he presented in the fall of
1799 to Susette Gontard, to whose four children he had earlier served as
resident tutor, and with whom he had fallen in love, though she was of
course already married. It is usually thought that she was the inspiration for
the figure of Diotima in Hyperion. In June 1802, however, Susette died, at
the early age of thirty-three, to Hölderlin’s considerable distress.

PHRASE II

“…  how shall we bear  …”: from Racine’s play Bérénice, act 4, scene 5,
lines 1113–15. The English version used here is slightly adapted from
Berenice and Bajazet, translated by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Faber &
Faber, 2012).

“Andromache …”: this and the brief fragment that immediately follows are
taken from Baudelaire’s famous poem “Le Cygne [The Swan],” lines 1 and
37. The English version used here is from The Flowers of Evil, translated by
James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172–77.
 PHRASE II: POSTSCRIPT

“At such a moment  …”: from Hölderlin’s “Notes” to his translation of

Sophocles’ Oedipus, which Lacoue-Labarthe translated into French and
helped stage in Strasbourg in 1998. The English version given here is
adapted from Hölderlin, “Notes to Oedipus,” in Hölderlin’s Sophocles,
translated by David Constantine (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 68,
modified to reflect the more literal rendering proposed in Phrase. Lacoue-
Labarthe wrote extensively on Hölderlin, at times in critical response to
Heidegger’s longstanding engagement with the poet, at times to offer a
distinctive interpretation of his own, based in part on the staging in
Strasbourg of his own French versions of Hölderlin’s two translations from
Sophocles. Lacoue-Labarthe’s own account of Hölderlin’s work may be
found, for instance, in the books Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics, edited by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998); Poetry as Experience, translated by Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999); and Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry,
translated by Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); as well
as in numerous uncollected essays, including “Hölderlin’s Theatre,” in
Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 117–36.

“idle speech [parole vaine]”: an explicit reference to Maurice Blanchot’s

1963 essay by that title written in response to Louis-René Des Forêts’s story
Le Bavard and later collected in the volume Friendship, translated by
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 117–28.

PHRASE III

“…  fall into the blue sky”: a threefold allusion, first, to Hölderlin’s
suggestion that “one can also fall upwards,” in “Reflexionen,” in Hölderlin,
Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, edited by Jochen Schmidt
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 519; Essays and Letters on
Theory, translated by Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 45;
second, to Georg Büchner’s short story “Lenz,” in which the author notes of
his eponymous protagonist that “it sometimes struck him as unpleasant that
he could not walk upside down,” in Büchner, Dichtungen, edited by Henri
Poschmann (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 225; Lenz,
translated by Michael Hamburger (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008), 3
(translation slightly modified); and finally, to Paul Celan’s comment,
apropos of Büchner’s “Lenz,” in “Der Meridian,” Gesammelte Werke,
edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, 7 vols. (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 2000), vol. 3, 195; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,
translated by John Felstiner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 407, that
“whoever walks upside down, Ladies and Gentlemen—whoever walks
upside down has the sky for an abyss beneath them” (translation modified).

PHRASE IV

“Not as I wish, but as you command me”: from the semi-fictional epistolary
novel Die Günderode (1840) by the writer Bettina von Armin (1785–1859),
in which Hölderlin, on the authority of his erstwhile friend Isaac von
Sinclair (1775–1815), who features in the novel under the name of St Clair,
is credited with the following words:

Whoever is initiated into poetry in the godly sense of the term

must acknowledge the spirit of the Most High as standing
lawlessly above him, and must sacrifice the law to it. Not as I
wish, but as you command me!—and in that way he must not give
himself any law since poetry will never allow itself to be
constrained, and, if it were, the edifice of the poem would be but
an eternally empty house inhabited only by poltergeists.

See Bettina von Arnim, Die Günderode (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1982),
247.

PHRASE V

“In der lydischen Tonart [In the Lydian mode]”: words written by
Beethoven in the margin of the manuscript for the third movement of his
String Quartet no. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132.

“King Marke”: in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, Marke, King of

Cornwall, who is betrothed to Isolde, is betrayed by her and by his vassal
Tristan (who is accompanying Isolde back to Cornwall by sea) as a result of
the love potion administered to the pair, without their knowledge, by
Isolde’s maid, Brangäne. Tristan, however, who has allowed himself to be
wounded by one of his friends or rivals, dies of his injuries, and Marke ends
the opera grieving over the loss of this faithful servant.

“Golaud”: in Debussy’s opera Pelléas and Mélisande, Golaud, a widower,

happens across the mysterious Mélisande while out hunting and promptly
marries her. He later discovers, however, that his own half-brother Pelléas
has also fallen in love with her. Golaud then, out of jealousy, kills Pelléas
and wounds Mélisande, who denies any adultery. Shortly after, despite
Golaud’s pleas for forgiveness, Mélisande, weakened by the birth of a
daughter, quietly dies.

PHRASE VI

“that famous analysis of King Lear”: Freud’s paper “Das Motiv der
Kästchenwahl” (1913), most often known in English as “The Theme of the
Three Caskets.”

“the third returns, and is once again the first”: a transposition of Gérard de
Nerval’s famous line in the poem “Artémis” (from the sonnet sequence
“Les Chimères”) referring to the first and thirteenth hour in the twelve-hour
clock: “La Treizième revient  …  C’est encore la première”; i.e., “The
Thirteenth returns … It’s once again the first.”

PHRASE VII

“Plorans ploravit in nocte  …” This and the subsequent extracts quoted in

this section are drawn from the Latin text of “The Lamentations of
Jeremiah.”

“Nothing can affect me now  …”: words from the obituary account of
Hölderlin’s final years by the poet Gottlob Kemmler (1823–1907) recording
Hölderlin’s propensity to apparently lose himself in a state of creative
monologue, and attributing to him, on such occasions, the remark that “es
geschieht mir nichts [literally: “nothing can happen to me”].” Lacoue-
Labarthe also cites the phrase in his Poetry as Experience, 21.

“But there is the child”: Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache,
killed in the closing scene of Euripides’ Trojan Women.

PHRASE VIII

The headings to each of the subsections here are taken from the celebrated
thirteenth-century Latin hymn the “Stabat mater,” famously set to music by
Pergolesi, Haydn, Dvořák, Verdi, and numerous other composers.

“this pure empty/transport”: a reference to Hölderlin’s “Notes” to his

translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus. The translation used here is from
Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 63.

PHRASE IX

“an article in Le Monde newspaper”: the reference is to a book review titled

“Hugo von Hofmannsthal, de la grâce au désespoir [Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, from grace to despair]” published in Le Monde, March 6,
1981, by the critic Jacques Le Rider.

“The inexpressible …”: from a famous letter by Ludwig Wittgenstein to his

friend Paul Engelmann, dated April 9, 1917.

“Wittgenstein’s maxim …”: the passage is taken from Theodor W. Adorno,

Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 101–2.

“Benjamin’s phrase about Hölderlin  …”: the reference is to Benjamin’s

essay on Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities), in
Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974–89), vol. 1, book 1,
182; Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings,
4 vols. (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004-6), vol. 1, 341.
“Rimbaud’s ‘Memory’”: the poem “Mémoire,” from Rimbaud’s Vers
nouveaux et chansons. The English version given here is freely adapted
from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 125. The lines are
also quoted in Poetry as Experience, 30.

PHRASE XII

“Quidquid latet apparebit [whatever lies hidden will appear]”: words from
the Latin Requiem Mass.

PHRASE XIII

“Menin aeide …”: the opening words of Homer’s Iliad, literally: “sing the
anger.” In Richmond Lattimore’s classic English version (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), they run: “Sing, goddess, the anger of
Peleus’ son Achilleus / and its devastation” (75). Lacoue-Labarthe
comments on the significance of the scene in his Ending and Unending
Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, translated by Hannes Opelz (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2015), 62–64.

PHRASE XIV

“Muss es sein?—Es muss sein [Must it be?—It must be]”: from

Beethoven’s manuscript of the final movement of String Quartet no. 16 in F
Major, Op. 135.

“Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind”; “a place of disaffection”;
“cleansing affection from the temporal”; “empty of meaning”; “Internal
darkness”: all quotations from T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (Four Quartets).

“deep lane”: words from T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” (Four Quartets).

“the unprayable / prayer”; “I do not know much about gods; but I think that
the river / Is a strong brown god”: all quoted from T. S. Eliot, “The Dry
Salvages” (Four Quartets).
“Andromache, torn from a husband’s arms”: as earlier (cf. Phrase II),
quoted from Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cygne” (The Swan).

“I am told she is / become like a wasteland”: from Hölderlin’s translation of

Sophocles’ Antigone, act 3, scene 2, line 852, which Lacoue-Labarthe
translated into French and helped stage under the direction of Michel
Deutsch in Strasbourg in 1978 and 1979. The text used here is adapted from
David Constantine’s rendering in Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 96.

“Partial horror”: from T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (Four Quartets).

“the sense of my frail existence”: from the “Deuxième Promenade [Second

Walk]” in Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the
Solitary Walker). The English version given here is based on the translation
by Russell Goulbourne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14.
Lacoue-Labarthe quotes the passage at greater length in both Poetry as
Experience, 102, and Ending and Unending Agony, 43–44.

“I raised my head  …”: the closing words from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. Lacoue-Labarthe explains his admiration for the story (calling it
“one of the greatest texts in Western literature”) in the essay “The Horror of
the West,” in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Contemporary Thought,
edited by Nidesh Lawtoo (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 111–22.

“Molto adagio,” “in der lydischen Tonart,” “Heiliger Dankgesang eines

Genesenen an die Gottheit [Hymn of Thanks to God from a Convalescent],”
“neue Kraft fühlend [feeling new strength],” “Doch du gabst mir wieder
Kräfte mich des Abends zu finden [You gave me back the strength to find
myself in the evening],” “mit innigster Empfindung [with the most heartfelt
feeling]”: all taken from the manuscript for the third movement of
Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132.

“O welch’ein Glück”: “Oh, what happiness!” as sung by Pamina in Mozart,

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), act 2, scene 28.

“the man who has blood / in his name”: the jazz and blues guitarist James
Blood Ulmer.
“Mehr Licht!” (“More light!”): the proverbial dying words (though often
thought to be apocryphal) attributed to Goethe, the celebrated German poet
and writer.

PHRASE XV

“the old undomesticated sense”: from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’

Oedipus, act 1, scene 1, line 48; Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 18. Here, as below, I
have slightly modified David Constantine’s translation to reflect Lacoue-
Labarthe’s reading of Hölderlin’s text.

“When you / arrived  …  on this shoreline without boundary”: from

Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, act 2, scene 2, lines 428–29;
Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 28, translation modified.

“A disarray of the soul, a riot of the heart”: from Hölderlin’s translation of

Sophocles’ Oedipus, act 3, scene 3, line 747; Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 38,
translation modified.

“Could we not say …”: from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus,

act 3, scene 3, lines 851–55. Compare Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 41, translation
modified.

PHRASE XVI

“that the ear is the organ of fear”: from Nietzsche, Morgenröte (Daybreak),
iv, §250.

“that / Viennese disciple haunted by Mahler”: the psychoanalyst Theodor

Reik, the author of The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in
Life and Music (1953), which Lacoue-Labarthe discusses at some length in
his essay “The Echo of the Subject” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics, 139–207.

“Some still small voice”: from 1 Kings 19:12. The phrase also contains a
reference to the similarly titled narrative Une voix de fin silence (1966), by
the novelist and essayist Roger Laporte, now collected in the omnibus
edition of Laporte’s fiction, Une vie (A Life), published by P.O.L. in 1986.
Laporte’s narrative cites as its epigraph a translation of the passage from 1
Kings 19:11–13 by Emmanuel Levinas. Lacoue-Labarthe dedicated his
book Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2002) “to the memory of Roger
Laporte, writer and friend.”

PHRASE XVII

“crushed humanity”: the reference is to De rerum natura (On the Nature of

Things) by Lucretius (99–55 BCE), most probably to book I, lines 62–63.

“Gott selbst ist tot [God himself is dead]”: the words of the Lutheran hymn
“O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid [O Boundless Grief]” by Johann Rist (1607–
67), as quoted by Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Religion, in Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel,
20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 17, 297; Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, vol. III: The Consummate Religion, edited by Peter
C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 125.

“Adieu” and “The Gospel’s a thing of the past!”: both from Rimbaud, Une
saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). Lacoue-Labarthe comments on the
significance of Rimbaud’s words in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry,
32, 57.

“Lento assai e cantante tranquillo”: the tempo markings for the third
movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135.

PHRASE XVIII

“that title of Apollinaire’s”: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913

collection of poems titled: Alcools (Alcohols).

“Peer Gynt”: the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name
(1867), who, after running away from home and leading a dissolute life,
hears a voice telling him to go back home, where his mother is said to be
dying. He duly returns to see her again, but then leaves once more to travel
the world before finally coming back for good in the last act.
 PHRASE XIX

“And what the dead had no speech for  …”: from T. S. Eliot, “Little
Gidding” (Four Quartets).

PHRASE XX

“above the meadows of the Charente”: from Hölderlin’s unfinished draft

poem, “Das Nächste das Beste [The Nearest the Best],” in Hölderlin,
Sämtliche Gedichte, edited by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 2005), 402–7; Hymns and Fragments, translated by
Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 174–75.

“Lautréamont”: the comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym of the writer

Isidore Ducasse (1846–70), author of Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs
of Maldoror).

“uniform and regular”: from Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, canto

5, strophe 1.

“Aristotle called them upheavals”: most probably a reference to Aristotle’s

Athenian Constitution.

“Euripides …”: words from a lost play by Euripides, quoted by Socrates in

Plato’s Gorgias, 492e. The phrase is also a silent quotation (or, more
accurately, the quotation of a quotation) from Hölderlin’s late fragment “In
lieblicher Bläue [In Lovely Blue],” where one similarly reads “Leben ist
Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben [life is death, and death also a life],” in
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, 481; Hymns and Fragments, 252–53.
Lacoue-Labarthe also quotes the passage in his essay Métaphrasis, suivi de
Le Théâtre de Hölderlin (Paris: P.U.F., 1998), 22.

“Jocasta”: the reference is to The Phoenician Women by Euripides, which

Claire Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe translated for a production
directed by Michel Deutsch at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg in 1982.
Their translation, together with the original Greek, a preface by Lacoue-
Labarthe and Michel Deutsch, and an introduction by Claire Nancy, was
subsequently published as Les Phéniciennes (Paris: Belin, 2007).

“Acts of barbaric cruelty”: the reference is to The Trojan Women by

Euripides, line 764. The version given here is slightly adapted from
Euripides, Trojan Women, Iphigenie Among the Taurians, Ion, translated by
David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 91.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s French text is drawn from Claire Nancy’s translation of
the play in Euripide, Théâtre complet I (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 218.
READING PHRASE1
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BAILLY
  

Someone who worked for many years in “philosophy,” and whose previous
publications were pigeonholed as belonging to that discipline, but who
didn’t much care for that categorization himself, and, being forever
dissatisfied with it, sought to detach himself from its constraints, writes a
book that detaches him from them even more. But that book, Phrase, is
neither a diversion nor a temptation. It has little to do with those occasional
pastimes or weekends away that philosophers sometimes indulge in. First of
all, as indicated by the dates that punctuate its various fragments or fresh
starts, the book was written over a period of twenty-five years, between
1976 and 2000 to be precise. At the same time, as far as its author was
concerned, it was no secondary or marginal enterprise, or a mere passing
sideline. What is issue in the book, what it questions, therefore, is at the
heart of all the questions addressed in Lacoue-Labarthe’s other work. It is
the persistent, ever-recurring center on which everything turns, even though
there are no clearly marked paths leading to it, and no preliminaries in view,
and where programmatic exposition and retrospective explication are
equally of no avail.
The center is there from the outset, like an exuberant, all-consuming
tension, suspended or spread-eagled between intention and truth. And this
center or central motif neither accepts to be held in (or as) any discourse nor
is it resigned to be only a voice (it is therefore neither philosophy nor poetry
as such); it is what endlessly turns aside from each of these would-be
solutions, and it is this continually reiterated gesture of turning aside (and
maintaining that detour) that Lacoue-Labarthe calls “phrase,” using a term
which henceforth has the status of an occasional yet definitive title.
But what is this phrase, what does it say about itself, and what does it
say about what a phrase in general can say? What is said in the book
entitled Phrase is that everything that writes itself, everything that attempts
to generate meaning, or to phrase something, is only ever the paraphrase of
another phrase that is both immediate and immemorial, untouchable and
assumed, insistent and hidden. And that this other phrase (which is neither
an ideal nor a target, but on the contrary a kind of enduring anteriority) is
that about which thinking thinks, or in which it thinks, when it thinks of
itself, so to speak, without instruments. What there is in the book is a desire
to escape all instrumental reductiveness and all rhetorical trickery, indeed
any kind of rhetoric at all, and that’s why it’s as though the phrases which
feature in the book, and may be read as part of the book—phrases which are
of course retained within the instrument of language and are still therefore
paraphrases, in this regard even imitations—have all been lost or gone
astray. And the book is made up of this lost movement of phrases each
reaching for the phrase they once heard within themselves.
When and where such a phrase occurs nobody can say in advance:
neither a “philosopher” nor a “poet,” nor even a “thinker” conveniently
positioned between the two like some helpful intermediary. Nobody, that is,
no figure and no role—and yet, necessarily, there is somebody there,
speaking or at least being given the lead. Without it being at all the
equivalent of a muse, the phrase nevertheless has the power to give
dictation. What it dictates is not an utterance as such, but an exigency
internal to speaking, of which all speaking seeks however to rid itself. What
it dictates, therefore, and this is said explicitly in the text, is a renunciation:
a renunciation that is utterance. Speaking of Celan in Poetry as Experience,
Lacoue-Labarthe says that the poem clears a way for itself “between the
‘saying nothing’ of mutism or singular aphasia and the ‘saying too much’ of
eloquence.”2 For Lacoue-Labarthe—it was one of the things he emphasized
most forcefully and most persistently—the poem always tries to say (or do)
too much, is always on the brink of eloquence, even when it renounces it.
He therefore had no hesitation in declaring “every poem is always too
beautiful, even in Celan.”3 Perhaps I should note here that, for my part (it’s
all we ever talked about from the very outset), this isn’t a view I share, and
that, from my perspective, a poem, on the contrary, is arguably never
beautiful enough. I might add though that, as far as the end result or
finished text is concerned, it amounts to much the same thing, since
whether the aim is to achieve beauty or to avoid it, in neither case is it a
matter of attaining some ideal.
The debate is not, however, one we can hope to resolve, not least since
the place of origin of the renunciation of the poem in Lacoue-Labarthe is
not purely and simply the poem itself. The poem both presents and
withdraws itself in a single movement: in other words, it presents itself as a
possibility that must immediately be withdrawn. It’s as if in opening—
opening itself up as a possibility of speaking, as the hypothesis of a
plenitude of meaning—the poem is opening the space of a task that is too
difficult for it. The task, which would not otherwise be apparent at all,
cannot, however, be entrusted to anything else nor delegated to any other
genre. It therefore falls to the poem, forever poised between language and
silence, to try to fulfil it. Lacoue-Labarthe’s entire enterprise, in a sense, is
to want a phrase that would be more original than the poem, which would
go beyond the disappointment of the poem, and might therefore be
described as a way of keeping faith with the all-powerful truth of dictation:
the dictation that dictates renunciation!
If such a phrase, prior to all phrasing, dictates absolutely and dictates
renunciation, or dictates something that says “I renounce,” it is because the
space of its deployment is neither that of art, nor that of writing or speaking,
nor even that of truth in so far as truth relies on a modulation of meaning.
Phrase is the place where truth is not yet attached to any meaning or given
meaning. The meaning it bears is of such violence that it cannot be captured
within any statement—which is why the phrase in question cannot but be a
musical phrase too.
Music (and not musicality, which is a kind of transmissible value,
transmissible in particular to language) occupies a significant—I would
even go so far as saying preeminent—place in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking
(such intimacy with music, and with the determining character of music, is
something unprecedented in philosophy since Adorno).4 Why? Because,
even if music is threatened by art just as much as the poem is, if not indeed
more so (Wagner here being the musical artist par excellence), it sometimes
delivers a response (in the liturgical sense) to the silence, and provides
renunciation with an echo. Phrase, then, does go into language, but is also a
musical term. Phrase for Lacoue-Labarthe, in that it precedes all phrasing,
needs therefore to be understood as an attempt to give consistency to this
homonymy between a musical phrase and a linguistic phrase—not simply
by coupling the two, which would merely be a case of legitimizing singing,
but, on the contrary, by fusing or merging them. Phrase, then, should be
thought to name neither a song nor any verbal utterance, neither an
articulation nor a melody, but a kind of background noise or murmur, a kind
of extremely tenuous, languid or slow-motion “big bang,” internal to
consciousness but distinct from the voice—indeed from any voice that
might, for instance, be capable of saying ego sum. For as Lacoue-Labarthe
puts it:
 It is an illusion to place one’s trust in one’s own
voice, which is no more our own than our
way of moving or looking.

This phrase, which is not yet a voice, is closely related to the

“voicelessness” of emotion, and, insofar as it is without breath, it is also not
unlike a catching of breath. The point where it is gathered up, or hunched
up, while being inside the subject who receives it (the subject, as always, is
an emissary of the voice), at the same time escapes and traverses that
subject, like a crumpling sound come from afar, from the very beginning of
language, or from its beginning in language, as something not yet unfolded
and basically incapable of being unfolded, which is nevertheless self and
properly belongs to the self, as its properness, its singularity, and its
openness. Phrase—i.e., this phrase—may therefore be described as the
opening of the human within the human, the background noise proper to
every human, to every individual insofar as he or she forms a fold in the
human. The human, here, is not, however, an ethical category, nor is it the
realization of that hierarchical separation between “man” and “beast”
(which is the false posture common to all humanisms). As das
Menschliche,5 it is much rather what folds all humans within a contraction
of their solitude, which is ever the same and ever different. In this sense,
“phrase” is simply the word used by Lacoue-Labarthe for the “thrownness
of existence,” the aim being to replace the Heideggerian schema with a
formulation less prone to pathos. There is—indeed—Dasein, but first of all,
at its heart, and intimately folded at the heart of the world, there is phrase.
This phrase which is—at the same time is always still to come. The
phrase in question, as it reaches beyond art and beyond the poem, is a
phrase that, lying along this avenue, offers itself up as a kind of accession,
pure and simple, of language to language. Phrase, in other words, refers to
the way language is seemingly capable of withdrawing from the control
exerted by the will to meaning, capable, that is, of eluding its trickery,
together with everything else that constitutes it not only as techné but as the
very first of all manifestations of techné.
This wrenching away from the will to meaning and its wiles—of
which the poem, in wanting to escape them, is perhaps ultimately, no doubt
in spite of itself, the wiliest example of all—suggests another term, that
Lacoue-Labarthe does not hesitate to use several times over, which is
prayer. What the word implies here I can only guess, with difficulty, and
only by removing the word from the mass of (all equally problematic)
connotations that surround it in my view, that is, by releasing it as much as
possible, in any case beyond a point of no return, from anything religious,
which would also entail taking the religious far beyond everything I
personally can say about it.
But what does that mean?
Address is what binds prayer in that, in prayer, one addresses someone
or something. Prayer here is something I feel needs to be understood as
what linguists call a language situation, notably that situation in which
language, being addressed to some absolute authority or other fixed
depository of truth, may be said to be reduced to its bare essentials, in an
appeal to its own truth, and, in that respect, far less removed from that
originary, silent phrase that constitutes and forms the fold of whoever is
indeed at prayer. What gives poetry its particular quality is its solitude
—“das Gedicht ist einsam [the poem is solitary],” as Celan has it,6 in words
that Lacoue-Labarthe cites time and again—and, by that token, its
resonating within the fold. But this resonating resonates too loudly, and
that’s the danger of beauty, the ornamental, narcissistic risk present at every
moment, even when the poem is syncopating language.7 Prayer, on the
other hand, which also has its point of anchorage in the most solitary fold of
the human, is deployed in a register where beauty is not at issue. A prayer is
not something beautiful, but is (or should be) more like a fold that is dull,
and entirely without brilliance. It’s as if Lacoue-Labarthe wanted to
eliminate from the religious all ritual (which is collective, and whose
gestures, always cleaving to the side of representation, imply beauty, or at
any event raise the question of beauty by elevating it, as shown by the work
of Chateaubriand or in Catholicism more generally) in order to keep only
the solid, purely Reformed kernel; in other words, the knot that is tied in
and by prayer between the one praying and the one to whom he or she is
praying, who remains nameless.
One might then say that the attention given to the phrase in prayer
draws the phrase toward its originary truth, without praying as such being
actually at issue. It would obviously not be a prayer one was merely
imitating (that would be the worst of all possible false poses), but it would
have the status of a mode, or of some restless, disseminated presence.
Indeed, I can understand or imagine how that might work, like some kind of
warning light, or alarm bell. The unutterable, we are told toward the end of
Phrase, is something to be respected:

A diction could return to us, no reason

to despair, if I strive no longer
to trust in the fury of words
and so long as we are capable of respecting the unutterable.

And respect here, I can see, is rather like that warning light; i.e., the
dispersion of the prayer effect within the poem itself, what restrains its
various initiatives, and links them, from one genre to another, since Phrase
(the book), as it proceeds, necessarily encounters not only poetry and
discourse but also note-taking, fiction, and even, at one point, theater, or at
least an idea of theater. But nowhere does it go all the way with any of
these; it passes alongside as though they were so many ports of call at
which it refuses to disembark, preferring to keep its distance. This distance
is prayer inserted into language, not as some empty gesture, but as
something into which Lacoue-Labarthe was forced by his own inclination,
which was not able to free him from the pain of folding.
As a result, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s poem as a whole, or, perhaps better,
in this recitation-cum-narrative of an impossible song, there are very few
sense impressions—those peaceful passing moments that the silent world of
things drip-feed into language, such as a meadow, a street name, the trees in
the park, or the cafeteria in a clinic, or even in lively, confident, sudden
fashion, San Francisco Bay (“I remember, it was / possible to see the
dazzling reflection of the bay, / shimmering in the sun like a sheet of metal
or corrugated iron”). All these details share a kind of pallor or self-effacing
quality, but it is on the basis of such trivia that I’d like to discuss the
question of prayer, since it seems to me that it is indeed such nothings, or
such remnants, that, like the name of the river Garonne in Hölderlin, help
protect us. And that it’s through them, beyond all address and authority, that
we may be silently drawn out of silence and accustomed to our fold. It does,
however, seem to me that, when compared to this weak, mundane
brilliance, the idea of prayer still presumes too much, not unlike what
Nietzsche, who is also very present in all of this, would call “human, all too
human,” and that we might instead envisage a kind of beauty that would
only begin on this side of the fold, on this or the other side of the human as
such.

Let me conclude by recalling two personal memories, starting with the most
recent. Not long ago I returned to the village of Waldersbach, which I
hadn’t visited for quite a long time. Michel Deutsch wanted to shoot a scene
there for his film Hôtel de l’Esprit (which takes its title from the “Hotel
zum Geist” in Strasbourg, which was a kind of central hub for German
literature, the subject of the film). Naturally enough, the scene was about
the writer, dramatist, and political activist Georg Büchner, who fled to
Strasbourg in 1835, and his story Lenz, and the idea was to use the exact
locations described in the story (which itself is based on the real-life events
recounted by Oberlin),8 including the pastor’s house, which is now a
museum; the fountain into which Lenz on several occasions threw himself;
the Protestant church where he was allowed to deliver a sermon; and the
nearby Vosges forest with its deep, silent valleys. Lenz, or Lenz-the-phrase,
was an important touchstone for Lacoue-Labarthe insofar as it doesn’t
depart, or departs only very slightly, from an idea of literature born as pure
futurity, as a kind of inaugural moment without appeasement. (Lacoue-
Labarthe himself, in fact, with that phrase, or on the basis of that phrase
while departing from it only very slightly, wrote the script for a film that he
really wanted to be able to make.)9 And those locations—i.e., the places of
January 20,10 which are still intact, but forever marked by an invisible trace
—are at the same time entirely void of ponderous solemnity, as I quickly
realized when I first discovered them. The extraordinary, secret beginning
of the modern age they commemorate has no inaugural moment; it is just a
setting forth, an escape into the woods, and a phrase that catches them up
and follows them, and nothing else, in total contrast to any commemorative
plaque or possibility of discourse (and it was good, that summer’s day, that,
as a prank and in a spirit of disrespectful tribute, one of the group of young
Germans visiting the museum threw himself fully clothed into the fountain).
Before all else, then, while also touching the most painful part—
Lenz’s own fold being folded back and tearing him apart—there was joy,
the joy that an emotion might remain intact and so unaffected. There was
joy, then, but also, that particular day, surprise—because I went into the
Protestant church, which has presumably changed little since Oberlin’s time
in charge. And what surprised me was the interior which indeed reminded
me of Lacoue-Labarthe and his phrase, whose dull resonance he aims to
capture in this book. What I mean—though, basically, one would have to
remove the word “church,” or at least remove all its wider connotations—is
that this “house,” as I may be allowed to call it, and that this place—this
house, then—was the exact setting for the speaking one finds in Phrase, a
place exactly appropriate to its diction. It was bare and unadorned, with
simple benches, a plain stove and no pictures, and nothing that might
resemble a theatrical stage. Though it was free of all ostentation, it did
however have a raised platform and, to that extent, perhaps, incorporated a
theater, albeit one that was without demonstrative intent, bound merely to
the possibility that a phrase might be said, then said again, not in any single
definitive manner, but just as one among an infinite number, like a phrasing
chanted in a neutral tone that was utterly naked and utterly impoverished.
Despite what the building itself prescribes, I cannot however make up my
mind to call this prayer, though it was what I thought one should be able to
hear in such a strange location.

To remove theater (i.e., the theatrical) from the theater, to remove art from
the poem, or even to remove the sacred from the theater (though this last
thought is my own suggestion, I do believe Lacoue-Labarthe would have
been willing to pursue Reformation that far)—such is the continual, austere
temptation. One can without much difficulty identify where its aesthetic
impact might be felt, and cite the names that come to mind almost
automatically, in the wake (I’d say) of Aeschylus, including, among others,
Bach or Thelonious Monk, Hölderlin or Pasolini, Giorgio Morandi or Bram
van Velde. But there is also something else at stake here, something other
than mere “aesthetics.” This something else is shown by the gesture made
—even if one chooses to resist it—toward prayer, and I should like finally
to attempt to capture what this involves with the help of a second anecdote.
But I should also like to say, as one must, not only that this unfeigned
austerity is not a privation of any kind, but also, or finally, that, beyond
everything it owes to disappointment, stress, or despair, it nevertheless
stands out, or is capable of doing, like a new dawn or, in its own fashion, as
a kind of expansiveness.
The episode I have in mind emerges for a brief moment in that part of
Phrase that is subtitled “Scene,” in which there is the bare outline of a
dialogue (involving myself) on the topic of the religious. “We were left
speechless,” writes Lacoue-Labarthe, “by the mausoleums in South Korea.”
The mausoleums he is referring to are the tumuli of Gyeongju, those
extraordinary circular grass mounds dating from between the first and sixth
century, where the monarchs of the Silla kingdom are buried, and which we
indeed visited together in 1993. Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of them as though
they were the tombs of the gods, but no matter, royalty here, evidently
enough, was “sacred.” The word, which I have now let slip, is of course
anthropologically appropriate to the nature of these graves. But if “we were
left speechless,” it was clearly not because of that objective or historical
fact, but as a result of a kind of effect of immersion or contagion. And I
remember that, while we were there, once a moment’s silence had passed,
we both employed the word “sacred,” a word that is perhaps only one side
of a coin of which the other is the unutterable. We used the word, in the way
that tourists do, simply saying, for instance, “that’s obviously something
sacred,” or perhaps, to slightly different effect (I really can’t remember),
that “people here obviously believe that’s something sacred.” The
dimension of “what others believe” was at any event clearly present, though
it only had the sense of a detached observation. It was something, in other
words, that it was necessary to acknowledge: yes, it was there, there had
been and still was something of that kind, something it was impossible to
understand without the use of that word, even if it’s only right that one
should turn it over it and consider the other side of the coin.
But what was it we were looking at? Acts of burial that, instead of
being concealed, had been left showing, and instead of showing themselves
with the aid of some architectural construction or edifice (as is almost
invariably the case elsewhere), in fact edified nothing, but made do with a
sort of bulge or grass dome, with the site as a whole being made up of a
succession of these relatively high or wide domes—twenty or more of them
—dotted along the valley. The effect was of some extraordinary, silent
exigency, as if gravity and duration had been offered stasis and levitation,
and as if the landscape had somehow been converted into a kind of
stationary wave in which the powers of life and death had come together in
one single, fundamental tonality. Obviously I am speaking, and can but
speak, only in very approximate fashion. In the face of these domes, as they
pondered the unutterable, any word at all was already a mistake and a
madness. Just like the word “sacred,” which we ended up using while we
were there, and which is most likely inevitable, these words of mine would
have to be understood quite differently, as referring, not to ritual or to
ceremony, but rather to the influence of an absent trace, to what one might
formulate, abruptly enough, by saying that what was sacred in fact was the
withdrawal of all consecration. I think that what overwhelmed Philippe at
the time was the ease, and I would even go so far as to call it the efficiency
with which the withdrawal was no different, in physical terms, from the
absence not only of all décor but also of all figure.
And no different, therefore, from nothing.
From nothing as a kind of threshold. Whence the joy. Whence the joy
envisaged by the impoverishment. Before all else, then, renunciation means
not renouncing joy: beyond church and tomb, I can still hear the atheistic
breath of my Reformation-minded friend. And beyond the violation that
Christianity perpetrates on the unutterable, I can still hear the nomadic,
subjectless phrase of which Phrase, the book, traces the verbal contours—
like the remains of a prayer perhaps, but, in that case, in the sacred space of
the effacement of all gods, and, beyond words (both logos and fury), in the
tension of a language taken to its limits, but nevertheless still to come.
NOTES
  
1. From Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Véridiction: sur Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2011), 15–30. The essay was first
published in 2008 under the title “A propos de Phrase” [translator’s note].
2. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 56; translation modified.
3. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 69; translation modified.
4. See, for instance, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta (Figures
of Wagner), translated by Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994) [translator’s note].
5. On “das Menschliche” (“the human”) in Lacoue-Labarthe’s
thinking, see Poetry as Experience, 47 [translator’s note].
6. See Celan, “Der Meridian [The Meridian],” Gesammelte Werke, vol.
3, 198; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, 409; translation modified.
Lacoue-Labarthe quotes the phrase in Poetry as Experience, 42 [translator’s
note].
7. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 49.
8. Johann Friedrich (or Jean-Frédéric) Oberlin (1740–1826) was the
philanthropic Protestant pastor in Waldersbach who, between January 20
and February 8, 1778, gave refuge to the dramatist J. M. R. Lenz (1751–
1792) during one of the latter’s acute schizophrenic episodes. Georg
Büchner (1813–1837) drew on Oberlin’s account of those weeks for his
story “Lenz,” first published posthumously in 1839. Büchner and Lenz
were of particular interest to Lacoue-Labarthe, not only because of the
connection with Strasbourg (where Lacoue-Labarthe lived and worked for
many years), but also as a result of Celan’s remarks on Büchner’s work in
“Der Meridian [The Meridian],” the famous poetological lecture delivered
in Darmstadt, Büchner’s home city, upon receipt of the prestigious Georg-
Büchner-Preis in 1960 [translator’s note].
9. In collaboration with his friends Christine Baudillon and François
Lagarde, who also made the film Entretiens de l’île Saint-Pierre (2003)
with Lacoue-Labarthe [and Jean-Christophe Bailly].
10. The standard text of Büchner’s “Lenz” begins with the words: “On
the 20th of January [Den 20. Jänner],” using the regional German name
(“Jänner”) for the first month in the year, instead of the more common
“Januar.” Celan recalls Büchner’s opening sentence, now mindful of a
subsequent and significantly different January 20, the date of the notorious
1942 Wannsee Conference, in “Der Meridian,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3,
201; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, 412 [translator’s note].